Salience

From Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia, we find this:

Salience refers to the relative importance or prominence of a piece of a sign. The relative salience of a particular sign when considered in the context of others helps an individual to quickly rank large amounts of information by importance and thus give attention to that which is the most important. This process stops an individual from becoming mentally overloaded with data.

What is meant by a "sign" is a "tag," a label that represents the thing that's tagged. Price is a common tag. Quality is another one. Color, and so on. People, things, and ideas have tags on them put their either consciously by a person or collectively by all those who are aware of that person, thing, or idea. Sometimes we don't even realize the tags we wear. They're like food we spill on ourselves without realizing it until somebody tells us we have food on our shirt.

In an entrepreneurial context, salience refers to what users or customers of a given product or service think is important. Salience can vary from low to high. If price is very important, that is an object has high salience, your product or service better cost about the same as competing products or services. If you charge more, you have to make sure customers are getting something when they buy yours than customers are getting when they buy the other person's.

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