ABSTRACT
Pricing can be a solitary and technical discipline. It requires mastery of concepts that are not always well known outside the profession, time needs to be spent gathering and analysing data from disparate and often incompatible sources, and in many companies pricing does not have the attention of the executive. A study by one of this book’s editors, Stephan Liozu, has found that CEO’s spend little of their time thinking about pricing issues (Liozu 2010) and pricing is sometimes referred to as ‘the forgotten P of marketing’ (Kolassa 2009). This is odd given the power of pricing as a profit lever (Meehan et al. 2011; Mohammed 2010). More importantly for this essay, pricing is a critical consideration when making decisions about the other three Ps: Product, Promotion, Placement. As E. Raymond Corey of Harvard Business School famously wrote in 1962, ‘Pricing is the moment of truth - all of marketing comes to focus in the pricing decision’ (Corey 1983). In some cases, pricing experts face active opposition and not just benign neglect. Sales has been known to refer to pricing as ‘the sales prevention organization’.
