The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing [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).

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.

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.