6 Must Read Quotes About Pricing Strategy | SBI Growth

6 Jan 25

Read six great pricing strategy quotes to maximize your revenue. Words of wisdom from stars including Warren Buffet, Fergie, and Ron Johnson.

We do our best to give great pricing advice, but it sometimes can be good to hear what other people have to say on the topic as well. Let’s take a look at 6 great pricing quotes and see what insights we can draw from their knowledge and experience. (You might be surprised by some of the people on the list!)

 

Warren Buffet

Warren Buffett is a pricing guru, though he specializes in pricing companies in the stock market instead of pricing products. Even still, his pricing insights are very much relevant to your pricing strategy. His quote here is a great reminder to look at your product from your customer's perspective. Customers will only buy your product if they believe that the value they’re receiving is greater than the price they’re paying; otherwise, why would they pay? This idea forms the basis of our specialty: value-based pricing. For more information on the topic, feel free to read our blog discussing the subject: Value-Based Pricing.

 

Fergie

Fergie follows up perfectly with what Warren Buffett said. You might not think of Fergie as a pricing diva (we see her as more of a musical genius, have you heard Fergalicious?!) but her thoughts here are on point. Pricing should based solely on how much value your customer finds in your product. Your customer doesn’t care about how much (or in this case how little) you spent developing your product and if you’re offering a unique product, you shouldn’t price based on how much your competitors are charging. Fergie seems to find a lot of value in her Wet N Wild 666 lip liner and would probably pay a lot more than 99 cents for a tube (we’d argue that this company is leaving money on the table). This is why we tend to shun cost-plus and competitor based pricing.

 

Katharine Paine

Katharine hit the nail on the head here. Pricing is the most critical component to maximizing your revenue. Harvard studies have found that a 1% improvement in your pricing can add up to 11% to your profits. With bad pricing, you’re missing out on profits in every transaction that you make, not to mention the deals that you completely miss out on. Pricing is also a big factor in your branding and reputation. Prices that are too high can make you come off as arrogant, while prices that are too low can call the quality of your product into question (would you eat a steak that only costs $3?).  

Carl Rogers

Carl here may be exaggerating a little bit, but his underlying message rings true. After all, who doesn’t love free stuff? This kind of thinking provides the foundation for the freemium model: Everyone loves free stuff, so let’s give the product away for free to attract users and then figure out a way how to get these users to pay. There’s a couple problems with this thinking. First, since you’re giving your product away for free, you’re implying that your customers will find no value from it (otherwise, you could charge something and they would be willing to pay). Second, and more importantly, you’re leaving money on the table because you're not collecting revenue from customers who were originally willing to pay for your product but are now using it for free. (When was the last time you had a customer volunteer to pay you?).

 

Ron Johnson

We realize that former CEO Ron Johnson’s turnaround attempt at JCPenny wasn’t successful, but that doesn’t make his pricing advice any less valid. Great pricing is all about figuring out how much your customers value your product. Now, finding customer valuations isn’t as easy as Mr. Johnson claims, but we like to think of it more as a science than an art. 

 

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Patrick Campbell

The last quote is from Patrick, Price Intelligently's founder. This captures the essence of why pricing is critical to all sorts of businesses. You spend all that time, energy, and money developing your product and in the end, pricing is the only means that you can use to convey all of your efforts, like an exchange rate. Yet, in many companies, pricing is overlooked or just guessed at. Don’t shortchange your efforts developing and producing your product by ineffectively pricing it; put some real thought into how much value you think you’ve created for your customers.

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Of course these quick soundbites can't capture all of the intricacies of pricing. But together, they do give you a sense of the essence of great pricing strategy.

To learn more about pricing specifics, check out our Pricing Strategy ebook. We're here to help!

Written by SBI

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