Wondering who started girl math? Wondering why on earth I'm even talking about it? Friend, girl math is the PERFECT entryway into talking about marketing psychology and simple pricing strategies that make people buy.
In this episode I'll tell answer: What is girl math? Explain the girl math meme... And then tell you how you can harness the power of this ridiculous trend when pricing your offers, as a service based business owner.
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Hosted by Jenna Warriner, Creator of Magic Marketing Machine
What is girl math? (And how you can use it to price your offers better)
Coming in hot, a marketing psychology nerd takes on girl math. Have you heard of this trend? Let's rewind. Have you heard of the trend girl dinner? It's this internet meme about how when a girl, like when no one is looking, we make ourselves a dinner that's like a pickle and a scoop of mashed potatoes and three grapes.
And that's like girl dinner. It's something that's like thrown together. It's not aesthetic and... When it got popularized on the internet and specifically TikTok, everyone was like, Yeah, I make girl dinner too. So that became like this whole thing. And then that morphed into this trend of girl math, which is like the ridiculous way that we can look at and justify money.
So knowyourmeme. com has sourced this back to a creator called Sam James, which is Sam James with like six ex S's, and I was on a hunt to find out who actually invented this trend, and it was kind of hard to find, but I did find an article on Forbes that sourced Know Your Meme. I didn't want to talk about it without giving credit where it's due, but it's gone so out of control that, like, Podcasts and creators and blogs and everything all over the world are talking about, like, girl math right now, and that's turned into dog math and boy math.
Okay, so let me give you some rules of girl math as Forbes puts it. Girl math is an invented set of rules that women supposedly keep when justifying impulse spending. So, for an example, any item under 5 Is free as is anything bought with cash. Concert tickets bought in advance are also free by the time the concert rolls around.
Purchases that are returned for a refund aren't just free but profitable. So it's funny and it's one of those things that's like, it's funny 'cause it's true. But I, the marketing psychology nerd among us, was like, this is genuinely how consumers justify purchases. And so as marketers, we have the opportunity and we do reverse engineer that when pricing.
So I want to give you a bunch of examples of this. I want to just draw a direct correlation between how you can use this concept of girl math, which is essentially positioning when pricing your offers. God, I feel like a nerd, but the way that girl math works is you'll just like add up all of these sometimes ludicrous, but sometimes actually how our brains work things to like justify a purchase.
In, in terms of marketing psychology, how many times have you seen something listed for 9. 99 instead of 10? Like, that is a very specific choice, because a lot of us see certain numbers as almost like humps. They're like transition points to the next big amount of dollars. So, How many times have you gone, Well, I'll buy that if it's under 10 bucks.
Yeah, I'd buy that for 20 bucks, but 21 bucks? No. No bueno. Too much money. And so, by positioning something as 9. 99 in our brains, it's less than 10, it's therefore cheap, even though Like, in Canada, pennies don't even exist anymore. 9. 99 is effectively 10, but we still constantly price things ending in 99, so they feel like less.
There's also the same sort of thinking around sevens. Make something 9. 97, oh wow, that's way cheaper. That's even cheaper than 9. 99. No, it's not. It's two pennies. Those literally can't get you anywhere. And yet, it works. Here's another example. Say you want to buy a book for 20 bucks, or you can pay for that book in five easy payments of five dollars each.
Option A is 20. Option B is ultimately 25. But because you're saying you can pay for it in increments of 5, it feels so small. 5 to you feels doable. Feels like a steal. Feels like a bargain. Feels affordable. Even though, long game, you're going to end up paying more. Payment plans are typically priced at just a little bit more money.
Then when you pay for something flat, because then the second piece of that is you can say if you buy it for 20, save 5. What? What 5? Where did that 5 come from? You're only saving 5 from the more expensive payment plan option. I mean, isn't it crazy? And it's all just like how we, it's all positioning. It's all girl math at the end of the day.
One of my friends said this to me when we were both bartenders and it stuck with me forever. She said, We can't afford not to buy quality clothes when they're on sale. I thought that was such an interesting perspective and so true. Because five H& M tops that are all gonna get wrecked in the dryer and fail cost you returning to the store, cost you the price point for each of them, you know, cost you the annoyance of wrecking another shirt in the dryer versus one good quality piece of clothing that, when on sale, is about the same price as five H& M shirts, but doesn't cost you all of those extra things and lasts a lot longer.
Interesting, right? I'll leave you with one more way that you can use Girl Math when pricing your own service. Think about what your client saves by working with you. So here's an example, uh, in Magic Marketing Machine right now there's a sobriety coach and one of the ideas we were tossing around is how much money does someone save by not drinking when they get sober using your services.
Here's another example using sort of time. If you take an Uber, it saves you 10 minutes in not having to park the car. So, chew on that. What's time or money someone saves by working with you, even if it doesn't have anything to do with your price? You can use that positioning when you are marketing your service.
Here's another one. I market Magic Marketing Machine. As one of the benefits being, you'll manage your account in 15 minutes a day. So right now, if you're spending 2 hours a day on Instagram, Bam! You just saved 8, like almost 9 hours a week saved. And then you can go so far as to say, now what are you gonna do with that?
That's an extra workday a week. What can you accomplish in that extra workday a week if you had an extra free nine ish hours? And then, now suddenly, the benefit of taking the program is getting an entire day back a week and the ROI of how much more money you could make if you had An extra four days a month, an extra 48 days a year to be working on and 📍 growing your business.
Isn't it bananas? How quickly all of these girl maths can add up and, and you're reading marketing that is like this. You're seeing marketing positioning that is like this all the time. It's all around you. So keep an eye out for it and see how you can apply it on your own sales pages and your own posts.
And that's all for me. I'll see you next time.
