Nike: The Dark Horse of Digital Fitness
Nike’s digital strategy has been building towards a dream of personalization at scale. The lynchpin of this strategy is the Nike membership program, which allows Nike to digitize customer interactions. Their app ecosystem allows Nike to collect data on customers that power personalized commerce experiences. One of those apps is Nike Training Club. In this article, the author explores how Nike employs Freemium strategies to engage new users and then moves into personalized subscriptions, product sales and more to maintain customer relationships.
Management Pricing Concerns: Which Issues Matter?
All it takes is a cursory look at the news to find plenty of examples of the pricing issues of well-known companies being covered in the public sphere. These examples can help us to determine which pricing concerns are most important to management. While any pricing concern could be most important to a given company at a given time, there are a few recurring themes across industries.
The Need for Commercial Excellence 2.0
One of the business impacts clearly demonstrated during the COVID-19 crisis is that, due to a combination of the pandemic’s economic impact as well as the accelerated rate of commercial digitalization, Commercial excellence 1.0 is dead. Long live commercial excellence 2.0. This new version is fast, furious, focused on impact, grounded in pricing science, and leveraging technology for efficiency, as the author explains.
Pricing and Greed
A pricer’s job is to capture value, but we tread a fine line between optimizing short term revenues and jeopardizing customer trust by becoming what is labelled as “greedy.” In this article, the author explains what constitutes “greed” in pricing provides strategies to help pricers avoid these tactics.
What Skills and Training Do Pricing Professionals Need?
Pricing can mean various things in various industries and companies. Similarly, the tasks that different pricing professionals require at different stages in their career vary considerably as well. However, there are certain commonalities in the type of skills that pricing professionals use at different levels of maturity, as the author explains.
Sales and Pricing Discipline in a Downturn: Winning Resourcefully
While measures to stabilize businesses are surely top-of-mind, now is also the time to think both strategically and tactically about sales and pricing capabilities. Successful companies understand what drives sales wins and focus resources accordingly. In this article, the authors focus on tactics to use right now to protect the existing business and improve win rates, despite the market environment.
Pricing Through the Pandemic: Getting Ready for Recovery
Experience shows that some of the most thoughtful pricing leaders take advantage of slowdowns to invest in the future. Building new pricing discipline, flexibility, and capabilities now can create long-term competitive advantages. For pricing leaders, the three most important areas to focus on are: being creative in meeting customer needs while preserving value, driving strong pricing discipline, and investing boldly in capabilities for the future, as the authors explain.
Optimus et Ultima
In pricing and sales negotiations, the vast majority of people are haunted by the “ghost of prices past.” This is because the only method for truly determining if a price point is a market competitive price occurs at the transactional level, and this analysis requires real time knowledge of market conditions, product state, margin erosion, M&A activity, and at least 142 other measurable variables. So how can you know for certain that your price is competitive?
Why Pricers Should Act Carefully Today
While the current global crisis is making it necessary for companies to act quickly, careful consideration must be made regarding pricing decisions and strategies. Rash actions can have detrimental effects that can become long-term burdens, and poor decisions in a time of uncertainty can result in years of rebuilding in order to restore profitability. In this article, the authors present immediate actions that you can take to protect your company’s cash flow while also ensuring its long-term success.
Managing Cost Plus Pricing in a Crisis
In a very chaotic world, such as the one in which we currently find ourselves, cost-plus pricing is straight forward. Costing, however, can be rather complex, which makes managing dynamic cost-plus pricing very tricky. If your main pricing orientation is cost-based or cost-plus, you should consider the points presented here in order to survive current challenges.
Advising the Certified Pricing Professional Program for CPP 4.0
2020 will mark the release of the fourth generation Certified Pricing Professional (CPP) program, the only globally recognized pricing designation. In this article, the Academic Advisor to the CPP designation explains what is new about “CPP 4.0” and explores what CPP designates, what challenges it qualifies pricers to address, and the development process and academic integrity involved in the creation of the curriculum, materials and testing models.
Agile Pricing for COVID-19: 10 Smart B2B Pricing Measures for the Crisis
The coronavirus crisis is affecting companies and the economy with full force. The consequences are multifaceted, from the increasing vulnerability of supply chains and the rising number of infections on production lines to added stress on sales teams, which must react to rapidly changing market events. Adding agility to their pricing processes and price models can help companies reduce the impact of the crisis, as the authors explain.
Download Recent Editions
Download past editions of the Pricing Advisor newsletter and the Journal of Professional Pricing. For a full selection of past editions, visit our PDF Archives page.