pricing

When recession hits, pricers seem to grab onto a couple of tools: how soon to discount, and how much? It seems more risky to use other pricing approaches in bad times than in good, but, as authors Marco Bertini and Luc Wathieu point out in the May Harvard Business Review (”How To Stop Customers From Fixating On Price“), smart pricing strategies can also serve to remind customers about things other than a product’s… well, price.

Ryanair's CEO Michael O'Leary has announced his desire to remove all but one of the toilets on each of his planes, and install a coin-operated lock so passengers need to pay to use it. What's strange to me isn't how radically nutsy this idea might be. Rather, it's that nobody is terribly surprised.

Companies that have discounted in response to the Great Recession now find themselves in the position of needing to find a way to return prices to something closer to “normal,” whatever that is. Those companies have gotten some good news and bad news in the form of research from Michael Tsiros of the University of Miami and David Hardesty of the University of Kentucky, as reported in the April Harvard Business Review.

My last Neuromarketing post, Neuro-Menus and Restaurant Psychology, talked about various things restaurant menu engineers do to maximize sales and profits. I think it’s worth calling special attention to one aspect touched on in that post: how price presentation affects sales. Not, the price itself, which of course is very important, but the way the price is displayed to the diner.

Restaurants are great test labs for testing neuromarketing techniques. It’s easy to change offerings, menus, and pricing, and one gets immediate feedback on what’s working and what’s not. One technique I’ve written about from a product standpoint but which is also used by restaurants is decoy pricing.

by: John Caddell

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

Kodak has just announced its new "Print and Prosper" marketing campaign, and I think it's utterly brilliant branding.

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

If you ever needed proof that the context of would-be purchasers' lives is a far more important quality than any attribute of brand that you might promote, just look at the emerging utility "paycheck cycle" for packaged goods marketers.

Why a logical product lineup may not be the most profitable

When marketers plan a company’s product offerings, they usually try to do so in the most logical way possible. Several levels of product may be offered - a stripped-down, basic version, a more capable better version, and perhaps a “best” version. These would normally be priced at quite different levels, probably based in part on the relative manufacturing costs of the products.

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

Ouch.

As of last week, Starbucks is closing 600 stores (100 pre-announced and 500 announced, in the convoluted chronology of corporate disclosure), firing thousands of baristas, and slashing expansion plans. Its stock continues to crap out faster and worse than the crappy stock market overall. The mediasphere has been abuzz with causes and suspects for the malaise...