Posts by: Kyle T. Westra
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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