Posts: 1370 from 2003/2/15
From: Central Europe
Quote:Quote:
ASiegel wrote:
'Some people' understand this quite well, in fact. However, the real fact is that the price elasticity is fully dependent on consumer perceptions that can only be changed if you openly challenge them. One approach is to ask why someone is willing to spend 500 EUR on a second or third Powerbook to run MorphOS on but hesitates to pay a fraction of that sum on a second or third MorphOS license, for instance.
No offense intended, but in my view that comment only shows lack of understanding of the PED concept.
Quite the opposite. I am confident I understand this
extremely well.
My guess is that you fail to realize a number of things: First, even if the perceived value of a good decreases with every additional unit a consumer buys, there is a gap between the good's price and the maximum amount the consumer would be willing to pay for the first unit. So, if the second unit has 10% less perceived value for the consumer, that does
not imply the price should be lowered by 10%. As long as the price is lower than the maximum amount a consumer is willing to pay for the n-th unit of a good, which usually equals the perceived value of this additional unit, there is no need to offer any discounts.
Second, the perceived value of the n-th unit of a good is
not determined by some ominous law of nature. Irregardless of what simplistic calculations first-semester marketing students have to do, there is no set of fixed mathematical rules to determine exactly how much value consumers will attribute to a particular good in real life. Even with a large set of statistical data, the best you can do is to make educated guesses. The primary reason for this is that people are people and not primitive robots (a.k.a. "homo oeconomicus"). The perception of value of the first or n-th unit of a good is often more based on feelings than on facts. In many cases, it is far more effective for a company to change the perception of consumers than to adapt its pricing model to their current opinions. Advertizing and other forms of communicating with consumers are the tools to achieve this.
Quote:
A pity (but an interesting observation) that this thread turned into *yet another* MorphOS price discussion. Like we haven't had enough of those...
I personally don't mind discussions about the price. I would have chosen a different one.
However, when, as has happened on MorphZone and Pegasosforum, people either explicitly or implicitly suggest that you have to be incompetent and / or ignorant to disagree with a need for multi-license discounts, I cannot help but feel insulted since I do disagree with it with regards to MorphOS, am not uneducated about marketing and know a gazillion successful companies that do not offer them either (some of which sell software that is more expensive than MorphOS).
