The Infrastructure of Persuasion: Why Dynamic Pricing Alone Isn’t Enough
- Jeffrey Radwell
- Apr 15
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 19
Introduction
Ask most commerce leaders what they want from a pricing system, and they’ll say what you’d expect: “Faster response times. Real-time adjustments. Competitive undercutting. Smarter elasticity.”
It sounds reasonable. It even sounds strategic. But it’s a trap.
Because price isn’t just a reaction to market conditions, it’s a message. It signals quality, urgency, trust, scarcity, intent. Every pricing decision is a psychological prompt disguised as a number.
And yet, most dynamic pricing platforms stop at speed. They optimize, but they don’t orchestrate. They calculate, but they don’t persuade.
At Camouflet, we believe pricing is infrastructure. But not just for commerce. It’s infrastructure for influence. For behavior. For identity.
This is why dynamic pricing isn’t enough, and why we built something else entirely.
The Myth of Dynamism as Strategy
The phrase “dynamic pricing” gets thrown around a lot, by retailers, investors, and even competitors as though it’s inherently forward-thinking. But more often than not, it’s just reactivity wrapped in code.
Most pricing engines work like this: monitor competitor movements, run elasticity models, apply a discount, test response, repeat. It’s fast. It’s mathematically elegant. But it lacks memory. It lacks context. And it lacks meaning.
Imagine speaking to your customers in a different tone every hour. One minute you whisper exclusivity, the next you scream discount. That’s what most “dynamic” pricing systems do. They optimize for a transaction, but ignore what pricing actually represents, your positioning, your promise, your precision.
Camouflet doesn’t play that game. Because price, to us, isn’t just a lever. It’s a layer of orchestration.
A $6 difference means nothing if the shift is dissonant. But a $2 difference that’s personalized, timed, and framed, that persuades.
Our platform doesn’t just move price points. It builds logic around them. It synchronizes them with audience segments, time-of-day behavior, inventory risk, and conversion history. A price change in Camouflet is never arbitrary. It’s scored, like music.
What Pricing Actually Persuades
Price isn’t just a number. It’s a mirror. It reflects how the customer sees themselves in the moment they’re deciding to act.
At Camouflet, we ask a different question than most pricing platforms:Not “What is the customer willing to pay?” but “What does this price say to them about who they are?”
Because price doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it sits inside a constellation of cues: trust, scarcity, urgency, value, identity. When misaligned, even a perfect price falls flat. When precise, even a slight adjustment converts.
A/B test results showing that a price framed as a reward converts better than the same price framed as a discount can be attributed to the framing effect, one of the core concepts of behavioral economics¹. Camouflet leverages this not just once, but dynamically, depending on segment, timing, and purchase history.
That’s why Camouflet doesn’t just deliver a price. It delivers a pricing experience.
Every interaction, loyalty tier, cart behavior, session length, source referral, SKU history, feeds a behavioral profile. Our system maps those inputs into a personalized pricing journey. One customer might see a 3% nudge accompanied by “You’ve unlocked early access pricing.” Another sees no discount at all because our models know they associate higher price with premium quality and trust it more.
This is persuasion, not manipulation. It’s price as language, not just lever.
Our segmentation engine factors:
Emotional elasticity (how likely is this user to abandon over $2?)
Cognitive framing (is the price being presented as a benefit, or as a risk?)
Loyalty narrative (what’s the memory of previous price exposure?)
For many users, avoiding a perceived loss is more motivating than achieving a gain². Camouflet identifies segments likely to respond to “lock-in” pricing language vs. those more motivated by exclusive access.
We don’t just move prices, we align them with emotion.
In one recent test, cart conversion increased by 13.4%—with a higher average price—simply by changing the language around the same pricing event.
Why? Because price isn’t rational. It’s relational. It’s about trust, timing, identity, and the feeling that this was meant for me.
A price is never interpreted in isolation. Behavioral economists refer to this as anchoring bias³. Camouflet’s infrastructure accounts for the user’s prior exposures, discount history, previous PDP views, even related SKUs, to make sure each new price is perceived as meaningful, not arbitrary.
Camouflet doesn’t just optimize margins. It optimizes meaning.
Beyond the Dashboard: Camouflet as Infrastructure
Most pricing platforms are just that. Platforms. Tools you log into. Dashboards you monitor. Engines you point at a problem and hope they course-correct.
Camouflet isn’t a dashboard. It’s infrastructure.
Camouflet doesn’t sit on top of your business, it runs through it. Embedded across channels, wired into inventory, connected to behavioral signals, Camouflet isn’t something your team checks.
Here’s the difference.
A dashboard reacts after the fact. Camouflet recalibrates in real time. A dashboard offers averages. Camouflet works in precision. A dashboard needs human babysitting. Camouflet conducts autonomously, unless you decide to take the baton.
Our API-first architecture makes pricing composable. Brands can run localized experiments, price dynamically across geographies, integrate with ERP systems, sync with fulfillment centers, and push channel-specific nudges, all from a single orchestration layer.
Inventory overstocked in the Northeast? Camouflet adjusts pricing there without touching the West Coast. Loyalty engagement slipping in your top 10% segment We automatically reinforce reward-based framing and early access language. A product is seeing high add-to-carts but poor conversion? We know what language, what price message, will close that gap.
And because Camouflet is embedded, not just visible, it works everywhere pricing happens: PDPs, email, cart, checkout, search, push, customer service.
No more siloed discounts. No more channel confusion. Just one unified, invisible layer of orchestration, everywhere pricing is part of the experience.
Because Camouflet isn’t just there to move prices. It’s there to move people.
The Persuasion Gap
The future of pricing isn’t just faster. It isn’t just smarter. It’s more human.
There’s a widening gap in the market between brands that treat pricing as a mechanical exercise in elasticity, and those that see it as a high-touch layer of persuasion infrastructure.
Most pricing tools optimize. Camouflet orchestrates. Most move numbers. Camouflet moves behavior.
In an era where every customer touchpoint is saturated, pricing is one of the last subtle levers left to tell someone who they are, what they deserve, and why it matters now. If that lever is blunt, silent, or misaligned, you lose margin, trust, and momentum all at once.
Camouflet was built to close that gap. Not by pricing more aggressively, but by pricing more intentionally.
What we’ve built isn’t just a pricing engine. It’s a system that thinks in timing, emotion, memory, and trust. A system that understands that persuasion happens when infrastructure disappears and clarity takes over.
If your current pricing system answers “What should we charge?”
Camouflet answers, “What does this price mean to them?”
That’s the difference. And in today’s market, that difference is everything.
Conclusion: Pricing as Behavioral Architecture
Camouflet’s approach is grounded in decades of behavioral research. From Kahneman and Tversky’s framing theory to Richard Thaler’s work on mental accounting, we’ve built a system that doesn’t just know what price to serve, but how, when, and why it should be served for maximum effect⁴.
Because price is never neutral.
It’s never just a dollar amount, a markdown, or a number on a tag. It’s a message. A mirror. A frame. A story a customer tells themselves about worth, urgency, fairness, identity, and desire. Behavioral economists have shown us that decision-making is not logical, it’s narrative. That what we pay is shaped more by context than by math.
Camouflet turns that truth into infrastructure.
We’ve encoded years of behavioral science into a system that orchestrates price as a psychological experience, across moments, devices, moods, and user histories. We don’t just change numbers. We shape expectations. We honor memory. We tune friction. We apply cognitive nuance to commercial scale.
This isn’t just optimization. It’s architecture.
Camouflet is built to be invisible but influential. Embedded, but expressive. Not a dashboard you babysit, but a layer of intelligence that aligns perception with profit. It turns pricing into a channel of communication, and one of your brand’s sharpest, most underleveraged tools of persuasion.
If your competitors are optimizing for reaction, Camouflet is composing for resonance.
Because the future of pricing isn’t just about what people pay.It’s about why they believe it was right to do so.
¹ Tversky & Kahneman, The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice, 1981
² Kahneman & Tversky, Prospect Theory, 1979
³ Ariely, Predictably Irrational, 2008
⁴ Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, 2015
About Camouflet
Camouflet, a Los Angeles technology company, is the first embedded dynamic pricing platform to offer a suite of real-time AI-driven pricing solutions. Our mission is to equip clients with advanced pricing tools that fuel success in today’s fast-paced market, enabling businesses to capture demand, optimize profitability, and gain a competitive edge. By driving technological progress, scaling globally, and championing diversity, Camouflet is redefining industry standards.
As an LGBTQ+ founded and led business, Camouflet takes pride in our commitment to fostering inclusivity, diversity, and innovation. Established in 2024 by Jeff Radwell, the company offers modular and embedded technology to deliver tailored solutions that empower businesses across industries to maximize profitability and maintain a competitive edge. With cutting-edge, real-time dynamic pricing tools designed to enhance profitability and competitiveness, Camouflet is redefining the landscape of pricing innovation. As an LGBTQ+ led organization, Camouflet is dedicated to championing representation in the technology space and inspiring others to embrace the power of diversity as a catalyst for driving meaningful change.
