What do you do if your marketing pricing strategies are not influenced by strategic thinking?

1 What is strategic thinking?

Strategic thinking is the ability to analyze, evaluate, and plan your actions based on your goals, your environment, and your resources. It involves looking at the big picture, identifying opportunities and threats, and choosing the best course of action to achieve your desired outcomes. Strategic thinking is essential for effective marketing, as it helps you align your pricing with your value proposition, your target market, and your competitive position.

3 How to assess your current pricing strategy?

Before you can improve your pricing strategy, it is essential to evaluate how well it is working for you. Ask yourself questions such as ‘Did you use a systematic process to set your current prices, or did you follow your gut feeling or copy your competitors?’ and ‘How do your prices compare to those of your competitors?’ Consider how customers perceive your prices in terms of fairness, reasonableness and attractiveness. Evaluate the effect of your prices on sales, profitability, and customer satisfaction. Are you meeting or exceeding your targets? Are you attracting and retaining the right customers? Are you leaving money on the table or losing customers to lower-priced alternatives?

4 How to improve your pricing strategy with strategic thinking?

Once you have identified the strengths and weaknesses of your current pricing strategy, you can take steps to improve it with strategic thinking. To do this, first define your pricing objectives and align them with your overall marketing strategy. Consider what you want to achieve with your pricing, and how it supports your value proposition, positioning, and differentiation. Next, research the trends, opportunities, and challenges in your industry as well as the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your target segments. Analyze your competitors' pricing strategies and their effects on your market share, margins, and customers' choices. Finally, test and monitor your pricing by measuring its performance and impact with key indicators and metrics. Collect data and feedback from customers and competitors to adjust and optimize your pricing based on the results.

5 How to develop your strategic thinking skills for pricing?

Strategic thinking is not a natural talent that you either have or don't have, but a skill that you can learn, practice, and improve over time. To develop your strategic thinking skills for pricing, read and learn from experts and best practices in pricing. There are many books, articles, podcasts, and courses that can teach you the principles, methods, and tools of strategic pricing. You can also seek feedback and advice from others, such as colleagues, managers, mentors, consultants, customers, suppliers, or partners. Additionally, you can experiment and learn from your mistakes by using techniques such as A/B testing, split testing, or pilot testing to compare and evaluate different pricing scenarios. With this approach, you can refine your strategy accordingly.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?