A New Paradigm for Pricing

Price wars are inherently destructive.

At least, that’s been the assumption of many in the business world for decades now.

But according to Wharton experts Jagmohan Raju and Z. John Zhang, it’s time to throw that pricing assumption—and many others—right out the window. In their new book, Smart Pricing: How Google, Priceline, and Leading Businesses Use Pricing Innovation for Profitability, Raju and Zhang show readers how innovative business minds are changing the pricing game. The authors also offer a powerful alternative to traditional pricing models.

Raju, the Joseph J. Aresty Professor of Marketing, and Zhang, the Murrel J. Ades Professor of Marketing, focus on a new set of influencers in pricing strategy: consumer psychology, economics and marketing. To do so, they draw on their own breakthrough pricing research, as well as their most recent work helping enterprises rethink their approaches to pricing.

Raju and Zhang make pricing more tangible and concrete by revealing innovative strategies that are helping companies create and capture more value and more new customers. Readers will learn about restaurants where customers, not the owners, set the price. They’ll discover how Google and other tech companies have used pricing to reconstitute entire industries. And they’ll see how executives in China have made an art of initiating and fighting price wars, in spite of the conventional Western wisdom that price wars are inherently risky.

Replete with examples from contemporary business, this book heralds a revolution in how companies establish pricing and measure its effectiveness.

Better Green Business: Handbook for Environmentally Responsible and Profitable Business Practices

By Eric Olson

Better Green Business brings together practical insights and start-to-finish strategies for moving any enterprise to a higher level of environmental stewardship.

Drawing on his extensive experience from working across industries and functional boundaries, Eric G. Olson shows how to systematically drive “win-win-win” gains: growing top-line revenue, helping customers increase efficiency and improving the environment at the same time. Olson introduces powerful business process transformation methodologies and technologies for increasing operational efficiency and reducing waste, including IBM’s impactful Green Sigma approach. He also identifies new opportunities to drive value by “instrumenting the planet” and introduces the technologies that make this possible.

Finally, he assesses long-term trends that will make “green business” increasingly crucial in the coming years: Defining “green strategy” and crafting transformation plans that work; using Green Sigma to reduce environmental impact and drive business value; instrumenting the planet for a more intelligent, sustainable world; and anticipating the future of green business—and all business.

Marketing_MetricsMarketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance, 2nd Edition

By Paul W. Farris,  Neil T. Bendle, Phillip E. Pfeifer & David J. Reibstein

Marketing Metrics, Second Edition, is the definitive guide to today’s most valuable marketing metrics.

In this thoroughly updated and significantly expanded book, four leading marketing researchers show exactly how to choose the right metrics for every challenge. The authors show how to use marketing dashboards to view market dynamics from multiple perspectives, maximize accuracy and “triangulate” to optimal solutions. Readers will discover high-value metrics for virtually every facet of marketing: promotional strategy, advertising and distribution; customer perceptions; market share; competitors’ power; margins and pricing; products and portfolios; customer profitability; sales forces and channels; and more.

This edition introduces essential new metrics ranging from Net Promoter to social media and brand equity measurement. Last, but not least, it shows how to build comprehensive models to support planning—and optimize every marketing decision you make.