Posts by: Kyle T. Westra
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.
More
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.
More
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.
More
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.
More
Middlemen make for an easy target for disgruntled customers and observers of the economy. At times it can be unclear how they are adding value to a transaction. Sometimes it looks like middlemen are simply inserting themselves into a transaction to increase costs and take a cut.
More In my upcoming book, preliminarily titled The New Invisible Hand, I’ll explore the most important technological trends affecting pricing and commercial strategy. One chapter will focus specifically on this issue: unpacking the promise and perils of dynamic pricing.
More
Software is good at automating repeatable processes, but that doesn’t make them the right processes. Doing the wrong thing efficiently isn’t the same as doing the right thing. There’s a reason that Peter Drucker wrote about the effective, not the efficient, executive.
More
On the other hand, getting people to open up their wallets and pay for a service, especially if they’ve become accustomed to using it for free, is hard. That’s true for pay-only services and it’s also true of the attempt to split the difference between free and paid: freemium.
More
If you find yourself in this situation, reducing price can help to clear existing inventory but it will not solve the fundamental problem of lacking a product that people want. Better to preserve what profits you can and invest them into developing a product that addresses a customer need.
More
Shortages can be signals of excitement, quality, even virtue. “Sold out” is a powerful story for the right kind of product. Musk’s goal isn’t optimizing his earnings from flamethrowers. His goal is building excitement and investment around his companies. Selling out a flamethrower, and even a hat, does that in a big way.
MoreAbout The Author
