Carragee Consulting

This weekend I was in Santa Cruz at a brewery that was packed. As we sat down to a table a gregarious young boy approach us selling rocks. He showed us a tray with flat rocks with painted symbols on one side and words written on the other. He was so young it didn’t seem he had painted them himself, but he had the sales pitch down. The rocks are a dollar each or “you can donate as much as you want” he said gleefully. A dollar for “Transendence”[Sic] isn’t a bad deal.

Somewhere off in the parking lot his grandmother sat quietly and waiting for her grandson to return with a bit of cash. With her out of the picture it was easy to imagine that this spirited kid could command a premium for his product. The girl/boy scouts have been leveraging the power of cuteness for sales for decades too.

The perpetual question for pricing is how to make people feel good while charging them more. Sometimes the seller is most of the value proposition.