PPS Celebrates Brazil!

The Professional Pricing Society Celebrates 140 Attendees At The Inaugural Latin America Workshops & Conference in São Paulo, Brazil.

Commemorating a quarter of a century, PPS now turns its eyes to its upcoming 25th Annual Fall Workshops & Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Marietta, GA (PRWEB) September 08, 2014

The Professional Pricing Society (PPS) announced today the successful expansion of its conferences into the emerging market of Latin America. The Inaugural Latin America Workshops & Conference successfully debuted in São Paulo, Brazil, on August 27-28, 2014 to complete PPS’ vision of bringing pricing and revenue management excellence to four continents.

Of the company’s newest debut, President Kevin Mitchell said, “This is such an exciting time for PPS. Hosting this historic event in São Paulo where the business community is growing and thriving has been remarkable! We are very pleased with the response and turn-out for this conference, and we’re looking forward to many more successful years ahead in Latin America.”

PPS is also proudly celebrating a quarter of a century hosting global pricing and revenue management workshops and conferences. This year, the 25th Annual Fall Pricing Workshops & Conference will take place in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 21-24, 2014. Executives and business professionals’ alike look forward to two full days of insightful educational workshops, and engagement with the industry’s most experienced pricing, revenue management, and profit optimization practitioners. This conference also features an exclusive pricing for the Executives Summit on October 22, 2014.

For more information, please visit us at: http://www.pricingsociety.com/LasVegas2014

About The Professional Pricing Society

The Professional Pricing Society (PPS), founded in 1984, is a member association comprised of thousands of business professionals and executives. The company provides best practices in pricing, revenue management, and profit optimization to professionals via educational materials, live, and online training. This industry-leading training helps organizations excel in their pricing, revenue management, and overall profitability.

Five global conferences are held annually on four continents, enabling thought leadership and state-of-the-art pricing knowledge to be shared. These exciting events are world renowned for tremendous networking opportunities, and the ability to interact with pricing subject matter experts from around the world.

PPS is also the only professional organization to offer a pricing certification, the Certified Pricing Professional (CPP) designation. This coveted certification rewards its achievers with a highly desired skill and uniquely profitable professional edge.

Interested In Keeping Up With PPS?

To learn more about the company and its services, please visit our home page and “About PPS”:http://www.pricingsociety.com/home/about-pps

Value-based Pricing is More than a Pricing Strategy!

Guest Post by Stephan Liozu, PhD, CPP

Let me open this short essay with a very direct statement: value-based pricing is not just a pricing strategy. It is a go to market strategy. It is a customer-focused approach that touches segmentation, differentiation, communication and much more. Why am I making this statement? I have been working with many organizations and their pricing teams over the past few years as they are trying to design and execute value-based pricing strategies. Most of them are full of good intentions but are facing a lot of organizational resistance, strong silos, and roadblocks during the execution phase. At the heart of value-based pricing is a different value mindset that requires a strong alignment between all customer-focus functions: innovation, marketing, pricing, and sales.

This is why I am making this strong statement. Putting customer value at the center of your pricing models requires putting customer value at the center of your innovation, marketing and sales models as well. And it does start with the innovation process as your organization’s innovators create new pockets of customer value in the front-end of innovation. Value-based marketing and technical programs in turn articulate compelling value propositions and value messages to the market using the outcome of the innovation work and of the dollarization process. Pricing teams bring more science on how to measure and dollarize customer value as well as on how to deploy pricing tactics that will prevent leaving money on the table. Finally, sales organizations negotiate for value and enter into value conversations with customers.

In addition to deploying all four of these value-based processes, business professionals also need to make sure the three steps of the value management process are equally managed. First customer value is created or extracted. Then it needs to be measured using the EVE® process. Finally it needs to be captured during the commercial interactions. The measurement process is a must-do activity prior to deploying value-based tactics. Measuring is all about being in control. It is about measuring how much economic value a firm brings to its customers and how much is shared with them without leaving money on the table. It is all about not flying blind!

So you get it. Deploying value-based pricing as a pricing strategy will bring you good results. Doing it as a holistic value-based approach will bring great results. It will align your customer-focused processes and will help you with the transformation of your commercial culture. To help organizations and pricing teams operationalize value-pricing and the EVE® methodology, I have designed a unique workshop which will be held at the upcoming Professional Pricing Society conference in Las Vegas on 10/21/2014 (http://pricingsociety.com/home/workshops-conferences/conferences/north-america---fall/fall-2014-workshops-and-conference/las-vegas-2014-workshop-day-1/stephan-liozu). This one-day workshop will cover four key blocks:

1. Latest science on value-based pricing and the EVE® methodology
2. Critical capabilities to execute value-based pricing and EVE®
3. Operationalizing EVE® and customer value across all customer facing functions in the organization
4. Creating a value culture to enable value-based strategies

Participants will be able to assess their capabilities with value-based pricing and EVE®, as well as their current value culture. They will receive specific tools and tips on how to execute value-based innovation, value-based marketing, and value selling programs so that value-based pricing activities can be fully leveraged. I hope you can join us.

Be bold! Join the customer value revolution!

Become a Great Pricing Director

What Does It Take to Become a Great Pricing Director?

When I work with clients on pricing transformation, they often ask what skills they should look for when hiring a Pricing Director to lead the initiative.

Before I answer the question, let’s talk about what a pricing director is often charged to do:

• Brings pricing best practices (tools, frameworks, processes, capabilities) to the organization
• Drives mindset change
• Gets people throughout the organization to make smarter pricing decisions

Since a Pricing Director is typically not the final decision maker nor has the rank to stop bad decisions, he or she essentially is a change agent without the power. Not an easy job indeed.

What Does It Take to Become a Great Pricing Director?

Susan S. Lee

Partner

Simon-Kucher & Partners LLC

Strategy & Marketing Consultants

One Canal Park, Cambridge, MA 02141, USA

Tel: +1 617 231 4565, Fax: +1 617 576 2751

Susan.Lee@simon-kucher.com

PPS Inaugural LATIN AMERICAN Pricing Workshops & Conference

Pricing: A Brazilian Perspective

Staying informed with pricing has become an essential part of how you do business in any industry. Brazil understands this concept better than anyone. There are several aspects to pricing that can often be challenging and sometimes unclear.

The Professional Pricing Society is here to help. We will hold our Inaugural Pricing Conference in  São Paulo, Brazil on 27-28 August 2014 where Frederico Zornig will be speaking on the Brazilian Pricing Perspective to give you his incredible insight on the topic.

Mr. Zornig has over 25 years of pricing experience in Brazil and across the globe. As a Brazilian native he understands what works in Brazil and how different local and regional conditions can affect pricing.

 Attendees will learn:

• What is working in Brazil and what is not in pricing
• Key challenges for local pricing implementation
• Overview of business conditions in Brazil and how they affect pricing decisions

How Do You Grow Profits by Designing Offers for Target Markets?

Exceptional companies, in both revenues and profits, are not purely “customer-driven”. They instead target markets, and design offers for those markets, where they can leverage operational differences to compete from a position of strength.

How can companies stop losing money due to excessive price competition?

When many companies all pursue that same strategy simultaneously, most lose money due to excessive price competition. Convincing purchasing departments to help find win-win ways to serve customers more efficiently enables firms to grow more profitably.

Discover an alternative to the old “customer-driven” paradigm

During the Advantage-Based Marketing for Profitable Growth Keynote Presentation at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Lisa Thompson will teach attendees how to build price and discount structures that attract more profitable customers, and drive the high costs ones to competitors. Utilizing two decades of experience helping clients with their organic growth goals as well as increasing gross profits through better pricing, Lisa will discuss how to target the customers you can serve with competitive advantage.

How Do You Harness the Power of Social Technology to Create Better Pricing Strategies?

Social tools like Facebook and Twitter are changing how companies interact with their customers, and there are far-reaching impacts on pricing as Social Listening technologies bring new access to real-time information about customer attitudes, emotions, desires, and actions.

How can pricers leverage Social?

Companies are harnessing the power of Social technology to forge closer ties (and updated pricing strategies) with their customer bases.  Social provides an amazing opportunity for pricers to become even more instrumental to their organization’s customer relationships. It is a catalyst for building a bridge to marketing teams who need help pulling insights out of mountains of data. 

Learn how to harness the power of Social technology

During the Getting Social with Pricing Keynote Presentation at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Laura Preslan will help participants learn how to get the most out of Social. Utilizing her experience managing a global team of over 50 pricers who set all prices for Microsoft’s Online Advertising business, Laura will discuss what Social means for pricers in the B2B and B2C spaces while giving examples of how Social technology changes customer interactions. 

How Do You Develop a Pricing Strategy for Long-term Profitable Growth?

Every organization wants to achieve profitable growth over the long term and become sustainable. However the tendency is to focus on improving current operations and meet short-term expectations. The organization that does not allocate the resources required to build future-growth platforms is short-sited. Developing world class pricing strategies and capabilities better positions organizations for long-term profitable growth, but developing a pricing strategy is very difficult. 

How do you build an effective pricing strategy?

In order for a pricing strategy to be effective, an organization must build value-based pricing strategies, establish new product offer structures and pricing, and create win-win strategies to support major account negotiations. In addition, organizations must incorporate value into their product development processes and build value-based pricing and selling capabilities, tools and training.

Learn how to effectively institutionalize a pricing strategy process that is robust and enduring

During the Building an Effective Pricing Strategy workshop at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Kirk Jackish will help participants create more effective and enduring pricing strategies by focusing on experiential exercises that allow pricers to test world class tools and processes that generate high impact pricing strategies. Utilizing his 20 years of strategic pricing and consulting experience, Kirk will explore best in class tools, frameworks and processes for developing pricing strategy.  Workshop participants will have ample opportunity to ask questions and share experiences that will heighten the learning for the entire class.

What Are the Best Practices in Pricing Organization Design?

With more companies valuing pricing’s strategic importance, they increasingly look for insights on how to best organize their pricing function and resources. Pricing has been elevated from an informally managed, fragmented function to a rigorous business discipline with an acknowledged need for an organizational infrastructure to manage it.

How should your company’s pricing function be structured and organized?

The design of the pricing function has to be accomplished in light of the right decision authority, reporting relationships, centralization vs. decentralization, skill requirements, governance and key performance metrics. Understanding the role that culture plays in structuring a pricing function is vital, as is establishing the right types of roles and responsibilities.

Learn to identify the core competencies and skills required for a successful pricing organization

During the Beyond the Organization Chart: How to Structure and Organize Your Company’s Pricing Function workshop at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Larry Montan (pictured top left) and Maggie Laird (pictured bottom left) will explore how to diagnose common issues and barriers to pricing function performance. Workshop attendees will also learn how to manage pricing talent and future trends in pricing organization structure.

How to Price and Design Products for Profitability

Effective product design considers the trade-off between what a customer is willing to pay for various potential features and what it costs to provide them.  When designing a product line with a customer orientation a manager should contemplate which market segments will be the primary targets and what each segment will be willing to pay for each set of features.

How do you develop a product line that achieves the desired market penetration while minimizing unprofitable cannibalization?

To do so successfully, consider different approaches to pricing new products such as skimming and penetration pricing.  Improve product line and product mix profitability by using bundled pricing. In addition to cannibalization – consider competition and customer psychology in designing and pricing product lines.

During the Pricing and Designing Products and Product Lines for Optimal Results workshop at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Scott Davis will review the primary ways of estimating customers’ wiliness to pay for product features. Valuable for product and brand managers responsible for designing and pricing product offerings; this workshop includes interactive discussions and opportunities to analyze simplified case studies to understand how to apply the key concepts with the assistance of spreadsheet models.

Value Price Like a Pro

Value pricing, when done right, can provide higher profits, more competitive products, and customer-oriented marketing. To effectively execute value pricing, pricing professionals must be able to think like a CFO and communicate like a sales professional to determine the target customer’s true willingness to pay for a particular product. 

How do you effectively execute value pricing?

To do so successfully, you must understand the basic elements of financial statements and how your product and service benefits translate into quantifiable economic terms that make a difference to customers. 

Learn the basic rules on how much is a fair share of value an organization can keep and how much they must share with the customer.

During the Financial Management for Value Pricing workshop at the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Conference in Chicago, Adrienne Gordon will break value pricing down into simple, concrete steps. 

Attendees will learn a method to view customer income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements as a simple one page process flow map where each element has a purpose. Case studies of well communicated value statements will be reviewed along with examples of value creation and how it affects each financial element in the process.

Foolproof your Price Improvement Effort

 Pricing done right can have a huge impact on a company’s profitability. Reliable price intelligence can enable them to develop new pricing and promotional strategies in order to compete more effectively and maintain margins.  However, many pricing initiatives prove ineffective because of unanticipated factors that are counterproductive to obtaining results.

Is your company struggling in pricing between sales generation functions and sales disruption functions?

How can your company achieve a quick-win through intuitive analytics?

Because Asian companies are familiar with working in a traditional paradigm, the sales function has to lead revenues and take full responsibility of its results. In a matured pricing perspective, if your company is still looking at the shadows and not the reality of these functions, you have the chance to be a successful pricer and leader of change in your organisation and across industries.

Learn step-by-step approaches to earn the engagement of internal stakeholders around pricing.

 

During the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore keynote session From Shadows to Reality: Facilitation with Numbers Across Sales, Finance and Marketing, YongHyun Kim, CPP will ensure attendees leave this session with tools and examples of success from simple and powerful analytics to reshaping commercial polices instinctively.  Pulling from his 13 years of strategic pricing management experience and capabilities, Mr. Kim will help attendees learn how to avoid functional silos to achieve pricing excellence.

Enhance Your Pricing with a Multi-Year Business Strategy

As customers demand more transparency around pricing, businesses incorporate a plethora of sales and marketing strategies to remain profitable. Creating strategies and marketing/sales actions that are understood at the highest level and executed throughout all levels of the company have potential to positively impact your company’s ability to increase prices in the short, mid and long-term.

Which business and marketing strategies optimize future pricing dynamics and performance?

What is the best approach to market and competitor analysis?

Outstanding price performance is the result of pricing organizations that raise the pricing competence of the marketing /sales organization, influence leadership behaviors to support pricing excellence, run pricing projects across diverse industries and implement pricing processes/systems.

Create the potential for improved market dynamics over a multi-year time frame by refining your business and marketing strategies.

Joanne Smith, former DuPont Corporate Head of Marketing, Pricing and Customer loyalty,  will discuss the importance of strategic pricing and behaviors for specialty and commodity businesses in her workshop Advanced Strategic Pricing: Setting a Multi-Year Business Strategy to Enhance Pricing. 

During the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Workshops and Conference in Chicago workshop participants will also review the behaviors and actions of marketing and sales, as it relates to price execution, that enhances your ability to positively impact pricing.

Pricing Professionals as Agents of Change

One of the most critical elements in an organization’s journey towards pricing excellence is its capacity to change.  Price setting and implementation has implications throughout an organization; requiring pricing professionals do more than analyze data – they must become agents of change.

What’s the most difficult part of a pricing professional’s job?

According to a recent poll conducted by Pricing Solutions in Asia, the answer is change management. In fact 94% of those polled put change management at the top of the list, which makes it one of the few issues that unifies pricing professionals across industries, geographies and levels of experience.

Learn how to recognise the common symptoms associated with inadequate change management.

During the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore keynote session How Can One Beat the Odds and Lead Change in Pricing Organisations, Dominic James will explore the challenges surrounding both operational and strategic change for pricing today. 

Pulling from his 10 years of experience leading large-scale transformations for some of the biggest companies in the world Mr. James will help attendees learn how to take practical actions to gain organisational support.

Understand the Science behind Pricing Software

Today, a number of software solutions are available to aid in the process of pricing decisions. These “black box” solutions range from simple rules-based price planning offerings to highly sophisticated price optimization models.

What should you consider when selecting a price planning and price optimization solution?

How do you take the guesswork out of forecasting?

Can a solution truly be customized to your specific business needs?

Take a step behind the curtains of the pricing analytics software solutions and examine the fundamental modeling concepts that make them work.  Modeling results and insights help to forecast demand, develop pricing and promotion strategies, control inventory levels and improve customer satisfaction.

During the PPS 25th Annual Spring Pricing Workshops and Conference in Chicago, you can attend a full-day workshop entitled An Introduction to the Science of Forecasting with Price and Substitution Effects, Dr. Mark Ferguson will walk you through the basics of forecasting historical sales data and measuring price effects.
Workshop participants will have “hands-on” practice using some of most common forecasting and price-optimization models .

Unlock Profit Potential in South-East-Asia

Price pressure from competitors, rising raw material costs and inflation rates worry company managers, despite steady economic growth in South-East-Asia. Instead of focusing solely on cost cutting, companies have to look at professional price management in order to stop losing money.

What pricing challenges and opportunities exist in South-East-Asia?

How can you get out of the cost dilemma?

Understanding purchasing criteria and the factors that influence customers’ buying behaviours in these markets allows for a segment-specific offer structure, taking imbalances in purchasing power and the growing middle-income consumers into consideration.

Unlock your company’s profit potential in South-East-Asia through insights and best practices tailored to the region’s unique challenges and opportunities.

During the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore keynote session Unlock Profit Potential in South-East-Asia, Jochen Krauss will discuss developing market entry and pricing strategies, optimising pricing processes and designing innovative price and product structures.

Jochen Krauss, Managing Partner - Singapore, Simon-Kucher & Partners

Grow Sales & Profit Through Pricing

Even in a difficult economy, there is plenty of opportunity for more profitable pricing. 

Challenging economic times make it essential for companies to get more skillful in making and implementing pricing decisions and increasing customers’ willingness to pay.

How do you build a strong business case for price improvement initiatives?

What are the risks associated with a pricing initiative?

A new pricing initiatives’ success relies on properly identifying areas of opportunities, analyzing risks and challenges, and mapping the time to value.

Strengthen your company’s approach to pricing.

Using the framework from his book Daring Caution: The Executive’s Guide to Pricing Improvement, Bob Sherlock will show workshop attendees how to balance daring and caution in a sustainable effort to improve margins and profits.  Workshop attendees will learn how to plan and carry out an initiative that gets customers to recognize and pay for the value they receive.

During the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Workshops and Conference in Chicago workshop Sales & Profit Growth through a Pricing Improvement Initiative, Sherlock will review how to find opportunities for improved pricing and terms of sale, how to increase your company’s pricing power and how to improve your company’s process for making pricing decisions.

Price New Products with Value in Mind

Value pricing, unlike cost plus pricing, considers that customers care how much value they receive at a particular price not how much it costs companies to make it. 

Every year companies spend billions developing and launching new products from ‘revolutionary’ to ‘incremental innovation’ to catch up with competition.

When should pricing teams get involved with new product development? 

How can value pricing help minimize conflict between finance, marketing, and sales?

If pricing is an afterthought, there’s a higher risk of failure on new product launches. The failure can manifest in either lower than forecasted unit sales, lower than expected margin percentage, or lower than expected revenue.

Use a robust price setting process!

Companies with high pricing power share certain traits: a culture dedicated to pricing, sophisticated tools to quantify customer willingness to pay and customer price elasticities, and robust pricing processes.



Krishna Vankayala, CPP
Director Global Pricing
Schneider Electric, Singapore.

During the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore keynote session New Product Pricing: Intersection of Sales, Marketing & Finance: Value Pricing, Krishna Vankayala, CPP will describe how Schneider Electric’s product refresh in the Japan market led their team to implement Value Based Pricing in its new product development process.

We hope to see you there!

Become a Pricing Change Leader!

The difference between change management and change leadership is managing risk and riding the wave of change versus being the driving force leading an organization through risk with vision and process.

What are the key drivers for a successful pricing change?

How can your pricing team become change leaders within the company?

Understanding the basic concepts and theories of change management are vital for pricing practitioners whether you are leading a small project or embarking on a transformational pricing journey.  Change in value and pricing management is challenging and often takes time to become adopted and implemented.

Lead the transformation with an emerging change management framework

Armed with the latest science in change management and change leadership, Stephan M. Liozu, Ph.D., CPP will lead workshop attendees through real-life-in-class exercises.  Workshop attendees are encouraged to identify real-life pricing projects for which they can apply change management tools and develop a practical roadmap.

During the PPS 25th Annual Pricing Workshops and Conference in Chicago 2-day workshop Change Management in Pricing: Theories, Best Practices and A Transformational Framework, Dr. Liozu will review the ten dimensions of change in pricing that are important for the pricing journey and identify potential roadblocks to change and how to handle them.

Increase Your Pricing Influence within the Company

Price cuts are often a quick win for management during recessions. When time is compressed and tactical decisions take on new importance and urgency, price cuts seem easier than improving service levels or introducing new products. As a pricing expert, you see the potential of increased price realization and the executive team may agree.
 
How do you create pricing strategies that allow management to make quick pricing decisions without reverting to price cutting? 

Where should your company invest to make short-term pricing progress?  Technology? Strategic development?

Pricing must strike a balance between short term goals and the long term health of the business.  While the pricing team within your company understands pricing strategies, tools and best practices; influencing top executives may present a challenge.

Increase your pricing organization’s value to the company

Perceived value is a pricing fundamental. And so it is with influence as well.  Become a valued influencer through creating a standardized and transparent approach within your pricing organization.  Confirm value and create credibility by communicating progress.

During the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore keynote session Lift Where You Stand – Know Where to Begin, Nitesh Chadha will describe how NCR’s Pricing team educated executives, sales and others to gain support for their strategic pricing plan. 

Nitesh Chadha is Pricing Director APAC at NCR.

The Two Sides of Human Economic Behavior - Mr. Spock and Homer Simpson

In the past brand names such as Ford and Kraft had an inherent value because as a consumer, you assumed anything they made was pretty good.  Some new company advertising a new product was risky, so you stuck with what you knew.  A recent Pricewaterhouse Coopers study found that 80% of consumers look at online reviews before making major purchases.  Proof that in today’s digital world our buying decisions are strongly influenced by access to research, consumer reports, J.D. Power’s quality rankings, and our social network’s collective opinion.

Who wins when the value of a product is subjective and pricing contextual?  The consumer who can make better choices?  The big boys who make brand association integral to the experience of the product? Or new-to-the-market brands building better, cheaper products and spreading the word through today’s digital channels?

Economists have developed models for how pricing works. What’s needed now is to base our strategies on how people work.  Ronald J. Baker will walk workshop attendees through The Two Sides of Human Economic  Behavior by exploring the principles of Austrian economic ideas and recent research on behavioral economics will also be presented in the context of consumer decision making and pricing.

Baker will lead the workshop Mr. Spock and Homer Simpson: The Two Sides of Human Economic Behavior at the PPS 25th Annual Spring Pricing Workshops and Conference in Chicago this April.

Move Your Pricing Strategy to the Digital Age

Sony’s music business had a 32.5% increase in its operating profit and a 14.4% revenue increase in 2013 fiscal Q3 which they attribute to continued digital revenue growth. Sony Corp. posted a 23.9% sales increase in the fiscal quarter attributed to the games division’s launch of PlayStation 4 and smartphone sales.

How do companies such as Sony manage to stay a few steps ahead of their competition despite the changing pace and speed of information? 

In today’s digital arena – how can your company see growth while reinventing their pricing strategy? 

Anuprita Bhomick, Global Marketing Director at Dell will discuss what pricing pitfalls to avoid in the digital marketing mix. Through her experiences in emerging markets, she’ll share how pricing can still provide a competitive advantage in the digital world through social media, big data and advanced analytics. 

Bhomick will give the keynote session Pricing in the Digital Marketing Mix at the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore this April.

Is price a major indicator of quality? Can a price increase lead to growth in demand?

Consumer perception of luxury brands is heavily influenced by price. Commonly characterized by their quality, craftsmanship, and exclusivity; luxury brands thrive on consumers’ thirst for status.

Ultra-luxury products sell, even in a market downturn, compared to midrange items.   Discerning consumers expect luxury brands to justify their price by adding value with gifts or loyalty programs rather than discounting.  To increase market share without damaging brand perception - some luxury brands have begun to create extensions into secondary lines with relatively lower price points.

Is price a major indicator of quality? 

Can a price increase lead to growth in demand?

Core pricing skills such as pricing for different customer segments, implementing pricing increases, and understanding and measuring price elasticity should be in every pricing professional’s playbook.   Are you a seasoned pricer who hasn’t thought about core pricing principles in a while?  Or are you new to pricing?

Learn leading pricing methodologies from dozens of case studies from a variety of industries in Professional Pricing Society’s Full-Day Core Pricing Skills Workshop.  Jan Weiser and Shenaz Bilkis from Simon-Kucher & Partners will engage workshop attendees, giving all participants the opportunity to ask questions and add from their own experience. 

Attendees will master the essentials of pricing performance by learning:

• Why pricing is the profit lever
• The fundamentals of value pricing
• Segmentation and price differentiation
• Making pricing change stick through better price implementation

Weiser and Bilkis will be leading the workshop Core Pricing Skills at the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore this April.

  

Paying a High Price for Discount Management Methods?

U.S. retailers reported a 2.7% sales increase this holiday season despite succumbing to consumer pressure for deep discounts well before Black Friday. Proof that a discount pricing strategy is useful for driving traffic and short term sales – but is good for long term profit margins?

Tim Smith, Ph.D., CPP,
Founder and Managing
Principal of Wiglaf Pricing

How can discounting increase your profit margin long term?

Does discounting damage your market position and brand loyalty?

Discounting isn’t something most executives like to do since it can consume resources and cause organizational strife.  Yet, when properly managed, this form of price segmentation improves profitability. When not properly managed, discounts wreak havoc on profits.

Using in class exercises, Tim J. Smith, Ph.D., CPP, will apply quantitative approaches to monitoring discounts, enabling participants to use these techniques on their own company’s datasets. Pricing executives and analysts who attend can expect to discuss:

• How discounting can improve profitability, lower market entrance prices, and increase volumes
• Quantitative methods for measuring and monitoring discounting policy
• Managerial and quantitative tools for restraining discounts
• The influences of Prospect Theory and competition on discounting policy

Dr. Smith will be leading the workshop Advanced Quantitative Methods in Discount Management at the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore this April.

How to Increase Prices Without Affecting Sales Volume

Pricing has a direct impact on a company’s bottom line.

So why is pricing often not considered an executive management task? 

Can a company develop an affective overall strategy and not take into account buyer’s perception of value, let alone pricing?

All good pricing decisions must involve managing price differentials. Buyers have certain behavioral and cognitive boundaries, and it is critical you understand these boundaries to maximize profit. You can increase prices and not affect your sales volume if the pricing is right.

Determining the Right Price:

At what point does a customer decide the price is too high for your product? In discussing this turning point, we must understand that buyers do not see pricing as absolute. We need to de-termine the tipping point between the customer purchasing your product and your customers deciding the price is too high. It is important to remember that just because you change prices, doesn’t mean you change the customer’s purchasing behavior.  Pricing is seen as a reflection of quality and product/service.

During the PPS 2nd Annual Asia-Pacific Pricing Workshops and Conference in Singapore, you can attend a full-day workshop entitled Managing Price Differentials: An Executive Perspective, Dr. Kent B. Monroe and Lillian Cheng give an executive summary of price differentials, examining how consumers respond to various differential thresholds.

Who Should Attend this Workshop:

This workshop is ideal for those who have a broad range of questions regarding the importance of pricing differentials. Specific topics such as understanding how pricing strategies define pricing tactics,  the role of the executive in pricing, and how to increase prices without affecting sales volume, among others topics, are discussed.

Dr. Monroe is the founding editor of Pricing Practice and Strategy and is J.M. Jones Professor of Marketing Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign. Ms. Cheng is a partner at Cheng, Monroe, and Associates and co-author of An Appraisal of Behavioral Price Research (Part 1)  and  An Appraisal of Behavioral Research (Part 1).

Introducing our new Pricing Channel on YouTube!

The Professional Pricing Society is delighted to introduce our new Pricing Channel on YouTube! The Pricing Channel will be brimming with:

• Free educational videos from the pricing profession’s top experts.
• A digital library filled with pricing tactics and topics from the world’s best pricing experts and software innovators.
• Practical insights on the expanding roles of pricing in C-Level decision-making.

Our first wave of 16 Pricing Videos are now uploaded so SUBSCRIBE to the Pricing Channel right away at

www.youtube.com/pricingsociety   

It is easy to Subscribe:

First, click on the blue “Sign In” button on the top right and use your YouTube credentials to login...

Then, click on the red button that says “Subscribe”, and that's all!

You’ll have a vast array of free pricing resources and expertise available 24 hours/7 days a week!  And by subscribing, you’ll immediately receive an email notification each time PPS posts a new and insightful pricing video.

Click on the image to see our latest video, Who Controls Pricing?

 

ACT NOW and subscribe to the Pricing Channel, and don’t be left out of this exciting feature!