Archives posted in: Pricing
“Discrimination” is a charged and highly sensitive word in the English language, but is it really that bad when it comes to pricing?
More Despite abundance of available and accessible literature, value-based pricing (VBP) as a concept remains mystified. The key reason is the difficulty of implementation. This article’s aim is to provide the reader a concise review of the ‘do’s and ‘don’t’s of VBP.
More Who should oversee pricing decisions? Marketing? Sales? Finance? Research by Homburg, Jensen, and Hahn showed it was none of them, all of them, and it depends.
More When selling things that go together, should the company offer discounts on the individual parts or the whole shebang? Sourav Ray, Charles A. Wood, and Paul R. Messinger examined these questions across 650,000 daily price listings and through customer and manager surveys in a recent Journal of Marketing article. Their results have broad price-management implications.
More Kimberly-Clark Corp. (KMB) is “desheeting” its products to improve profitability. Weber Stephen Products LLC avoids price promotions and markdowns on their grills, and yet maintains a dominant market position. These are two rather disjointed activities but they both appear to fall afoul of the suggestions given in a recent Wall Street Journal article by Professor Ailawadi of Tuck and Professor Farris of Darden. Are Ailawad and Farris wrong, are the companies wrong, or can both pairs be right?
More Having a long list of prospective buyers may be comforting for a salesperson, but a highly applied sales methodology for business markets suggests salespeople should only pursue prospects that fall within two out of four response modes. What are these response modes? How do they affect price performance? And why should salespeople only pursue two of them?
More Since childhood, we have heard about economics. Now that we are adults with jobs, it seems like using an economics for pricing would be wise. But, as grown-ups, we also know that things are never as simple as they appeared when we were kids.
More Which is a better price: $15.99 or $16.49? To answer this question, we have A/B testing and price optimization, but this approach doesn’t work all the time.
More JC Penney’s CEO Ron Johnson has had a tough go at it. Stock valuation is down roughly 40% since the time Johnson took over. Customer sales are down 20% from last year. Some are calling for his resignation. But before we chant “off with his head” with the Twitterati, let’s see if we can’t help him find a way out of his quandary.
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