Success Quote by Roy H. Williams

Williams is smuggling a minor magic trick into a sentence that pretends to be simple arithmetic. By defining value as the gap between what you expect to pay and what you actually pay, he yanks “value” out of the realm of materials, durability, or even usefulness, and plants it squarely in the consumer’s head. The line is a reminder that pricing isn’t a neutral label; it’s a narrative device.

The specific intent is practical and slightly mischievous: teach marketers to stop obsessing over the product’s inherent worth and start engineering expectations. “Anticipated price” is doing most of the work here. It’s built by brand signals, packaging, placement, influencers, scarcity cues, the anchoring effect of a crossed-out “was” price, and the subtle theatre of luxury. Once you control anticipation, the tag becomes less a cost than a punchline: the reveal that delivers the dopamine hit of a “deal,” even when the deal is manufactured.

The subtext is a cold-eyed admission about consumer psychology. People don’t evaluate purchases in isolation; they evaluate them against an internal reference point that businesses help set. That makes “value” pliable, which is empowering for sellers and hazardous for buyers: if the reference point is inflated, overpaying can still feel like winning.

Contextually, this is classic direct-response and retail strategy thinking: the world of anchors, bundles, MSRP-as-prop, and “limited-time” scripts. Williams isn’t describing what things are worth. He’s describing how we’re persuaded to feel.