Yes, the brand value approach I understand. Thing is, I don't really want to upsell to events and I agree regards consulting not being scalable, but i have a dilemma regards pricing for my course.
You know best - but don't overlook the possibility of in-person training for groups. It's halfway between an event and a training course.
I just spent a couple weeks with 7 other people learning about Cisco Routers from a single instructor - Total cost was $7300 each - so, $50K for a two-week class.
There's really good money in in-person class training.
The kicker is that this plays really really well with established companies. Pretend you're hypothetically a Cisco Routers consultancy. Parachuting into a random company and solving their Cisco Routers problems requires a very experienced consultant, both in terms of technical mastery and in terms of soft skills like interfacing well with clients' technical staff, dealing with political problems where you have imperfect background of who the key players/concerns are, and generic client relations.
Presenting about Cisco Routers (after the presentation has been substantially pre-written) and talking about them intelligently in response to audience questions requires a more limited, and far less expensive, skill-set.
This allows operating consultancies to do training offerings using more junior staff than they use for their consulting offerings, but to sell them at rates and quantities pegged to their consulting reputation rather than at the rate/quantity suggested by the person who will be tasked with delivery. And customers will often be quite thrilled, because training existing employees is often far, far cheaper than hiring pre-existing experts on the open market.
(There exist many other ways to do it. Pure-play training companies exist, for example, and there are companies which focus on synchronous online training, asynchronous online training, hybridized models, etc etc.)
Yes, just went on the similar thing for Elasticsearch - and a number of my colleagues did the same. It was around $800/day, and the class was about 20 people - so there's definitely some money in it.
I guess I need to give it more thought.