Chapter 1
Strategic Pricing

Coordinating the Drivers of Profitability

The economic forces that determine profitability change whenever technology, regulation, market information, consumer preferences, or relative costs change. Consequently, companies that grow profitably in changing markets often need to break old rules and create new pricing models. For example, Netflix changed the model for renting films from the daily rate at video stores to a time-independent membership model. Ryanair radically unbundled the elements of passenger air travel—charging separately for baggage, seat selection, in-person check in, beverages—enabling it to generate greater occupancy and more revenue per plane per day than its established European competitors. Producers of new online media created a new metric for pricing ads—cost per click—that aligns the cost of an ad more closely to its value than was possible in traditional media. Apple changed the market for music in part by pricing songs rather than albums.

Unfortunately, few managers, even those in marketing, have received practical training in how to make strategic pricing decisions such as these. Most companies still make pricing decisions in reaction to change rather than in anticipation of it. This is unfortunate given that the need for rapid and thoughtful adaptations to changing markets has never been greater. The information revolution has made prices everywhere more transparent, making customers increasingly price sensitive. The globalization of markets, even for services, has increased the number of competitors and often lowered their cost of sales. The high rate of technological change in many industries has created new sources of value for customers, but not necessarily led to increases in profit for the producers.

Still, those companies that have the capability to create and implement strategies that take account of these changes are well rewarded for their efforts. Our ValueScan survey, covering more than 200 companies in both consumer and business markets, found that firms developing and effectively executing value-based pricing strategies earn 31 percent higher operating income than competitors whose pricing is driven by market share goals or target margins.¹ Specific examples abound that illustrate the power of strategic pricing to reward innovation.

One prominent example is the iPhone. When Apple launched the iPhone, critics claimed that a price over $400 was way out of line when competitive products could be bought outright for half as much or obtained “free” with a two-year contract from a wireless service provider. Apple, however, understood that a hard-core group of technology “innovators” would easily recognize and place a high value on the iPhone’s unique differentiation. By focusing on meeting that group’s needs at a high price, Apple established a high benchmark for the value of its easy-to-use interface. When Apple later lowered the price to a still high $300, it seemed like a bargain in comparison to that benchmark, causing still more people to buy the phone. Having established a high value, the company now captures a dominant share at competitive prices while earning more than $1 billion per year from the sale of third-party “apps.”

Wal-Mart is another company that has grown profitably by pricing strategically, but with the focus on where and how to discount prices. For example, Wal-Mart puts its deepest discounts on products, like disposable diapers, that drive frequent repeat visits by big spenders on other products. Since competitors with narrower product lines cannot justify an equally low price on a “loss leader,” Wal-Mart can undercut them to generate more store traffic without triggering a price war that would otherwise undermine its strategy. As Wal-Mart illustrates, the measure of success at strategic pricing is not how much it increases price but how much it increases profitability.

This book will prepare you to understand the forces that determine the success of a pricing strategy, to develop strategies to address those forces proactively, and then to effectively implement tactics that enable you to profit from them. We offer no magic bullets that enable you to win higher prices than competitors while delivering no more in value. Many years of experience have convinced us, however, that applying the principles explained in these pages is an essential capability to earn profits commensurate with the value of one’s products and services.

Before this goal can be achieved, managers in all functional areas must discard the flawed thinking about pricing that leads them into conflict and drives them to make unprofitable decisions. Let’s look at these flawed paradigms so that we can discard them once and for all.

Cost-Plus Pricing

Cost-plus pricing is, historically, the most common pricing procedure because it carries an aura of financial prudence. Financial prudence, according to this view, is achieved by pricing every product or service to yield a fair return over all costs, fully and fairly allocated. In theory, it is a simple guide to profitability; in practice, it is a blueprint for mediocre financial performance.

The problem with cost-driven pricing is fundamental: In most industries it is impossible to determine a product’s unit cost before determining its price. Why? Because unit costs change with volume. This cost change occurs because a significant portion of costs are “fixed” and must somehow be “allocated” to determine the full unit cost. Unfortunately, because these allocations depend on volume, and volume changes as prices change, unit cost is a moving target. To “solve” the problem of determining unit cost before determining price, cost-based pricers are forced to make the absurd assumption that they can set price without affecting volume. The failure to account for the effects of price on volume, and of volume on costs, leads managers directly into pricing decisions that undermine profits. A price increase to “cover” higher fixed costs can start a death spiral in which higher prices reduce sales and raise average unit costs further, indicating (according to cost-plus theory) that prices should be raised even higher. On the other hand, if sales are higher than expected, fixed costs can be spread over more units, allowing average unit costs to decline a lot. According to cost-plus theory, that would call for lower prices. Cost-plus pricing leads to overpricing in weak markets and underpricing in strong ones—exactly the opposite direction of a prudent strategy.

How, then, should managers deal with the problem of pricing to cover costs? They shouldn’t. The question itself reflects an erroneous perception of the role of pricing, a perception based on the belief that one can first determine sales levels, then calculate unit cost and profit objectives, and then set a price. Instead of pricing reactively to cover costs and profit objectives, managers need to price proactively. They need to acknowledge that pricing affects volume, that volume affects costs, and that pricing strategy is in part about effectively managing the utilization of fixed costs.

Instead of asking whether the price covers fully allocated costs, a pricer should ask whether the change in price will result in a change in revenue that is more than sufficient to offset a change in total fixed variable costs. When the change in revenue minus the change in variable costs is positive, the firm is earning more revenue to cover its fixed costs. When the change in revenue minus change in variable costs is negative, the firm is earning less revenue to cover its fixed costs. In a later chapter on financial analysis of price changes, we describe shortcuts to calculate the change in volume necessary for any proposed price change.

Customer-Driven Pricing

Many companies now recognize the fallacy of cost-based pricing and its adverse effect on profit. They realize the need for pricing to reflect market conditions. As a result, some firms have taken pricing authority away from financial managers and given it to sales or product managers. In theory, this trend is consistent with value-based pricing, since marketing and sales are that part of the organization best positioned to understand value to the customer. In practice, however, the misuse of pricing to achieve short-term sales objectives often undermines perceived value and depresses profits even further.

The purpose of strategic pricing is not simply to create satisfied customers. Customer satisfaction can usually be bought by a combination of over delivering on value and underpricing products. But marketers delude themselves if they believe that the resulting sales represent marketing successes. The purpose of strategic pricing is to price more profitably by capturing more value, not necessarily by making more sales. When marketers confuse the first objective with the second, they fall into the trap of pricing at whatever buyers are willing to pay, rather than at what the product is really worth. Although that decision enables marketers to meet their sales objectives, it invariably undermines long-term profitability.

Two problems arise when prices reflect the amount buyers seem willing to pay. First, sophisticated buyers are rarely honest about how much they are actually willing to pay for a product. Professional purchasing agents are adept at concealing the true value of a product to their organizations. Once buyers learn that sellers’ prices are flexible, the buyers have a financial incentive to conceal information from, and even mislead sellers. Obviously, this tactic undermines the salesperson’s ability to establish close relationships with customers and to understand their needs.

Second, there is an even more fundamental problem with pricing to reflect customers’ willingness-to-pay. The job of sales and marketing is not simply to process orders at whatever price customers are currently willing to pay, but rather to raise customers’ willingness-to-pay to a level that better reflects the product’s true value. Many companies underprice truly innovative products because they ask potential customers, who are ignorant of the product’s value, what they would be willing to pay. But we know from studies of innovations that the “regular” price has little impact on customers’ willingness to try them. For example, most customers initially perceived that photocopiers, mainframe computers, and food processors lacked adequate value to justify their prices. Only after extensive marketing to communicate and guarantee value did these products achieve market acceptance. Forget what customers who have never used your product are initially willing to pay. Instead, understand the value of the product to satisfied customers and communicate that value to others. Low pricing is never a substitute for an adequate marketing and sales effort.

Share-Driven Pricing

Finally, consider the policy of letting pricing be dictated by competitive conditions. In this view, pricing is a tool to achieve sales objectives. In the minds of some managers, this method is “pricing strategically.” Actually, it is more analogous to “letting the tail wag the dog.” Why should an organization want to achieve market-share goals? Because managers believe that more market share usually produces greater profit.² Priorities are confused, however, when managers reduce the profitability of each sale simply to achieve the market-share goal. Prices should be lowered only when they are no longer justified by the value offered in comparison to the value offered by the competition.

Although price-cutting is probably the quickest, most effective way to achieve sales objectives, it is usually a poor decision financially. Because a price cut can be so easily matched, it offers only a short-term market advantage at the expense of permanently lower margins. Consequently, unless a company has good reason to believe that its competitors cannot match a price cut, the long-term cost of using price as a competitive weapon usually exceeds any short-term benefit. Although product differentiation, advertising, and improved distribution do not increase sales as quickly as price cuts, their benefit is more sustainable and thus is usually more cost-effective.

The goal of pricing should be to find the combination of margin and market share that maximizes profitability over the long term. Sometimes, the most profitable price is one that substantially restricts market share relative to the competition. Godiva chocolates, BMW cars, Peterbilt trucks, and Snap-on tools would no doubt all gain substantial market share if priced closer to the competition. It is doubtful, however, that the added share would be worth forgoing their profitable and successful positioning as high-priced brands.

Strategic pricing requires making informed trade-offs between price and volume in order to maximize profits. These trade-offs come in two forms. The first trade-off involves the willingness to lower price to exploit a market opportunity to drive volume. Cost-plus pricers are often reluctant to exploit these opportunities because they reduce the average contribution margin across the product line, giving the appearance that it is underperforming relative to other products. But if the opportunity for incremental volume is large and well managed, a lower contribution margin can actually drive a higher total profit. The second trade-off involves the willingness to give up volume by raising prices. Competitor- and customer-oriented pricers find it very difficult to hold the line on price increases in the face of a lost deal or reduced volume. Yet the economics of a price increase can be compelling. For example, a product with a 30 percent contribution margin could lose up to 25 percent of its volume following a 10 percent price increase before it resulted in lower profitability. Effective pricers regularly evaluate the balance between profitability and market share and are willing to make hard decisions when the balance tips too far in one direction.

What is Strategic Pricing?

The word “strategy” is used in various contexts to imply different things. Here we use it to mean the coordination of otherwise independent activities to achieve a common objective. For strategic pricing, that objective is profitability. Achieving exceptional profitability requires managing much more than just price levels. It requires ensuring that products and services include just those features that customers are willing to pay for, without those that unnecessarily drive up cost by more than they add to value. It requires translating the differentiated benefits your company offers into customer perceptions of a fair price premium for those benefits. It requires creativity in how you collect revenues so that customers who get more value from your differentiation pay more for it. It requires varying price to use fixed costs optimally and to discourage behavior that drives excessive service costs. It sometimes requires building capabilities to mitigate the behavior of aggressive competitors.

Although more than one strategy can achieve profitable results, even within the same industry, nearly all successful pricing strategies embody three principles. They are value-based, proactive, and profit-driven.

• Value-based means that differences in pricing across customers and changes over time reflect differences or changes in the value to customers. For example, many managers ask whether they should lower prices in response to reduced market demand during a recession. The answer: if customers receive less value from your product or service because of the recession, then prices should reflect that. But the fact that fewer customers are in the market for your product does not necessarily imply that they value it less than when they were more numerous. Unless a close competitor has cut its price, giving customers a better alternative, there may be no value-based reason for you to do so.
• Proactive means that companies anticipate disruptive events (for example, negotiations with customers, a competitive threat, or a technological change) and develop strategies in advance to deal with them. For example, anticipating that a recession or a new competitive entry will cause customers to ask for lower prices, a proactive company develops a lower-priced service option or a loyalty program, enabling it to define the terms and trade-offs of the expected interaction, rather than forcing it to react to terms and trade-offs defined by the customer or the competitor.
• Profit-driven means that the company evaluates its success at price management by what it earns relative to alternative investments rather than by the revenue it generates relative to its competitors. For example, when Alan Mulally took charge as Ford Motor Company’s CEO in 2006, he declared that henceforth Ford would focus on selling cars profitably, even if that meant that Ford would become a smaller company. He cut Ford’s 96 models to 20 and sold off its unprofitable Jaguar and Land Rover brands. When the recession appeared in late 2008, he quickly and relentlessly cut production—ending the long-standing policy at all the Big Three U.S. auto manufacturers to increase customer and dealer incentives to maintain production as long as possible.³ Although Ford initially gave up market share, it was in the end the only one of the Big Three to avoid bankruptcy.

These three principles are evident throughout this book as we discuss how to define and make good choices. A good pricing strategy involves five distinct but very different sets of choices that build upon one another. The choices are represented graphically as the five levels of the strategic pricing pyramid (Exhibit 1-1), with those lower in the pyramid providing the necessary support, or foundation, for those above. Although the principles that underlie choices at each level are the same, implementing those principles in any given market requires creative application to the specifics of each product and market. Consequently, after briefly describing each choice here, the next five chapters will illustrate in greater detail the tools and tactics for making each choice well. Notice, however, that the choices fall into what, in large companies, are different functional domains staffed by different people. That is why senior management needs to be involved in pricing; not to set prices but to articulate goals for each set of choices that facilitate the implementation of a coherent strategy.

EXHIBIT 1-1 The Strategic Pricing Pyramid

Value Creation

It is often repeated that the value of something is whatever someone will pay for it. We disagree. People sometimes pay for things that soon disappoint them in use (for example, time-share condominiums). They fail to get “value for money,” do not repeat the purchase, and discourage others from making the same mistake. Of greater importance for innovators, most people are unwilling to pay more for things that are new to them (such as acupuncture treatments or electronic books) despite the fact that in some cases growing numbers of consumers will eventually come to recognize and pay for those benefits.

Although deceiving people into making one-time purchases at prices ultimately proven to be unjustified is a strategy, that is not our agenda in this book. Ours is to show marketers how to create value cost-effectively and convince people to pay commensurate with that value. We expect that, as a result, those of you who apply these ideas will contribute to an economic system in which firms that are most adept at creating value for customers are most rewarded by improvement in their own market value.

Unfortunately, some companies that have the technology and capability to create value fail to convert that into value for customers. They make the mistake of believing that more, from a technological perspective, is necessarily better for the customer. One of us worked for a company making high-quality office furniture that was disappointed by its low share in fast-growing, entrepreneurial markets. The company wanted a strategy to convince those buyers what more established companies recognized already: that highly durable furniture that would hold its appearance and function for 20 or more years was a good investment. But it took a few interviews with buyers in the target market for the furniture maker to recognize the problem. Companies in this market expected either to be bought out in five years or be gone. The problem was not that customers did not recognize the differentiating benefits of the company’s products. It was that the target market company did not see good value associated with those benefits.

Exhibit 1-2 illustrates the flawed logic that leads many companies to produce good quality, but poor value. Engineering and manufacturing departments design and make what they consider a “better” product. In the process, they make investments and incur costs to add features and services. Finance then totals these costs to determine “target” prices. Only at this stage does marketing enter the process, charged with the task of demonstrating enough value in these better products and services to justify premium prices to customers. Sometimes they get lucky; but often a much smaller share of the market sees enough value in the improvements to justify paying for them.

EXHIBIT 1-2 Alternative Approaches to Value Creation

When cost-based prices prove unjustifiable, managers may try to fix the process by allowing “flexibility” in the markups. Although this tactic may minimize the damage, it is not, fundamentally, a solution because the financial return on the product remains inadequate. Finance blames marketing and sales for cutting the price, and marketing blames finance for excessive costs. The problem keeps recurring as the features and costs of new products continue to mismatch the needs and values of customers. Moreover, when customers are rewarded with discounts for their price resistance, this resistance becomes more frequent even when the product is valuable to them.

Solving the problems of cost-based pricing requires more than a quick fix. It requires a complete reversal of the process—starting with customers. The target price is based on estimates of the value of features and services given the competitive alternatives and the portion of it that the firm can expect to capture in its price by segment. The job of financial management is not to insist that prices recover costs. It is to insist that costs are incurred only to make products that can be priced profitably given their value to the targeted customers.

Designing product and service offers that can drive sales growth at profitable prices has gone in the past two decades from being unusual to being the goal at most successful companies.⁴ From Marriott to Boeing, from medical technology to automobiles, profit-leading companies now think about what market segment they want a new product to serve, determine the benefits those potential customers seek, and establish prices those customers can be convinced to pay. Value-based companies challenge their engineers to develop products and services that can be produced at a cost low enough to make serving that market segment profitable at the target price. The first companies to successfully implement such a strategy in an industry gain a huge market advantage. The laggards eventually must learn how to mange value just to survive.

The key to creating good value is first to estimate how much value different combinations of benefits could represent to customers, which is normally the responsibility of marketing or market research. We will describe how to estimate value in Chapter 2.

Price Structure

Once you understand how value is created for different customer segments, the next step in building a pricing strategy is to create a price structure. The most simple price structure is a price per unit (for example, dollars per ton or euros per liter) and is perfectly adequate for commodity products and services. The purpose of more complicated price structures is to reflect differences in the potential contribution that can be captured from different customer segments by capturing the best possible price from each segment, making the sale at the lowest possible cost, or both.

An airline seat, for example, is much more valuable for a business traveler who needs to meet a client at a particular place and time than it is for a pleasure traveler for whom different destinations, different days of travel, or even non-travel related forms of recreation are viable alternatives. Airline pricers have long employed complex price structures that enable them to maximize the revenue they can earn from these different types of customers. On Monday morning or Friday afternoon, they can fill their planes mostly with business passengers paying full coach prices, but they are likely to be left with many empty seats at those prices on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. While they could just cut their price per seat to fill seats at those “off-peak” times, they then would end up giving business passengers unnecessary discounts as well. To attract more price-sensitive pleasure travelers without discounting to business travelers, they create segmented price structures so that most passengers pay a price aligned with the value they place on having a seat.

On the Tuesday morning when this was written, you could fly from Boston to Los Angeles and return two days later for as little as $324—but with a nonrefundable ticket, a $100 charge for changes, a $15 checked baggage charge each way, and low priority for rebooking if flights are disrupted by weather or mechanical problems. For $514 you could get the very same seats on the very same flights, but with a refundable, changeable ticket and high priority rebooking in case of disruption—all things likely to be highly valued by a business traveler but barely missed by a pleasure traveler. Similarly, you could pay $934 for first-class roundtrip travel with a non-cancellable ticket and $150 change fee. Totally flexible and cancellable first-class travel would cost you $1901. With these different options, the airlines maximize the revenue from each flight by limiting the seats available at the discounted, non-cancellable prices to a number that they project could not be sold at higher prices.⁵

More recently, airline price structures are being designed to discourage behaviors that make some customers more costly to serve than others. The European carrier Ryanair has taken the lead in discounting ticket prices and in charging for everything else. If you don’t print out your boarding pass before arriving at the airport, be prepared to pay an extra €5 to check in. Want to check a bag? Add €10. Want to take a baby on your lap? €20. Want to take the baby’s car seat and stroller along? €20 each. To board the plane near the front of the line will cost you €3. Of course, you will pay for any food or drinks, but if you are short on cash you might be well advised to avoid them. The CEO recently reiterated his plan to charge for using the on-board lavatories on short flights, arguing that “if we can get rid of two of the three toilets on a 737, we can add an extra six seats.”⁶ Do you think this is pushing price structure complexity so far that it will drive away customers? We thought so too.

Chapter 3 will describe in detail how to develop price structures that align prices with differences in value and cost across segments.

Price and Value Communication

Understanding the value your products create for customers and translating that understanding into a value-based price structure can still result in poor sales unless customers recognize the value they are obtaining. A successful pricing strategy must justify the prices charged in terms of the value of the benefits provided. Developing price and value communications is one of the most challenging tasks for marketers because of the wide variety of product types and communication vehicles. In some instances, marketers might employ traditional advertising media to convey their differential value, as was the case with the now famous “I am a Mac” ads created by Apple. The ads, featuring the actors Justin Long posing as a Mac and John Hodgman as a PC, highlighted common problems for PC owners not faced by Mac owners and are credited with making a major contribution to Apple’s success in the late 2000s.⁷ In other instances, value messages will be communicated directly during the sales process with the aid of illustrations of value experienced by customers within a market segment or with the aid of a spreadsheet model to quantify the value of an offering to a particular customer.⁸

The content of value messages will vary depending on the type of product and the context of the purchase. The messaging approach for frequently purchased search goods such as laundry detergent or personal care items will tend to focus on very specific points of differentiation to help customers make comparisons between alternatives. In contrast, messaging for more complex experience goods such as services or vacations will deemphasize specific points of differentiation in favor of creating assurances that the offering will deliver on its value proposition if purchased. Similarly, the content of value messages must account for whether the benefits are psychological or monetary in nature. As we explain in Chapter 4, marketers should be explicit about the quantified worth of the benefits for monetary value and implicit about the quantified worth of psychological benefits.

Price and value messages must also be adapted for the customer’s purchase context. When Samsung, a global leader in cellular phone sets, develops its messaging for its new 4G (fourth generation) phones, it must adapt the message depending on whether the customer is a new cell phone user or is a technophile who enjoys keeping up with the latest technology. Samsung must also adapt its messages depending on where the customer is in their buying process. When customers are at the information search stage of the process, the value communication goal is to make the most differentiated (and value creating) features salient for the customer so that he or she weighs these features heavily in the purchase decision. For Samsung, this means focusing on its phones’ big screens and high data-transfer speeds. As the customer moves through the purchase process to the fulfillment stage, the nature of messaging shifts from value to price as marketers try to frame their prices in the most favorable way possible. It is not an accident when a cellular provider describes its price in terms of pennies a day rather than one flat fee. Research has shown that reframing prices in smaller units comparable to the flow of benefits can have a significant positive effect on customer price sensitivity.⁹

As these examples illustrate, there are many factors to consider when creating price and value communications. Ultimately, the marketer’s goal is to get the right message, to the right person, at the right point in the buying process. We show how to approach the challenge later in Chapter 4.

Pricing Policy

Ultimately, the success of a pricing strategy depends upon customers being willing to pay the price you charge. The rationale for value-based pricing is that a customer’s relative willingness-to-pay for one product versus another should track closely with differences in the relative value of those products. When customers become increasingly resistant to whatever price a firm asks, most managers would draw one of three conclusions: that the product is not offering as much value as expected, that customers do not understand the value, or that the price is too high relative to the value. But there is another possible and very common cause of price resistance. Customers sometimes decline to pay prices that represent good value simply because they have learned that they can obtain even better prices by exploiting the sellers’ pricing process.

Telecommunications companies increasingly face this problem. In order to get people to consolidate their phone, Internet, and cable TV with one supplier, they offer attractive contracts (typically $99 per month) for new customers. After one year, the rate reverts to regular charges, which are higher by 20 percent or more. Because these offers have been advertised for some time, subscribers have learned that they can beat the system. At the end of one year, many simply sign up for one year with a new supplier for $99 per month. Thus, a program that was designed to induce people to learn about the high value of a supplier’s service has become a program to enable aggressive shoppers to avoid paying prices that reflect that value.

Pricing policy refers to rules or habits, either explicit or cultural, that determine how a company varies its prices when faced with factors other than value and cost to serve that threaten its ability to achieve it objectives. Good policies enable a company to achieve its short-term objectives without causing customers, sales reps, and competitors to adapt their behavior in ways that undermine the volume or profitability of future sales. Poor pricing policies create incentives for customers, sales reps, or competitors to behave in ways that will undermine future sales or customers’ willingness-to-pay. In the terminology of economics, good policies enable prices to change along the demand curve without changing expectations in ways that cause the demand curve to “shift” negatively for future purchases. Poor policies allow price changes in ways that adversely affect customer’s willingness-to-pay as much or to buy as much in the future. Chapter 5 will describe good policies and alert you to the hidden risks of poor but commonly practiced pricing policies.

Price Level

According to economic theory, setting prices is a straightforward exercise in which the marketer simply sets the price at the point on the demand curve where marginal revenues are equal to the marginal costs. As any experienced pricer knows, however, setting prices in the real world is seldom so simple. On the one hand, it is impossible to predict how revenues will change following a price change because of the uncertainty about how customers and competitors will respond. On the other hand, the accounting systems in most companies are not equipped to identify the relevant costs for pricing strategy decisions, often causing marketers to make unprofitable pricing decisions.

This uncertainty about marginal costs and revenues creates a dilemma for marketers trying to set profit-maximizing prices: How should they analyze pricing moves in the face of such uncertainty? There are many pricing tools and techniques in common use today such as conjoint analysis and optimization models that take the uncertain inputs and provide seemingly certain price recommendations. While these tools are invaluable aids to marketers (we show how to use them to maximum advantage in Chapter 6), they run the risk of creating a sense of false precision about the right price. There is no substitution for managerial experience and judgment when setting prices.

Price setting should be an iterative and cross-functional process led by marketing that includes several key actions. The first action is to set appropriate pricing objectives, whether that means to use price to drive volume or to maximize margins. McDonald’s used a penetration pricing approach in 2008 to take significant share from Starbucks during a time when customers were increasingly price sensitive and willing to switch because of the recession. Once consumers tried McDonald’s new premium coffees, they found that the taste was excellent, and many opted not to switch back. The second action is to calculate price-volume trade-offs. A 10 percent price cut for a product with a 20 percent contribution margin would have to result in a 100 percent increase in sales volume to be profitable. The same increase for a product with a 70 percent contribution margin would only require a 17 percent increase in sales to be profitable. We are frequently surprised by how many managers make unfortunate pricing decisions because they do not understand these basic financial considerations.

Once the price-volume trade-offs are made explicit for a particular pricing move, the next activity is to estimate the likely customer response by assessing the drivers of price sensitivity that are unrelated to value. Two coffee lovers might value a cup of Starbucks equally. Despite placing equal value on the coffee, the retiree on a fixed income will be much more price sensitive than the working professional with substantial disposable income. Conversely, both of those individuals may be made less price sensitive to the price of a Starbucks coffee relative to Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, because the higher price is a signal that Starbucks is of superior quality. The marketer’s job is to understand how price sensitivity varies across segments in order to better estimate the profit impact of a potential pricing move. As we explain in Chapter 6, there are a variety of tools to help accomplish this task while always remembering that it is better to be approximately right, rather than precisely wrong.

Implementing the Pricing Strategy

Over the past decade, pricing has risen in importance on the corporate agenda. Most top executives recognize the importance of price and value management for achieving profitable growth. Yet, given this strategic importance, it is surprising to us how many firms continue to organize their pricing activities so that pricing decisions are made by lower-level managers lacking the skills, data, and authority to implement tough new pricing strategies. This tactical orientation has financial consequences for the firm. Our research found that companies that adopted a value-based pricing strategy and built the organizational capabilities to implement the strategy earned 24 percent higher profits than industry peers.¹⁰ Yet in that same research, we found that a full 23 percent of marketing and sales managers did not understand their company’s pricing strategy or did not believe their company had a pricing strategy.

Implementing pricing strategy is difficult because it requires input and coordination across so many different functional areas: marketing, sales, capacity management, and finance. Successful pricing strategy implementation is built on three pillars: an effective organization, timely and accurate information, and appropriately motivated management. In most instances, it is neither desirable nor necessary for a company to have a large, centralized organization to manage pricing. What is required, however, is that everyone involved in pricing decisions understand what his role in the price-setting process is and what rights he has to participate. Whereas the pricing manager might have the right to set the price, sales management might have the right to consult on the pricing decision while senior management might have the right to veto the decision. Too often, these decision rights are not clearly specified, changing the pricing decision from a well-defined business process to an exercise in political power as various functional areas attempt to influence the offered price.

Once managers understand their role in the price-setting process, they must then be provided with the right data and tools to make the decisions assigned to them. In our research, when we asked managers about what would make the most improvement in their firm’s pricing decisions, more than 75 percent answered, “Better data and tools.” When one considers the data requirements for making organization-wide pricing decisions, this response is not surprising. Marketing managers need data on customer value and competitive pricing. Sales managers need data to support their value claims and defend price premiums. And financial managers need accurate cost data and volume data. Collecting these large volumes of data and distributing them throughout the organization is a daunting task that has led many companies to adopt sophisticated price management systems that can integrate with their data warehouses and ensure that managers get only the information they need. Not every firm needs to invest in dedicated systems to manage pricing data. However, everyone must address the question of how to get the right information into the right manager’s hands in a timely fashion if they hope to keep their pricing strategies aligned with the ongoing changes occurring in most markets.

One last, important point about implementing a pricing strategy is the need to motivate managers to engage in new behaviors that support the strategy. All too often, people are offered incentives to act in ways that undermine the pricing strategy and reduce profitability. It is common for companies to send sales reps to training programs designed to help them sell on value, but when they return to work, they are paid purely to maximize top-line sales revenue. When sales reps or field sales managers are offered only revenue-based incentives, it is hard to imagine them fighting to defend a price premium if they think that doing so will increase their chances of losing the deal. But incentives can be developed that encourage more profitable behaviors.

A senior salesperson we know was recently promoted to regional sales manager for an area in which discounting was rampant. He began his first meeting by sharing a ranking of sales reps by their price realization during the prior quarter. He invited the top two reps to describe how they did those deals so profitably and the bottom two reps to describe what went wrong. He then facilitated an open discussion among the 30 reps on how challenges like those faced by the bottom two reps could be managed better in the future. At the end of the meeting, he told them that this exercise would be repeated every quarter. One month into the subsequent quarter, sales reps were asking to see where they stood in the rankings, suggesting that they were highly motivated to engage in productive behaviors to avoid a low ranking at the next meeting.

Summary

Pricing strategically has become essential to the success of business, reflecting the rise of global competition, the increase in information available to customers, and the accelerating pace of change in the products and services available in most markets. The simple, traditional models of cost-driven, customer-driven, or share-driven pricing can no longer sustain a profitable business in today’s dynamic and open markets.

This chapter introduced the strategic pricing pyramid containing the five key elements of strategic pricing. Experience has taught us that achieving sustainable improvements to pricing performance requires ongoing evaluation of and adjustments to multiple elements of the pyramid. Companies operating with a narrow view of what constitutes a pricing strategy miss this crucial point, leading to incomplete solutions and lower profits. Building a strategic pricing capability requires more than a common understanding of the elements of an effective strategy. It requires careful development of organizational structure, systems, individual skills, and ultimately culture. These things represent the foundation upon which the strategic pricing pyramid rests and must be developed in concert with the pricing strategy. But the first step toward strategic pricing is to understand each level of the pyramid and how it supports those above it.