Friday Research: Is Divide and Conquer a Better Pricing Strategy?

When Will You Use This?  

Developing and designing your promotional materials that include price information.

What’s The Red-Letter Bite Today? 

Whether making purchases online or in person, people often come across prices that are split into two or more quantities. For example, an online fashion retailer offers you a dress with a base price of just £15, but with a shipping fee of £4.95. This company could charge a single combined price of £19.95, respectively, but instead choose to display arguably more complicated partitioned price instead.

Partitioned pricing is a widely used pricing strategy and current research* investigates the impact of regulatory focus on the perceived attractiveness of partitioned and combined pricing.

The study reveals that promotion focused individuals perceive partitioned prices to be more attractive than combined prices, while prevention focused individuals rated the two types of pricing similarly attractive.

Unite or Divide: Is "All Included" Better?

Addition To Your Bag of Tricks    

 

Following the results of current research, ads designed with higher levels of ambiguity would benefit from the addition of partitioned pricing information.

Earlier authors define promotion focused individuals as the ones who "place more importance on what they “want” to do" and prevention focused individuals as the ones who "place more emphasis on what they should, or “ought” to do." Having that in mind, current study suggests the importance of partitioned pricing for companies selling the products which are associated with promotion concerns.

Moreover, authors highlight that "companies must always balance the costs and benefits of adopting different pricing strategies, and the current research suggests using combined pricing for products with prevention concerns may be the better choice in the long run.<..>We suggest that low seller reputation turn on a red light, which leads consumers to become prevention focused and pay."

*Kay Lee, Choi, Jungsil, & Yexin Jessica Li. Regulatory Focus as a Predictor of Attitudes Toward Partitioned and Combined Pricing.Journal of Consumer Psychology: April (2014) {Thanks for the material}

P.S. When you’re done reading, I’d love for you to share your experience with pricing strategies? Leave a comment or Tweet me, let's chat!

P.P.S. Need some help on crafting your marketing message? Let's do this together.