Professional Pricing

For many enterprises, price management is a big challenge. Market saturation and excess supply, a constantly increasing awareness of the price-performance ratio, increased competition and the decreased efficiency of time-tested control systems are drawing more and more attention to this problem area. Ingmar Brunken, pricing expert with Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, gave a lecture on how to achieve "pricing excellence" during a Business Breakfast in Vienna.

"The price of a product or of a service is a factor that is extremely difficult to define. It is hard to determine objective criteria, and many subjective factors – such as price perception or communication – play a part", Brunken pointed out in his lecture. While most enterprises have been implementing systematic improvements concerning the optimization of costs and quality for a long time, the far more complex optimization of turnover is still limited to isolated solutions. For this reason, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants has developed the RB pricing process, a systematic process for the optimization of prices and turnover.

According to Brunken, "with this tool, we can systematically process the starting points for pricing excellence". The spectrum includes the prevention of premature price reductions, the identification of potentials for price increases, the use of intelligent pricing models and the implementation of intelligent price differentiation. "A well-thought-out marketing strategy is extremely important. Injudicious price reductions wipe out profits and incite competitors to enter into a price war", says the pricing expert. For this reason, all main aspects are taken into account in the analysis according to the RB pricing process.

Speakers:

Dr. Manfred Reichl, Managing Partner for Austria and Central and Eastern Europe, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, Vienna

Dipl.-Kfm. Ingmar P. Brunken, Principal and director of the Pricing Intelligence Group of Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, Düsseldorf