Customer Reviews

The Price Advantage (Wiley Finance)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Price Advantage makes the case that pricing is the most under-appreciated lever for improving performance in most companies today. The authors put forth an argument that is compelling for business leaders in every company to elevate their view of pricing opportunities in general, and pricing as a key lever for performance management in particular. Most importantly, however, the book provides practical, pragmatic insights into what approaches a businessperson can take to identify and capture pricing opportunities. It brings both the opportunities and potential pitfalls to life through the frequent use of case examples where companies succeeded in "ringing the cash register" through effective pricing or left a great deal of money on the table through poor pricing actions.

Of particular usefulness are chapters on specific topics that a business leader tackling pricing is going to face sooner or later. The chapter on "industry strategy" where the authors lay out some of the tactics for being a price leader or good price follower seems to be fresh writing on these topics ( I have not seen anything written about this before, and I thought it was quite actionable). Also, the chapter on pricing architecture set forth nicely the different ways of structuring price to drive the right customer and reseller behavior, again providing a way to look at the issue that should drive toward results effectively.
The chapter on issues/opportunities that arise from mergers/acquisitions provides distinctive perspectives on how to take advantage of opportunities and/or avoid huge downside risks associated with these events. The price wars chapter provides a guide for many managers to utilize in avoiding counterproductive (often inadvertent) actions across the markets in which they compete. Sidestepping just one of the potholes that the authors describe is likely to save a business great pain. Executing a strategy that weaves its way through the price war minefield discussed is likely to make the business a top performer, and the managers leading such an effort heroes.

The discussion of pricing technology appeared only to scratch the surface, perhaps a necessity due to the rapid innovation underway. While I was left wanting more in this area, the book did provide a way to segment solutions and approaches in this area that should be useful for those exploring the range of options available in today's - or tomorrow's - marketplace.

Finally, as you would expect from the authors' backgrounds, the insights on how to architect an organizational change program provide a framework that should be useful regardless of whether the challenge is a large enterprise or if you're tackling a focused initiative to capture value in a single product line.

A friend of mine who knows I have an interest in pricing sent me a free copy of this book. Michael Marn has led the pricing practice at McKinsey & Company for a long time now, and I'd been wondering why he hadn't published a pricing book before now.

Unfortunately it turns out to be something of a one-trick pony, and a pony pretty long in the tooth at that. About half of it talks about the well-known price-benefit map. No question it's a fundamental idea, but hardly leading edge. Plus you need a McKinsey team to execute it. Given the pedigree of the authors I was hoping for more. A lot of the book just repeats McKinsey's early work on price wars, postmerger pricing, and overall strategy--good stuff but again nothing new.

If you're interested in pricing, in my opinion there are better options than this. ...

This is the best book on pricing out in the market today. It is easy to understand and pragmatic......not one of the theory intensive books written by academics that have little or no practical value. Mike Marn's ideas are both easy to understand and to implement. I manage pricing for a SBU of a very large industrial company. Using the ideas from the book (along with a lot of very hard work), we were able to realize a very significant improvement at our bottom line without adding to the competitive intensity of the marketplace. Nothing in the book is magic; however, it all hangs together. A company that executes well on his ideas, will no doubt improve their financial performance.

The book, The Price Advantage, highlights a topic often neglected by senior management. But a careful execution of some of the ideas of Roegner et al. can have enormous consequences for the bottom line!

I found the book extremely useful in helping our organization structure its thinking around the possibilities in the pricing arena. The material in the first chapter on the effect of a price increase versus cost reduction is not new but certainly worth a reminder.

The categorization of the three levels of price management is particularly useful and practical. In a product segmentation exercise we ran internally in our organization, we were quickly able to identify the appropriate approach to the various segments. In fact, shortly after reading the book, we were able to craft a broad based pricing strategy that thoroughly impressed our senior management and will now be worked out in more details with a view to implementing it in a few months.

Having been through the re-engineering rage of the 90's with some questionable results, it is reassuring to realize that there are methodologies that could still dramatically improve the bottom line. This is particularly relevant for those having to cope with the consequences of ever changing exchange rates.
I have encouraged quite a few managers to read this book and see where the ideas can be put into practice.

This book is an compilation of many paper published by Mckinsey.

If you have read "The Power of Pricing" or "The Hidden Value of Postmerger Pricing" or "Pricing in a Downturn", all published by the Mckinsey quarterly, you must read this book if you want to go in deep.

I recently start working in pricing, and in my company we start seeking for a software provider to help us is pricng process. well, I meet with the best software providers, and all of them talk about "The Power of Pricing", and I note that these systems are Copy&Paste of the paper. now I note that is a Copy&Paste of the book.

if you are not sure to buy the book, first look for the papers. if you want to have pricing conversation, join to our free pricing forum http://pricing.gforo.com

bye.

The Price Advantage is one of the essential books on pricing and it is the second one I would read after Tom Nagle, John Hogan and Joe Zale's The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing (5th Edition). (I have not yet read Tim Smith's Pricing Strategy: Setting Price Levels, Managing Price Discounts and Establishing Price Structures which looks like it will be an interesting read.) Reed Holden and Mark Burton Pricing with Confidence: 10 Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table is also a good first introduction.

The authors are McKinsey consultants (one has recently moved to the pricing software vendor PROS Software) and they bring a great deal of consulting experience to the book which greatly enriches the case studies. Pricing excellence is divided into three elements, Market Strategy, Customer Value and Transactions and tools, advice and examples are provided for each element. This book provides the best introduction to the Pocket Price Waterfall (and its extension the Pocket Margin Waterfall), which is not surprising as the authors are the people who developed this framework. Appendix 1, which provides numerous examples of waterfalls is a great thing for them to have shared and is itself worth the price of the book. The book also has the best presentation I have seen of Value Maps and the Value Equivalence Line and how they are relevant to strategy. Even though I have problems with this approach (see below) it is important foundational reading for anyone interested in pricing and pricing strategy. The extended case study on Monarch Battery provides a good summary of the ideas in the book and how they can be applied. This is a great way to pull things together at the end of a book and it also provides a touchstone for people involved in pricing that we can refer to in conversations.
I do have three problems with this book.

The Value Mapping approach has been criticized by Gerald Smith and Tom Nagle (see "Pricing the Differential" by Gerald Smith and Tom Nagle, published in Marketing Management in the May/June 2005 issue and available on the Resources page of the LeveragePoint website). In short, value maps tend to over estimate the contribution to price of shared (commoditized) benefits and to understate the potential contribution of differentiated benefits. Value models like Nagle's Economic Value Estimation are a far more powerful way to understand the economic impact of a product for a customer and how to use this in setting and communicating price. Baker, Marn and Zawada do not mention value modeling or respond to the well known criticisms of value maps. This is part of a wider problem with the book, it is narrowly depended on the McKinsey approach and experience and does not engage the wider conversations taking place in the pricing community.

The book also fails to relate pricing concepts and frameworks to other work. For example, on Page 229 they discuss new product launches and characterize these as Revolutionary, Evolutionary and Me To. This discussion would be greatly enriched by putting it in the context of Clayton Christensen's work, see The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials) and subsequent books. This is actually a general problem in the pricing community, which tends to be inward focused and caught up in its own role and frameworks. But pricing will only show its full potential to transform business when it is connected to other parts of the business: product development, marketing, sales and finance. This will only happen when pricing frameworks are related to the frameworks used by people in other functional areas. There is a special need for someone to put pricing in a context meaningful to sales, so that sales can stop seeing pricing as "the sales prevention department."

The Pricing Advantage does not address emerging opportunities from two-sided markets. Two-sided markets, or platforms, are becoming more and more common and surface all sorts of important pricing and competitive strategy issues. If you have a conventional business model, and you are caught on the wrong side of a two-sided market, you are basically done for unless you can find a new business model. To get insight into two-sided markets, their challenges and huge opportunities, see Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World's Most Dynamic Companies by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee and Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson.

The Price Advantage makes the case that pricing is the most under-appreciated lever for improving performance in most companies today. The authors put forth an argument that is compelling for business leaders in every company to elevate their view of pricing opportunities in general, and pricing as a key lever for performance management in particular. Most importantly, however, the book provides practical, pragmatic insights into what approaches a businessperson can take to identify and capture pricing opportunities. It brings both the opportunities and potential pitfalls to life through the frequent use of case examples where companies succeeded in "ringing the cash register" through effective pricing or left a great deal of money on the table through poor pricing actions.

Of particular usefulness are chapters on specific topics that a business leader tackling pricing is going to face sooner or later. The chapter on "industry strategy" where the authors lay out some of the tactics for being a price leader or good price follower seems to be fresh writing on these topics ( I have not seen anything written about this before, and I thought it was quite actionable). Also, the chapter on pricing architecture set forth nicely the different ways of structuring price to drive the right customer and reseller behavior, again providing a way to look at the issue that should drive toward results effectively.
The chapter on issues/opportunities that arise from mergers/acquisitions provides distinctive perspectives on how to take advantage of opportunities and/or avoid huge downside risks associated with these events. The price wars chapter provides a guide for many managers to utilize in avoiding counterproductive (often inadvertent) actions across the markets in which they compete. Sidestepping just one of the potholes that the authors describe is likely to save a business great pain. Executing a strategy that weaves its way through the price war minefield discussed is likely to make the business a top performer, and the managers leading such an effort heroes.

The discussion of pricing technology appeared only to scratch the surface, perhaps a necessity due to the rapid innovation underway. While I was left wanting more in this area, the book did provide a way to segment solutions and approaches in this area that should be useful for those exploring the range of options available in today's - or tomorrow's - marketplace.

Finally, as you would expect from the authors' backgrounds, the insights on how to architect an organizational change program provide a framework that should be useful regardless of whether the challenge is a large enterprise or if you're tackling a focused initiative to capture value in a single product line.

McKinsey certainly has a very rigorous pricing development program, you can see it reflected in this book and in the programs they bring (at a very high price) to corporations. I was asked to read this by a boss several years ago (he bought a box of them and passed them out like an evangalist) and put it into practice immediately. It is a solid book on pricing with practical techniques to put a strategic approach to pricing in place. Although much of it is not new material, it is assembled in such a way to make it useable in a real business.

The one bent it certainly has is around premium pricing (which the authors reflect with admirable integrity in thier cover price). The techniques are best for those implementing pricing programs on products or services that they are choosing to differentiate from their competitors and price is both a component and result of that differentiation.

I would highly recommend this book to those in smaller businesses who are transitioning from an oracle-based pricing method (e.g. the VP or owner decides all pricing) to a more strategic and systematic approach.

This book is very easy and understandable written. It covers pricing strategy in a practical way. I can recommend this book to everybody interested in pricing

The Price Advantage has principles that you can apply immediately to your business. We are in the process of analyzing each of our product lines and markets using the principles and steps right now. We are seeing a 1 to 2% increase in profit in each market where we have implemented the changes. It isn't all about raising price either. The waterfalls have helped us identify some leakage points that we can address with no to little customer reaction. The VEL plotting has led us to lower prices in some areas where our value proposition is no longer in line with our competitors. Finally, we are segmenting our customers and products more effectively than before so that a customer who is sensitive on price in a few areas receives lower prices in those areas, but not across every product they buy from us. The book explains things simply and practically so that you can apply them. We aren't sophisticated enough to apply everything all at once or in every market immediately, but we can apply at least 1/2 of the principles one market at a time. For any company or leader that hasn't focused on pricing, you are leaving money on the table and the knowledge gained from this book will help you get some of it back. I think the book paid for itself within the first ten to fifteen minutes of reading. Highly recommended.