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- How a coffee shop taught me to charge 3x more
How a coffee shop taught me to charge 3x more
Jordan Schwarzenberger
August 07, 2025
Coffee shops are where I go when I need to lock in.
Where I sit in the corner with my laptop and have some of my best ideas, write some of my best content, and solve some of my most complex problems.
So when I buy a £4.50 coffee, it isn't really just coffee.
It's the price of admission to my most productive workspace.
It's buying myself permission to sit somewhere for 4 hours without feeling guilty.
It's the ritual that signals to my brain: "Okay, time to do real work now."
Call me crazy but I genuinely see this as pricing psychology in its purest form.
From scattered, distracted me dealing with a thousand notifications across slack, WhatsApp, email, LinkedIn, Twitter etc etc → to focused, strategic me who can actually think in complete sentences and maybe even have an original thought or two.
And this is what I see most businesses completely miss the mark on when it comes to their pricing.
They think they're selling products or services.
They're explaining what their thing does instead of what their customer becomes after using it.
But their customers are buying outcomes, experiences and feelings.
They’re buying competence, confidence, progress.
This is why creator brands are eating traditional businesses alive.
Creators understand intuitively that people don't buy things - they buy better versions of themselves.
But let me go a little deeper on this because I think most people fundamentally misunderstand what actually drives purchase decisions…
We've been conditioned to think that buying is a rational process.
That people carefully evaluate features, compare prices, weigh pros and cons, and then make logical decisions based on objective criteria.
But that's not how human psychology actually works.
Every single purchase decision, no matter how mundane or significant, is fundamentally about identity transformation.
When someone buys something, they're not really buying the thing itself - they're buying who they believe they'll become by owning that thing.
This is how our brains are literally wired to make decisions.
We construct our sense of self through our choices, and every purchase is a vote for the kind of person we want to be.
Whether my favourite coffee shops knows this or not, they’re selling access to my most productive self first.
This is why price sensitivity disappears when the transformation is clear and compelling.
Most companies are trapped in what I call "feature prison."
They obsess over making their products objectively better - faster, cheaper, more efficient, more reliable.
They think that if they can just build the superior mousetrap, the world will beat a path to their door.
But superiority is almost never why people buy.
People buy because they want to become someone different than who they are right now, and they believe your product or service will facilitate that transformation.
Instead of asking "How do we make this better?" you might ask "Who does our customer want to become, and how can we help them get there?"
This pretty much explains why premium pricing often works better than competitive pricing.
When you price low, you're signalling that the transformation isn't particularly valuable.
When you price high, you're communicating that the outcome is significant and meaningful.
People don't want cheap transformations - they want effective ones.
They'd rather pay more for something that genuinely changes their life than pay less for something that leaves them exactly where they started.
This is why luxury brands can charge thousands for items that cost literally pennies to produce.
They're selling access to identity, status, belonging, transformation.
The reason creator brands are demolishing traditional businesses is because creators understand identity transformation at a visceral level.
They've built their entire careers on helping people become different versions of themselves.
When a creator launches a product, their audience is evaluating whether this purchase moves them closer to becoming like the creator they admire.
Traditional businesses approach customers as rational economic actors making logical purchasing decisions based on objective value assessments.
Creator businesses approach customers as humans desperately seeking ways to become better versions of themselves.
Guess which approach is more psychologically accurate? Guess which drives more revenue?
This is why positioning matters infinitely more than product development.
You can have the best product in the world, but if you can't articulate the transformation it enables, nobody will buy it.
The transformation is the product. Everything else is just delivery mechanism.
But most business owners resist this framing because it feels manipulative or inauthentic.
They want to sell based on merit and objective value.
But that's not actually serving their customers better - it's just making it harder for customers to understand why they should care.
When you clearly articulate the transformation your product enables, you're not manipulating people - you're helping them understand whether your solution aligns with their aspirations.
You're making it easier for them to make good decisions.
The businesses that win in the next decade will be the ones that master transformation-based thinking.
And they'll discover that when you're selling transformation instead of products, pricing becomes exponentially easier because you're not competing with other products - you're competing with the status quo of staying the same.
A £4.50 coffee isn't expensive, it's an investment in becoming the person capable of being locked in for 4 hours straight.
And that transformation, my friends, is worth infinitely more than the cost of admission.
If you want to figure out what transformation you're really selling and how to price it properly...
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