Analytics

There is no right price without clear objectives, but getting that clarity is often harder than it seems like it should be.  There are, however, a range of simple tools that facilitate objective setting and alignment between business and marketing objectives. The Business, Marketing, and Pricing Objective guides below are examples of how we might help guide the overall process of determining the right objectives for pricing.   

Value for money is ultimately in the eye of the customer. This makes  customer segmentation and targeting an important pre-step for marketing strategy. These guides and tools explore the segmentation process and provide some aids to prioritizing targets.  

One way to determine prices is by defining a premium or discount index versus a benchmark.  There are, however, different types of prices that  may serve as  indexes and choosing the wrong one can lead to bad decisions.  These  tools and guides discuss the index-setting process and provide some aids to help.     

 Understanding price elasticity is crucial if one seeks to improve results through better pricing.  Yet, calculating elasticity can be an infuriatingly complex task. These tools and guides explain the process of how to collect data for pricing, estimate price elasticity and provides some simple examples of different approaches. The demand curve generator is a simple, wisdom-of-the crowds tool that can help different points of view into a consensus around the impact of pricing changes. It is good for workshops and for hypothesis formation.  More sophisticated pricing tools abound, but still require judgment when being applied.

Gauging the short-term profitability of a promotion can be harder than it seems it should be..  On has to first construct a counterfactual of how sales would fare in the absence of a promotion, and then develop the scenariao of costs and revenue with  the promotion.   The promotion ROI calculators below are simple, tactical planning tools that estimate the profitability of a typical CPG trade promotion through a retailer, given expected lifts and investments. 

While usually not reported publicly, trade and consumer promtion discounts are often the second biggest "cost item" after cost of sales. How much of % reduction in revenue should be targeted can vary by industry and customer mix.  There is a point where everyone can recognize that it is too high, but no discounts vs. list price is also usually not advisable either.  The sweetspot lies somewhere in between.  The first step to bringing trade and consumer promotion discounting more in line with business objectives and strategies is to make them more visible (internally).   Price waterfalls are powerful tools to monitor how different price and trade elements drive net sales. 

 Another important task is to make sure that the prices across one's own SKUs are logical given their relative value.  This applies to everyday prices and after considering relative promotional support..  Price Ladders are simple, visual tools to compare price ranges around one's own or competitive codes and to monitor compliance with pricing guidelines.