For some organizations, the COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis, while for others, it has created market opportunities. For all, it has forced quick and difficult pricing decisions. Price gouging, price promotions and discounts, and dramatic price increases and decreases have all occurred within the first months of COVID-19 reaching the European and American continents. Which tactic to execute, if any, can be revealed through thoughtfulness and analysis.
If your competitors continue to outperform your market offerings in terms of sales volume, despite the fact that you offer both higher quality and lower prices, there are four critical elements you need to analyze in order to identify the cause, as the author explains.
Tariffs generate seemingly endless complexities, which change by the month and muddy the waters of any coherent pricing strategy pricing teams try to implement. What can pricing professionals do right now to preserve margin, maintain volume and remain compliant with audit requirements? This article outlines recommendations that have been developed through first-hand experience with customers dealing with tariffs in multiple industries.
In this article, the author presents a methodology for accurately projecting sales budgets. Specifically, the methodology presents a series of five equations that can be used to determine the income forecast necessary for the sustainability of current profit margins, which the author calls the IFSPM Method. Examples are provided to demonstrate the methodology’s applicability in both project and service-driven businesses.
There is an assumption that certain low-cost providers (think Costco, Amazon, Target, or Walmart, for example) must necessarily have the lowest prices on a given item. However, that assumption is often false. Brands count on customers being sticky and not comparison shopping for every single item. The presence of a membership fee makes that stickiness even truer, as the author explains.
While there are other research techniques that seek to understand the perceived value of products or services, the Conjoint Analysis method indirectly addresses the customer and therefore bypasses biases from direct research methods that make it harder to correctly model consumer choice behavior. In this article, the authors examine the benefits of Conjoint Analysis in developing pricing strategies, present several methods for applying this approach and review case studies of successful pricing projects.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence have become very popular topics in the pricing community. However, many perceive these tools as overly complex and not practical to implement quickly into their existing processes. In this article, the author presents a machine learning technique called regression analysis and demonstrates simple applications that can be readily employed by pricers in any industry.
Executive dashboards are valuable tools for coordinating across disciplines as well as for communicating critical business metrics to executives. Since pricing impacts these key business metrics, which elements should the pricing team include in their pricing dashboards? In this article, the author provides a list of items to consider when building a pricing dashboard.
Pricing is a decision under executive control. Sometimes the price is not what the market will want, but it is still a decision executives must make even if the decision is to let the market go. In this article, the author examines what an executive’s role should be in the pricing process.
All new hit innovations need a winning price. But having never priced the product before, how do companies know what to put on the price tag? In this article, author Jan Haemer discusses conditions and success factors in deciding between two pricing strategies for new products: skimming and penetration pricing.