The Art of Pricing: How to Find the Hidden Profits to Grow Your Business [Hardcover]

Rafi Mohammed (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1400080932 | ISBN-13: 978-1400080939 | Publication Date: October 11, 2005

Want to make a bad year better or turn a good year into a blockbuster? Stop leaking profits and discover the untapped gold mine that exists in your products.

The Art of Pricing is the first practical, easy-to-understand guide to solving one of the most important dilemmas in business: how to use price to uncover a product’s hidden profits and find new opportunities for growth.

When it comes to setting prices for products and services, even the most sophisticated businesspeople often rely on formulas and seat-of-the-pants instinct, based on what the competition is charging, marking up costs, and doing things as they’ve always been done. The result is that businesses of all sizes, from start-ups to the Fortune 100, leave money on the table.

In The Art of Pricing, Rafi Mohammed, one of the world’s leading experts on pricing strategy, shows:

• The astonishing impact that small changes to a pricing strategy can have on the bottom line

• How the right pricing strategy can boost profits and grow your customer base

• Why the right way to think about pricing is as a series of easy-to-implement strategies that allow companies to serve and profit from the largest possible customer base

• Why the art of pricing involves understanding and capitalizing on the fact that different customer segments are willing to pay different prices for the same product

• Why an effective pricing strategy is not about price gouging but one that incorporates fairness into every important pricing decision


The Art of Pricing will be the invaluable missing link for people running companies, departments, divisions, and product lines, as well as for those in sales and marketing. Dr. Mohammed shows that an effective pricing strategy helps complete the circle by reaping the rewards due for the enormous effort, creativity, and investment made in developing and marketing products and services. Using a range of examples, from neighborhood restaurants to huge companies like Ford, he shows the importance of not falling short—and shortchanging yourself—when it comes to the heretofore little understood art of pricing.



Also available as an eBook

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mohammed's breezy, informal account of a range of pricing strategies takes as its starting point the realization that different "customers place different values on the same products." With this in mind, Mohammed (Internet Marketing) recommends a variety of strategies that will attract customers with different product evaluations and yield different profit margins. With emphasis on familiar consumer practices like quantity discounting, early-bird discounts and mixed bundling, Mohammed describes, for example, setting a high initial price to capture extra profits from early adopters, then reducing prices to attract other customers. Alternately, he notes, music and book stores "often take a contrary pricing approach" and give lower prices to their first customers. Mohammed writes clearly but does not offer enough direction on when to choose one strategy over its opposite. Though the book targets anyone who sets prices, including managers, it focuses narrowly on price discrimination without an analysis of the integration of pricing into general marketing or strategy. Nor does Mohammed cover how to estimate the cost and demand factors necessary to evaluate different price schemes. The book is too basic for experienced marketing professionals, but novices interested in price discrimination will find this an easy-to-understand introduction. (Oct. 18)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Rafi Mohammed is the ‘da Vinci’ of pricing!”

“A lighthearted, anecdotal, but theoretically sophisticated primer on pricing, highly personal and readable, with abundant illustrations.” —Alfred E. Kahn, Robert Julius Thorne Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus, at Cornell University, and former chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board

“Rafi Mohammed provides a win-win pricing solution for both businesses and consumers. The pricing strategies that he advocates help companies rightfully profit from their entrepreneurial activities and, just as important, benefit customers by offering a variety of purchasing options. The Art of Pricing is a “must read” for every manager; it will help you better serve your customers as well as make you more money.” —Irving Azoff, CEO, Frontline Management

“In a thoroughly engaging manner, Rafi Mohammed describes how relatively simple changes in price can unleash tremendous profit potential in virtually any company. This book is richly illustrated with stories that show how pricing is as much disciplined science as art, and that the masters of this discipline can reap profit while delighting consumers. Rafi Mohammed is the ‘da Vinci’ of pricing!” —Robert G. Cross, chairman and CEO of Revenue Analytics and author of Revenue Management

“Companies big and small struggle to appropriately price products and services. Rafi Mohammed provides a road map for relatively uncharted territory. With an engaging style and numerous real-life examples, Rafi makes a tough subject accessible.” —Heather J. Myers, senior vice president, Strategic Planning and Business Development, Scholastic

“Rafi Mohammed’s pricing strategy has broad application, creating a new call-to-arms for businesses. Diverse corporate segments from consumer products to entertainment can benefit from Mohammed’s approach and extract new value from their products.” —John Mass, executive vice president, William Morris Agency

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Crown Business (October 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400080932
• ISBN-13: 978-1400080939
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #344,408 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #43 in Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Pricing

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally a book on pricing for the practitioner and consumer, October 27, 2005

By 

Craig Thompson (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of Pricing: How to Find the Hidden Profits to Grow Your Business (Hardcover)

This is the first book I've read on the subject that is accessible to anyone with an interest in pricing; no daunting formulas or mathematics. Dr. Mohammed provides an excellent new perspective on the practice of pricing grounded in classic microeconomic priciples. As such, through a down to earth writing style and myriad examples, he liberates the reader from the notion that there is one right price for an item or service.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pricing by value, October 3, 2007

By 

Rich T (Frederick Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Art of Pricing: How to Find the Hidden Profits to Grow Your Business (Hardcover)

This book was a delightful read not only because it was short and to the point, but also for it's many real-life examples. I've felt for a long time that prices need to be set to the customer's perception of the value of the product or service, so it was very encouraging to read a book where the author was able to break down the reasons and supply applications for this type of pricing he calls "Value pricing". As with an auction (a theme covered in the book) there is a price for every interested buyer, but it is not always the same for everyone. Just as only one person is willing to pay the highest "winning" bid, there are those who will pay more for any product or service than the average customer. This book helps you to identify those people.
Rich

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars it will start you thinking, March 18, 2006

By 

Martins Blums "mblums" (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of Pricing: How to Find the Hidden Profits to Grow Your Business (Hardcover)

If you are new to the field of pricing this book will help you start asking some of the right questions about how to establish a pricing system in your organization. For those of you that have had some experience in the field already it will draw your attention again to the fact that price differentiation has a much larger impact than statistical price optimization.
The book is full of fun examples and is a quick read.