Pricing is universal for everybody,but it is worth while making concessions even in retail. How IEM implements individual approach humanlessly.
Selling cheap is easy, but not very profitable. Needless to remind
you of that joke about the dollar that cost eighty cents.
Selling expensive is much more difficult,
but much more profitable.
Easy selling at
high prices is a pie in the sky of any entrepreneur.
Dreams are made to be attainable otherwise it isn’t quite a
dream.
However, the Ultimate IEM approach enables us to come closer to some of such pipedream.
Perhaps only a few steps closer. But each of these steps is worth its weight in gold. We have already told you about some
before.
Every single business can divide its customers into two groups
according to their price sensitivity: highly- and lowly sensitive.
It is clear, that the figure
may vary greatly for a certain company: somewhere two percent is far too much, but there are cases
when 300% difference in price is not that crucial for the choice of the supplier.
Nevertheless,
in 99% of cases these two groups of customers can be clearly identified.
The relative size of these two groups can also be very different. It is obvious that one pricing strategy is well reasoned (rationality is estimated in terms of generating the maximum profit in the medium and long term period) if 90% of the customers are not too price-sensitive, and the opposite one suites if they are not.
Once the internet is a critically important sales and promotion
tool the choice of pricing strategy has another important issue to keep in mind.
In the era of
Web2.0 the ability or desire of the customer to influence the public image of your company is as
important as his purchasing power.Very often the customer who doesn’t buy a thing will trash your
company. For some unknown reason the ones who are extremely particular about the price (due to
poverty or greed) are hyperactive on the Internet — forums, reviews, ratings etc.
Thus, even if price-sensitive ones make only 10% of your customers , these usually are the most active 10%, so you can not just ignore them.
Here is how this conflict is settled (or at least mitigated) with
help of Ultimate IEM in the example of Ulmart.
On-line service "My price":
The idea is as following: customers who demand low price, fill in
an on-line form and additionally specify the details of the competing offer.
The information is
automatically validated by Ultimate IEM (the validation criteria are commercial secrets), and the
system reserves the goods at the lowered price for that customer.
Note: It is only the customer
who submits the form who gets the special offer. The price on the Price-list (and, accordingly,
Total gross profit for the item), does not change.
Therefore:
- the meticulous customer gets the best price
- the company loses nothing in terms of profit — selling one unit of product at a slightly lower price has no overall effect, not even within the statistical discrepancy
- loyalty of the particular customer (and, as a consequence - the company’s public image) gets an additional incentive through the favourable personal communication
The described process is repeated in Ulmart several thousand times a month -with absolutely no effort on the staff side. Everything runs in the background mode (the relevant commodity manager has the right to interfere with the process — but such cases almost never occur).
Here it is — the conveyor of personal approach.
In addition to
that very cake.
So what about your price sensitivity?