What Kyrie Irving’s Shoes Taught Me About Marketing

This psychology of buying is now ingrained to me forever

Last weekend, my son Koji wanted to buy a shoes for the next school year and at the same time, as his basketball shoes. It was his birthday celebration weeks earlier and he received money as gifts from his friends. In addition, he wanted a new shoes because it’s the summer, and he was going to basketball summer camps.

So we drove to the stores such as Hoops by Footlocker, Nike Store, Dicks Sporting Goods and Hibbet. Because we were shopping for a while, we were bombarded with “data”, price data.

First, we looked for $50 basketball shoes, then eventually to $70 to $90 price range.

Koji didn’t like the lower price range and was eyeing for the more expensive price range of $160. These shoes were LeBron James’ shoes. It is expensive but I would say the design looks cool and I bet it would be cool to wear too. Around $130 range are Kyrie Irving’s Nike Shoes.

The first day of shopping, we didn’t buy, but I remember a conversation with my wife when she was asking for a particular shoe.

“How much was that shoe again” She asked.

“$70”, I said yes.

“$70 doesn’t sound expensive anymore,” She said.

That’s when a light bulb popped into my mind.

I been studying marketing in my own. This was in conjunction with starting up my business. Almost 3 hours a day, I devout myself in studying the concepts of marketing by reading books and listening to lectures.

When my wife said $70 doesn’t sound expensive anymore, that was because we were looking at shoes with price range of $100-$160.

I know $70 is expensive for shoes.

But this was before looking at $160 shoes. After comparing shoes and looking at shoes with a $160 price tag, $70 became not expensive anymore.

What happened?

Psychologists call this Anchoring.

I don’t want to bore you with the theory and technical details but anchoring happens when we cling to something, an idea or a number, in our mind.

Study shows that when subjects were asked to guess a number, for example, the population of Tibet, and before that, the subject was asked what his telephone number was, most likely, the subject’s guess to what the population of Tibet is, will be close to or related to his phone number.

Anchoring is used in marketing all the time. Take for example a sale. It is not uncommon to see price signs like this:

Previous Price: $78

Now: $60

The idea is to anchor you mind to the $78 and then shows you a lower price, $60.

The best anchoring technique that I used in on-line marketing is the stack slide. This idea came from Russel Brunson. He basically shows the value of each offer and then sell the whole offer for less.

Let me show you what a stack slide looks like…

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Total Value: $1097.00

You can get this today only for only $299

That’s an example of the stack slide, at it came from the idea of anchoring. Anchoring is one of the principle working here, but if you scrutinize the slide, it shows you things that are not related to the stack slide but marketing principle nonetheless.

First is the price. It is well known that prices showing 9–9 or 9–7, in the internet, is an effective sales tactic.

Second is the word BONUS or FREE in the slide. Bonus or Free is too hard to resist for a human being. That’s the reason free is in the slide.

Third is scarcity. The word today only is a marketing technique called scarcity. It’s basically saying it’s now or never. Get it today.

Anyway, those are the marketing principles involved, and the primary one is anchoring.

In the end, Koji settled for the high cut Kyrie V shoe, the Oreo blast color. I said to myself, I was anchored to expensive shoes like the $160 LeBron James’ shoes, that’s why I settled for Kyrie’s shoes, where the price range is around $130.

Now it’s time to use anchoring in my next sales message.