Posts by: Tim J. Smith, PhD
Sonos Inc. felt the heat of Amazon’s Alexa in the in-home wireless sound movement. What to do? If you can’t beat them, join them. Working with Amazon, Alphabet, and Apple, Sonos is planning to make smart speakers for all of them. Smart move Sonos for the increasing Smart Home.
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Neil Rackham, Reed Holden, Andy Zoltners, Prabha Sinha, and many others have all repeatedly found that good salespeople are methodical. They use an approach towards sales that drive prospects through a process. The process starts with discovery, goes through a learning phase and needs understanding stage, then a proposal that solidifies the tradeoffs, and finally closing.
More Wendy’s achieved another quarter of same store sales growth. Was it their sassy social media campaign that reminds detractors of the existence of refrigerators? Was it their new menu items? Or was it the fast food chain’s competitive pricing? Of the three, I think it was their social media campaign that propelled otherwise strong product and pricing strategy to outperform.
More I have seen three or four multinationals, and four to six local suppliers sell the same core product in the same country, at roughly the same price. Because there is so much competition in these markets, customers ask for discounts and drive suppliers to bid against each other to win their business. It is hard to make a stable supplier business in these situations. How can one win? And, what does value-based pricing have to contribute to these markets?
More What better way to attract customers than with a discount? I’ll tell you what is a better way: Redefine your business into something customers actually want to engage as a first resort, not as a cheap resort.
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Because the exchange value approach examines the focal product against its next nearest competitor from the viewpoint of a specific market segment, it creates a focused picture of how an offering is likely to be evaluated by that specific segment. If more segments and competitors are to be considered, more models of the Exchange Value to Customer are needed. This leads to better and more accurate pricing on a segment-by-segment basis.
More What will Gillette do? As a starter, they cut prices by 12%. Good for consumers (and society overall), bad for investors. Competition’s role is to drive prices down and quality up. This is part of the reason private capitalism is better than state-controlled enterprise.
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Our own research—that of Homburg, Jensen, and Hahn—as well as research by Hinterhuber and still other works by Liozu, repeatedly indicated firms that engage sales, marketing finance, and pricing leaders in pricing decisions outperform those that don’t. At this point, we may even call this settled managerial science.
More “As for his real estate properties, my advice would be to divest himself of all his upscale properties. The cash infusion this would generate would encourage Trump to develop a large chain of medium-priced hotels in smaller markets. They would cater to the Trump voting bloc, and could also be very profitable.”
More Let me get this right: Grainger’s “pricing action” was to lower prices. The result was higher volumes and lower gross profits. The aim was a clear market share take. And CEO Donald Macpherson is happy with the result?
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