The Mech Touch novel Chapter 226

Setting the right price mattered a lot in the mech industry. The MTA maintained a public record on every certified mech sold by a mech designer. Potential customers often looked up his recent record to get an estimate on the value of his products.

The initial price often set the standard.

Consider coming up with a mundane product like a pair of shoes. These days, modern manufacturing techniques have turned these articles of footwear into a cheap commodity that could be bought for rock-bottom prices. Some of the more affluent consumers even fabricate their own if they own a household 3D printer.

Most shoe manufacturers saw little future in trying to compete on price and volume. Instead, they went into the opposite direction, coming up with something fancy by employing famous fashion designers and incorporating trace exotics in their products.

All of that cost a lot of money, so the shoe manufacturers charged a higher premium for their fancy shoes. Sometimes they charged fifty times the unit cost of a single pair of shoes.

It sounded like a scam, right? Yet many shoe manufacturers sold out their most exclusive and expensive products the moment they released them on the market. They painstakingly built up a brand for excellence that consumers trusted.

Put in a cynical way, a strong brand effectively brainwashed the market. Consumers believed that the high prices the manufacturers adopted represented genuine value.

Sometimes, this even turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. As brands grew in recognition and value, people who owned them earned more social recognition. Clothes made the man and woman.

Every company in pretty much every sector aimed to built up a brand like this. Unfortunately for Ves, the Living Mech Company hadn’t reached this level yet. It barely got off the starting line.

To charge a twelve million credit premium for the Mark II Eternal Edition could be considered arrogant and premature. Neither his company nor his design achieved a strong enough brand to let him get away with such an outrageous price hike.

At least according to conventional wisdom.

"Then again, nothing what I do adheres to conventional wisdom." Ves said to himself.

Ves faced two main hindrances to getting his audience accept his higher prices.

First, he barely started operating a year ago, and the LMC only came into existence a couple of months ago.

While he built up his company’s brand on Cloudy Curtain, extending it to the vast and limitless Bentheim market required an even greater investment than before. Throwing a couple of billion credits on ad campaigns would barely be able to bump his company’s profile from zero percent to one percent awareness.

Second, the true value of his products lay in the X-Factor, which had a definite effect on people but could not be measured directly. In addition, since Ves wished to keep his knowledge of the X-Factor a trade secret, he couldn’t even direct the audience to take note of its effects.

Buyers had to trust in their gut feeling to appreciate his mechs enough to fork over the extra premium.

Yet they weren’t always stupid.

The more credits at stake, the more they started thinking with their brains instead of their guts. When they looked at the Mark II Eternal Edition and inspected its specs, they would know that its performance simply didn’t match its price.

If there was one thing consumers hated, it was being made aware that they were overcharging for a product. A strong brand blinded consumers to this occurrence, but Ves didn’t enjoy such a luxury at the moment.

A purchase should feel good. Ves hoped that anyone who decided to buy his mechs felt happy that they went for his designs. He’d leave a bad taste in their mouths if he appeared to be overcharging his products. This explained his current lack of sales.

As visitors kept pouring into the convention center, Ves still hadn’t made a sale. The few potential buyers among the crowd soundly rejected his greedy prices and turned elsewhere to satisfy their cravings.

Even his neighboring booths sold a couple of mechs. Ves didn’t think much of the mundane-looking mechs neighboring his booth, but their mech designers joyfully appealed to the crowd milling in front of his show models.

The prices of their mechs ranged from ten to twenty million credits. From what Ves could see, the desperate mech designers didn’t even charge much of a premium for their mechs. They’d barely make more than half-a-million credits after deducting their production costs and license fees.

Still, as poor as they behaved, at least they made some progress. Ves on the other hand sat with empty hands while the first day of the festival already progressed halfway.

"It comes down to feeling." Ves realized after musing about this point. "There’s got to be a way to make the feeling more poignant."

He turned his head to the nearby simulator pods. Marcella’s organization brought ten pods to his booth to allow the guests to try out the virtual versions of his show models.

They loosely set a limit of ten minutes per guest so that every potentate got a turn. Even then, around fifty eager guests waited in line.

Ves noted that everyone who wanted to try out a simulation consisted of average festival goers. While that helped leave a good impression behind, the mass of people blocked his potential customers from accessing the pods quickly.

Ves immediately turned to Antje. "I think it’s best to encourage our potential customers to try out the simulators. Let’s cut back on access to the pods to the general public."