Price vs Value: The PowerPoint presentation, Koi Pond, & Kindle

The PowerPoint Presentation

I’ve been reading over the comments from last week’s post on that $25,000 PowerPoint presentation and the votes cast out on whether the price was justifiable.

They came in at: one person couldn’t justify it; one person thought it was worth paying (if getting your message understood is that important, go ahead and pay it); and a couple of people wanted to add it to their service bin if they could get $25,000 for it :)

And six people said it was a good price, $25,000 for a PowerPoint presentation…a bargain compared to other things you might have to do to get all that information compiled. They pretty much thought it was a good value as long as the return was good.

As a matter of fact, all of their comments can be summed in one person’s comment, which was, “The ROI is worth it. You should undertake any project if the expected return is greater than one.”

What surprises me about that is over half the people justified the price based on its value in the end. They compared it to the return/results, instead of thinking about the fact that it came out to $500 per slide, or attacking a line item, like that $3,500 to make the PowerPoint template.

That’s sneaking up on $100-an-hour, even if you took a whole week to do it. And that wasn’t something that anybody really approached.

For me, depending on how you frame it, it’s looking like $200-an-hour work, which I would expect to pay for a licensed, certified specialist—like a doctor or a lawyer or something—but not really for researchers who are just regurgitating customer-supplied content into a PowerPoint presentation.

But anyway, this is a small sample. This isn’t real research or anything. But it’s worth noting that just over half the people who left comments justified an admittedly steep price.

I mean, everybody said it was high, but they justified the price based on the value – not the market rate, not tasks or service provided, not the skills or experience needed to do the work. So long as they got back more than they put out, the price didn’t matter at all.

The Koi Pond & The Kindle

And this goes for relatively small stuff, too, right? Like my mom had this Koi Pond application on her iPhone, something like you touch the water…the fish scurry…something weird.

But it didn’t work like it did on my sister’s telephone. Come to find, my mom had the free version, and to get all the extra Koi Pond features, you had to pay 99¢. And she said, “Oh, shoot. It’s not worth that.” And she didn’t buy it.

And so we turned back to the computer, and I was reading to her about the new Kindle, all the features and all that good stuff, all the benefits. And after all her oohing and ahhing, her first words were, “Can I order it now? Can it get here by Friday?”

What’s the Kindle cost, right? Like 350 bucks? 400 bucks with overnight shipping? And she didn’t care. She didn’t care at all. The 99¢ Koi Pond app was too expensive for her, or to her, right? Because it wasn’t that important. She didn’t like it enough.

But the $350 Kindle, that price tag was incidental…pretty much irrelevant, and so was the hefty price tag for overnight shipping, because to her it meant everything to be able to get a week’s worth of books to the beach without filling up her carry-on, and to have it here in time.

So, next time you let your brain simmer on pricing your services or products (or somebody else’s services or products) remember the justifiable $25,000 PowerPoint presentation, the ultimately desirable $350 Kindle, and the entirely dismissible 99¢ Koi Pond.

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Tagged as: pricing

Photo credit: corrinely