Pricing strategy is always a critical component of business strategy, but it’s even more important in a volatile economy. Thanks to exploding consumer demand, supply chain disruptions, and easy monetary policy, inflation is rising rapidly around the globe. According to the latest data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US Consumer Price Index rose 9.1% from June 2021 to June 2022—the highest year-over-year increase of the last 40 years.

Experts disagree about how long global inflation will last这使得在不损害利润的情况下给产品定价变得尤为困难. If there was ever a time to thoroughly examine your pricing techniques, it’s now.

I started my career as a consultant at Bain & Company, 在那里，我为许多地区和各种行业的各种规模和规模的公司进行定价项目. Later, when I became a freelancer, I chose to focus on pricing. And throughout, all too often what I’ve seen are thoughtfully developed, 复杂的定价模型和数页详细的数据分析最终无法创造任何真正的价值.

Why? 在很多情况下，这是因为人们并不真正理解的基本原则 pricing strategy or appreciate the complexity of the contextual variables that factor into it.

For example, many pricing models depend heavily on historical sales data and customer behavior. But these aren’t likely to be useful in new situations like a global pandemic or a war.

To create and maintain an effective pricing strategy, management teams need to continually adapt their models to better fit ever-evolving macroeconomic circumstances and consumer preferences. The projects that I see succeed and drive substantial margin gains for their companies are generally those where the team truly understands the underlying principles behind their pricing strategy as well as the psychology and behavior of their customer base, and pays ongoing attention to the interaction between those forces.

In this article, I’m going to share four types of pricing strategies to help your team accomplish this. They may appear counterintuitive, but they’re drawn from my experience, and supported by independent research. 我认为它们将对任何希望开发功能灵活的定价模式并使其保持最新的公司有所帮助.

Pricing Strategy Tip No. 1: It’s Not Always About Being the Cheapest

Intuitively, 你可能会认为打败竞争对手的最好方法就是削价. That’s because the basic economic framework underlying any pricing strategy assumes a tradeoff between price level and sales volume. If there is consumer demand for your product, all other things being equal, decreasing its price should result in greater sales volume. But pricing isn’t necessarily that simple.

In 2021, the Boston Consulting Group’s Center for Consumer Insights conducted a study in which it asked 41,000 consumers around the world about their spending habits and found that, depending on the purchases they were asked about, 70% to 90% of those surveyed identify themselves as “value conscious” (defined as always carefully considering price before spending money). 然而，这种自我定位并不总是转化为实际的购买行为. 当被问及最近购买的各种消费品和服务类别时, 在大多数情况下，只有一小部分受访者真正购买了价格最低的商品, less than 15%.

The key takeaway I want to highlight here is that the amount of value that individual consumers attribute to a product is subjective. 消费者通常愿意为他们认为更有价值的产品支付稍高的价格. 对许多购物者来说，价格可以作为质量的指标或授予某种地位. 有人可能会乐意多花几美元来享受一杯优质的星巴克咖啡, while another might be just as pleased drinking Nescafé and saving a few bucks. 在制定产品定价策略时，环境和条件是需要考虑的关键因素.

Case in point: In my early years at Bain, I conducted pricing research for a large retailer in Brazil. One of our most interesting findings was that there were large offer gaps in many segments of the cosmetics market—meaning most available products were clustered either at the high or low end of the price spectrum, with relatively few offerings in between.

为了获得更大的市场份额，大型生产商往往专注于价格最便宜, and this is exactly what we found. Most of the larger players had positioned their prices too low—to the point that their products were perceived as cheap and poor quality. At the same time, 许多小众厂商将价格定得如此之高，以至于超出了中产阶级的预算, who comprised the vast majority of the market.

这为我们的客户提供了一个以前未开发的巨大收入潜力的机会 “masstige” segment. 我们可以开发生产成本与低价产品相似的产品, 我们只需要把价格定得高一点就能增加销量，这样就会让人觉得它们的质量更高. Discovered through what started as a simple benchmarking effort, this product development insight led to significant increases in margin.

我认为同样的概念适用于几乎所有的产品——从B2B软件到制成品. Because pricing has such a significant effect on consumer perception, 有必要在吸引注重成本的消费者和那些优先考虑质量的消费者之间取得适当的平衡.

Pricing Strategy Tip No. 2: Don’t Assume Promotions Equal Profits

Done properly, promotions can be a great way to boost revenue. Many consumers have even come to expect sales and discounts at certain times of the year. However, I’ve seen firsthand that companies can easily become too reliant on promotions, which can ultimately destroy value.

In 2018, one of the largest premium furniture retailers in Brazil brought me on as a pricing manager to help it find ways to increase revenue. With this aim in mind, 该公司已经制定了一个促销日历，最初在不削减整体利润率的情况下增加了收入. But as the revenue goals became more aggressive, so did the promotions, and I noticed a troubling pattern emerge in the data. The company was experiencing a noticeable drop in sales numbers after each promotion.

该公司试图通过在日历上增加更多的促销活动来弥补这种“宿醉效应”, a tactic that led to a vicious year-round promotional cycle. These promotions were tarnishing the brand’s image with its primary customer base, undermining the value of the product, and effectively training consumers to postpone purchases until the next sale.

After hearing our findings and recommendations, a courageous executive decided to put an end to the cycle. Some promotions were kept but many were scrapped, 该公司还将更多的精力投入到基于客户细分的个性化服务上, which generally has less of a negative effect on margins.

Research also supports the need to handle promotions with care. After surveying more than 1,000 leading consumer companies about their pricing practices in 2019, 贝恩发现，大多数在市场份额增长方面表现最好的公司都有一些共同的策略. Among these were using data to continually fine-tune their strategies and quickly finding and killing the “bad promotions”—defined as those that hurt profitability, damage the brand, or fail to significantly increase sales. These findings reinforce my point that promotions should be approached scientifically, not treated as an easy way to create a quick bump in sales.

Pricing Strategy Tip No. 3: Dynamic Pricing Isn’t Just for Airlines

You might think that dynamic pricing 仅限于旅游和电子商务行业，但它也在其他领域站稳脚跟. For instance, the producers of The Lion King effectively used dynamic pricing strategies to make it the highest-grossing show on Broadway in 2013, 如今，许多网约车公司利用“高峰”或“需求”定价来增加高峰时段的利润.

Although it’s probably not a great idea to change the prices of your B2B SaaS platform every time a client logs in to your website, 许多行业都可以将动态定价的一些原则纳入到他们的方法中.

Service providers like consulting firms and enterprise software companies already use dynamic pricing practices, but they don’t call them that. These businesses generally rely on proposal-based pricing—a form of value-based pricing in which the price quote for providing a particular product or service is tailored to a customer’s needs and their perceived value of that product or service. 这可能不是教科书上对动态定价的定义，但其精神和效果是相似的.

实体零售企业也可以利用动态定价原则as long as they do so carefully. For example, a customer might be turned off by price changes for staple items, but not mind them as much when it comes to trendy or one-off purchases. And as with any pricing experiment, retail businesses must test and refine their strategies to ensure the optimal outcome.

By reconsidering the pricing question frequently and with some scientific rigor, you can manage it in a more dynamic way—potentially generating meaningful margin increases regardless of the size and scope of your company.

Pricing Strategy Tip No. 4: The Most Valuable Thing You Can Get From a Price Change Is Information

This last tip can go against the grain of companies that view maximizing short-term profit as the only objective of pricing strategy. But a well-structured price change can generate more than just margin gains. It can translate into actionable insights and valuable market knowledge that are vital components of profitability and competitive success over the long term.

The prices of seemingly everything, including basics like groceries and electricity, are rising right now, so it’s easy to see how a CEO might think the best course of action is increasing prices to pass these costs on to the consumer. But that would be wasting a valuable chance to develop a better understanding of your customers’ preferences and purchasing behaviors by taking a more disciplined, responsive approach to price setting.

Nowadays, many processes are “data-driven” or “evidence-based,” from marketing efforts to public policy decisions, 你的定价策略可能也是如此，但很可能没有达到所需的程度. The more information about your market, competitors, and customers you can acquire and use to continually update and optimize your strategy, the more effective your pricing will be. But the results of analytics are only as good as the data itself. Even the most sophisticated pricing models will fail if they’re fed garbage data. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of it out there.

Many traditional industries used to perceive data not as a valuable asset, 但更多的是一种事后的想法——主要是为了监管目的而保存的东西，尽可能容易和廉价地存储. Unstructured data-定性和/或难以解析-和受污染的数据仍然是许多公司的可悲现实. In my experience, although you need data to inform your strategy, you will almost never have all the right data exactly as you would like it. As a consultant and a freelancer, most of my time and my team’s has been spent “scrubbing” the data that we’ve been provided in order to be able to turn it into something that we could use to conduct any meaningful analysis.

Rather than getting overwhelmed, I recommend taking an 80-20 approach to cleaning the data you have before using it as the basis for price changes. Focus your efforts on cleaning the data sets that are likely to have the biggest impact on your company’s most profitable products or segments. If you wait for all the data to be thoroughly cleaned, you may be waiting forever.

The point I want to emphasize is that the best thing you can do is take advantage of every opportunity you have to collect good data. You’ve probably noticed that for all of these tips, I’ve emphasized the need to observe, evaluate, and refine. Like so many areas of business strategy, pricing strategy isn’t something you can think about once, set in motion, and leave to its own devices. As conditions change, so must your approach.

But those changes need to be strategic, 基于你所拥有的数据，并设计出更多关于你的市场和客户的有价值的信息. Instead of just raising prices, consider segmenting 你的客户群，并对每个细分应用不同的加薪，这样你就可以比较不同类型的客户的反应. 或者你可以尝试将更高的价格应用于一个客户群，并监测对流失的影响.

In retail, applying a different approach to each product category will most likely deliver the most helpful insights. For enterprise software companies, breaking your product down into smaller component parts and conducting pricing experiments on individual features might increase your knowledge of customer preferences. For SaaS companies, usage-based pricing is the latest growth strategy. However you proceed, tracking how your customers respond to price changes in a structured and intentional way can give you the information you need to refine your strategy to effectively maximize revenue and retention.

During volatile economic times, all businesses need to take a closer look at their prices to maintain profitability. 将价格定得过低或过度使用促销和销售会以适得其反的方式改变消费者的观念和行为, while raising prices willy-nilly can alienate customers and reduce sales volume. The most successful businesses constantly reevaluate their pricing strategies and thoughtfully experiment with price changes grounded in good data. 你也应该这样做——我希望这些定价策略的例子能帮助你了解如何做.