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Bloomberg reports that companies are not gaining the pricing traction they had hoped for as the economy picked up. “There is no pricing power, and the notion that it’s returned is just wishful thinking,” says James Smith, a former Federal … Read More

Last week I attended the Professional Pricing Society‘s 16th annual Spring Conference in San Francisco. Over 500 pricing people were there, which of course is a lot of pricing people in one place. There were a couple dozen presentations, some … Read More

Despite earlier comments by the chairman of the Japanese auto giant, Toyota will not raise prices to take the heat off GM. Toyota and Honda fear a political backlash against their sucess in the US market. Honda CEO Takeo Fukui … Read More

Intangible goods are always hard to price, and software is no exception. Advancing technology is making it harder. Server software typically had a per-CPU price. This provided a very rough proxy for value—companies running the software on a single CPU … Read More

I’m heading out to California for the Professional Pricing Society’s Spring Conference in San Francisco. For people who are new to pricing (usually just over half the attendees), the conferences provide a wealth of information, and for regulars, it’s a … Read More

A critical part of pricing is demand estimation. By understanding the shape of the demand curve, we can segment product offerings, and set pricing and promotions. When prices get fixed at an artificially low level, supply gets constrained, rather than … Read More

(My apologies for those of you coming here from the newsletter.) For those of you who only read the blog, you may want to check out the latest issue. Particularly interesting, IMHO, is the Value Price Waterfall, which takes the … Read More

Michael Lawrie resigned as CEO of Siebel today after disappointing Q1 earnings. The CRM giant has suffered declining revenues since 2000. Lawrie came on board from IBM under a year ago to reverse the slide. Siebel faces growing competition from … Read More

If you’re promotions make you feel like this, it’s time to rethink what you’re doing. Scott Adams is a genius, although our corporate world certainly gives him plenty of material.

Bowing to customer complaints, Best Buy says it will eliminate mail-in rebates within two years. Rebates allows the company to offer low prices, but require customers to mail in rebate forms, receipts, and pieces of the product packaging. Naturally, not … Read More