The Pan Am Experience

Here are two posts that (if you are a true marketer with a passion for product) you should read.

1. The Pan Am Experience.
2. Take The Pan Am Experience Yourself.

One of my favorite Twitter quotes (I wrote it, so of course I like it) is this:

• Discounts and Promotions are taxes placed upon brands for being unremarkable.

The more unique something is, the more you can charge for it.

It's common in project work in the past two years to see companies raise prices (significantly) on new merchandise ... a comparable item that used to sell for $24.99 is reintroduced as a new item (with a new button or zipper) and is sold for $29.99. This yields a nasty dynamic ... customers won't buy the $29.99 item, so the brand deepens the discount (goes from 30% off to 40% off) ... but does so across the board, thereby lowering the price on the item that the customer likes ($24.99) from an effective $17.49 (30% off) to $14.99 (40% off).

See what happened there?

The newer item at a higher price point doesn't sell, causing the lousy marketer to discount EVERYTHING which lowers the effective price of the good-selling item thereby mucking-up the pricing integrity of all items.

I know, I know, you can't create "The Pan Am Experience" for your brand ... you sell widgets "in a highly competitive marketplace".

But you can do SOMETHING, right? You can have elite merchandise at a high price point that nobody else bothers to sell. Right? And you can make those handful of items special, from a marketing standpoint. Right?

Right?