When a business wants more customers, the most obvious lever is price. Lower the price and you become more attractive, win the sale against a competitor, and see the effect immediately. It feels like the most direct and controllable thing a business can do, which is exactly why so many reach for it. But competing primarily on price is a trap dressed as a strategy, because a low price is the single easiest thing for a competitor to match. Anything that depends only on being cheapest can be undercut by anyone willing to be cheaper, and there is almost always someone - larger, better-funded, or simply more desperate - who can.
What follows is the familiar race to the bottom. You cut to win business; a competitor cuts to win it back; you cut again. Each round the prices fall and the margins with them, until an entire market is competing for customers who care about nothing but price, at prices that leave too little to sustain a healthy business. The customers won this way are the least loyal of all - they came for the lowest price and will leave for a lower one the moment it appears, so the business buys volume without buying any durability. And the thinner the margin, the less there is to invest in the very things - quality, service, improvement - that might let the business escape the trap. Price-cutting is easy to start and very hard to climb back out of.
The alternative is to give customers a reason to choose you that is not the price - to compete on value. Value is everything a customer gets for what they pay: the quality of the product, the reliability, the service, the expertise, the convenience, the experience, the trust. A business that is genuinely better on some of these dimensions can charge a fair price and keep customers who are choosing it for reasons a competitor cannot simply undercut, because matching a distinctive strength is far harder than matching a number. This is slower and more demanding to build than a price cut - it requires actually being better at something - but what it builds is defensible in a way a low price never is.
None of this means price is irrelevant; it means price should not be the only thing, and rarely the main thing, a business competes on. The practical shift is to ask what would make a customer choose you even if you were not the cheapest, and then to build and communicate that - the quality, the service, the specialism, the reliability that justifies the price. A business that competes on value can hold its margins, invest in getting better, and keep customers who value what it does; a business that competes only on price is one competitor's decision away from a race it cannot win. The cheapest option is a position only one business in any market can hold, and holding it is usually a slow way of going out of business.