The key to helping your customers better enjoy your photographs is to raise your prices.
A 2007 USA study, with the catchy title of “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness”, showed that marketing actions, such as changing the price of a product, can affect consumer enjoyment of that product.
The study used functional MRI to observe the brain activity of test subjects while they sampled differently-priced wines.
The subjects were told that five different wines were priced at $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90. But unknown to them, there were really only three different wines: the $5 and $45 wines were the same; the $10 and $90 wines were the same.
The more expensive the wine, the more the test subjects enjoyed it. When the $90 wine was labeled as $90, the subjects liked it. But when it was labeled as being $10, they no longer enjoyed it. Subjects didn’t enjoy the $5 wine but when it was labeled as being $45 then they did.
To make sure the test subjects were being truthful about which wines they enjoyed, functional MRI was used to monitor brain activity. Levels of enjoyment can be seen by increased activity in certain parts of the brain.
What this seems to show is that consumers take (emotional) cues from the marketing surrounding a product. In this case, higher prices led to higher levels of enjoyment. It must be good because it’s more expensive.
Many businesses already know this. But photographers need to learn that lowering prices, in an attempt to get more business, will backfire in the long run. Customers will always associate low prices with low quality and no one enjoys that.
When a photographer discounts their prices, they’re only discounting themselves.
