Apple's Pricing Decoys

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3. Obscure the reference price. Ah, this is a more clever Apple marketing trick—instead of giving consumers a reference price, hide the pricing altogether. Mail order business Omaha Steaks does this by selling complex bundles of meat and side dishes for about $100; the assortment of items obscures any comparison with prices at your grocery store. Candy in movie theaters is another classic example of price obscurity, because it comes in unusual, large boxes that are shaped nothing like what you see at other stores—so $5 candy seems cool. Apple also obscures references by making its products look like nothing else, from the first iPod with a unique scroll wheel to the current iterations wrapped in gleaming aluminum. Apple seems wondrously unique, until you consider aluminum is the same material you wrap leftover fish in … and then it hits you: Apple is disguising itself so you can't compare prices. Is the new $99 Apple TV box a good deal? Who knows? It looks like nothing else on the planet.

4. Bundle price components to hide what you can. Buy an Apple product, and you'll spend more downstream. For every iPad or iPhone sold, Apple likely counts on your future song purchases, video rentals, and soon iAd clicks on app advertising. That sexy new Apple TV thing doesn't store anything, so you'll pay to play. Apple is not unusual here; almost every mobile handset, for instance, has some of its costs buried in future monthly data fees over a two-year phone contract. All of this "bundling" means the price over time is much more than what you think picking up the Apple gadget.

The pricing strategy is brilliant. By staging a series of perceived technology innovations and then adding price decoys, reference prices, obscurity, and bundling, Apple makes us willing to pay more to do the same stuff we did 30 years ago: Read magazines, type messages, watch shows, make phone calls. The communication breakthroughs are mostly an illusion, but with shiny aluminum in our hands, who cares what it costs?

Ben Kunz is director of strategic planning at Mediassociates, a media planning and Internet strategy firm. He is author of the advertising strategy blog ThoughtGadgets.com.

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