Givng people a good reason to pay extra

Seth Godin writes:

Consider the market for a dozen eggs, sold at the supermarket.

There are commodity eggs, normal, regular, use-these-eggs-in-your-cake-or-your-omelet sort of eggs. When you have a choice of two brands of normal eggs, you buy the cheap ones, because, of course, all eggs are the same. One is a perfect substitute for the other.

Right next to those eggs, though, are eggs with a story. Eggs that are free range or organic or cruelty-free or high in this or low in that. And these eggs cost more. Some people happily buy these eggs, substituting them for normal eggs, because to them, they’re worth more.

If you want to charge extra for eggs, then, you need people to believe that they are worth more than the substitutes. This sounds obvious, but it is the key wisdom that gets us started. How much it costs you to make an egg is completely irrelevant to this discussion (or even how much it costs the chicken, but that's a whole different discussion). People will switch to a similar good any time you haven't given them a good reason to pay extra.

When the price of all eggs goes up, because of an egg truckers strike or because of increasing costs, very few people stop buying eggs and start buying cream cheese instead. That’s because if you want to make a cake, you need an egg. And because if you sell tamago, you need eggs. Eventually, if the price goes really high or the high price sticks around for a long time, some people will find a substitute in a different market, eating Cheerios instead of eggs for breakfast, for example. (This is called elasticity, and we could talk about it forever, but one thing that's worth noting is that elasticity varies wildly across and within categories).

Read more here.