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Posts Tagged ‘gaining market share’

Greatness: Accelerating the Recovery – Part II

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Part II: Narrowing Your Focus

Your organization can’t be great if you try to serve too broad a market. With every new market you target you run the risk of diluting your offerings. No where does this become more obvious than in conversations with clients about market share. (more…)

Tags: counter-intuitive pricing, gaining market share, market share, price management, Pricing, pricing for profit, pricing for profitability, pricing management, pricing strategies, pricing strategy, strategic pricing, value pricing, value-based pricing
Posted in Economy | No Comments »

Discounting During Peak Season

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Great strategy?

Or sheer folly?

It’s early spring. I’m listening to the radio when I hear an ad for the premier carpet cleaning company in our city. The woman in the ad is telling her friend how awful her carpets after having dirt, sand, salt and grime tracked in all winter long. (more…)

Tags: counter-intuitive pricing, gaining market share, Pricing, pricing errors, pricing for profit, pricing for profitability, pricing management, pricing mistakes, pricing strategies, pricing strategy, strategic pricing, value pricing, value-based pricing
Posted in Branding, Pricing | No Comments »

Flying Blind

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Flying Blind

What does aviation have to do…

…with your pricing strategy?

Break the bonds of industry pricing!

Get compensated well for the value you provide.

Imagine that you’re a seasoned pilot. You’ve filed your flight plan when a massive snow storm hits. Visibility is zero and the winds are gusting up to 30 knots. Are you going to take off? Not unless you have a death wish, right? You know the dangers of flying blind.

Yet business owners fly blind time and time again. How? Let’s say that your competitor comes out with an improvement to its offering. Your sense that the enhancement is going to give them competitive advantage so you scramble to provide a similar enhancement. You just took off in a blinding snow storm.

First, you don’t know whether their customers, or yours, will value this enhancement. Unless your competitor raised its prices to reflect the additional value the enhancement provides and their customers are paying that price, you don’t know whether the enhancement has any value to the customer.

Second, many business owners give away these enhancements without ever asking for higher prices. Their rationale is that they’ll gain “competitive advantage” and garner a “larger share of the market.” How often has that really happened in your industry? Isn’t it more likely that there was little, if any, shift in market share?

If that’s true, your competitor drove up its cost structure without gaining any additional revenue. That means its margins just dropped. Worse yet, you followed them blindly. Your costs are going up as well, without the benefit of additional revenues. If that weren’t bad enough you just made additional investments to do so. Ouch!

It’s counter-intuitive, but following a competitor’s lead in enhancing their offerings without evaluating their approach and the impact it will have on their bottom line is the equivalent of abandoning your flight plan and taking off into a blizzard. The results can be devastating.

For more information on how you can command higher prices for your products and services, please post your questions or comments below, send Dale an email at dale@furtwengler.com or call him at 314-707-3771.

To see how counter-intuitive thinking can be applied to other business issues, visit Dale’s blog, The Invaluable Leader at www.furtwengler.com/theinvaluableleader/.

What does aviation have to do…

…with your pricing strategy?

Tags: counter-intuitive pricing, gaining market share, market share, price management, Pricing, pricing management, pricing strategies, pricing strategy
Posted in Branding, Pricing | No Comments »

Retail’s Black Friday

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

Great strategy…

…or sheer folly.

Retailers have decided to move Black Friday, the day they begin their heavy holiday season discounts, up a month. (more…)

Tags: counter-intuitive pricing, gaining market share, market share, price management, Pricing, pricing errors, pricing for profit, pricing for profitability, pricing management, pricing strategies, pricing strategy, strategic pricing, value-based pricing
Posted in Pricing, Sales, Strategy | 2 Comments »