Hello there 👋

Hope your first week back wasn't too brutal!

On our end, we've kicked the new year off by doing a few copy audits and punch ups (our new, one-day turnaround copywriting service) and almost every single one has been about tackling two growth-killing potholes:

1. Price sensitivity (AKA, customers feel it’s “too expensive” or they can’t see why it’s worth more than the alternatives, so they wait for a discount)
2. A lack of clarity about messaging and voice (AKA, the site, socials and emails feel like they're all saying slightly different things, so it's hard to “get” what makes the brand so awesome)

So for the next few weeks, we're going to be digging into copywriting, messaging and brand voice tricks and tips that can help you make sure your copy makes it immediately clear why your products are awesome and why they're worth the money.

To kick things off, we're looking at one of our favourite examples of a brand using their messaging to massively reduce price sensitivity: Bold Bean Co.

Because if you can use your messaging to get customers to ignore the fact that they can get 12 cans of Heinz Beans for about the same price as 3 jars of Bold Bean, you're probably doing something right.

So let's break it down 👇

Why Bold Bean Co make effort a core part of their brand voice

In last week's email, we talked about how important it is to make sure your messaging and copy isn't blending in with your category.

And one of the ways we talked about doing that was to bake your brand's unique point of view into everything you write.

Because if you don’t have a clear belief at the heart of everything you write, your copy becomes a mish-mash of techniques and different messages: a bit of punchy language here, a bit of funny there, some emojis, some "oh no, we need to drive more sales" FOMO there... with no red thread to tie them together.

And Bold Bean Co's unique point of view is: beans are worth obsessing over.

And that is baked into everything they write.

(They literally call their customers Bean Champs and The Leguminati. Love that.)

And it's that obsession (and the effort that comes with it) that is a key ingredient in how they make the humble bean feel like something worth splurging your cash on.

Baking effort heuristic into all of their copy and messaging

From their “Our Story” page all the way down to their product descriptions, Bold Bean Co make sure a sense of effort is a fundamental, immutable part of their brand messaging.

Go to any page on their site and you'll find something that nods to the idea that "a lot of work went into this".

In fact, their Our Story and Beans pages are almost entirely about effort.

On their story page, we open with Amelia's story of discovering beans and overcoming her skepticism, but then the rest of the page is all about the effort that has been put into launching Bold Bean Co.

All over the page, we get bits of copy like this 👇

4 years of working and learning, more and more, searching high and low, cooked and seasoned to perfection... everything from the things they're saying down to the construction of the sentences underlines that "we put in the work" message.

Then, on the page that's all about their beans, we see things like this 👇

And again, we get copy that really draws attention to manual labour, thought and effort that goes into everything they do:

Again, every section on the page reinforces the idea that "we spent a lot of time and energy and thought doing this".

Why this is clever (and why it helps with price sensitivity)

Before you buy Bold Beans, you obviously can’t taste them. So you can't know that they taste better.

So we do what humans always do: we make a decision using mental shortcuts (or heuristics).

And Bold’s story page is a *chef's kiss* masterclass in feeding our brains the right signals over and over until we think "these must taste so much better" so that it makes sense that they cost more money.

Here's why it works:

👉 It's a classic example of effort heuristic: when quality is hard to evaluate, we use perceived effort as a kind of mental cheat code.
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In the original study, researchers asked people to rate the same poem/painting before and after knowing how much time and effort it took to create. Invariably, the painting was deemed as higher quality and worth more money when they believed it took more time and effort to produce.

That's exactly what Bold Bean are doing. We understand on a gut level that these beans are better quality and worth the extra money because of all the time involved in creating them.

👉 It plays into operational transparency, too: Another classic study by Buell & Norton shows that making your behind-the-scenes labour visible can increase perceived value of your products, especially in online contexts.

This is kind of like Effort Heuristic 2.0. Effort heuristic is when we lazily think "effort = worth more" on a gut level. Operational transparency helps us be able to rationalise and explain why these beans are worth more money because "effort = care = better quality = worth more".

👉 Brand stories increase price perception too: A really interesting study found that attaching short narratives to cheap trinkets made their resale value jump by 2,706%.

Now, obviously this doesn't mean you can slap a story on your product and wait for your CFO to stand up and do the conga, but it's a really solid bit of proof that narrative and story help improve how much customers think is a fair price for your product.

(We touched on this when we looked at Lucky Saint, too.)

👉 Concrete language makes it feel tangible and increases price perception: research published earlier this year in Journal of Consumer Research found that increasing linguistic concreteness is linked to higher customer satisfaction and higher actual spending because it makes the customer feel, at least a little bit, like they already own the product.

And that's exactly why Bold Bean's story is packed with concrete effort cues (years, places, chefs, “searching high and low”, specific retailers/awards) and concrete tasting cues (like their h1 "BIG. VELVETY.TENDER. BEANS").

Steal this for your brand: turn your process into your brand's super power

Obviously, you don't have to make effort a key part of your brand voice to get these price-bumping benefits.

You can do it in much quieter ways, too.

Because here's the other thing: customers love a peek behind the curtain.

So whether you're obsessive about testing your products, always hunting for rare ingredients, use a unique method to make your products, work with farmers closely... whatever it is, if effort went in, show it off.

Add a "Behind the product" section to your PDP. Shout about your process on Instagram. Sneak process (or a hint of process) into your product descriptions.

Basically, if you can make your customers imagine what's going on behind the scenes and it'll shift the value of your product in their brains.

To make it even easier, here are some shortcuts to sneak effort into all of your copy👇

1. Start by picking the type of effort you want to own:

• How much time it takes (use words like slow, patient, meticulous...)
• Your standards (the things you refuse to compromise on, the reasons you use more expensive ingredients)
• Your obsession with quality (list ingredients, sourcing, testing)
• The process and craft (it takes 3 oranges to make one of our bars of soap, we ferment these for 20 days, etc...)

Then, weave those things into bits of copy here and there. Product descriptions, headlines, a section on your PDP.

It doesn't have to be massive, but little hints of effort make a big difference. (If you can get some in before the customer sees the price too, even better.)

👋 Two pro tips to really make the effort stick Make the effort feel meaningful by linking it to a customer payoff (taste, comfort, performance, reliability, confidence, etc...). ​ Don't make the effort the takeaway of your copy, make it "we do this effort because it benefits you". ​ Think "We cook these low and slow so they're tastier" or "We only use Manuka honey because of its healing properties" or "Each bit of wood is different, so we carve our chairs by hand to ensure quality and attention to detail" instead of "we all work really hard". ​ Make it even more believable by being candid about constraints and trade-offs. If you do something that makes the process harder (or the product more expensive), own it and explain why. ​ That kind of “we don’t do X because…” is called two-sided messaging (you acknowledge the counter-argument/limitation, then address it) and studies show that it reliably increases how much people trust your brand.​ ​ Basically, it makes you more authentic and trustworthy. ​ And being authentic and trustworthy makes people happier to pay more for your stuff. ​ Which is why Collider run ads like this 👇

TLDR: Don’t just tell people you’re premium. Show them how much work goes into making it premium.

Repeat that effort in your brand story, your product descriptions and your “why us” proof, your ingredients lists... and you suddenly stop selling a commodity that feels expensive and instead start selling something that feels premium and well worth the extra money.

(P.S. Next week, we're looking at another trick where you don't just increase your value, you change the products you're being mentally compared to.)

Want to dial up your copy & messaging in 2026?

Most of the brands we work with say the same thing: they’ve built an awesome brand with great products and 5* reviews, but their messaging and copy feels like it’s not doing it justice.

And somewhere between all the meetings, pitches, social content, supply issues, customer service... copy has fallen down the list of priorities and now you've got a patchwork of messaging that doesn’t really reflect how awesome you know the brand can be.

(AKA, new copy becomes a 107-comment Google Doc, your Klaviyo emails feel like they’re for a version of the brand that existed a few years ago and your ads are super safe because no one’s sure what the “right” message is anymore.)

If that all sounds familiar, we’d love to help your brand get crystal clear on what you’re saying, really pin down your voice and then turn that into customer-winning copy across every touchpoint.

​Let's chat 👋​

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Peace and love ✌️ Jack and Joe co-founders, co-brothers and co-pywriters at Do Words Good​