Price promotions - competing against your future self

Price promotions are important elements of any pricing strategy.  However, they should be used with caution.  In this post, we'll review how putting items on sale now will shape how consumers view your future pricing

Price promotion - 5 benefits beyond increased revenue

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One common goal for price promotions is to increase revenue - but they can drive additional benefits for your company that can make price reductions successful regardless of their impact on revenue.  In this post I'll discuss 5 of those benefits...

Pricing decisions - the volume / revenue trade-off

Whenever you adjust your pricing, you're volume will change, and you impact your revenue.  In this post we'll discuss how to think through those dynamics.  What happens to your revenue - and more importantly, profit - when you raise or lower price and what you need to know to predict the outcomes.

It's worth noting that if you're changing price as part of a promotion, the volume increase is only one part of potential value created and deciding whether or not it's worth doing.  See the related post on price promotion benefits beyond additional revenue for more information.

Marketing Funnel - 4 common mistakes companies make in customer adoption

In this post, I'll go over 4 common mistakes companies make regarding their marketing funnels.  The marketing funnel is the journey a person takes to become your customer - if you're unfamiliar with the marketing funnel (a.k.a. customer or product adoption process), please see my previous posts introducing the marketing funnel and how to diagnose it.

Marketing Funnel Diagnostics - understanding your customer adoption performance

Now that you understand the Marketing Funnel and how non-customers become customers, let's discuss how you can measure your performance across the six stages of adoption and how that can inform how to improve your customer adoption.

In this post, we'll go over:

1. How to measure customer adoption
2. How to calculate customer conversion between stages of the Marketing Funnel
3. How to identify areas of concern
4. The importance of Marketing Funnel benchmarks
5. Why these concepts are important to your company

The Marketing Funnel: how strangers become customers - the 6 stages and key questions

In this post, we'll go over the Marketing Funnel, which illustrates the journey to customer adoption.  I'll define the concept, explain each of its 6 stages, and suggest key questions to ask yourself at each stage about your company's performance.

In future posts I'll explain Marketing Funnel diagnostics and common mistakes companies make.

Brand Linkage: Don't just advertise your category, advertise your brand

Image from Energizer.com

If your company pays to advertise, one of the factors to consider is how well your advertisements are linked to your brand.  In this post I'll be referencing television commercials since they are vivid examples that most people can relate to, but the concepts can apply to all advertising media.

I'll explain what brand linkage is, why it's important, and what happens when great advertising has poor brand linkage - it's not always bad, as long as you're the industry leader, as illustrated by the Energize Bunny example.

Negotiations: BATNA and your walkaway or reservation price

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In this post I'll explain a fundamental negotiating concept, BATNA.  Specifically, I'll define the term, explain how to calculate it, how it should inform your negotiating approach, and discuss the challenges of non-financial components of BATNA.

The examples that follow will be about buying/selling cars and job offers, but you can apply these concepts to any negotiations you encounter, including dealing with your customers, suppliers, employees, and employers.

Negotiations: Win-win (integrative) vs. zero-sum (distributive) outcomes

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In this post I'll go over two approaches to negotiations: the more familiar zero-sum (distributive) approach and the superior win-win (integrative) approach - and illustrate both with an example of negotiating for an orange.

I'll also provide 3 requirements for achieving win-win outcomes.

Pricing: Cost-Plus vs. Willingness to Pay

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Pricing decisions are critical - get them right and you can maximize profitability.  Get them wrong and you can destroy your revenue or leave loads of money on the table.

In this post we'll review why pricing based on your customer's willingness to pay (WTP) is superior to simpler, cost-plus pricing.  I'll include a few examples that illustrate why this is true.