Pricing Of Products And Services by Tridib Mazumbar, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

The price of a product or a service is a critical element of the marketing mix. If priced too low, product sales may go up, but the product margin suffers; priced too high, customers look for other alternatives and sales may decline. Despite the critical role price plays in influencing corporate revenue and profit growths, formal training of the pricing function is often missing from business school curriculum. This book provides business students as well as managers necessary tools to make profitable pricing decisions under a variety of real-life contexts — current and emerging. It offers a balance of theory, applications, and analytics to achieve the goal of arriving at appropriate pricing decisions in a competitive and changing business environment. The book begins with a framework for pricing decision and utilizes short cases and numerical illustrations to demonstrate how customer valuation, cost, and competition are triangulated to arrive at a feasible price range for a new or an existing product. Theories from economics and psychology provide conceptual foundations for price customization and segmentation, framing price offers to customers, price bundling, and other prevalent pricing practices. The book then focuses on specific areas of application that managers frequently encounter. These areas include: (a) pricing of a new product or a service, (b) pricing of a product line, (c) pricing through marketing channels, (d) price promotions and their effects, (e) price structure (e. g., non-linear prices such as quantity discounts, peak load or surge pricing), (f) pricing contracts and customer lifetime value, (g) pricing contingent or inter-dependent products. With respect to pedagogy, the book places a strong emphasis on utilization of data and analytics to arrive at sound pricing decisions, although intuitions and judgments remain a prerequisite. The use of number-driven decisions is especially evident in areas such as (a) valuations of the products and product attributes, (b) developing demand functions from surveys and point-of sales data, (c) assessing the effects of trade promotions through the channel, (d) customer lifetime value and price structuring decisions, and (e) price-attribute trade-offs using conjoint analysis. Finally, the book provides overviews on emerging pricing practices on the Internet. Topics include: reverse auctions or Name Your Own Price (NYOP); pricing opaque products, C to C pricing (e. g., eBay), price tracking tools/apps. The book also highlights the interdependencies between price and other marketing mix variables as well as with other functional areas within an organization. | Pricing Of Products And Services by Tridib Mazumbar, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters