I am fascinated by how organisations of all shapes, sizes and vocations choose to earn revenue from their efforts to stand out and serve the market. It is exactly at this moment—when a business asks customers to trade good money for the products and services it delivers—that ineffective practices tend to creep in and value “leaks out” of the exchange.
Indeed, pricing is a topic that business leaders seldom talk about with enthusiasm. Although most leaders understand that their decisions here can make or break the bottom line, they act without the aid of a carefully crafted strategy. Rather, you witness collections of tactics held together by questionable assumptions and crude heuristics that, by shunning customers and obsessing over just about everything else, put financial and brand health in jeopardy.
I often stress that a proper pricing policy is part economics, part psychology—as prices invariably play different roles in a market. Striking the right balance across these levers introduces new opportunities to capture, communicate and even grow value in the eyes of customers.
The Ends Game
Digital technologies are transforming every business but the core principle of value creation endures: take care of the customer. But how? Bertini and Koenigsberg provide managers an insightful roadmap based on careful research and lively examples.
Erik Brynjolfsson / Professor, Stanford University; co-author of The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
The Ends Game elevates our current understanding of pricing to the next level. The book is simultaneously rigorous and practical, and belongs on any executive’s shelf.
Hermann Simon / Founder and Honorary Chairman, Simon-Kucher & Partners
Speech topics
Teaching monetisation implies covering several topics. Above all, it is important to understand that an effective strategy first addresses the revenue model of the business, then reviews processes to set prices and defend them against customers and competitors, and finally sets rules to vary prices according to the circumstances of the market. At each point, the discussion usually turns to the question of “value:” is the business truly different from competitors and meaningful in the eyes of customers.
Work with companies
I engage with practice in several ways. By far the most common formula is work tailored to the specific need of the business—a keynote speech at a conference or important gathering, a private workshop, or a consulting project where I act as an independent advisor. However, I also run open executive education programmes on behalf of academic institutions, including of course at ESADE. Finally, I am constantly on the lookout for collaborations slanted toward research (whether this be a formal academic study or, say, a case study).
