A Beer on the Beach, and Other Mysteries of Fair Pricing

Businesses want us to view them as fair – there is arguably nothing more important than a reputation for fairness in the daily marketplace of commercial transactions. As business managers what can we do to ensure that decisions we make – about pricing or other actions that are clearly visible at the point of the customer-product interaction – will be seen as fair? Is fairness something absolute, immutable and precisely quantifiable?  Or is it situational, capricious and ever-changing?  The bad news, perhaps, is that ‘fairness’ is a very elusive notion to pin down with certainty – it’s hard to put fairness in a bottle and label it as such.  The good news is that fairness more than anything else is about perception and the relative judgments of your customers and potential customers in varying demand situations.  That’s good news because the better you understand the granular contours of your demand environment and the precise needs and propensities of your customers, the more likely you are to understand how to make decisions in that environment that are both fair to the customer and profit-optimizing to your business.

thirst-quenching - but is it fairly priced?

Here’s a test of fairness.  Imagine you are lying on the beach on a hot summer day and find yourself craving a cold, satisfying beer.  What price would you be willing to pay to quench your thirst?  Now imagine two alternative scenarios.  In one, the only place within walking distance to buy a beer is the poolside bar of a swanky five-star beachfront hotel.  In the other, there is a rather run-down beachfront grocery store that sells beer.  Imagine further that both the hotel and the grocery store sell the exact same brand and type of beer.  Does your maximum price point change depending on whether you think you are getting the beer from the hotel or the store?  Do you think it is fair for two different establishments to sell the same commodity for a different price? Read the rest of this entry »

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From 1.0 to 4.0 in 130,000 Years: Pricing’s Extraordinary Adventure from Haggling to Scientific Micromarketing

Pricing has evolved from the ancient art of haggling to the application of scientific methods to the micromarket.  In a sense we are going back to the unique knowledge of individual customers and products that existed in the old bazaars and town squares – but we’re armed with powerful technological tools of the 21st century.  The world of Pricing 4.0 is upon us.

But let’s start at the beginning.  In the beginning there was the trade, and the trade saved humanity.  Seriously.

Homo neanderthalensis – Neanderthal man – had been occupying the planet for about 200,000 years when our ancestral gene pool, Homo sapiens, showed up on the scene (both species evolved from a common ancestor Homo habilis that had begun to make and use basic tools about 2.5 Ma (million years ago), but their evolutionary paths diverged some 600,000 Ma).  Despite what would seem to be a solid first-mover advantage thriving in the harsh Ice Age climate of Europe and Western Asia, Neanderthal man vanished from the face of the earth sometime around 30,000 years ago while the progeny of H. sapiens went on to give the world the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Magna Carta and How I Met Your Mother.  In 2005 academicians Richard Horan, Erwin Bulte and Jason Shogren presented a well-researched argument for why this happened: trade.  According to their paper “How Trade Saved Humanity from Biological Extinction: An Economic Theory of Neanderthal Extinction” it appears that our ancestors had particularly honed skills in organizing specialized activities such as tool-making, and trading their goods between different social organizations.  As the Ice Age melted and populations grew and migrated, the skills of free trade became an evolutionary competitive edge. Read the rest of this entry »

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Is Pricing a Core Competency?

I’m not sure whether or not Tom Peters actually coined the term “core competency”, but it certainly took firm root in the business world following publication of his Ur-management tome In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best Run Companies back in 1982.  The equity bull market that started that same year may have run its course, but core competencies are still with us.  A core competency is supposed to be a unique configuration of intelligence, skills, experience, processes, systems – the things that enable a company to do something really, really well, that are hard for others to replicate and therefore lead to an enduring competitive advantage.   In the business world “advantage” is achieved through profitability, and profitability is achieved through doing things that lead to higher revenues and lower costs.  And the strongest lever the company – any company – has at its disposal to shape its profit line is price.  Given this rather widely understood fact, would not it be logical to assume that a large number of our best-run companies manage pricing as a core competency? Logical, perhaps – but the evidence seems to indicate otherwise.

For all its impact on the bottom line pricing often seems to be more on the periphery of the activity flow than at the center – an outer rather than a core competency, and sometimes not much more than an afterthought – oh, yeah, we need to stick a price on that now… hmmm, let’s see.   There are three commonly-used methods for firms to price their goods and services, and none of them could be considered the basis for a core competency.   The Old Faithful of pricing methodologies is cost-plus: add up a bunch of direct and indirect costs, slap an arbitrary profit margin on top and voila – that’s the price. Then there’s competitor-based pricing, which many people seem to think is several evolutionary legs up from cost-plus but which Michael Douglas’ Wall Street character Gordon Gekko might have called “a dog with a different set of fleas”.  Why should either bean counters in the accounting department or your competitors be the metronome for what you charge your customers?

The third common pricing method perhaps comes closer to hitting the mark, but it still falls short of a core competency.  In fact it is not really a method per se but more an amalgam of several things – gut instinct, trial and error and maybe some back-of-the-envelope elasticity calculations .  Here the intention is right – try to figure out what motivates a customer to want to pay a certain price and then try to meet it – but the delivery is weak.  Even mid-sized companies in retail or distribution businesses face literally millions upon millions of pricing decisions every day – what product to what customer in what location via what marketing message and selling channel?  The permutations are too staggering to handle in any way other than with technology-aided, systematic rigor.  For a long time the tools did not exist to facilitate this – but as more companies become aware of the tools and best-in-class practices evolve (to borrow another one of those indispensable bons mots from Tom Peters) I expect that we’ll see some migration of the pricing discipline from the periphery to the core.

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