Now that you’ve done all the work, gone through a lot of sweat, used up resources including your time and money to build a good reputation for your personal brand, what have you gotten from it?
Have you experienced accelerated ROI after becoming a known brand or are you still haggling over prices just like your competitors? Pricing is a significant factor for any personal brand. Therefore, getting paid what you’re worth can be challenging for most entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and start-up organizations.
One of the advantages of creating a known personal brand is that it allows you to charge premium prices for your product and services. This is easier when you’ve been able to place a great value on your brand by bringing unique products or services of great value. The valuable your services or products are, the more chances people will like to purchase them over your competitors. With your brand staying on the lips of everyone, over time, it becomes a norm that if someone wants quality, they should be ready to buy from you irrespective of the cost compared to your competitors.
This is the reason behind the cost of getting Nike shoes. Over time, Nike has positioned itself over the years as the brand with quality. They spent years building their brand as a powerhouse, writing it in the minds of people. Now Nike has become a status symbol, and wearing shoes or products from Nike says something about who you are. Today, Nike charges exorbitant prices for their shoes and this is simply premium pricing.
What is Premium Pricing
Premium pricing is simply adopting a pricing strategy where your brand products are higher than that of your competition. This is done to create a perception in the minds of your potential buyers that your products are of higher value.
Most brands do this to get more value for their products and services hoping that the consumers won’t investigate to discover if the products actually have a higher value than the others. Therefore, to be able to do this successfully, you must have built your personal brand to the point that it’s well trusted so consumers won’t have to investigate when you introduce premium prices to your services/products.
For example, a Honda Accord which costs $25,000 is still a reliable car and can take you from one point to the other but a Bentley which does the same thing is priced at about $250,000. They can sell at such an exorbitant price because the buyers believe that it’s a car of higher quality and also stands as a much better status symbol compared to Honda. That is simply premium pricing in action!
Bentley simply leveraged the value of their professional brand positioning themselves as a luxury brand which they’ve built over the years to charge higher prices than their competitors. This is done to place more value on their cars and also increase profits.
So as an intrapreneur, an entrepreneur, or a thought-leader in your organization, how can you leverage the value of your executive brand or personal brand to charge premium prices for your products and services?
Create High-Quality Assets
If you must charge a premium price for your products, in addition to the value of your personal brand, you must make sure that your products or services satisfy a specific market need. Your product should be able to bring real solutions to your market, making the lives of your potential buyers convenient and better.
Personal Brand Perception
With your competitors offering similar products or services, one of the major differences that will sway the mind of your buyers to purchase from you rather than your competitors is the perception they have about your personal brand. Yes, it’s true you’ve built your brand, created awareness about it but the real question is, what do people think about your brand? The perception you create about your business is a major key to the conversion of potential buyers into customers.
If you study the Cola war between Pepsi and Coke, you’ll understand how branding prevails. Pepsi and Coke are similar products. Although both have completely different flavors, a study has shown that consumers are not able to tell the difference between them without their brand information. However, Coca-cola tops the market shares with people having a great preference for it over other similar soft drinks.
This is all possible because the Coca-cola brand is not just valuable but has been made memorable and unforgettable to people. One of the ways to achieve this is to assign human characteristics to your products or services. People are more inclined to go for products that speak to them about their traits. For example, you could associate your product with friendliness compassion, kindness, etc. This type of strategized marketing will separate you from your competitors.
Consistency
Introducing a good product into the market is just the beginning. The challenge is being able to do so consistently. If you want to write your brand in the hearts of people or make it a family name, you must find a way to bring into the market exemplary and useful products or services that satisfy various needs consistently. By doing this, you’ll be able to establish brand equity, create a personal brand identity and gain trust from your audience.
Take a bite from the story of Orabrush, a small business that produces a tongue-scraping oral product designed to kill brand breath. The company had serious challenges in 2009 and was able to generate only $30 in sales of only 10 pieces of their product. They came up with a marketing strategy using a 2-minute video on halitosis which flooded the internet with over 900,000 views. People got interested and cleared their inventory of 10,000 units of the product for free. They built upon the success of this video and consistently created more videos that are funny and engaging. Today they’ve sold 2.8 million tongue cleaners.
Conclusion
Before you can charge prices higher than that of your competitors, you must have shown your audience that there’s something better with your brand. You must have gained their trust, making your brand unforgettable to them. This will create the opportunity for you to maximize your revenue products for better profits. So get started by building a trustworthy brand with high-quality and expect your potential customers to buy irrespective of the price.
If you render only services, create that trust as well and start new negotiations based on the new price benchmark. Don’t be afraid of losing jobs because opportunities that will test your commitment to the new price will emerge. In as much as it might be acceptable to negotiate a lower price with concessions that will add up to your new standard fee is fine, accepting jobs with less fee just because the client can’t meet up with the new fee is not. So it is important to believe in your new pricing. If someone calls over the phone asking for it, be bold and confident enough to quote your price without an apology or long explanation. Over time, if you’ve built your personal brand equity, clients will start to patronize you even more.