Strategy and Tactics of Pricing A Guide to Profitable Decision Making

by Reed K. Holden

This entire book is a practical guide loaded with topical examples. As in the first edition, The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: A Guide to Profitable Decision Making, Second Edition shows how sound analysis could have prevented some well-known pricing failures and, in other cases, has pointed the way to profitable successes! Nagle and Holden offer a conceptual approach that helps readers learn how to THINK about pricing, and include step-by-step formulas and procedures that show readers HOW to analyze a pricing problem and formulate a pricing strategy. A sampling of topics includes advice on how to understand how costs affect your pricing and profits, integrate costs with market-based pricing, integrate the elements of profitability, capture full value through price segmentation, adapt strategy in a changing life-cycle environment, develop models to aid in anticipating purchase behavior, and determine the constraints on profit maximization.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Economics, Buisness, Management, Entrepreneurship, Finance

409 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1986

Reviews

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

[This is my what I do for a living] OK, it's only of interest to marketing geeks, but it's a bible for good pricing. The fourth edition eliminates some errors (and co-authors who no longer work with the author) that troubled the third edition.

[David Wygant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Value based pricing is the perceived value by customers but doesn't take into account context. Use economic value as a starting point then layer in competitive differentiation. Create a range of prices according to market segments.

[Gerrit Gmel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a good intro to all things pricing, nothing more, nothing less.

[Pedro Pinto · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good text book on pricing in its strategic and tactical perspective. Decided to read it in order to shore-up my Pricing knowledge and it was of great utility. I do recommend its reading for someone that wants to know more about pricing, to the professionals already working to provide a sound framework to their day-to-day activities and allow better decisions that have implicit a tremendous value to the overall organizations they work for.

It provides pricing theory as deemed needed (and if you want to explore more you have a plethora of references you can explore), but it's practical text book that applies the theory presented to actual cases and guides you through such important strategic process. Even in the field on how to determine the pricing level (value, pricing elasticities, etc...) always have a pragmatic and practical approach that one can use immediately.

Pricing is presented where the push comes to shove. i.e. when every company captures the value it has previously created and you can see a lot of value be siphoned away due to bad practices.

From all the applicable concepts presented, i would like to highlight the following:
- The Value Cascade - great representation on how to manage value and then pricing. An how you spill value in each caption
- How to define the best value to your customer;
- How to estimate the economic value estimation (economic vs. psychological);
- How to create break-even sales curves vs. pure elasticities (difficult to estimate in real markets)
- Ethics and law - also a good chapter that push-back some preconceived ideas and limitations,

Do recommend its reading and have it readily available for every pricing professional.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ugh, this book was a struggle to get through. One of my pet peeves is when a book refers to content in future chapters, and this book does that in abundance. It probably could have been 50pages shorter if not for all the references to forthcoming topics! The authors put out some good information, and if the reader is careful, he or she can glean the necessities of what is being said. However, there are so many subtle disclaimers that the authors hardly ever seem to take a solid stance on anything. With enough disclaimers, one can spout all sorts of half-baked ideas and strategies and never be proved wrong, a fine art, indeed.

When your boss gives you a book to read, you read it. So, I did. If you have a position with enormous amounts of flexibility in your pricing structure, then maybe this book would be good for you, if only for the copious amount of examples.

[Nivas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pricing textbook

[Leonardo Alfonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was easy to read and to the point. The only problem that I had was that some of the concepts were a little difficult to apply to small business. Overall a solid book on pricing.

[Ned · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book discusses the various aspects of pricing and different ways to calculate whether certain price change makes sense. It has some useful nuggets about how prices are set and some insights into different tactics that can be used. Overall found it fairly lengthy and that the content can be condensed.

[Yates Buckley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Long winded but fairly exhaustive review of pricing strategy. Hiwever still feels out of date and unstructured. I would venture to say this is a marketing book, where most of the content is hypothesis rather than measure.

[Samuel Maina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Foundational instalment of the pricing methodology.
Complete with appropriate models to utilize and the fences.
Among the 4Ps, price is like the harvest as the others create value...that speaks to the price.
A good read.

[Juan Pablo · Rating 3 out of 5]

La mayor parte me pareció acertada. Le resto 2 estrellas: una porque una parte no me pareció correcta (contradice otros libros con los que coincido) y la otra porque hay cuestiones que solo sirven como ejercicio hipotético (en la vida real son inaplicables)

[Patrick Vankwikelberge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book in pricing.

[Priyank Goyal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very Useful !!!

[Louis Lamoureux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Substantive content about the theories and practices of pricing

[Byron Flores · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was expecting more practical topics as the book sometimes gets very theoretical but in general terms it has good information.

[Adam Kieliński · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written justifications of claims made within the book. Coming from a theoretical economics background, it deepened my understanding of more practical approaches to pricing.

[Isaac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting theories and a good overview. Did not feel like it took me further than Econ 101 could

[Julian Haigh]

Incredibly long-winded, but covers the full gambit. I hated it personally, but it was a necessary book for indepth consideration of pricing strategy.

[Lindsey Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply the best business book that I have ever read.

[Lori Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read book on licensing and pricing for the knowledge worker, manager, executive, or entrepreneur.

[Carole Skees · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anyone that works with pricing as any level of manager will be left with new theories to apply.

[Stefaan Van ryssen · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE book on pricing. Nothing else compares to this. Throw everything else in the bin (or recycle). Bravo, Thomas!

[Bagehi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easier said than done. Good ideas anyway.

[Adora]

I'm a fan of value-based pricing so picked this up as a refresher. It's a pretty good primer on the subject but much of the material is more relevant to those working at older companies with lots of historical pricing data and customers to experiment with. That said, the first half of the book is still good for founders who are clueless on pricing and need a quick introduction to the matter.