Strategic Movements: October 2019

Market Share? Meh. Customer Satisfaction and Brand Equity? YES, Please! Managers care a lot about market share, but should they? Meta-research by Alexander Edeling and Alexander Himme in the Journal of Marketing entitled “When Does Market Share Matter” shows that market share does, on average, have a small positive impact on company value, but that…

Read More

Is That Membership Paying Off?

My wife’s favorite holiday is Halloween. As such, we were in the market for a life-sized skeleton for the house. We also recently became Costco members, so that seemed the natural place to get some discount decorations. We purchased some (I mean a lot) of Halloween candy there, but didn’t pull the trigger on Costco’s…

Read More

Supreme Court Ruling Sparks Explosion in Sports Betting

As expected, last spring’s Supreme Court ruling, which struck down the 1992 law that banned commercial sports betting in most states, has created an explosion in legalized sports betting. According to Casino Connections magazine (September 19, 2019 issue), sportsbooks in the United States are reporting brisk business as the National Football League (NFL) season kicks…

Read More

The Many Flavors of Price Variance

One of the most insightful steps of any pricing project is identifying and investigating price variances. Price variances are price differences that exist between customers for the same offering. There are two essential price variance questions to answer: Do price variances exist in the dataset, and Which factor (or factors) is driving the variance? Generally,…

Read More

The Purpose of Business and Pricing

Milton Friedman must be turning over in his grave. 49 years after penning an op-ed in the New York Times on the primacy of shareholder value in driving business decisions, the Business Roundtable has declared the idea moribund. Signed by 181 CEOs of large corporations, the Business Roundtable recently declared that companies should consider a…

Read More