Pricing. It’s not just about coming up with a pricing strategy or a price point. Or even attaching price stickers to products on store shelves as one of my neighbors once thought. Pricing can be an incredible lens through which you can scrutinize your entire business. You need to make sure that your pricing analysis takes a holistic view of the business. That you look at the whole business, beyond the narrow confines of what is purely pricing. This is particularly necessary when pricing isn’t the cause of your pricing problem, it’s only a symptom. A holistic approach will not only help avoid taking expensive, unnecessary and ultimately unsuccessful pricing actions, but will also help identify root causes to problems which may have otherwise remained undetected without the scrutiny of that pricing lens.
In these situations your pricing analyst should find out what the cause of the problem is, and work with their non-pricing colleagues who really own the problem, to come up with a joint solution. Executives like to know that someone is proactively uncovering problems. But what’s even better is when they are presented with not only the problem, but also the solution. And the team that created/owned the problem? They are now part of the solution so it becomes a win-win for everyone.
