Topic: Pricing Strategy
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Restaurant’s Has Increased Prices By Nearly 100% Over 5 Years
Casual dining restaurant chains in the US are facing some moments of truth in 2025. After five years of raising their prices at a faster pace than inflation, they may need to get more creative at a time when the combination of rising costs and sharply declining consumer confidence threaten their margins. For many, this…
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Users or Usage: What drives value of GenAI?
The market for generative AI (GenAI) seems to evolve on a daily basis, but the providers of these applications nonetheless face some fundamental challenges. One of these is the choice of pricing model. In this week’s guest contribution, our colleagues Jacob Konikoff and Saran Rajendran describe the rationales and risks behind the options for pricing…
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Planning Retail Promotions in Volatile Markets
In Part III of Game Changer my co-author Arnab Sinha, and our colleagues, looked at how companies in retail and consumer goods sectors are deploying advanced analytics to completely rethink and revamp their promotion strategies. This is challenge for companies in sectors with short or seasonal life cycles, such as apparel, furniture, and décor. As…
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“Demand if you do, demand if you don’t!”
The market for software has evolved from the days when we purchased products from Adobe or Microsoft on discs in cardboard boxes. When we use today’s cloud-based services, we tend to see one of two pricing models: we either subscribe to the service and pay per user per month (or year) or we pay based…
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Changing the Pricing Game in Retail Banking
In Part III of Game Changer we worked with our colleagues at BCG to show how several companies successfully switched pricing games in response to shifts in customer behavior or other market forces. The retail banking sector presents a special case in this regard, because banks have traditionally played several pricing games simultaneously, a factor…
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Pricing Enters the C-Suite Agenda
We contend that the right pricing strategy can change the entire trajectory of a business, a market, and even society. Judging from trends in the job market, it seems that companies also believe it. The fastest growing professional role in the United States over the last five years is Chief Growth Officer, according to LinkedIn’s…
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All Eyes on Pricing
In: Pricing Strategy
In most of our newsletters, my colleague Arnab Sinha and I have focused on the nature of the seven games in the Strategic Pricing Hexagon. Today we focus on the individuals and teams that play the games day in and day out. They are the ones who wield the power behind our definition of pricing…
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Winning the Dynamic Game
The pricing of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) applications is a hot topic. Microsoft revealed its vision for its Copilot “digital companion” last month and affirmed price points of $30 per month for enterprise customers. But the critical question for software companies and platforms providers at this stage should not be “how much should we charge?”…
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Exploring the Fair Value of Work
How much is your work worth? That is the pricing challenge almost everyone confronts personally. The wages people receive are the prices set for their work. That applies to the current tense negotiations between the United Auto Works (UAW) and the car and truck manufacturers in the United States as much as it does to…
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Winning the Custom Game
Imagine going to the store to buy your favorite breakfast cereal – a classic Uniform Game product – but instead of paying the price displayed at the shelf, you negotiate the number of flakes in the box, customize your own mix of fruit, nuts, and sweetener, demand a special container and dispenser, and ask for…
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Winning the Power Game
One of the most enduring clichés in marketing is that “the market sets the price.” Business leaders may feel they lack pricing power in the conventional sense, because they don’t have obvious differentiation or loud competitive advantages. This is especially true when the market is highly concentrated on both sides. The outcome of every deal…
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Winning the Cost Game
If pricing professionals brainstormed for a slogan to put on mugs and t-shirts, we’re confident that “Never Use Cost-Plus Pricing!” would make their short list. The critics call out the simplicity of the approach. How can the fusion of only two numbers – a cost and a target margin – possibly serve a company well…