Many restaurants and other businesses are adopting Pay What You Want or Can pricing strategies that are based on customer satisfaction. So do others think you're worth as much as you do?

What if you could pay what you want the next time you ate out, downloaded a new album or went to a concert? If restaurants or other businesses started to use a Pay What You Want pricing strategy, wouldn't customers take advantage of the service and pay very little or nothing? Judging from the experiences of many businesses that have tried this non-traditional approach to price setting, the ways customers open their wallets may surprise you.

Over the past few years, a number of restaurants throughout North America have adopted Pay What you Want menus. Some of them include numbers as a guideline, but when served with the final bill, customers find "???" instead of a price. The motivation for some of the restaurants—known as "Robin Hood restaurants"—is to make affordable quality food available to all.

Better World Café in Highland Park, N.J., is one such establishment. The restaurant's philosophy centers more around Pay What you Can, not Pay What you Want. In this case, those who can afford to pay more help to subsidize those who can't.

While the Pay What You Can approach to pricing is more appropriate to the charitable-based restaurant, Pay What You Want is growing in popularity and being used by higher-end restaurants to promote their service and generate both consumer trial and media exposure. Some restaurants have adapted the Pay What You Want approach as a way of staying ahead in a very competitive sector.

Oscar's Restaurant, a high-end eatery in Barrie, Ont., featured a month-long Pay What You Want promotion earlier this year. The restaurant offered a fixed menu with no fixed prices. Taverne Crescent in Montreal had a similar limited-time promotion last February, inspired by the four Little Bay restaurants in London.

Both Oscar's Restaurant and Taverne Crescent gleaned considerable publicity with their promotions. The amount of free publicity and new customer trial that was generated exceeded expectations for the owners of both places. At a normally slow time of year, the promotions allowed each restaurant to stand out in a very competitive sector.

Little Bay's Pay What You Want promo in London ran for the month of February and is credited with attracting 10,000 new customers and a slew of media exposure.

While these restaurants rave about the free publicity and the new customer trial, what about staying in business and paying the bills? Interestingly, related research has shown that most people pay a fair price for the food, and many actually pay more than what the restaurant would have charged. While some customers may underpay, most people don't want to be viewed as being cheap and, when given something, there is an inherent desire to give back. As consumers we do this by opening our wallets and assigning a fair price for goods or services received.

Throughout Europe, Australia, and the United States, there are an increasing number of restaurants that base their entire business on Pay What You Want pricing, rather than just offering it as a week- or month-long promotion.

Terra Bit Lounge, a coffee shop in Seattle, allows customers to pay what they want. The owners say that some customers pay $20 on their first visit of the week, and then they return throughout the week without paying again for coffee. Others customers appreciate the pricing strategy, as it allows them to order a full cup of java when their wallets are empty and make up for what they didn't pay on their next visit.

Restaurants aren't the only businesses testing the Pay What You Want approach to pricing. A couple of years ago, the British band Radiohead launched its most recent album, In Rainbows, through its own record label with no price attached. The album was launched exclusively on the band's website. When fans reached the check out page, the price read, "You set the price." If they hit the refresh button, they were greeted with the message, "No, really, you set the price." The album garnered massive media exposure before eventually being released through conventional means.

While a Pay What You Can/Want strategy may not be viable for your particular business, it would be beneficial if every organization took a good look at the thought process behind it. Imagine how business owners would approach their offerings if customers paid based on their satisfaction!

Melanie Taljaard is the founder and principal marketer of More in Store, a Halifax-based marketing consulting company that focuses on the customer experience.