I have a theory that most products fall into one of two categories, and the analogy I like to use is the difference between buying an ice cream and buying a mattress. That reaction you just had is the reason why I use it.
A fairly good ice cream costs four dollars, and the feedback loop takes about ninety seconds. You buy a cone, you eat it, and you know whether you picked well before you reach the bottom. If you wanted to, you could work through a different shop in your town each weekend until you found the one you liked, then stay loyal to that shop until it goes under or you stumble into a better one through a recommendation from a friend. My wife and I did the same thing with burgers in Fort Worth. We worked through the options, found Kincaid's, and that was the end of the search.
Do that for a summer and you become an expert. Not in the sense that you know how it's made, but in the way that it generally performs, which is the only expertise a buyer needs. You can tell good pistachio from lazy pistachio, you know whether you're a cone person or a cup person, and the education cost you maybe fifty dollars. The product taught you.
Now try becoming an expert in mattresses. You'll buy maybe six in your life, roughly one every seven to ten years, which is what the mattress companies will tell you to do. Each one runs upwards of $1,000, and you can sleep on a bad one for a month before it starts giving your back real hell. The lessons arrive a decade apart, by which point your back, your weight, and the technology have all changed. Six data points spread across a lifetime is not an education. Almost no one becomes a mattress connoisseur. And lying on a showroom bed for four minutes (I love doing this, and my wife gets so embarrassed) tells you very little about what six months on the same bed will do to your back, or your partner's.
I've been surprised in both directions. I bought a Purple mattress a few years ago. Their marketing was excellent, I tried it in the store, and it felt great. Six months later I just wanted to throw it in the trash. It hurt so much.
The mattress I sleep on now came from Hilton. I bought it because I stay in their hotels constantly and had slept well on their beds for years. When it arrived I thought I'd made an expensive mistake, and Hilton had no returns policy, so I was stuck with it. I spent four or five months sleeping on it and wondering what I was going to do, and somewhere in those months it broke in and became really comfortable.
With Purple, the showroom test pointed the wrong way. With Hilton, I'd tried the product plenty of times on the road, and my first impression in my own house still pointed the wrong way. I own a grand total of two data points, and both of them misled me early on.
Buying blind
So here's the crux. A mattress buyer can't decide off their own experience, because they don't have enough of it. They have to decide off something else, and the something else is whatever the seller puts in front of them. Social proof, authority, the word of a friend, a warranty thick enough to feel like confidence. Robert Cialdini covers these levers in Influence, and they work hardest here, on the purchases we make too rarely to learn from.
The buyer doesn't feel blind, and making sure of that is the genius of good marketing, though it has to be good marketing. The job is to make the buyer feel like they're making an informed decision. Read enough vendor material and you start to believe you've done your research, when what you've mostly done is memorize the seller's argument. I did this with Purple. I could have recited their marketing back to you, and at the time I'd have called it research. That being said, I know I'm a total sucker for marketing. I once drove three hours to buy a Wendy's Baconator.
What should a mattress cost?
Walk into a room of fifty people and ask what an ice cream should cost, and I'd bet most guesses land within a dollar. Ask the same room what a mattress should cost and you'll get a spread from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. Buying something often gives you price instinct. Buying something twice a decade gives you nothing to anchor on except what the seller puts in front of you.
Sellers know this, and good, better, best pricing is the cleanest use of it. Put a stripped-down option below and a padded option above, and the middle tier starts to look like the smart buyer's choice. The customer isn't comparing the mattress to the market, because they don't know the market. They're comparing the mattress to the two options either side of it, and the seller built those too.
Purple ran this play on me. The top came in one, two, and three inch thicknesses, and we bought the two inch. Not because we knew what an inch of their grid material was worth. We had no way of knowing. We used the cheap tier and the expensive tier to convince ourselves the middle was the sensible deal, which is the job those tiers were built to do.
And when a buyer can't judge value directly, they count whatever they can. Features per dollar, tablets per hour, rows on the comparison chart. The thing being counted often has little to do with whether the product will work, but counting feels like diligence.
Swap the mattress for an ERP system or a piece of industrial machinery and little changes except the number of zeros. A CFO picks an ERP system maybe a handful of times in a successful career. They can't taste-test it, so the decision runs on references, reputation, and the vendor's own story told well. Or worse, they skip the decision entirely and stick with what they know, even when what they know doesn't fit the application or hasn't been the modern option for years. They upgrade from the server version to the cloud version of the same product, and the familiar name does the work that an objective look at what the business needs should have done.
Enterprise marketing looks the way it does for a reason. Case studies, analyst reports, logos on the website, the site visit to a happy customer. It's social proof and authority top to bottom, because the buyer's own experience isn't available to sell against.
If you're the seller
If you sell an ice cream product, your job is to get tried. Samples, the little wooden spoon at the counter, the first month at half price. The product does the persuading, so the money goes into distribution and trial, and the fewer steps between the customer and their first purchase, the better. I've watched companies lose perfectly good small customers by putting a credit check and a six page onboarding form in front of a four hundred dollar order.
Ice cream products are also repeat products, so winning the customer is half the job and keeping them is the other half.
Cheap-per-pound industrial chemicals behave the same way as ice cream here. The customer reorders constantly, they know to the cent what the product should cost, and they'll reprice you the moment your execution slips. Businesses like these live on product execution and experience, and price sensitivity comes with the territory. One thing I take objection to is people who sell ice cream products and think it's all about price. Really it's about value. There are some very expensive ice creams out there, and the people buying them feel like they're getting their money's worth. What a frequent buyer can judge is the relationship between the price and what they feel they're getting, and all those cheap experiments are what make that judgment possible.
If you sell a mattress product, your buyer can't inform themselves, so your job is to be the most credible substitute for experience they can find.
First, shorten the feedback loop artificially. Casper sells mattresses with a hundred night trial and free returns, and buried in the terms is a rule that you can't return one during the first thirty nights. Casper knows a body takes about a month to adjust to a new bed, so they wrote the product's own feedback loop into the returns policy. Free returns are expensive to run, and the expense is what makes the promise believable.
Second, borrow a feedback loop that's already run. My Hilton purchase was a borrowed loop. I'd slept on that bed dozens of nights, in a dozen cities, before I ever paid for one. Customer references, case studies, paid pilots, and site visits all do the same job. They let a prospect use somebody else's six months of experience instead of waiting for their own.
Third, carry the risk yourself. Guarantees, performance based pricing, money back if the numbers disappoint. Each of these needs to cost you something real. A promise that would be cheap to keep tells the buyer very little and is often seen as disingenuous.
And whatever you do, don't discount. Your buyer doesn't know what the product should cost, so the number you're discounting from was yours to begin with, and cutting the number mostly signals that the first price wasn't real. A discount treats a trust problem as a price problem, and the hesitation was rarely about the invoice. The buyer is worried about being wrong for six months.
One last thing, on reviews. For long feedback loop products they're close to useless, because most get written in the honeymoon weeks, before the product has revealed anything. My Purple review at week two would have been glowing. My Hilton review at week two would have been furious. Both would have misled the next buyer. If you sell a mattress product, ask for feedback at six months. Fewer people will answer, and the answers will be worth something.
So which one are you selling, ice creams or mattresses?