Dell has launched a new back-to-school campaign highlighting the lower prices of of Dell laptops compared to Apple. At a high level, this is a great idea. Apple has regained a (the?) leadership position in the educational market, which is … Read More
value pricing
The best 5 minutes of TV for sales
If you haven’t already, check out Gerhard Gschwandtner interviewing Ron Hubsher from the Sales Optimization Group on the sales negotiation process. Ron looks at the sales process with the same philosophy I do– namely, selling value instead of price, and … Read More
Value is what the customer is buying– not what you’re selling
In a previous post (Be Better, Not Cheaper) I talked about the importance of differentiated value. I have conversations about value almost as often as I have conversations about pricing, because a lot of pricing confusion is really value confusion. … Read More
Subscriptions are in, free is out
Chris Anderson of Wired said that Free is the price of the future. Some of us beg to differ. Among those with other opinions are Lincoln Murphy of 16 Ventures who published a paper called The Reality of Freemium in … Read More
The exponential benefits of differential value
I wrote a couple weeks ago about Value, Scarcity and Pricing in the Age of Superabundance. Now there’s a timely report about the concentration of profits among cell phone makers from Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi. Sacconaghi estimated that while … Read More
Value, Scarcity, and Pricing in the Age of Superabundance
For most people, throughout most of human existence, scarcity was paramount.** Now we live in an age of not just abundance, but superabundance. The agricultural revolution created abundance– not by today’s standards– in food. The industrial revolution created abundance in … Read More
The hidden story from Apple’s WWDC
Unless you’ve been assiduously avoiding the news lately, you probably heard that Apple announced a new iPhone model yesterday at their World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), along with updated laptops and various software updates. Most of the news coverage focused … Read More
Microsoft’s Pricing Dilemma (Part 2)
We mentioned in a previous post that Microsoft is in the grips of a pricing dilemma. Changing paradigms have weakened Microsoft’s dominant position in operating systems and office productivity programs. Businesses and affluent consumers no longer upgrade regularly. What they … Read More
More on risk measurement– recency bias
Measuring risk is a critical, yet impossible task. How can we act effectively without understanding the risk? How can we see the future? Or, what is the right balance between educated estimates of risk and potential benefit? These questions are … Read More
Thoughts on commodities
I recently returned from a two week trip to India. I visited high tech campuses that shimmered more brightly than their counterparts in California and villages where people relied on manual water pumps. The responsibility for feeding the billion-plus Indians … Read More