Quoted from EricR:
Of course the question would be whether they would gain more in upgrades from Pro to Pro Plus than what they would lose to those that would have bought Premiums instead? I think if the Pro models are really the bulk of their sales as many suggest then this might be a good option for Stern.
What you are going through here tho is your exercise of establishing your product tiers... something every business does. What feature goes into what tier?
You highlighted it before where you said 'sometimes people just wanted that one thing...' - there is two stories behind that. One, the selfish one.. which is where a customer wants a customized game that suits THEIR tastes and refuses to acknowledge there are more customers than just them... or that they can't have their cake and eat it too. (of course not everyone is this way... but some can't step back and see the world is bigger than themself). The second story is the intentional product upsell. You intentionally put a desirable feature in a higher model to create an upsell opportunity. This is of course marketing.. and you must balance creating the demand without pissing people off.
If we put everything everyone wants in a model... it costs too much. If we don't create enough differentiation between models, they cannibalize each other and we create confusion with the customers. You must have enough separation between models and a reasonable target customer... else your tiers won't be effective and you lose money in building inventory that won't sell.
From a business standpoint, we want to ensure people are buying the highest model we can make them feel comfortable with.. because we want to maximize revenue per transaction, and typically your premium products have higher margins.
In most cases, Stern is doing a reasonable job of differentiating products... but many people gripe because the cheapest product doesn't fit what they want to buy. And there is some merit in that purely from the point that the lowest model is the PRICE point many customers were used too.. so it's not as much about model #1, #2, or #3, but rather what people used to get at a certain price point.
If the price tiers were $3500, $4500, $5500.. I bet we'd be having a very different discussion around Stern's tier'd model. But the friction comes from collectors wanting the feature edition that is moving towards a $7000 price point vs the $4000-$5000 of not too long ago.