Impressions from Singapore – 4th Annual Asia Pricing Summit

Visiting the 4th Annual Asia Pricing Summit has given us a real valuable insight into the world of pricing and revenue management. It was a chance to hear how some of the world’s biggest names make their pricing decisions, promote the value of their products and embrace new pricing strategies/approaches.

The main topic was the dynamic pricing – meaning that the prices may change every day (or even several times per day!) depending on a number of market factors. This illustrates how the focus shifts from the ‘static pricing’ approach, where the prices are set to remain the same for a period of time, to the new one, where prices fluctuate rapidly over time to adjust to the most recent market changes.

Another  interesting point of discussion was presenting the importance of pricing to your company management (in other words – how to get board room members aware of your pricing dilemmas) – how to get them to understand that being a leader in a very diverse landscape of competitors means accepting new approaches and adapting to the current pricing trends.

Building a reputation of a product was also an important point of discussion – in terms of playing on quality versus playing on pure product price? You can build a reputation of your brand for being cheap, but you can also build a reputation around your brand’s value and quality, and use that as a leverage against your competitors. Investing in new technologies and constantly improving your products may also be a good approach, since it allows you to promote the value of your brand and make that the defining factor, and not just the product’s price. In particular, it was very interesting to hear how Nike uses this approach to build and promote value of their products. (great presentation by Sarah Walton, Nike’s  Senior Pricing Director)

Of course, pricing discussions had to take into consideration other important factors making consumer’s mind, like the number and positioning of competitors, delivery terms, the purchasing power of the given market, company’s reputation etc.

What was also fascinating was seeing the amount of effort companies have put in in analyzing historical pricing trends, and predicting the impact of price changes on future sales levels. More and more pricing experts try to think a few steps ahead and predict the consequences of their pricing decisions – how the profit fluctuates if prices change. From that perspective, Yihaodian’s Jerry Liu‘s analytical approach and the formula connecting competitor’s pricing, market price sensitivity and own historical sales volumes looked real intriguing, and definitely worth a deeper reading.

We are also pleased to say that Asia Pricing Summit was a very interactive event, so between the speakers’ presentations we got a chance to take part in different round-table discussions and share our thoughts with the rest of the participants.

Speaking of interactivity,we were really happy with the number of questions and and the the discussion which followed our own presentation (Price monitoring: one step beyond)

Price2Spy is very proud to have been a sponsor of such an event and thankful for meeting all the inspiring professionals that participated. See you next year!