How much consideration does the company give to competitors’ prices when setting their own?

Pricing Strategies

This is going to be a fun, but challenging assignment. So start WAY early!! Select a company and interview the owner/manager regarding their pricing strategies and methods. Report on your findings. Ideally, this will be your current company, but you may need to be resourceful and find a business owner or manager from another company who is willing to visit with you. Your goal is to discover the following:

1. What is the company’s pricing objective? For this question, it would helpful to show the interviewee a list of the pricing objectives on page 469 with very brief descriptions.(I suggest that you either highlight the first 1-3 sentences under each objective and then show the interviewee the highlighted descriptions in your text OR simply retype them on another sheet of paper for use in the interview).
2. Do they have some target segments that are less price sensitive than others?
3. How much consideration does the company give to competitors’ prices when setting their own?
4. What method of pricing do they use to arrive at the final price for the customer? For this question, you should be very familiar with the methods found under “Step 5” on pages 475-480 before the interview, but do not ask the interviewee to select from among them. Instead, simply listen to the description of their pricing method(s) and process. Then, after the interview, try to determine which of the textbook’s methods the company uses. You do not need to request or report exact markups or profit margins! You should make this clear when requesting the interview! We are looking for methods of pricing, not exact figures.