I am fascinated by how organizations of all shapes, sizes and vocations choose to capitalize on their efforts to stand out in the market and serve customers. It is exactly at this moment, when a business asks individuals or other businesses to trade good money for the products and services it conceives, that ineffective practices tend to creep in and value regrettably “leaks out” of the each relationship – making both parties, and often society, worse off.
In my experience, many leaders in organizations apply the wrong logic when they think about prices and pricing. For one, they often fail to think strategically about the challenge. 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.
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).
