By Comparison
Three behavioural patterns deciding what your frames and lenses are worth.
“Value” might be the most overworked word in optical retail. We talk about value frames, value lenses and value brands. We tell teams to “communicate the value.” We complain that patients don’t see it and we position practices around offering it. Underneath all of that sits an assumption that value is a property a product has. Like weight, or material; something you can measure, demonstrate and justify.
Value is a relationship. Between what’s in front of someone and what they’re comparing it to. Change the comparison and the same frame becomes worth more or less, to the same customer, on the same day. That’s the whole mechanism.
An example of this outside of the optical sphere is the Red Bull story.
When Red Bull launched in 1987, soft drinks came in 355ml cans, around 12cm tall and 6cm wide. Dietrich Mateschitz launched the brand in an 250ml can, taller and slimmer at 14cm by 4cm. The Coke sitting next to it on the shelf was now a different shape and a different size, which meant it had become a different category. Red Bull could charge whatever it wanted because shoppers had nothing to measure it against. A can of Red Bull sells for around £1.80 today. Coke sits closer to £1.
In a study by Richard Shotton, he showed shoppers a 16oz tub of Ben & Jerry’s priced at $3.99. Half were also shown a Walmart own-label at $1.99. 27% rated the Ben & Jerry’s as good value. The other half were shown a Halo Top at $4.99 instead. 41% rated the same tub as good value.
Same product, same price, 52% swing in perception. The figure next to it on the shelf did all the work.
Rory Sutherland’s line on this is the one I keep coming back to: “Weirdly, you make the can smaller. Suddenly people think this is a different category of drink for which different price points apply.”
Now apply that to a frame on a shelf.
The Comparator Nobody Designed
A frame has a price tag, a brand name and a story. The customer’s eye runs along the display; a £400 frame next to £180 frames feels expensive. The same £400 frame next to £600 frames feels fair. The frame was the same, the neighbouring stock simply did all the work.
Most independents build their range from a mix of rep relationships, what they can actually make money on, what’s been selling, what they fell for at a trade show, and what they’ve inherited from past buying decisions. The comparator gets built that way; by accident, over time, through a hundred small decisions made for other reasons.
I’ve watched this play out in my own store and in plenty of others. A frame I genuinely believed in would sit untouched for weeks. Repositioned within the same shop, that same frame would start moving within days. The product was identical. Different stock around it, different outcome.
The bit nobody designed is doing more pricing work than the price tag.
The Anchor Already Set
There’s a second comparator at work, the one that’s been installed in every patient’s head before they walk through your door.
Two for £69 (or similar, just pick your price point).
It’s been in circulation for over twenty years and it’s been the price anchor for the whole UK optical market, including patients who’ve never set foot in a Specsavers. They don’t need to. The number is just the background. The number sits in their head as the default comparator, so your frames (and your lenses) get judged against it whether you like it or not.
It’s a fight you can’t win on price. The external reference anchor is set. It’s also why “we’re more expensive but here’s why” sounds defensive at the dispensing desk. You’re justifying yourself against a comparator that’s been doing its work for two decades.
The comparator you do control sits inside your own four walls. Most practices just haven’t thought of it as a decision.
What Happens After The Order
Now flip the perspective.
If you’re a supplier, you’ve put serious time and money into internal price architecture. Entry tier, mid tier, premium tier. Reps have been trained on the story. Packaging and point-of-sale have been built to signal where you sit in the market. You have a clear position on what your brand is worth.
Let’s be honest, most of the time, none of that survives in the practice. A £450 acetate from your premium tier ends up two racks away from a £180 frame from a brand the practice also stocks. The £450 stops looking premium and starts looking expensive. The £180 stops looking entry-level and starts looking like a sensible choice. And neither of those messages was yours.
A rep can tell you what each account ordered last quarter, but most can’t tell you what their frames are displayed alongside. That information lives outside the order form or visit, which means it lives outside the conversation. This is where the brand work you’ve already done can falter - in a shop you've never been in, on a frame display someone else picked, for reasons that have nothing to do with you. The practice isn't trying to damage your brand. They're trying to run a business that pays its bills; your positioning was never on their list.
Lens suppliers face this in a different form. The lens range you’ve engineered comes with its own internal tier structure. What it gets compared to in the dispensing conversation is whatever the practice decides to mention first, alongside it or against it. Your premium lens is being judged relative to what the dispenser sets up around it. In this context, the framing matters far more than the technical features of your lens.
The Comparators Behind The Comparison
If value is built by comparison, it helps to know what the brain is actually comparing things to. There are at least three behavioural patterns doing this work in optical retail, sometimes all at once.
Anchoring
There’s a classic experiment where participants spun a wheel of fortune labelled 0–100, then were asked what percentage of African countries belonged to the UN. People who’d spun a low number guessed lower. People who’d spun a high number guessed higher. The wheel had nothing to do with the question. The brain reached for it anyway. The researchers, Tversky and Kahneman, called this anchoring.
The first reference number you meet shapes every judgement that follows, even when it’s obviously irrelevant.
In a dispensing conversation, the first number out of your mouth does the same job. Say “the standard lens is £80” and £80 becomes the figure every other lens is measured against. The client isn’t running a fresh calculation each time you mention a price. They’re rotating around whatever they heard first.
Contrast Effect
Put your left hand in cold water and your right hand in warm water, then plunge both into a tub of room-temperature water. The left hand reads it as hot. The right hand reads it as cold. Same water in the tub. Each hand disagrees because of what came just before.
The frame on your wall works the same way. A £400 frame doesn’t have a fixed reading. Surrounded by £180 frames it reads as expensive. Surrounded by £600 frames it reads as fair. The frame didn’t change at all, whatever came just before did.
Signalling
When something can’t be verified directly, observable cues stand in for it. In retail, the most common stand-in for “is this any good?” is price.
Frames are easier to judge; people have look, feel and brand to go on. Lenses are not. The patient cannot see the difference between a standard and a premium progressive while sitting in the dispensing chair.1 They cannot test it for themselves. So the price becomes the comparator the brain uses to judge quality. Discount the lens to sell more volume and you’ve told the patient something specific about what it’s really worth.
Questions Worth Asking
The point of any of this is to look at your own business and notice what’s currently doing the comparator work for you.
If you’re in a practice:
What’s the first number out of your mouth in a dispensing conversation? Is it the figure you want the patient working from?
What’s actually next to what on your wall? Who decided that, and why?
What’s the most expensive frame in your range, and what would happen if you put one twice the price on the same wall?
When you discount a lens to shift volume, what does the client hear about its quality?
If a client walks in with the £125 2for1 Specsavers number already in their head, what comparator are you offering them inside your practice?
If you’re on the supplier side:
What do you actually know about the display your frames sit on?
What does your premium tier get compared to in the practices that stock you?
When a practice discounts your product by 30%, what is the patient learning about your brand?
What’s your rep trained to talk about after the frame order is delivered?
If a practice owner had to describe your brand to a customer right now, what would they say?
Where This Leaves You
Value gets built in the gaps between things, the frame and what surrounds it. The number a dispenser says and the number the patient brought with them. It isn’t mysterious, it’s been left to whoever happened to be in the room.
So who’s doing the comparator work in your business, and how much of it have you actually decided on?
Eye Style is a weekly journal on the business and beauty of optical retail, behavioural science and what actually makes eyewear sell. If this is your kind of thinking, subscribe to get the next one.
For shorter observations on the same themes, you’ll find me on Instagram at @rebeccaa_thompson.
This piece is written with independents in mind, but the same behavioural mechanics apply on the supplier and brand side too. That’s where I spend most of my consulting time these days; designing the systems and interactions that make sales, referrals and sell-through easier for both optical suppliers and retailers. If that sounds like something you’re working on, get in touch.
Although the work Nikon Lenswear UK are doing is something you need to look at. They are solving this challenge brilliantly. Ask them about it, and please tell them I told you. I’m doing my own work showing how decisions are made so I’d love to know if you actually ask and what you think about what they’re doing when you get the information.