If you’ve ever picked up a Bang and Olufsen remote you’ll know they’re surprisingly heavy. But that’s nothing to do with function – it’s designed to exploit our assumption that heavier things are better quality.
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Cheap isn’t always good: we want some things to be expensive.
When Concorde was suffering during the 1980s, its owners discovered that the passengers significantly overestimated the ticket price. “So very simply, we said, we’ll charge them what they think they are paying. And so we put the fares up”. Concorde ticket prices were doubled to over $7,000, one way, in today’s prices and it was repositioned to provide a super-elite class for bankers, the rich, and the famous.
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According to John Foley, then CEO of Peloton, “in the very, very early days, we charged $1,200 for the Peloton bike for the first couple of months. And what turned out happening is we heard from customers that the bike must be poorly built if you’re charging $1,200 for it. We charged $2,000 dollars for it, and sales increased, because people said, ‘Oh, it must be a quality bike.’”