Posts by: Kyle T. Westra

The New Invisible Hand: Five Revolutions in the Digital Economy

What I (Re)Learned from Writing a Book

By Kyle T. Westra September 13, 2019

My book, The New Invisible Hand: Five Revolutions in the Digital Economy, has been out for six weeks, and I’ve been floored…

Being Threatened by Bill Gates

By Kyle T. Westra August 16, 2019

The following is an excerpt from my new Amazon bestseller, The New Invisible Hand: Five Revolutions in the Digital Economy. This story…

The New Invisible Hand

By Kyle T. Westra July 17, 2019

My book The New Invisible Hand will be released at the end of July. This book is for you if you’ve ever…

Example of ineffective UX design for conveying information

The Importance of Speaking Other Business Languages

By Kyle T. Westra June 17, 2019

I was recently in Portland, Oregon for the first time, attending a business conference. The Digital Summit series brings together all manner…

Having value-creating channel partners is much better than the alternative. But even good partnerships carry risk. In the channel, one of those risks is that the partner becomes more powerful than the supplier.

Channel Strategy in CPG

By Kyle T. Westra April 30, 2019

Forgoing traditional channel distribution didn’t stop Oatly from a quick expansion. The New York Times reported in January 2018 that “Oatly has spread from 10 locations in New York to more than 1,000 locations nationwide,” less than a year after it landed in the U.S. 1,000 locations pales in comparison to its footprint had they teamed up with grocery retail.

Treating Channel Partners Strategically

By Kyle T. Westra March 24, 2019

Common examples of channel partners include wholesalers, distributors, and retailers. All of these activities are necessary tasks for a functioning commercial organization. If the supplier doesn’t do one of these tasks, a channel partner must. Conversely, if a channel partner doesn’t, the supplier must.

Fixed vs. Variable Pricing

By Kyle T. Westra October 30, 2018

Home Page Text Tailoring price according to willingness to pay is theoretically sound but culturally still questionable. It’s important to determine how your customers will react to such variable pricing when deciding whether to have price variance, and by what characteristics.

Amazon the Kingmaker

By Kyle T. Westra September 29, 2018

Amazon’s Choice began as a solution for its Echo home device, which, when prompted by a user to buy an item not previously purchased, needed to know what to get. But its increasing presence in Amazon search results illustrates a problem with those results: there are simply too many.

What I’ve Learned From Three Years in Pricing

By Kyle T. Westra August 23, 2018

Traditionally, pricing is considered one of the Four Ps of Marketing, along with product, promotion, and place. But thinking about pricing as simply a subset of marketing is a mistake.

Kyle T. Westra is a Manager at Wiglaf Pricing. His areas of focus include pricing transformations, new product pricing, commercial policy, and pricing software. Most recently to Wiglaf Pricing, Kyle worked in project management, business systems analysis, and marketing analysis, starting his career in global strategy at a foreign policy think tank. He has extensive experience in ecommerce, sales strategy, economic analysis, and change management. His Amazon bestselling book about how technological trends are affecting pricing and commercial strategy is entitled The New Invisible Hand: Five Revolutions in the Digital Economy. Kyle is a Certified Pricing Professional (CPP). He holds an MBA with distinction from the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University and a BA in Political Science and Economics from Tufts University.