Setting a price point

Marketing is good – it lets people know our business exists, and might be worth checking out. But making the sale is the pointy end, so the Sales Plan has been another major focus of mine in the last year.

The trickiest problem to solve has been setting a price point. There’s nothing really like mountaincarts in Australia (that I can find), though the activity is popular at ski resorts in summer in Europe, where they have ski lifts running all summer for mountainbikes… and mountaincarts. So for those resorts, mountaincarts are a simple added extra. People are already buying a lift pass for a few days, may as well chuck in a fun activity.

But that means, the cost of the lift pass is already factored into the price of a mountaincart ride. We’re not going to have lift passes (or ski lifts – far too expensive to install for a project that may not be successful), so we need to consider setting a price point differently to global competitors. Buuuut, the prices charged in Europe give us a starting point, and not all operators have ski lifts (for example, in Wales an operator uses an old quarry for mountaincarts, and uses a unimog and trailer for uplift).

While there are no direct competitors in Australia, there are other outdoor adventure activities we can consider and compare. For example, ropes courses, abseiling, caving, skydiving, Puffing Billy, V8 race car driving, surfing, iFly, rafting, etc. I analysed a bunch of these for price, duration, thrills, and distance to get insight to their pricepoints.

Ride testing is another way to get information around what people are prepared to pay for the experience. We’re using a mountainbike track built on private land in the area to take people on test rides – the test track has jumps (not suitable for mountaincarts), is around 1.6km long and is insanely fun to ride. It’s not as safe as the real tracks will be (but experts assure me we can be safe and fun still). After people have a few goes down the test track, I ask them a few qualitative and quantitative questions (the same questions for each person), and collate the results.

So, we have global mountaincart pricepoint data (wooly, due to lift-pass combos), Australia-wide thrilling activities pricepoints, and the quantitative feedback from test riders; that’s a good start with solid data to make some decisions!