Accenture recently published a paper called “Going for Growth: The Role of Price and Cost in Driving High Performance in a Volatile Global Economy”
If you haven’t got time to read it, here are the key pricing-related points…
• Price optimisation was one of the three most important strategic priorities in the past 18 months for seven out of 10 companies;
• An equal percentage of companies did not have what Accenture would consider to be “sophisticated pricing capabilities”;
• Challenges in optimising pricing include sales execution, inadequate pricing analytics, unclear pricing strategy, inadequate decision support/analytics and governance and accountability incentives;
• Service, innovation and pricing are the most common levers for driving competitive advantage;
• Companies need to excel at delivering meaningful innovation at acceptable cost, and at a price that customers will ultimately pay;
• Companies most frequently use actions by competitors and the balance between supply and demand as inputs in setting price, and;
• Three-quarters of companies do not have a pricing strategy for difference marketing situations, nor is their pricing strategy tightly aligned with their overall business strategy.
The research surveyed 1,000 executives in 12 countries and 8 industries, all of whom have annual revenues over $100mill (ie, 'the top end of town').
And for everyone else, there’s http://www.pricingprophets.com/
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