The Price Advantage

by Craig C. Zawada, Eric V. Roegner, Michael V. Marn

Book Overview

The Price Advantage by three preeminent experts at McKinsey & Company is the most pragmatic and insightful book on pricing available. Based on in-depth, first-hand experience with hundreds of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471466697
• ISBN13: 9780471466697
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

You Must read It

This book is an compilation of many paper published by Mckinsey. If you have read "The Power of Pricing" or "The Hidden Value of Postmerger Pricing" or "Pricing in a Downturn", all published by the Mckinsey quarterly, you must read this book if you want to go in deep. I recently start working in pricing, and in my company we start seeking for a software provider to help us is pricng process. well, I meet with the best software providers, and all of them talk about "The Power of Pricing", and I note that these systems are Copy & Paste of the paper. now I note that is a Copy & Paste of the book. if you are not sure to buy the book, first look for the papers. if you want to have pricing conversation, join to our free pricing forum http://pricing.gforo.com bye.

The Price Advantage

This is the best book on pricing out in the market today. It is easy to understand and pragmatic......not one of the theory intensive books written by academics that have little or no practical value. Mike Marn's ideas are both easy to understand and to implement. I manage pricing for a SBU of a very large industrial company. Using the ideas from the book (along with a lot of very hard work), we were able to realize a very significant improvement at our bottom line without adding to the competitive intensity of the marketplace. Nothing in the book is magic; however, it all hangs together. A company that executes well on his ideas, will no doubt improve their financial performance.

Let?s make money

The book, The Price Advantage, highlights a topic often neglected by senior management. But a careful execution of some of the ideas of Roegner et al. can have enormous consequences for the bottom line!I found the book extremely useful in helping our organization structure its thinking around the possibilities in the pricing arena. The material in the first chapter on the effect of a price increase versus cost reduction is not new but certainly worth a reminder. The categorization of the three levels of price management is particularly useful and practical. In a product segmentation exercise we ran internally in our organization, we were quickly able to identify the appropriate approach to the various segments. In fact, shortly after reading the book, we were able to craft a broad based pricing strategy that thoroughly impressed our senior management and will now be worked out in more details with a view to implementing it in a few months. Having been through the re-engineering rage of the 90's with some questionable results, it is reassuring to realize that there are methodologies that could still dramatically improve the bottom line. This is particularly relevant for those having to cope with the consequences of ever changing exchange rates.I have encouraged quite a few managers to read this book and see where the ideas can be put into practice.

Pragmatic Approaches a Businessperson Can Use

The Price Advantage makes the case that pricing is the most under-appreciated lever for improving performance in most companies today. The authors put forth an argument that is compelling for business leaders in every company to elevate their view of pricing opportunities in general, and pricing as a key lever for performance management in particular. Most importantly, however, the book provides practical, pragmatic insights into what approaches a businessperson can take to identify and capture pricing opportunities. It brings both the opportunities and potential pitfalls to life through the frequent use of case examples where companies succeeded in "ringing the cash register" through effective pricing or left a great deal of money on the table through poor pricing actions. Of particular usefulness are chapters on specific topics that a business leader tackling pricing is going to face sooner or later. The chapter on "industry strategy" where the authors lay out some of the tactics for being a price leader or good price follower seems to be fresh writing on these topics ( I have not seen anything written about this before, and I thought it was quite actionable). Also, the chapter on pricing architecture set forth nicely the different ways of structuring price to drive the right customer and reseller behavior, again providing a way to look at the issue that should drive toward results effectively. The chapter on issues/opportunities that arise from mergers/acquisitions provides distinctive perspectives on how to take advantage of opportunities and/or avoid huge downside risks associated with these events. The price wars chapter provides a guide for many managers to utilize in avoiding counterproductive (often inadvertent) actions across the markets in which they compete. Sidestepping just one of the potholes that the authors describe is likely to save a business great pain. Executing a strategy that weaves its way through the price war minefield discussed is likely to make the business a top performer, and the managers leading such an effort heroes.The discussion of pricing technology appeared only to scratch the surface, perhaps a necessity due to the rapid innovation underway. While I was left wanting more in this area, the book did provide a way to segment solutions and approaches in this area that should be useful for those exploring the range of options available in today's - or tomorrow's - marketplace.Finally, as you would expect from the authors' backgrounds, the insights on how to architect an organizational change program provide a framework that should be useful regardless of whether the challenge is a large enterprise or if you're tackling a focused initiative to capture value in a single product line.