It’s time to strike the word affordable from your brand message.

I think we use the word affordable to describe our products and businesses for a number of reasons:

• we want people to like us
• we want to be able to compete in our niche
• we want to feel like we are not cheating people out of their money
• we are afraid of charging too much
• we don’t know how else to describe what we do
• we think that is about how much we would pay

Do any of these sound familiar? Can you think of more reasons?

The tricky thing about the word affordable is that it is all relative. Even the definition is ambiguous:

inexpensive; reasonably priced; believed to be within one’s financial means.

But, to whom? For what? When? Why?

I personally don’t find $15 cocktails at some fancy bar ‘affordable’. Maybe it is because I would rather share a $15 bottle of wine with a bestie on my back porch in the sunshine. Could I actually afford it? Sure. But would I fork over my hard earned dollars? Probably not.

On the other hand I have no problem paying $100 for a single pair of yoga pants (and I have never done a day of yoga in my life!) Couldn’t I just buy a $30 pair from target? Absolutely. But to me, those things are cheap. Meh. Don’t want em. I want the $100 pair, for all sorts of reasons.

I am sure that my affordable is someone else’s too expensive. But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes my affordable is someone else’s too cheap. Do you see why the word affordable is so tricky?

Even for a couple of best friends who are the same age, earn approximately the same amount of money, are interested in the same kinds of things, shop at the same stores… we still might have different ideas of affordable because we value different things. Our hopes and dreams and fears and problems (the internal stuff) is different.

So in order to really know if your product or service is ‘affordable’ you need to get crystal clear on who exactly is your right customer. You need to know what they value. You need to get real about their hopes and dreams and fears and problems. And you need to hone in on what exactly you can offer them – what it is they are really paying for.

And if you know all of that, then I bet you won’t even need the word affordable any more. You will have so much other information about what you do, who you serve, and why your business meets their needs, that the word affordable will just be a given.

Affordable really just means that a person is happy to pay for something that is of value to them. If I am not happy to pay, then I think it is too expensive. If it seems like the product is not valuable enough, then I might think it is too cheap. So your job is to find the right customers who value what you do, and also to demonstrate that value to them.

Remember, how you price your products/service, how you describe them and package them up, how you talk about them to people, including the words you use in your marketing messages… these are all part of your brand.

So scratch that word affordable right out of your vocabulary. Hit the drawing board and speak directly to your right customers. When you nail it, the word affordable is no longer necessary.

{Featured image via Designspiration}