Hermann Simon - Price Management

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is truly state of the art and the most comprehensive work in price management.

Prof. Philip Kotler

Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

This very important book builds an outstanding bridge between science and practice .

Kasper Rorsted

CEO, Adidas

This book provides practical guidelines on value creation, communication and management, which is an imperative for businesses to survive in the coming era of uncertainty .

Dr. Chang-Gyu Hwang

Chairman and CEO, KT Corporation (Korea Telecom)

The title Price Management expresses our ambition to produce a book which is both grounded in theory and relevant in practice. The author teaman academic (Fassnacht) and a practitioner (Simon)guarantees the desired integration of theory and practice.

This book is state of the art yet also looks into the future. Digitalization is penetrating all phases of the pricing process, from strategy and analysis to decision-making and implementation. The Internet and other new technologies (sensors, measurement, etc.) have led to a wealth of price management innovations which this book explores in detail. These include flat rates, freemium, pay-per-use, pay-what-you-want, new price metrics, two-sided price systems, negative prices, sharing economy, Big Data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Innovative payment systems and even cryptocurrencies are also having effects on price management.

We use real-world cases throughout the book to ensure the link between theoretical rigor and practical relevance. That is possible because we could draw on the vast and diverse experience of Simon-Kucher and Partners, the global market leader in price consulting. We have anonymized these examples whenever necessary to protect confidentiality.

It is easy to see price management as a basic discipline, similar to accounting or controlling and generally applicable across all sectors. But our decades of involvement in price management have taught us that the ways of framing and solving pricing problems are often industry-specific. Consumer goods, for example, are sold primarily through intermediaries (retailers), while industrial products are predominantly sold directly. The resulting pricing issues, strategies, and tactics in these sectors are very different. For this reason, we devote separate chapters to the respective price management issues in the consumer goods, industrial goods, service, and retail sectors.

This is the global book on pricing! We committed ourselves to a global approach throughout the book. Global competition means that companies around the world are confronted with similar price management challenges. In line with this global approach, we selected representative case studies and practical examples from around the world.

The integration of theory and practice makes this book equally relevant for students and academics as for entrepreneurs and managers. Price management is becoming more and more professionalized in companies around the world, with stronger engagement from senior management, all the way up to the CEO. We not only cover the role of price as a short-term profit driver but also show how companies can use price as a means to drive sustained increases in shareholder value.

Price management is taking up a larger portion of business studies. This is due in part to the Internet, which has massively increased price transparency, intensified price competition, and triggered more price wars. But at the same time, the Internet also increases value transparency. This dichotomy results in some surprising and highly asymmetric effects for the marketing instrument price.

We have many people to thank for their contributions to this book, and we call attention to them individually in the acknowledgments. But we are especially thankful to Anna-Karina Schmitz for her outstanding work as our project leader and to the associates of Simon-Kucher and Partners for their valuable support.

The preoccupation with price management dates all the way back to Ancient Rome. The Latin language uses the identical word for price and value, namely, the word pretium.

That is the core equation of price management!

Hermann Simon

Martin Fassnacht