To achieve a high price, you don’t always need high quality

Last week I wrote a post about how your price communicates a message about your brand. This prompted a lively discussion online about the importance of quality in this equation. Many chimed in that if your quality does not live up to the price expectation, you’ll fail.

This makes good sense … but it’s not always true. There are plenty of examples where quality has little or no impact on a purchase decision or the price that is paid.

In fact, you could say the difference between a raw market value and the actual achieved price is the impact of marketing.

Here are some examples where quality is not necessarily part of the price consideration.

1. It’s a great story

In my living room I have a beat up green table.

It’s a little rickety, has paint stains on it, and the drawer doesn’t work very well. By any standard, this is not a high quality piece of furniture you should have on display in your home. If you saw it at a yard sale you would probably pass it by. Yet I paid a couple hundred dollars for the thing and it’s my favorite piece of furniture in the whole house.

Why?

I buy stories.