Archive for 2019
Strategic Movements: August 2019
Online Grocer Pricing Thrive Market requires a $60 annual fee and offers free shipping for orders over $49. Public Goods requires a $59 annual fee and offers free shipping for orders over $45. Brandless requires a NO annual fee and offers free shipping for orders over $48. All three of these companies focus on house…
Read MoreCan Money Buy Your Morals?
Classical economics assumes that our rational self-interest will guide our decision making. The first part of that assumption, the “rational” part, was proven to be a premise needing clarification by the work of Kahneman and Tversky in their 1979 paper on Prospect Theory. This seminal work led to an entirely new branch of economics, best…
Read MoreWhat Are You Doing? Log-Linear Regression
For this month’s article, I offer an overview of a log-linear regression that I conducted for a client recently. While I find the mathematics and statistics that I used for this project fascinating in and of themselves, I do not want to get bogged down in the actual equations or any distracting minutiae. What I…
Read MoreThe New Invisible Hand
My book The New Invisible Hand will be released at the end of July. This book is for you if you’ve ever struggled to understand how your company should react to different competitive threats enabled by changing technology. You’ll learn how five technological revolutions are upturning entire industries and determining new winners and losers in…
Read MoreSome Bizarre Facts About Trademarks
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Mr. Berger is actively involved as an expert witness for trademark-related legal matters.) A trademark is any word, name, symbol, or design, or any combination thereof, used in commerce to identify and distinguish the goods of one source from those of another source. Trademark law is the set of laws and legal regulations…
Read MoreStrategic Movements: July 2019
Household Insecticide Pricing Raid, a household insecticide by S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. with roughly 50% U.S. market share, sells for $4.27 per 20 oz can canister ($0.21 per oz). Procter & Gamble Co. has recently launched Zevo, a competing household insecticide, for $6.97 per 10 oz can canister ($0.70 per oz). Does Zevo warrant…
Read MorePricing Dashboard Design
Executive dashboards are valuable coordination tools. They help pricing teams communicate facts and identify areas deserving executive attention. This is demonstrably clear. Yet, what facts specifically should be on a pricing dashboard? What are the issues that pricing should bring to the attention of their CEOs? To address this question, I asked ten different pricing…
Read MoreMachine Learning for the Masses: Regression Analysis
Machine learning has become a very popular topic in recent years. However, I fear that most people hear “machine learning” and assume that it must be a very difficult topic to understand. After all, machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence, so machine learning must be complex. On the contrary, some machine learning techniques…
Read MoreWhat are “Ironclad” Brands and How to Maintain Them
In her new book, an experienced brand strategist identifies the essence of powerful brands and offers ways to maintain and strengthen them. The book is Forging an Ironclad Brand: A Leader’s Guide by Lindsay Pedersen, a brand strategy and leadership coach with experience with powerhouse brands such a Clorox, Starbucks and T-Mobile. The book is…
Read MoreThe Importance of Speaking Other Business Languages
I was recently in Portland, Oregon for the first time, attending a business conference. The Digital Summit series brings together all manner of marketing practitioners, from strategists to email marketing specialists to search optimization experts. While only tangentially related to pricing, such an event is useful because it provides exposure to new ideas and other…
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