129 results for "pricing strategy"

Pricing strategies are the models used by businesses to determine the best price at which to sell their goods or services. This is clearly one of the most important questions faced by any business, since pricing has a tremendous influence on revenues, market competitiveness, and consumer perceptions of your product. Given its importance to the strategic management of a business, it is not surprising that there are a number of different pricing strategies to choose from.

Perhaps the simplest pricing strategy is cost-based pricing, where prices are set at the cost of providing the good or service plus a desired profit margin. Alternately, when many producers sell similar goods or services, market-based pricing and competitor pricing models can be used to set price points based on current market conditions and positioning versus competitors. Customer value-based pricing offers an even more sophisticated strategy, as it seeks to determine customer willingness to pay for a product and set prices accordingly.

The digital era has created new opportunities to push these and other pricing strategies forwards. For example, the advent of e-commerce has made it easy to gather more information than ever on the relevant prices of similar goods and services across different providers and different markets. And digital analytics on consumer buying behavior, as well as insights from behavioral economics, have provided new insights into customer psychology that can inform value-based pricing strategies.‎

Product and service pricing can have wide-ranging impacts on a company’s bottom-line performance as well as its brand perception. Thus, an understanding of pricing strategies is essential for sales and marketing professionals as well as executive decision-makers such as CEOs.

Market research analysts in particular must have an expertise in this field. They are responsible for studying market data and conducting consumer research to help companies determine what products and services customers want and how much they might buy at different price points. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, market research analysts earned an median annual salary of $63,790 per year in 2019, and these positions are expected to grow much faster than the national average as companies face increasing pressure to analyze and utilize the vast amounts of marketing data available today.‎

Absolutely. Coursera offers many different courses in business and marketing topics, including specific courses and Specializations on pricing strategy. With Coursera, you can learn about pricing strategy from top-ranked institutions like the University of Pennsylvania and IE Business School, as well as leading industry partners like Boston Consulting Group. These courses offer the opportunity to learn the same material from the same faculty as on-campus students, but at a much lower tuition. This appealing price point, along with the ability to learn remotely on a flexible schedule, has helped make Coursera the world’s leading online education platform.‎

The skills or experience you may need to have to learn pricing strategy can include having some knowledge of economics and marketing as well as a basic understanding of customer segmentation. It may help you to have a general grasp of how customers make decisions on what they pay for various products and services, including supply-and-demand situations. If you have any skills or experience in launching and pricing brands, building brand engagement, or managing brands or products, you may have some of the skills needed to learn pricing strategy.‎

The kind of people who are best suited for roles in pricing strategy may have dual interests in economics and consumer behavior. They understand the motivations, tools, and approaches behind data collection and analysis methods used by marketing professionals to sell products and services. They may also enjoy roles in pricing strategy because they will be interested in measuring a customer's willingness to pay for products and services of value, and learning the consumer psychology applications behind what is used to set beneficial prices of products and services.‎

Learning pricing strategy may be right for you if you are an entrepreneur, company owner, marketing specialist, or brand manager who needs to implement marketing strategies for products and services. It may be good for you to learn pricing strategy if you want to formulate pricing for your products and services or that of your company. Studying pricing strategy may benefit you if you're responsible for the bottom line in your company or if you need to understand price discrimination or pricing products and services for different customer segments. It can help you learn the tools and data needed to analyze and recommend a strategic response to real-world and complicated pricing challenges and decisions. Learning pricing strategy may be right for you if you want to better understand analyzing and applying pricing models, cost-plus pricing, marginal cost-plus pricing, peak-load pricing, and index-based pricing.‎