Pricing strategy

When Ben Franklin wrote Poor Richard’s Almanac and the words, “A little neglect may breed great mischief,” he did not have price fixing in mind. To the 47 executives in companies in the folding-box industry convicted of price fixing, however, the words seem tailored to fit. In those companies convicted under antitrust laws in 1976, […]

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 […]

The scene is a conference room in the head office in Geneva of Universal Data Corporation’s European operations. The time is shortly after lunch on a winter day in 1977. Three men are finishing cups of coffee which have been served by a secretary. Seated at the head of the table is Clive Price, age […]

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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 […]

To combat showrooming, retailers should try these four strategies instead.

This is part of the HBR Insight Center Marketing That Works. I use my credit card to pay for everything. Regardless of whether I am buying a $2,000 washer/dryer...

Instead of raising prices, consider bundling, repositioning your brand, or changing your pricing model.

Most executives know how pricing influences the demand for a product, but few of them realize how it affects the consumption of a product. In this article,...

Bundling products is a time-honored practice that marketers use to boost sales. But new research shows that it can backfire--that customers will actually...

Why fixed prices are inefficient.

Summertime in New England means lobster — and this year, there’s lots of it. With the abundance of lobsters in Maine this summer, prices that lobster fisherman receive at the docks have sunk to a 40 year low of under $2 a pound. (By comparison, last year dock prices reached $4 a pound.) With cheap […]

The answer may well be yes. Here’s why.

Employers have a lot of indirect influence.

Raising prices is rarely frictionless.

Coordination between advertising and price strategies may lead to higher profits. Analyses of data from 227 businesses show the price-advertising relationship....

This blog post is part of the HBR Online Forum The Future of Retail. Last year on Black Friday, I dropped by a local Staples store in Watertown, Massachusetts, to pick up a few office supplies. Surprised at the 40% off sale on many items, I ended up leaving with a lot of office supplies […]

Despite 30 years of evidence demonstrating that most acquisitions don't create value for the acquiring company, executives continue to make more deals,...

With razor-thin margins, players like Amazon need to maximize pricing efficiency. But brick and mortar stores can follow their example.

There's a fatal flaw in the low-price, low-margin, high-volume strategy that multinationals have been pursuing in the bottom of the economic pyramid for...