Posts by: Kyle T. Westra

Example of ineffective UX design for conveying information

The Importance of Speaking Other Business Languages

By Kyle T. Westra June 17, 2019

I was recently in Portland, Oregon for the first time, attending a business conference. The Digital Summit series brings together all manner…

More
The New Invisible Hand: Five Revolutions in the Digital Economy

The Elephants in the Room

By Kyle T. Westra May 24, 2019

Having value-creating channel partners is much better than the alternative. But even good partnerships carry risk. In the channel, one of those risks is that the partner becomes more powerful than the supplier.

More

Channel Strategy in CPG

By Kyle T. Westra April 30, 2019

Forgoing traditional channel distribution didn’t stop Oatly from a quick expansion. The New York Times reported in January 2018 that “Oatly has spread from 10 locations in New York to more than 1,000 locations nationwide,” less than a year after it landed in the U.S. 1,000 locations pales in comparison to its footprint had they  teamed up with grocery retail.

More

Treating Channel Partners Strategically

By Kyle T. Westra March 24, 2019

Common examples of channel partners include wholesalers, distributors, and retailers. All of these activities are necessary tasks for a functioning commercial organization. If the supplier doesn’t do one of these tasks, a channel partner must. Conversely, if a channel partner doesn’t, the supplier must.

More

Fixed vs. Variable Pricing

By Kyle T. Westra October 30, 2018

Home Page Text Tailoring price according to willingness to pay is theoretically sound but culturally still questionable. It’s important to determine how your customers will react to such variable pricing when deciding whether to have price variance, and by what characteristics.

More

Amazon the Kingmaker

By Kyle T. Westra September 29, 2018

Amazon’s Choice began as a solution for its Echo home device, which, when prompted by a user to buy an item not previously purchased, needed to know what to get. But its increasing presence in Amazon search results illustrates a problem with those results: there are simply too many.

More

What I’ve Learned From Three Years in Pricing

By Kyle T. Westra August 23, 2018

Traditionally, pricing is considered one of the Four Ps of Marketing, along with product, promotion, and place. But thinking about pricing as simply a subset of marketing is a mistake.

More
The New Invisible Hand: Five Revolutions in the Digital Economy

Whither Middlemen?

By Kyle T. Westra July 30, 2018

Middlemen make for an easy target for disgruntled customers and observers of the economy. At times it can be unclear how they are adding value to a transaction. Sometimes it looks like middlemen are simply inserting themselves into a transaction to increase costs and take a cut.

More
The New Invisible Hand: Five Revolutions in the Digital Economy

The Pitfalls of Dynamic Pricing

By Kyle T. Westra June 28, 2018

In my upcoming book, preliminarily titled The New Invisible Hand, I’ll explore the most important technological trends affecting pricing and commercial strategy. One chapter will focus specifically on this issue: unpacking the promise and perils of dynamic pricing.

More

When and How to Automate

By Kyle T. Westra May 23, 2018

Software is good at automating repeatable processes, but that doesn’t make them the right processes. Doing the wrong thing efficiently isn’t the same as doing the right thing. There’s a reason that Peter Drucker wrote about the effective, not the efficient, executive.

More

About The Author

ktw
Kyle T. Westra is a Manager at Wiglaf Pricing. His areas of focus include pricing transformations, new product pricing, commercial policy, and pricing software. Most recently to Wiglaf Pricing, Kyle worked in project management, business systems analysis, and marketing analysis, starting his career in global strategy at a foreign policy think tank. He has extensive experience in ecommerce, sales strategy, economic analysis, and change management. His Amazon bestselling book about how technological trends are affecting pricing and commercial strategy is entitled The New Invisible Hand: Five Revolutions in the Digital Economy. Kyle is a Certified Pricing Professional (CPP). He holds an MBA with distinction from the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University and a BA in Political Science and Economics from Tufts University.