Latest Pricing Insights

The 29th of March, 2019, the day the United Kingdom officially leaves the European Union, is fast approaching. It is important for businesses to know the impacts Brexit will have on pricing for their products and how they can prepare for post-Brexit. Food prices are expected to go up after Brexit and some have even encouraged the government to cut tariffs on international products. Adding to that, a "no-deal" Brexit could have huge consequences for businesses as they risk potentially going bust in the event of no trade deal being secured. Despite this, some companies can actually gain from Brexit if they know how to retain their customers when the prices will be impacted by Brexit and thus become out of sync with consumer/customer willingness to pay for certain goods.

Marketing teams face annual budgets for their various investments in brand equity creation, product development, promotions, advertising and much more. Price research can contribute in a number of highly valuable ways when it comes to these decisions.

1. Understand if the brand (or individual product) is considered over-valued or under-valued by the customers: Willingness-to-pay research is a great indicator of how much value customers associate with the brand in comparison to the current price. Take an example like this chart from the PriceBeam solution:

What should the price be for your existing line of products? Are customers willing to pay more than they pay today? Are consumers willing to pay more for brand extensions or entirely new products? What should be the optimal price for different markets? How do you implement the planned price increase? What would be consumers' reactions to different (price) promotions?

CPG/FMCG brand teams face a myriad of decisions related to pricing their brands and individual SKUs, be it existing or new products. Research shows that there is considerable profit improvement potential by collecting price research among consumers and applying those insights to the pricing of both individual items and across an assortment.

In this upcoming webinar we look at different methods for collecting actionable price intelligence through primary consumer research, and how to use those insights in different situations such as:

What should the price be for your main product or service? Are customers willing to pay more than they pay today, or are new customer segments willing to pay more than existing customers? What should the price be when launching into new markets?

As a Startup or Scaleup CEO there is often thousand of things to work on, and pricing either gets overlooked or prices are set too low to be on the safe side. However, research shows that Startups and Scaleups can improve their prices between 30% and 100% without losing any significant number of customers, by applying scientific and systematic price optimization techniques. In other words make a lot more profit for themselves and for their investors.

As we are approaching the last quarter of the year many companies look at increasing their prices for the coming year, in particular in B2B industries with cyclical negotiation cycles. But price increases are not always easy to implement and more than half of all price increases either fail outright or get neutralized by heavy discounting.

A question very often asked about price research is who uses it or benefits from it in an organization. The first answer is typically either "Marketing" or "the pricing manager", and they certainly can use the insights generated by price research. But in many cases, price research can also help sales people in various ways:

Most people working in the pricing department is aware that pricing is a very powerful tool. Yet still, when engaging with other departments or discussing the overall strategy of the company, price improvements are sometimes ignored, or at least its full value is not appreciated.

Tariffs and trade wars are in the media almost every day at the moment. Many industries find themselves caught in an environment where they may be facing tariffs, from steel production over jeans, whisky, auto-motive, to even indirect products such as the costs impacts for Coca Cola of tariffs on the raw materials for their soda cans.