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Why Retail Has Reached an “Inflexion Point”

By James T. Berger August 10, 2015

Alvarez says that if you have two or three mall anchors of tenants driving traffic, this affects the entire mall. This creates a domino effect that reached down into the community through the lowering of tax base. “One major trend that Retail Revolution (the book) points out is that retailers will reduce store count and also reduce the size of those locations as online commerce begins to satisfy more and more demand….”

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Pricing Isn’t an Event, it’s a Journey

By Tim J. Smith, PhD July 13, 2015

In the price improvement strategy, firms develop the organizational capabilities to manage prices better. Pricing and discount management processes are developed. People are hired to drive those processes. Tools are acquired to accelerate achievements. Cultures are changed towards a profit and discount cautious mentality.

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Deceptive Price Increases: Nothing to Sneeze At

By Gene Zelek July 12, 2015

Although reducing product contents, while maintaining price, remains a viable option for effecting a price increase, care should be taken to do it in a such a way to minimize the chances of a challenge on deceptiveness grounds.

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Keeping Customers Isn’t So Easy

By James T. Berger July 12, 2015

There are other fields – like airlines and hotels – where providers have invested heavily in customer loyalty programs. Here these programs are effective as long as the provider can fly to the right destination of the hotel company has a property there. When that is not the case, the customer seeks other choices and may be attracted into competitors’ customer loyalty programs.

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Turn Services into Packages to Outsell the Competition

By Daniel DiGriz July 12, 2015

The fundamental concern for service-based businesses is that each project is different and requires some variance in price and components. The vogue of productizing service offerings alleviates some of the natural envy toward product brands that can quickly adapt to the widening range of consumer demand, but that presents its own hurdles.

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Price Structure Improvements Drive UPS Earnings Up

By Tim J. Smith, PhD June 10, 2015

In terms of market segmentation alignment, different customers receive different benefits (perceived or real) from the same or similar product. This drives variation in willingness to pay. One goal in improving a price structure is to improve the match between the willingness to pay and the price extracted. It is a form of price segmentation.

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Cost-Plus or Value-Based (Services)

By Anirban Sengupta June 10, 2015

Value-based pricing talks about pricing based on whether a product provides more or less perceived value with respect to the next best alternative. In the case of professional services however there is a slight difference — since there is the “human touch” involved we can’t be sure whether the next best alternative is a true alternative at all.

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International Pricing Among Current Currency Fluctuations

By Tim J. Smith, PhD May 11, 2015

Given the current currency fluctuations and country specific economic situations, what problems do they create for firms and how are prices supposed to be managed across boarders today? These are the pertinent questions facing many of today’s executives.

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Hotels Carry Market Segmentation to the Ultimate

By James T. Berger May 11, 2015

Enter the age of Market Segmentation – totally efficient and totally cost effective. But now market segmentation has so proliferated that we have now entered the age of “ultimate segmentation,” as illustrated by the major hotel chains.

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Cost-Plus or Value-Based: Who Wins?

By Anirban Sengupta May 11, 2015

Cost-plus pricers believe in understanding the cost of making a product and then adding a profit margin on top of the cost to arrive at the price of the product. Value-based pricers on the other hand are not keen at looking at cost or a target mark-up. Instead they focus on realizing the value that the product brings to the customer and then pricing it according to the value.

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