The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: A Guide to Growing More Profitably [Hardcover]

Thomas Nagle (Author), John Hogan (Author), Joseph Zale (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 12, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0136106811 | ISBN-13: 978-0136106814 | Edition: 5

A comprehensive and practical, step-by-step guide to pricing analysis and strategy development.

The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing shows readers how to manage markets strategically–rather than simply calculate pricing based on product and profit–in order to improve their competitiveness and the profitability of their offers.

The fifth edition contains a new chapter on price implementation and several updated examples on pricing challenges in today’s markets.
 
 

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 5 edition (March 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0136106811
• ISBN-13: 978-0136106814
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #50,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Value Pricing & Customer Value Management Can Transform Business February 16, 2010

By Steven Forth

Format:Hardcover

Disclosure - I worked with Tom Nagle, John Hogan and Joe Zale at Monitor Group and continue to work with them at LeveragePoint, where we are coding many of their ideas into software tools, so my review may be a bit biased.

This is a major update of the classic book on strategic pricing, a book that introduced many of us to the field and that taught us how to think about customer value and how it relates to price. In my case, this book also helped me to sharpen my understanding of pricing, segmentation and bundling and changed how I thought about sunk costs and pricing. If I had read this book ten years ago I would be a wealthier person today.

What's New in the Fifth Edition?

A completely new chapter on "Pricing Strategy Implementation" identifies the challenges involved in embedding strategic pricing principles within an organization and describes how managers can lead a structured change process to build a commercial organization more consistently focused on value creation, for the firm and its customers

The revised chapter on "Pricing Policy" provides a theoretically grounded framework to describe specific policies for managing price changes for a variety of situations including raw material cost increases, demand recessions, and new product launches.

The chapter on "Value Creation" for the first time addresses explicitly how to deal with value differently when it is driven by subjective psychological drivers (such as doing the right thing for the environment) rather than by tangible monetary drivers (for example, saves money on fuel).

The chapter on "Value and Price Communication" has been substantially revised to describe how to communicate value in a wide variety of product and customer contexts. It demonstrates how to target communications to affect specific behaviors throughout the customer's buying process.

The chapter on "Price Setting" has been expanded to provide a robust process for setting prices that can be widely applied both to consumer and business markets.

Throughout the book, we have updated examples with more topical illustrations of current pricing challenges (such as iPhone pricing, new models for pricing music, and services pricing).

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is the real deal on pricing, pricing strategy, and tactics February 26, 2012

By Lincoln Park, Chicago

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is the "real deal" book on pricing strategy and the actual tactics used with great examples. Gets you to think outside traditional thought lines and use pricing to deliver value.

This is techincally a college textbook inteneded for upper level undergraduate or MBA level classes, but it reads like a consumer title. Because it's a textbook, you'll see that it's 5th edition, and revised every couple years. As we all know, textbooks change very little from edition to edition. Save yourself money and buy the previous edition, new or used its about 50% or 75% off the price.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars This is a book for CEOs, VPs of Sales, Marketing and Finance October 12, 2010

By Reg Nordman

Format:Hardcover

As my due diligence for a panel on pricing next week (Oct 20) in Vancouver ([...]) I have been reading Nagles 5th edition of his textbook on the subject and am thoroughly enjoying this book. It is as much the application of psychology as analytics. He makes the best arguments and execution strategies for value pricing I have ever read.

In his thoroughness I am finding lots of sales aha moments. These are the times when you encountered types of buyer and competitor behaviour, made a decision, learned to regret it, lost $$$$$$ , and over time developed/learned better responses. Nagle describes the theory behind why the better responses worked and how to improve even more . This is a very similar experience I had when first reading Geoffrey Moore. "All the time spent learning through doing when someone had already written this down". Of course had I known much of this sooner I would have been even more of a pain in the ass to my superiors/employers.

There may not be one book that contains everything on pricing, but this one comes extremely close. His generous use of examples pulls tired brains like mine through some of the numeric analysis. I know I will be a much better salesperson from reading this book. I suggest this is a book for CEOs, VPs Sales, Marketing and Finance in any type of company. Thanks Steven Forth for dropping this copy off to me.