Clever or clumsy?

I watched in horror recently as the COO of a well-known media company conducted a “quick bit of market research” (his words) on their Facebook page.

Subscribers had been asking for an ad-free option, so the COO posted:

“To go ad-free, an annual sub would need to be around $180–$200 (currently $69). Does that change how you feel about ad-free as a perk? If you’re a current subscriber and don’t care about ad-free, would you cancel?”

Fair to say, the post got a LOT of comments.

Most were horrified by the price and said, yes, they’d cancel.

(Dear Reader, the comments were quickly closed.)

So, was this a clumsy move by the COO, or a clever one?

Why it was clumsy

1. People don’t know what they’ll do

Asking hypothetical questions leads to hypothetical answers. What people say they’ll do often differs from what they actually do, especially when emotion, context, and friction kick in. Building a pricing strategy on guesswork is risky.

2. Price context matters

Throwing out a price of $180+, and comparing it to the current $69 draws attention to the magnitude of the change and makes the business look greedy.

How you communicate price is often more important than what the price is. For example, framing it as $3.50/week would have likely generated a different response (albeit still guesswork).

3. Public questions create public expectations

If you don’t act on what people say, you look like you weren’t really listening. That can damage trust. And if you do act on it, you might make a bad call for your business. 

But…could it have been clever?

Possibly.

While I doubt this was the strategy, there’s a behavioural silver lining in play: anchoring.

By floating $180–$200, any price less than that may feel like a relief. 

“We’ve heard you and here’s the compromise” is the type of line they could use to spin themselves out of this hole.

Two takeaways:

• Posing a question on Facebook is NOT market research.

 Real research is structured, tested, and focused on behaviour, not opinions.

• Don’t ask if you’re not ready for the answer.

Crowdsourcing your pricing strategy in public might feel transparent and a quick way to get answers, but if you haven’t planned how to handle the response, it’s a trap of your own making.

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