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Presentations at the Professional Pricing Society & the Pricing Institute

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Presentation

How to Avoid "ConsumerThink" in Marketing and
Pricing Strategy

Over the last 30 years, the world of business-to-business marketing has come to suffer increasingly from ConsumerThink - the infiltration of ideas from consumer marketing into the realm of B2B. As this has happened, many people have lost sight of the fact that

• business value - financial contribution to a business customers' bottom line - is something quite different from
• consumer value - the satisfaction of consumption needs, wants, whims, dreams and other "feel good" desires.

They have forgotten that the economics of value creation are quite different from the economics of value consumption, and that the two often call for quite different marketing and pricing strategies.

Participants in this session will come away with a better understanding of where, in fact, these two realms of marketing and pricing strategy do overlap and where they do not. In particular, they will get a good sense of which popular elements of ConsumerThink can cost them dearly should they try to apply those elements in a B2B context. Among other things, participants will get a better handle on:

• Where the simple ideas of a demand curve and price elasticities for a product can be useful in B2B markets and where they are more likely to be a risky illusion.
• Where the idea of customer price sensitivity holds up in B2B markets and where it does not.
• Where a focus on "feel good" value just isn't enough to make the business case to a B2B customer and what's needed to take its place.

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