Game Changer: How Strategic Pricing Shapes Businesses, Markets, and Society

Jean-Manuel Izaret, Arnab Sinha

John Wiley & Sons, Oct 17, 2023 - Business & Economics - 432 pages

The right pricing strategy can change the entire trajectory of a business, a market, and even society at large. To help you create your best pricing strategy efficiently and confidently, two leaders from BCG are introducing fresh perspectives on pricing that take you far beyond the realm of mind-numbing numbers.

In their new book Game Changer: How Strategic Pricing Shapes Businesses, Markets, and Society, Jean-Manuel Izaret and Arnab Sinha simplify and clarify pricing strategy by integrating its many frameworks and concepts into seven distinct pricing games, each with its own proven tools, rules, forces, and structures. To help you pick the right game and play it well, Izaret and Sinha have developed the Strategic Pricing Hexagon, a tool refined through years of testing, iteration, and adaptation. The Hexagon is your portal to a business world where stronger growth and better financial performance come from a set of strategic pricing decisions, not endless myopic quests for optimal prices.

But more than that, the Hexagon will change the way you think about and talk about pricing. The current conversation around pricing – as expressed through economics textbooks, Excel spreadsheets, political discourse, and educated guesswork – makes it easy to believe that pricing is nothing more than a technical, tactical and, for most people, boring game of numbers. Game Changer changes that conversation bysharing stories and research that bring the Hexagon and its seven pricing games to life.

With research from BCG’s Bruce Henderson Institute and real-world examples from the world's most influential companies, the authors and their colleagues at BCG define pricing strategy as a business leader’s or business owner’s conscious decisions about how money flows in their market. They show how companies succeed in the long term when they focus on collaborative growth and value sharing with customers, not zero-sum value extraction from them.

Discover how you can create and implement a winning pricing strategy that changes the trajectory of your business, your market, and even society.

Contents

• CHANGING THE PRICING CONVERSATION: 1
• Rethinking Pricing Strategically 19: 7
• Three Information Sources: 25
• Four Economic Frameworks: 40
• Seven Games in the Strategic Pricing Hexagon: 51
• Six Market Forces: 69
• What the Hex? The Political Angles of Pricing Decisions: 77
• Whats Next? The Design of Pricing Models: 90
• Winning the Seven Pricing Games: 107
• When Art Trumps Science: 109
• The All Time Classic: 119
• Where Efficiency Reigns: 134
• When Every Move Counts: 147
• Making Sense of the Chaos: 163
• Framing Options for Customers: 179
• When Everything Matters: 194
• Changing Your Pricing Game: 209
• Growing with Your Customer: 219
• Perfecting Price Differentiation: 228
• Going Direct to Consumers: 237
• Achieving the Ultimate Cost Advantage: 246
• Competing with the Most Magical Price Point: 254
• Shaping Society Through Pricing: 265
• How Buyers and Sellers Share Value: 281
• How Pricing Can Eradicate Diseases: 294
• How to Shape Demand for Sustainable Solutions: 308
• How to Encourage Lower Carbon Emissions: 325
• How Progressive Pricing Can Scale Social Ventures: 337
• EPILOGUE: 349
• NOTES: 359
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: 387
• INDEX: 393

About the author

JEAN-MANUEL IZARET (JMI) is the Global Leader of BCG’s Marketing, Sales, and Pricing Practice. Before joining BCG in 1997, he received a PhD from École Centrale in Paris.

As a Bruce Henderson Institute Fellow, he has studied pricing model innovations in technology, biopharma, industrial goods, financial services, and consumer services. He also explored how pricing and economic models could help solve issues such as education and climate-change mitigation.

JMI lives in Berkeley, California.

ARNAB SINHA is a Senior Partner and Managing Director at BCG where he leads the Pricing Practice for North America and for the consumer sector. Prior to joining BCG in 2005, he received a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Arnab develops pricing strategies in sectors as diverse as airlines, automotive, beverages, food, luxury goods, and restaurants. He co-developed BCG’s intellectual property and software that use artificial intelligence to optimize pricing and promotion strategies.

Arnab lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Game Changer: How Strategic Pricing Shapes Businesses, Markets, and Society
• Authors: Jean-Manuel Izaret, Arnab Sinha
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 2023
• ISBN: 1394190581, 9781394190584
• Length: 432 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Advertising & Promotion; Business & Economics / Finance / Financial Risk Management; Business & Economics / Finance / General; Business & Economics / General; Business & Economics / Strategic Planning