Posts by: Kyle T. Westra

The Cost of Free

By Kyle T. Westra April 26, 2018

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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When Price Doesn’t Matter

By Kyle T. Westra March 26, 2018

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.

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When Shortage Is Strategic

By Kyle T. Westra February 23, 2018

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.

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Checking Assumptions

By Kyle T. Westra December 22, 2017

Pricing is not only numbers, but strongly psychological and emotional. Certain norms emerge that dictate how products and services are sold in different industries. Customers come to expect those norms, whether or not they are necessarily the most economically efficient.

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Innovating the World of Management Consulting

By Kyle T. Westra November 16, 2017

Consultancies, he says, are focusing on lowering costs rather than driving value. “In any industry, when the basis of competition becomes efficiency versus innovation and new solutions, disruption lies on the horizon.”Innovating the World of Management Consulting

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Bundling Products to Help Your Customers

By Kyle T. Westra October 18, 2017

Price bundling typically involves combining two or more discrete products with heterogeneous demand, with the demand for the bundle resulting in higher profits despite it effectively being a discount on each individual product.

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Strategic Consulting as Detective and Diplomat

By Kyle T. Westra July 19, 2017

“Strategy consultant” is a job title that is can mean everything and nothing. It’s no surprise that people have trouble understanding what skills are necessary for a strategy consultant, let alone what the role even normally entails.

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Should You Fight for Market Share?

By Kyle T. Westra May 15, 2017

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.

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Complacency and Panic

By Kyle T. Westra April 12, 2017

Aspects of both complacency and panic probably sound familiar to most people who have worked at any number of companies. It doesn’t lead to a healthy company, either in its internal operations or its external relationships with suppliers and customers.

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Pricing in the Life Sciences

By Kyle T. Westra March 8, 2017

What is the value a consumer may place on a new drug that softens or even eliminates an otherwise terminal condition? Nearly limitless. That isn’t to say that prices therefore can or should be limitless, but it does underline the fact that price is determined by the value to the consumer, not the cost to the producer.

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About The Author

ktw
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.