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Peter Smith: Why Jewelers Struggle With Premium Pricing
Luxury brands charge thousands for their shoes and handbags. Jewelers pricing diamond products should take note, Peter Smith writes.
Peter Smith is an industry consultant, speaker, sales trainer, and author. He can be reached via email at TheRetailSmiths@gmail.com.
I saw a post on LinkedIn recently where someone from the trade was questioning the logic of natural diamond pricing.
He posited that since diamonds cost just “hundreds of dollars” to extract from the ground, and since they sell at retail for “thousands of dollars,” he wondered who was getting all the money, the implication being, “How can they sleep at night with all those profits!”
What he didn’t ask was how much it cost to make Louis Vuitton bags and why they sell for thousands of dollars, despite being crafted of materials that are decidedly less than rare.
He didn’t mention anything about the fact that LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault has become one of the richest people in the world off the back of those substantial profits from manufacture through retail.
He didn’t ask what Ferragamo shoes cost to make or why they sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
He didn’t even ask why Elsa Peretti open-heart pendants can cost thousands of dollars and why Tiffany & Co. (oops, back to LVMH again) commands so much money for such a basic product.
He posited that since diamonds cost just “hundreds of dollars” to extract from the ground, and since they sell at retail for “thousands of dollars,” he wondered who was getting all the money, the implication being, “How can they sleep at night with all those profits!”
What he didn’t ask was how much it cost to make Louis Vuitton bags and why they sell for thousands of dollars, despite being crafted of materials that are decidedly less than rare.
He didn’t mention anything about the fact that LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault has become one of the richest people in the world off the back of those substantial profits from manufacture through retail.
He didn’t ask what Ferragamo shoes cost to make or why they sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
He didn’t even ask why Elsa Peretti open-heart pendants can cost thousands of dollars and why Tiffany & Co. (oops, back to LVMH again) commands so much money for such a basic product.
“In a business where we command, in my view, appropriate price premiums for brands such as David Yurman, Roberto Coin, Marco Bicego, and even Pandora, we continue to tie ourselves in knots at the prospect of doing likewise with diamond products.”
— Peter Smith
I mean, have you ever even put those pendants on a scale?
In a business where we command, in my view, appropriate price premiums for brands such as David Yurman, Roberto Coin, Marco Bicego, and even Pandora, where the suggested retail pricing has virtually no bearing at all on the cost of materials and manufacture, we continue to tie ourselves in knots at the prospect of doing likewise with diamond products.
It’s as if even thinking about making margin on diamonds is crossing a moral rubicon.
Instead of asking ourselves what we should price the goods at, we gingerly tiptoe upwards from our costs and then, even after arriving at the minimum level of acceptable pricing, often allow discounting, further eroding essential margins.
Why do we do that? Why don’t we lean confidently into premium pricing and embrace the value proposition?
The science of pricing psychology is clear in showing that customers use prices as a proxy for quality. This is especially true when they don’t have a clear sense for the products or category in question.
The higher the price, the better the perceived quality. The higher the perceived quality, the greater the level of consumer satisfaction.
Do customers really care what your margins are or what you paid for a diamond or a piece of jewelry?
Do they know what the price of gold is before they visit their local jewelry store to mark a special occasion?
In “Unleash Your Primal Brain,” Tim Ash wrote, “If something is thought of as being cheap, our conscious mind will associate it with being less effective and substandard as well. Our brain can force us to undermine its objective qualities.”
It seems to me that retailers lose entirely too much sleep fretting over whether they are charging customers too much for product, instead of focusing on the most important task of inspiring customers to want to spend more.
Monsieur Arnault and Signore and Signora Ferragamo? They sleep just fine.
Happy retailing!
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