As a professional writer who is deeply entrenched in marketing, I have a lot of discussions with clients about pricing strategies.

Let’s face it, pricing is a delicate art. The last thing you want to do is let price drive decisions in the minds of customer on whether to buy your product or service.

The key is provide numbers that mean something of value to the people with whom you want to do business.

Trend-spotting author Jeremy Gutsche relates a great story about this in his book Exploiting Chaos. A few years ago while working for a leading Canadian credit card company, he and his group had an insight: “customers didn’t think about their rates as numbers, they thought about whether or not the rates were fair.”

Rather than advertise the lending rate on their card as a percentage, they switched to presenting it as “Prime +2,” which meant that their lending rate was just two percentage points higher than the prime rate set by the Bank of Canada.

Sales skyrocketed.