Ten K One Writing

My girlfriend and I recently went out for dessert in downtown San Diego.  We ordered a tall piece of chocolate cake with two layers of crème brulée and a citrus Napoleon, so named for being short, squat, and a tad grandiose, I’m sure. They were delicious, well worth the high price.  And our six-dollar pot of tea was the height of subtle complement, with rich oranges and smoky undertones.  It slapped the rich chocolate layers high-five and then came back around for a fist bump with the pillowy pile of French dictatorial pastry to the right.  Dendrobium orchids and rose petals festooned the frosted pinnacles.  The slight winking in the candlelight proved to be edible gold flake.  The final bill for this experience?  About $30, after a decent tip.  All in all, a good investment, the ideal antidote to a weekend that had just a touch too much dead turkey carcass.

But one area where the investment fell flat?  Quantity.  And not for the reasons you’d think.  I can put food away, but the twin masses of lovingly prepared deliciousness were too much for both me and my companion.  We wanted to finish them and lick our plates, but some small voice of reason told us that attempting such a feat would turn a pleasant evening into a masochistic tale of woe.  The human body simply cannot take that much buttercream.

Chocolate freebasing.

That left us two choices: try to take the hacked up chocolate cake and Napoleon with us, or leave them there.  They would never be as good as they were that night under the palm trees and tea lights, and it seemed silly to take them home to a fridge already chock-full of leftovers.  We were boarding a flight in 24 hours anyway.  So, instead, we left them, two half-spent plates of confectionary goodness going to waste like a poorly-told joke.  Wasting all that food lent an unpleasant taint to the delicious flavors we’d experienced.  I know, I know: we didn’t have to leave the food like the overindulged Americans we are…there’s nothing better than congealed day-old Napoleon, after all.  But I don’t want to have to choose, for what I paid.  I don’t think we’ll seek that place out again, or, if we do, we’ll order significantly less food.  We’ll pick either a delicious sheaf of chocolate cake or a scrumptious Napoleon paperweight.

This Napoleon was exiled to the dumpster.

Spend less money, leave less food.  No big deal.  But it got me to wondering: how often does an experience like ours occur?  How often does getting too much detract from the user’s experience of the product?  How would the dessert experience be affected if the restaurant halved their portions and upped their prices?

Now, that’s not usually a good move; everyone knows the refrain of the shrinking cake/burrito/sandwich/beer patron.  “They used to be bigger and cheaper!” said with a shaking fist.  When  a product gets smaller and more expensive, it can look like someone’s trying to pull a fast one on us, toying with our need for, say, a piece of chocolate cake the size of a pug.  What a downer, then, to get a piece of cake barely bigger than a toy poodle.  Disappointment and angry Yelp! reviews may abound, at least at first.  Seekers of pug-sized chocolate cakes will have to go elsewhere.

Let’s take a moment to consider the musts of the expensive-cake market.  People don’t want to be rolled out of restaurants with a wheelbarrow when they pull up to a place like this.  They probably put on nicer clothes.  They want something special, something they can eat and feel good about.  They value making better choices for themselves, which is exactly what you’re helping them do by halving the portions.  That’s right:

People appreciate your assistance in making decisions.  It’s OK to charge money for that.

So, when I plunk down $6.00 for half the amount of cake I was getting charged $9.00 for before, I’ll consider it a deal.  I’m thinking here of the satisfaction of cleaning one’s plate, of not breaking out into a cold sweat in the process of finishing what was served.  No hemming and hawing about whether to force more cake down my throat, pack it into waxed cardboard, or leave it to go to waste.  Great meals are for finishing, so I’ll pay you to help me have the most snag-free experience of this great meal, and then I’ll thank you for it.  This is the great thing about a market like this one.  When you offer a specialty item, you can actually augment user experience by offering appropriate portions and pricing them accordingly.

You’re probably thinking: I don’t sell fancy cake with crème brulée in the middle of it.  OK, point taken.  But you might have something else that you do sell that could benefit from this divide-and-charge method.  And your customers?  They could benefit too.  Nobody wants your product to feel like work, so make it as painless as possible.  Then say, you’re welcome.

My reluctant marketing guru, Naomi Dunford, seems to be giving the smaller-more-manageable-cake-thing a try.  She recently snatched her successful Online Business School off the shelves, and informed her readership that the OBS of the future is going to be a slightly different animal upon its resurrection.  She’s making it into “modules”, slicing her formidable cake smaller, and selling them piece by piece.  You buy one, you read it and do its bidding.  Your business glows.  Then, grab the next one, and repeat.  Small, manageable steps; no 264-page PDF sitting in your downloads folder, waiting you to break page 11.

That’s some tasty economics, right there.