Guest Blog: Everything but the Price: How Human Behaviour Shapes Pricing Decisions
- PPS
- 8 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Author: Ann Padley, Jenny Millar
Every year, companies leave millions on the table.
Not because their product is weak.
Not because their costs are too high.
But because they misjudge what people value.
When pricing is under pressure, most teams instinctively turn to numbers and seek comfort in predictability. They build models, analyse elasticity, benchmark competitors and simulate margin outcomes. All of that analysis matters, yet it can distract from a harder truth: pricing decisions are shaped as much by human judgment as by spreadsheets.
While commercial rigour matters, most customers are not evaluating your model. They are evaluating whether it feels worth it and seems fair. They are making a judgment call based on value and the fit of your solution to their needs. This is where things get far less predictable.
People experience value in many different ways. In fact, research has identified 30 different elements of value for customers and 40 in the B2B context. Some are functional. Does it save money? Increase efficiency? Deliver measurable return? Others are psychological. Does it reduce risk? Build confidence? Improve social standing?
When a buyer sees your price, they interpret it through this complex set of lenses. The same £100,000 proposal can feel expensive in one context and entirely reasonable in another. Different alternatives, budget constraints and levels of urgency change the frame of reference. So do perceived risk, internal pressure and how critical the problem is to solve.
Inside organisations, the same psychology plays out, and pricing decisions are rarely objective. They are shaped by confidence levels, loss aversion, sales pressure, fear of churn, and the stories teams tell themselves about “what the market will bear.”
When pricing underperforms, it is often less about a lack of data and more about human behaviour. As caution and bias begin to shape decision making, discounts can quietly become the default, sales teams lose confidence in holding the line, and margin erosion starts to feel inevitable.
To prevent this drift, pricing teams need to recognise how their own biases, risk aversion and internal pressures influence the choices they make. Without that self-awareness, even well-designed pricing strategies will flouder.
This is the big idea at the heart of our keynote session, Everything but the Price.
We’ll introduce the Pricing Sprint® framework as a structured way to bring cross-functional teams together, clarify what customers truly value, challenge internal assumptions and make confident, evidence-led pricing decisions.
We’ll explore how human behaviour shapes pricing perception in the market and pricing decisions inside your organisation, and how teams can apply behavioural principles to strengthen alignment and drive stronger commercial outcomes. In a year when AI tools promise ever more optimisation, the real competitive advantage lies in understanding the human dynamics that those tools cannot capture.
Join us, Jenny Millar and Ann Padley, at the PPS profitABLE26 pricing conference in Chicago.
About the Authors
Jenny Millar and Ann Padley are co-authors of The Pricing Sprint (Bloomsbury, 2026). Jenny is Founder of Untapped Pricing and a former eBay executive who has led major pricing transformations across Europe. Ann is Senior Partner at Untapped Pricing and a strategist specialising in human-centred design and behavioural science. Together, they help leadership teams understand how human behaviour inside and outside the business shapes pricing decisions, performance and profit.
