Pricing strategy

Price wars are a fact of life, whether we're talking about the fast-paced world of knowledge products, the marketing of Internet appliances, or the staid,...

Awareness of the five forces can help a company understand the structure of its industry and stake out a position that is more profitable and less vulnerable to attack.

In this article, authors James Anderson, professor at the Kellogg Graduate School, Northwestern University, and James Narus, associate professor at the...

Companies may want to shift a brand's position--to exploit less crowded territory, for example, or grow sales. Companies have long used perceptual mapping...

The way you set prices doesn’t just influence demand. It also guides the way buyers use your product or service—and that can have a lasting impact on customer relationships.

Companies often crimp profits by using discounts to attract price-sensitive customers and by failing to give high-end customers reasons to spend more....

An important task of the corporate financial manager is measurement of the company’s cost of equity capital. But estimating the cost of equity causes a lot of head scratching; often the result is subjective and therefore open to question as a reliable benchmark. This article describes a method for arriving at that figure, a method […]

Sales departments tend to believe that marketers are out of touch with what's really going on in the marketplace. Marketing people, in turn, believe the...

Over the past decade "freemium"--a combination of free and premium offerings--has become the dominant business model among internet start-ups and smartphone...

HBR first published this article in November 1950 as a practical guide to the problems involved in pricing new products. Particularly in the early stages of competition, it is necessary to estimate demand, anticipate the effect of various possible combinations of prices, and choose the most suitable promotion policy. Then as the product’s market status […]

Discount retailer Dollar Bill's has been struggling to maintain its margins over the past two years because of inflationary pressures, delays on imported...

When a customer buys a product he or she goes through a complex process of balancing the price of the product against the perceived benefits, costs, risks, and value in use of the product. If the customer thinks this way when analyzing a purchase, say these authors, it makes great sense for marketers to set […]

Why nickel-and-diming customers is the future of pricing.

When a company brings out a new product, it often raises the prices of its existing products--which means that you can follow suit without risking customer...

An advanced AI model considers much more than what competitors are charging.

Augustin Rey, the president of Emilia, a century-old clothing retailer in Spain, is determined to revamp the company's merchandising strategy and redesign...

The subject of transfer pricing doesn’t normally excite many people, but when your transfer pricing system is less than perfect, life gets interesting. We at Bellcore first got interested in transfer pricing in 1983. That’s the year before AT&T was broken up and Bellcore was being formed as the centralized organization supporting the seven regional […]

Jefferson Pilot Financial (JPF), a life insurance and annuities firm, was looking for new ways to grow. Its top managers recognized that JPF needed to...

Collusion doesn't always lead to higher prices.

Big retailers like supermarket chains often demand extra service from their suppliers, who are all too eager to forgive a late payment or meet "emergency"...