Strategic Pricing

“We can be blind to the obvious,
and we are also blind to our blindness.”

Daniel Kahneman

Everything has a price. In today’s world we have managed to put a price on anything and sell it in an ever-expanding global market. The moment you create something, a new service or product, you will need to decide how much you are going to charge for it. As such, pricing is an immensely important topic. Pricing tactics and strategies are important for managers and stakeholders aiming to maximise profits. Unfortunately, many managers are unaware of the latest developments and breakthroughs on understanding human psychology and decision making which can significantly influence pricing decisions.

The purpose of this one-day course is to prepare delegates to address strategic and tactical pricing across a wide range of pricing practices. They will learn how to choose prices based on their strategic planning, customer psychology, intended brand, competitors and marketing strategies. It is ideal for product managers, high level managers, management consultants, entrepreneurs and the self-employed who offer their products and services directly to customers.

Many successful business people have been busy developing their ideas into useful products and services. Quite often they have not attended an MBA course to master business skills or to learn about economic theories or pricing. This course aims to efficiently provide a set of handy tools and proven guidelines for people who need training in this area.

The course answers questions such as: How do you determine a price for a product? What is high-low pricing strategy? How would you know if the current price is suitable? How should you respond to competitors when they change their prices? What is segmentation strategy? How can you influence customer behaviour to boost profits?

The course contains many examples and case studies to illustrate key points using real-world examples used by some of the most successful corporations in the world. The course contains a variety of exercises which enables delegates to practice what they have learned during the course. These exercises along with subsequent discussions are immensely effective in training delegates and is one of the reasons why attending such a course can be very useful for delegates.

In this highly practical course participants will learn:

Strategic Objectives

• What is the difference between tactical pricing and strategic pricing?
• What is price elasticity?
• What is segmentation and how can you use it for pricing and increasing profits?
• How does strategic pricing fit into strategic planning?

Pricing Strategies

• What are some of the most commonly used pricing strategies?
• What are the advantages of each strategy and when should you use them?

Presenting Products and Prices

• How can you choose the right price?
• How should you take advantage of bundling strategies?
• How can you use prices to influence behaviour?
• What is contextual pricing?
• What is price psychology?
• How can you make customers more accepting of your prices?
• What is A/B testing?

Systematic Biases

• What are systematic biases and how does that apply to pricing?
• What is anchoring and priming and how are customers influenced by them?
• What is prospect theory and how does it relate to pricing and decision making?

Displaying Prices

• What display strategies can help you show prices that appear smaller?
• How should you apply psychological pricing?
• How reframing prices helps to boost sales?
• How can you use an analogy to illustrate your prices?
• What strategies are effective when you want to display low or high prices?
• What does it mean to use a pricing medium and how can it help?
• How can you make discounts or vouchers more appealing by just changing the way they are displayed?

Changing Prices

• What is Weber’s law?
• What is comparative selling?
• What strategies are effective when pricing discounts?
• What should you consider when changing prices?

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 Day

Course Level: Beginners & Intermediate

Consider using this course in conjunction with Strategic Planning as the topics complement each other and are both necessary to achieve the business objectives. 

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:

• Relate pricing strategy to overall business strategy and learn how they need to work in tandem
• Use a variety of pricing strategies based on their advantages, market conditions, your competitors and your business strategy
• Design, price and present your products in tandem and maximise your sales and profits
• Use human mind’s systematic biases to understand decision making and how this can affect your pricing tactics and strategies
• Use a number of tactics to display your prices in such a way that appeals more to your customers and leads to increased sales
• Follow best-practice guidelines on how to change prices or provide discounts

Pricing, marketing and business planning go hand in hand and the topic is rather extensive. Imagine a large corporation with multitudes of products that need to make high-level decisions on pricing, marketing and branding. You would expect people who would make such decisions to be well-versed in the skill, perhaps have an MBA and plenty of extensive training. You may therefor wonder what this one-day course aims to achieve.

This course is focused on many psychological aspects of pricing than on pure number crunching, economic theory, financial analysis, accounting and the like. It is aimed at delegates who are based in small to medium-sized businesses and who want to quickly learn how to set prices. Perhaps some delegates have a shop in town, or have setup an online e-commerce site to sell goods. Maybe they are self-employed and provide a service and are wondering how to charge their clients. There is plenty of information in this one-day course on how customers make decisions and how to appeal to them in order to sell product and services.

The course is packed with examples and guidelines that can be put to use immediately and is specifically designed so that everyone can follow them easily no matter what their background.

While designing the course, we had to use a currency for many of the examples provided. We have used the British pound (£) for this. However, all training materials are editable and you can easily change the currency to any other currency of your choice with a simple search and replace instruction in Microsoft Office.