New from CVI!
Now available: Value-Strategy Toolkit™ Software, 2012
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Customer Value Management is your key to more effective product management, product development, pricing, marketing, and selling. The Value Strategy Toolkit™ (VST) uses the tools of Customer Value Management, including the Value Map and Appraisal Table, to let you look at your products the way customers assess them – as choices competing head-to-head against other products in the category.
The main input into a Customer Value Analysis is the comparative performance table. This table compares your product to the competition in terms of the factors that matter to customers. The 2012 VST offers new tools that make it easy to populate this table and give you immediate feedback on the implications of the data for your product positioning and pricing strategy.
What can your product teams do with the new Value-Strategy Toolkit™?
- Understand the true strengths and weaknesses of your product offer, and identify opportunities that can make your product more competitive.
- Look at your product head-to-head against each of your toughest competitors to think through your selling strategy
- Set your prices based on what your product is truly worth
- Hone your marketing message
- Align your management team around a plan to serve customers better.
The patented Value-Strategy Toolkit™ (VST) software lets you do a comprehensive comparison of the performance of your product versus the competition using any combination of (a) technical measures from product specs, laboratory, or field trials, (b) customer satisfaction ratings, and (c) subjective expert-opinion scores. The 2012 version more completely integrates comparative costs into the analysis. For many products, the customers’ costs in owning and using the product are as important as the actual cost of acquiring the product. Products that can save the customer money in use are worth more than products that can’t. The Product Appraisal Table in the 2012 VST can estimate the worth of any product based on its comparative strengths in both performance and in the costs of ownership and use.
For more info:
How to construct value benchmarks for strategic pricing- get the 2012 article
Businesses, as customers, have a justified reputation for hard-nosed bargaining. However, as any marketer knows, although business customers do not lightly pay a premium price for a product, they don't always spring for the lowest cost options. Business customers are typically rigorous in assessing the performance of products they are considering. In the end, they will select products that give them superior value, performance for price.
What is your product worth to your customer? In an article just published in the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, Bradley T. Gale and Donald J. Swire provide a blueprint for developing a customer-eye perspective on what your product is worth. Implementing Strategic B2B Pricing: Constructing Value Benchmarks describes in detail how to measure performance the way your customer sees it, how to assess how your product stacks up to the competition, and how to relate that performance assessment to going rates in the market.
- Request your copy: Implementing Strategic B2B Pricing: Constructing Value Benchmarks (January 2012)
- Check out our patented* Value Strategy Toolkit ™ software, which implements the logic described in the paper.
- For additional resources to stimulate awareness and understanding about appraising multiple products along the competitive landscape in your targeted markets (video presentation, book, action-learning workshops), see, "Resources for Building Customer Value Management Capabilities" ((January 2012).
* US Patent No. 8,108,246 B2, Bradley Gale and Donald Swire, System and Method for Pricing a Product, Issued 1/31/2012
In-house Workshops: Learn Customer Value Management while Honing your Product-Market Strategy
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Three new 2-day in-house workshops to choose from:
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Seminar on Value-Based Pricing -- Now Online
Dr. Bradley T. Gale - Author, Managing Customer Value; Founder and President, Customer Value Inc. - speaks on Customer Value Assessment for Value-Based Pricing in this new online seminar. The 56-minute talk, available anytime 24/7, is a great resource for individuals or teams interested in pricing on value. Topics covered include
- Overview of the framework for managing customer value
- Case example illustrating the techniques and tools of customer value mapping
- Case vignettes of how business teams have used customer value analysis: business issue, analysis steps, insights gained, actions taken, and results achieved
- Responses to frequently asked questions
- Examples of how segmentation and differentiation link to value analysis
- How to get started
This seminar is one in a series on Value-Based Pricing produced by London-based Henry Stewart Talks. These talks are aimed at managers and executives in industrial and commercial enterprises who are looking to improve the profitability of their products and services. Leading experts have been brought together under the guidance of Series Editor Mr. Harry Macdivitt, Director of Axia Value Solutions, whose 20 years of experience in the field includes general and marketing management, consultancy and training.
A special discount for this talk as well as for the others in the series is available. For more information about the series and the special rate, see www.hstalks.com/r/cval.
Download brochure: Developing Successful Strategies using the Value Strategy Toolkit
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Value-Based Pricing & Marketing
The idea behind value-based pricing is compelling: make sure that your prices are in line with the benefits you deliver to customers. It's the only safe way to steer a course between the shoals of overpricing (alienating customers) and the rocks of underpricing (and leaving money on the table). But value-based pricing can be done only if you can calculate what your product, with its unique pattern of strengths and weaknesses, is really worth to the customer. The need for such calculations has spawned a number of different approaches to figuring out a product's worth. Among these approaches are attribute importance-performance analysis, economic value analysis, and conjoint analysis.
CVI's value-based-pricing methodology, described in our white paper Value-Based Marketing and Pricing, synthesizes these approaches. It allows you to draw on the best of all of the tools depending on what's most appropriate and what data you have readily available.
Who Uses Customer Value Analysis and Management?
Business-unit general managers:
- Stem market-share losses, earn market-share gains
- Align functions heads to outperform competitors on attributes that matter most to customers
- Drive profitable product-line growth
Product-development leaders
- Use objective measures on product performance elements to construct overall measures of performance for your products and competing products
- Assess competitiveness of alternative product concepts and targeted prices versus products likely to be on the market at launch
- Fund and accelerate the most promising product concepts, kill off unpromising concepts early on
- Set realistic target prices -- for launch and over the product life cycle
Product-line managers
- Prioritize actions to improve performance on key buying factors (product, service, relationship, and brand affinity attributes)
- Differentiate products to win in their targeted market segments
- Change prices based on the changing value of products, as customer needs and competitive offerings change
Marketing strategists
- Assess the product’s comparative advantages and disadvantages in key market segments
- Craft value propositions for the product category as a whole and for each targeted segment
- Prepare sales team aids for selling head-to-head versus each key competitor
Strategic pricing leaders
- Set realistic target prices for new products
- Change prices as the competitive value of products change