New pricing strategies: e-commerce versus classic wholesale/retail

Professor Oded Koenigsberg – London Business School

Pricing is an area of business that seasoned executives and budding entrepreneurs alike seldom talk about with enthusiasm. In fact, although most businesspeople understand that pricing decisions can truly make or break a company’s bottom line, they tend to tackle today’s demanding markets without the aid of a carefully crafted strategy. As a result, pricing policies are little more than collections of tactics held together by questionable assumptions and crude heuristics that, in many circumstances, put financial and brand health in jeopardy. Pricing as strategy should be pragmatic, action-oriented study of the different and at times surprising roles that it plays in capturing, communicating, and even increasing a firm’s competitive advantage.

The objective of this meeting is to help the audience to address strategic and tactical pricing issues (including e-commerce versus classic wholesale/retail, the introduction of prices when consumer valuations are uncertain or self-serving behaviour in price-quality competition) and to recognize the necessary data needed to make superior pricing decisions.