Shrouded Attributes

What You Really Get For 'x'.

I remember in my cubrep days incredulous prospects insisting that my competitor - despite playing extremely fast and loose with their true capabilities - claimed to do what we did, and came in at the same price. As they were invariably the larger, longer-standing, bluer-chipped option, buyers inevitably leant their way.

While such tactic is often the last minute panic of the second-placed bidder, I knew this projection was, to put it politely, misguided. Yet as seasoned sellers understand, perception is reality.

So how to adjust such mistaken belief?

Of the ways I got taught back then, a significant plank involved exposing actual costs.

The thing about Big Tech back then was their remarkable tendency to keep steadily adding on sums of all sorts of product and services, post-sale. Merrily selling them in year-in, year-out. Of the precise type that the house I worked at had the generous temerity to include in the initial price tag.

Such items ran to Enterprise quirks like Fixed Asset registers and Corporate Manager intra-group trading, Kitting and Warehousing. Which all combined meant we could reduce client outlay whilst giving ourselves valued differentiators.

And that's before you get to the then inevitable costs such behemoths charged for installing, servicing and tailoring their said 'does everything' kit. It would've been cheaper and quicker for many a buyer to have built a rocket to visit the moon.

In the decade from those mid-90s days, TCO was certainly a thing. Consider the difference between Day One Costs, and On-Costs. On uncovering Total Cost of Ownership measures careers could be made.

Leasing paved the way to rental style models. Of which the $x per person per month is a staple we see all around today. Yet even these are not immune to, ahem, creative practices like those of the past.

Which is where the label of shrouded attributes comes in.

One researcher notes that these;

"routinely take advantage of consumers’ limited attention by strategically obfuscating the price of add-ons ... whose true liabilities are hidden"

As the wisdom warns, if something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

This term is a cracker to introduce to the prospect that's been lured in to just such a big promise which we know to be false.

Indirectly, by implication too. Simply by stating we've no shrouded attributes, and mentioning what we include to allow the inference to percolate of only us uniquely doing so, can be enough.