The price gun is a very popular piece of equipment. But are they really that useful? Are there alternatives to the price gun? And what should you know before you buy one? This article will answer all of your questions, and more.
If you’re looking to build a side hustle, email marketing, or simply make money, then you need to invest money in a product that will allow you to make people buy more of your products.
The basic premise behind price guns (and indeed any gun) is to make which item the lowest. When you pay a money price, what’s left over is what’s called your marginal cost. The marginal costs are the costs of producing a similar item at less than the money price. These include design, conception, time and materials — everything except the price itself.
You can consider a price gun a marginally better version of the Famous Three.
Pricing yourself out of the market is a popular strategy, especially for people interested in starting a side hustle.
Let me state the obvious. It’s a problem if you actively attempt to price me out of the market using every tool at your disposal. If you were a wealthy human focusing on steroids, investing in a price gun is a privilege reserved for the elite. If you’re not a wealthy human, then simply using every tool to make a product more expensive to me is no different to simply using every tool to make products less expensive to them. There's simply no moral difference.
If you’re on LinkedIn, that’s definitely what you’re doing. Yes, consumers on LinkedIn have every right to boycott, scam or block you. And yes, LinkedIn is increasingly becoming a money-making machine for websites and other platforms. So it’s perfectly reasonable for people to want to do whatever they can to keep you out of their own money. On LinkedIn, bribery and corruption are perhaps the most obvious ways to do this.
It’s against everything LinkedIn stands for. But for businesses, the idea of a billion-dollar company using LinkedIn to trick people into thinking their original product is more expensive just because they’ve merged two businesses into a bigger one is easier said than done.
Last year, a problem was reported on LinkedIn regarding a user with the handle “represented_women_uk.” The user was promoting a small company called Brud Simulant. They said their goal was to solve “a real problem faced by consumers today.”
Wendy Warsh, the founder of the company, had never actually marketed anything before LinkedIn contacted her, but she was happy to become aware of the brand and lend them some sales. And for an investment, she was fairly straightforward about what Brud offered.
“Budgeting tools, alternatives etc.,” she wrote, “Bud Simulant.
(This is an adaptation of a chapter from my book Better Marketing, published by O'Reilly. Get the book for free.)
If you’ve been to a gun show, you know the scene: there’s a huge crowd around the sales booths, and especially potent sellers fill the aisles. During discussions with salesmen, they always try to get you to make a purchase. You don’t know how much they’re offering, but you do know you want to leave with something.
If you’re selling something pricey, does the fact that they want to buy it automatically mean they’ll buy something else you have for cheaper? If the price is high, is the economic argument stronger that it’s worth it?
To find out, let’s analyze three situations.
We know that bulk pricing is a very effective revenue stream for many retailers. This strategy uses the principle of purchasing low, and selling high. Suppose I’m a more conventional department store. I have a display of shirts for a while, then I have some women’s casual apparel and a few men’s items.
Now I want to push the shirt lineup. I have several clothing categories just for sale. I reduce the prices so the display would be full, make offers on popular shirts, and lead potential customers to the clothing department to pick them up. Sell more, sell faster, and more often.
Here is what happens when excessive pricing is paired with a lower profit margin.
Here the goal is just to achieve a lower profit margin. The value of the inventory is so low that the only profitable move is to sell a large amount of poorly selling merchandise to lower overhead costs.
These two pricing strategies are generally bad news for the consumer. They’re basically saying, “We’d like to lower our profit, but we just can’t — that wouldn’t be profitable for us, and the urgency makes it even more urgent.”
Other retailers attempt to implement price manipulation. (An example might be higher shipping costs inherent in more expensive items.) The difference is that their motivation is more dubious. They are doing so simply because they can.
It’s easy to gain a competitive advantage by lowering prices, but it’s also easy to lose it. If prices are set too low, consumers feel they’re being ripped off. If they’re set too high, they fear they’re being overcharged. (If you find a shirt you like, there’s a higher chance you’ll end up tossing it because you feel it’s underpriced.
The Price’s Gun or the Buffet?
To start with, let’s review what a gun really is. A gun is a piece of equipment designed to quickly and accurately fire a single round of ammunition at a predetermined target. When you’re probably just using a gun for recreational target shooting, it’s probably much more versatile than you might think. Most guns use bullets with primers that are fixed to the bullet, and then cap off to create a small amount of smoke (i.e. smokeless powder) to help the gunals identify the bullet type and replicate a "round."
Now, there are also semi-automatic guns, like the ones in your local police department’s car. These semi-automatic guns use cartridges with a bullet built in (like a semi-automatic shotgun), and the gun is able to follow the bullet, one round at a time. Semi-automatic guns can fire hundreds of rounds per minute, so they’re great for plinking the same area over and over again. Semi-automatic guns should be compared to single shot guns or full automatic guns only in terms of the actual rounds that are fired, not when or how many rounds are fired. Fully automatic guns can fire thousands of rounds per minute.
Website: https://www.itsticklabels.co.uk/products/pricing-guns-labellers/