Insights

While working with my strategic pricing class this week, I was reviewing responses to price cuts by competitors, and discussing when and how to respond to price competition. The tools and framework presented by The Big Picture © provide important insights for determining how, when, and why a firm would respond to price competition.

Strategic planning needs to change from an annual PowerPoint-driven presentation to frequent and memorable conversations about the business based on facts, logic, and reasoned discussion. Motivating change is difficult; we recommend a series of well-orchestrated steps:

A few years ago, while working at one of the most respected management consulting companies in the world, I realized that most of the strategic planning work we did for our clients never got implemented. A particularly memorable experience occurred during a relationship review meeting with one of our core clients, a Fortune 50 retailer. Our director in charge of the account was literally screaming at the CEO and pointing at a drawer while saying, “We refuse to do one more project for you that ends up in that drawer! You need to implement our work or this relationship will no longer make sense for either of us.” Despite the threats and impassioned speech, the consulting relationship continued for years, and I am sure the drawer containing all those never-implemented strategic plans got heavier and heavier. Over time, I have come to realize that frustration with strategic planning is as common as the plans themselves.

The Big Picture Fundamentals Program is a 3.5 hour e-learning experience that introduces professionals to the Big Picture framework, and provides a foundational understanding of its integrated nature as well as of its component tools. This introductory training course includes video and graphical components as well as progressive assessment tools to offer an effective and engaging learning experience.

This twenty-minute webinar on pricing, applies the Big Picture framework to topics of value creation and value capture. In the acquisition/stimulate demand quadrant we use pricing to encourage customer learning about the product and to generate trial. In the retention/stimulate demand quadrant, pricing is used to turn transactional into transformational relationships. For acquisition/ earn share, pricing must articulate the differential value between our brand and our competitive targets to encourage competitive customer trial. Finally, for retention/ earn share, pricing must articulate the experiential differentiation value to encourage increased loyalty amongst multibrand customers.

Big Picture course participants acquire a series of thinking tools to analyze customer-based problems in their organizations. The framework establishes a common language for marketing, the same way that Six Sigma created a common language for Quality in companies across industries.