Rory Sutherland is right that cheap looks suspicious, and he skips what happens after the sale

Rory Sutherland is the vice chairman of Ogilvy, and he tells The Diary Of A CEO that cheap strawberries make people suspicious. If they were any good, why is nobody charging full price for them? So sometimes, he says, you have to make a thing more expensive before people will trust it, unless you give them a story for where the saving came from. He is right.

Here is what he skips. He is describing a shelf. You are quoting a job. When you knock two hundred off to win the work, the customer does not hear a discount. They hear a story you did not mean to tell: either the first number was invented, or you needed this one badly. The discount is not the problem. The silence around it is. So never let a lower price travel on its own. Off peak slot. Standard spec instead of the upgrade. You collect instead of us delivering. The reason is what keeps the price believable.

They cannot value what they cannot see

The IKEA effect, he says. Kamprad believed that building the furniture yourself adds to what you think it is worth, and that the effort takes the shame out of a low price.

He is right, and every owner has felt the other side of it. Most small business work is done where the customer cannot see it. You were there at six, the machine is running by eight, and the person paying the invoice was asleep for the part that was hard. Effort nobody sees gets priced like effort nobody made. So show the work, once, in a way that costs you nothing. Two photos, before and after. The checklist left on the counter with the date on it. Three lines on the invoice about what you actually found and fixed. You are not padding the bill. You are giving them the version of the job they never got to watch.

Let them add the egg

The cake mix, he says. Just add water, and it did not sell. A psychologist said there is not enough effort in it to feel like cooking, so they changed it to add an egg, and it sold.

It sounds like a trick until you look at your own quotes. Most owners are working hard in the other direction. We handle everything. You do not have to lift a finger. It sounds generous, and it quietly turns you into a vending machine the customer has no stake in. So give them the egg. One real choice on every job, no more. Three options, not one. The date. The finish. Which room you start in. The customer who picked something is not a buyer any more. They are a part owner of the outcome, and they defend it when the price comes up at home.

The sale is not the finish line

Once the marketing job is done and the person has clicked buy, he says, that customer is handed to people whose metrics are anything but satisfaction. How do we keep them off the phone. How do we make the call shorter. How do we move it cheaper.

He is right, and he is describing a big company with departments. You are all of those departments. The person who sold the job and the person who has to answer the phone at half four on a Friday are the same tired human, and by then the money is already in. So put one thing after the sale that cannot be skipped. A call two days after the job is done. Not a survey. A call. Is it doing what you wanted. Count it like you count leads: five jobs finished this week, five calls made. That number is the difference between a customer and a transaction.

Count what is hard to count

Loyalty is much slower to measure than conversion, he says. So the money goes to the channels where the effect is easiest to prove, not to the places where it works hardest.

It is not only budgets. It is your Tuesday. An owner does the same thing with their own hours. Chasing a new lead feels like progress because you can see it. Ringing the customer from March feels like nothing, so it never gets done, and that is the customer who was going to come back on their own. So put one slow number on the board and read it once a month. How many customers bought from you again this month. That is it.

What the price tells them about you

Sutherland is right that cheap looks suspicious. What owners forget is that people are not buying what the job costs you. They are buying what the price, and everything after it, tells them about you.

So, this week. Give every discount a reason. Show one piece of invisible work. Put one real choice in every quote. Call every finished job in two days. And count who came back.