Pricing strategies are the models used by businesses to determine the best price at which to sell their goods or services. This is clearly one of the most important questions faced by any business, since pricing has a tremendous influence on revenues, market competitiveness, and consumer perceptions of your product. Given its importance to the strategic management of a business, it is not surprising that there are a number of different pricing strategies to choose from.

Perhaps the simplest pricing strategy is cost-based pricing, where prices are set at the cost of providing the good or service plus a desired profit margin. Alternately, when many producers sell similar goods or services, market-based pricing and competitor pricing models can be used to set price points based on current market conditions and positioning versus competitors. Customer value-based pricing offers an even more sophisticated strategy, as it seeks to determine customer willingness to pay for a product and set prices accordingly.

The digital era has created new opportunities to push these and other pricing strategies forwards. For example, the advent of e-commerce has made it easy to gather more information than ever on the relevant prices of similar goods and services across different providers and different markets. And digital analytics on consumer buying behavior, as well as insights from behavioral economics, have provided new insights into customer psychology that can inform value-based pricing strategies.

Product and service pricing can have wide-ranging impacts on a company’s bottom-line performance as well as its brand perception. Thus, an understanding of pricing strategies is essential for sales and marketing professionals as well as executive decision-makers such as CEOs.

Market research analysts in particular must have an expertise in this field. They are responsible for studying market data and conducting consumer research to help companies determine what products and services customers want and how much they might buy at different price points. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, market research analysts earned an median annual salary of $63,790 per year in 2019, and these positions are expected to grow much faster than the national average as companies face increasing pressure to analyze and utilize the vast amounts of marketing data available today.

Absolutely. Coursera offers many different courses in business and marketing topics, including specific courses and Specializations on pricing strategy. With Coursera, you can learn about pricing strategy from top-ranked institutions like the University of Pennsylvania and IE Business School, as well as leading industry partners like Boston Consulting Group. These courses offer the opportunity to learn the same material from the same faculty as on-campus students, but at a much lower tuition. This appealing price point, along with the ability to learn remotely on a flexible schedule, has helped make Coursera the world’s leading online education platform.