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Negotiations are no different, although not as dramatic and not as much a matter of life or death. Not surprisingly, on occasion, they devolve into a hypercompetitive, personality-driven blood sport
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What will Gillette do? As a starter, they cut prices by 12%. Good for consumers (and society overall), bad for investors. Competition’s role is to drive prices down and quality up. This is part of the reason private capitalism is better than state-controlled enterprise.
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Our own research—that of Homburg, Jensen, and Hahn—as well as research by Hinterhuber and still other works by Liozu, repeatedly indicated firms that engage sales, marketing finance, and pricing leaders in pricing decisions outperform those that don’t. At this point, we may even call this settled managerial science.
More In The Future of Shopping, a 2011 article by Darrell Rigby—a partner in the Boston office of Bain & Company—sees retail today as part of a 50-year cycle. Rigby writes 150 years ago, the railroads promoted the growth of big cities and the rise of the department store. One hundred years ago, the automobile made possible the shopping center and 50 years ago, we saw the rise of the Big Box category killers.
More “As for his real estate properties, my advice would be to divest himself of all his upscale properties. The cash infusion this would generate would encourage Trump to develop a large chain of medium-priced hotels in smaller markets. They would cater to the Trump voting bloc, and could also be very profitable.”
More Let me get this right: Grainger’s “pricing action” was to lower prices. The result was higher volumes and lower gross profits. The aim was a clear market share take. And CEO Donald Macpherson is happy with the result?
More Can both product managers and salespeople have their incentives and key performance indicators aligned to the corporate goal: profits? Yes. They can…
More Market share is not intrinsically valuable. In the world of business, good profit dollars are what has intrinsic value. Profit dollars, earned by serving customers, are the existential purpose of a firm. Anything else is merely instrumental.
More Since programming is the coin of the realm for the cable networks, an annual expenditure of $60 million is chump change when compared with the basic subscription revenue stream as well as lucrative secondary and merchandising market streams of income.
More Notice that the solution many companies have taken results in sales and product management being unaligned. Sales focuses on their individual account needs while product managers focus on creating solutions to address challenges, which may be faced by multiple customer segments.
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