When quality is hard to judge, price becomes a shortcut.
More quotesCheap can be reassuring when quality is visible. When it is hidden, cheap can look like a warning label.
That helps explain why raising tuition could increase applications. Parents were not buying hours in classrooms; they were trying to infer prestige and future value from a product maddeningly difficult to inspect. Price volunteered as evidence. The same shortcut appears with wine, consultants and enterprise software. An unfamiliar £9 bottle must fight suspicion before taste. A £300 adviser may be ignored beside one charging £2,000, even when both proposals contain the same nouns. A serious-looking software tier acquires credibility before procurement has understood a feature. Expensive does not therefore mean good. Uncertainty simply makes people recruit whatever signals are available.
Pricing, then, is part of the proposition rather than arithmetic performed after it. Go unusually low and explain the economic reason: automation, direct distribution, limited scope. Go high and make invisible quality observable through demonstration, guarantee, credential, process or experience. Then deliver at the level the number has promised. Hiking the price without improving the surrounding evidence is a short con against expectations; discounting a strong offer into the bargain bin can be equally destructive. Customers will use price to fill an information vacuum. Either provide better evidence or accept that the number will write its own story.