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When you are entering negotiations, is it better to offer a number first, or wait for the other side to do it? Although many books and seminars on negotiations suggest you should wait for the other side to offer a number, I disagree. I have been asked that question a few times, and my answer […]
Trade promotion spending is an important part of most companies’ annual budget. Although not always thought of as a component of pricing, a trade promotion is like a discount. It is another mechanism for transferring money from the seller’s pocket to the buyer’s pocket. On the other hand, a trade promotion can be superior to […]
In my last blog post, Dynamic Pricing Benefits Everyone. Politicians Should Stay Out of It, I described the many ways in which dynamic pricing benefits us all. As you can tell from the title, I also urged politicians to resist their natural desire to regulate things. Within a couple days of my post, there was […]
When the results achieved by a business are poor or less than expected, should the strategy be changed? It is a question every entity wrestles with at some time, and typically the worse the results, the more there is a demand to change the business strategy or the pricing strategy. Sometimes changing the strategy is […]
Last month I attended two Major League Baseball spring training games with some long-time friends. Of course, our experience included beer, because ball parks and beer go together so well. Buying the beers also reminded me that in pricing strategy, how you structure your prices is just as important as the prices you set.
Setting pricing strategies can be complicated, but doing it well is essential to the success of your business. In Wikipedia, you can find 23 different pricing models listed along with 9 laws of price sensitivity and consumer psychology. Many companies consider that seeming complexity, and decide they would prefer to simply figure out their costs and […]
A friend, also named Scott, recently sent me an article Leading the Way that discussed the frequency of small lubricant competitors leading the way in price changes. The article, originally published in Lubes’n’Greases magazine demonstrated that independent producers increased prices of lubricants as frequently or more than the major producers. The article reminded me you don’t have to be […]
Amazon announced recently they will no longer offer price match refunds on televisions. That follows Amazon’s decision last year to eliminate price matching on other items. They are not the first and they won’t be the last to start or stop matching prices. It raises a question we hear often – should your pricing strategy […]
Far too often we see organizations who say they want to improve their margins through better pricing, but their actions belie their statements. Effective pricing does not occur by chance, and it does not result from following trite slogans. Likewise, it is not an outcome of a one-time initiative from pricing consultants. Effective pricing comes […]
While there are surely more important things than crowd size for our politicians and news media to worry about, both groups have participated in a flurry of recent discussions of the expression “alternative facts”. While that is not a term often heard in negotiations, other erroneous statements are. You can improve your profitability by using the […]
