Articles on Pricing:

Aim For The Right Price

To discount or price hike? Top-earning firms know how to land on just the right amount. Investors Business Daily interviews Atenga's managing partner, Per Sjofors, on sound pricing practice. MORE>>

Pricing for Profit

Want to drive profit? Pricing right is the fastest, most productive way to improve your bottom line. MORE>>

Seeking Perfect Prices, CEO Tears Up the Rules

In early 2001, shortly after Donald Washkewicz took over as chief executive of Parker Hannifin Corp., he came to an unnerving conclusion. The big industrial parts maker’s prices scheme was crazy. For as long as anyone at the 89-year-old company could recall, Parker used the same simple formula to determine prices of it’s 800,000 parts…MORE>>

Economic and hiring outlook, Second Quarter 2008: A McKinsey Global Survey

Executives say that their companies can’t raise prices to match inflation. Manufacturers— and executives in China—are the only exceptions. Executives around the world feel stymied by current economic conditions: although most respondents face rising inflation, almost half don’t expect their companies to raise prices over the next six months, according to the latest McKinsey Global Survey. MORE>>

Pricing Tells a Story

Storytelling in marketing is nothing new. In All Marketers are Liars (Seth Godin), we learned that all marketers tell stories and the best marketers tell stories customers believe. Seth goes on to explain that stories are shortcuts to understanding what a product/service is all about. MORE>>

Pricing: The Magic Number

If you don't have a carefully considered pricing strategy, chances are you're leaving money on the table. Here's how to figure out what your prices should be. Lisa Pierce sets her company's prices using a technique best described as advanced back-of-the-envelope. The founder of eight-employee Alpha & Omega Delivery, a courier service in Springfield, Ill., simply adds up her costs and estimates how much she needs to charge to cover that amount. MORE>>

Don't fool with pricing

Should sales people have pricing authority? No. How's that for unequivocal? Whenever I ask this question, I generally get plenty of responses from those who wish to argue this point with me. Save your words. I don't budge on this issue, and here's why: Pricing is a strategic marketing decision that salespeople execute tactically. Sales is a function of marketing, not the other way around. Should pricing managers listen to the field and use their input for their decisions? Yes. MORE>>

Show Me the Margin

Ask most any distributor why they are in business, and they'll give you a pretty straightforward answer: to provide a service, but also to make a profit. Too many times though, distributors are stuck in a circle of providing those services, but not really accruing any profits. Upon realizing that they are caught in this kind of no-win situation, some distributors make the decision to not really "fire" their customer, so much as stop doing business with them. Some may even insist that the customer buy more to make the relationship more beneficial to the distributor. MORE>>

Customer Segmentation Done Right

If banks could choose their customers the way kids choose sides on the playground, customers in the 18-to-35 age bracket would be picked last. With their relatively small incomes, low account balances and large student loan debts, young customers aren’t exactly the sort over whom the average bank salivates. MORE>>

Do's And Don'ts In Pricing

Profitable companies use pricing lever to realize profits, while unprofitable companies rely on increasing sales volume. Leverage the Iron Law of Pricing. Different customers will value your products and services differently. Savvy companies look at their marketplace and identify their most profitable customer segments. They do cost-to-sell and cost-to-serve analysis, and they have processes and a single customer database with data tags that identify their marketplace's purchase and price drivers. MORE>>