Pricing Evolution Podcast

It’s the most discounted time of the year, and so in this 19th episode of the Pricing Evolution Podcast, we look at why brands and retailers run discounts. I list eight reasons why businesses have discounts and talk about the benefits and pitfalls of each. Thanks for reading PricingEvolution! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like t...

What’s the common thread between that acquaintance who likes to tell you about how he got a huge payment from the developers who wanted to cut down the trees at the edge of his property and the AI scientists that Meta is offering $100 million pay packages? It’s that being the last piece of the puzzle, which allows a larger project to get done, creates a unique pricing power. In this episode of the...

This latest episode of the Pricing Evolution Podcast takes a different format from usual. It’s an interview with Doug Mullett, the founder and owner of Forthright LED . Doug sells LED lighting to larger commercial buildings like warehouses and factories. His typical customer is lighting an indoor space larger than a football field. He’s not a trained pricer, he’s an entrepreneur running his own bu...

In 1905 there were less than 100,000 total cars on US roads, and the price of a car was 2x-3x the average annual wage of a US worker. That means that in terms of the years an average person would have to work to buy a car, the cars of 1905 (which had about the power of a modern lawn mower and a top speed of perhaps 30 miles per hour) took as long to save up for as a modern Corvette Z06 Supercar or...

This pricer has seen too many pundits pontificating that the economy had adjusted to tariffs and we can see that because the stock market is back to where it was on April 2nd before President Trump announced his reciprocal tariffs on countries across the world. I discuss the speed at which companies are actually adjusting to tariffs and how it will be 3-6 months before you can really expect to see...

With tariffs and other market changes going on, a lot of companies are trying to decide whether they need to take a price increase. In this week’s episode, I dive into how you should evaluate whether you need to take a price increase, and — it you do need to take one — how to segment your product and customers rather than simply taking the same price increase on all products and customers. I addre...

It’s been a week since I last posted, and I didn’t want to let it stretch to longer. That’s because things have been really busy, both at work (tariffs being a huge part of the issue there) and in life otherwise. However, I didn’t want to leave things entirely empty here, so I sat down after a long weekend of running the annual mulch sale fundraiser for my sons’ Boy Scout troop to talk about “last...

I’d been looking at a few different fun topics for this episode, but in the end, there’s one topic which is dominating price discussions at the moment, and I couldn’t ignore it. So, this week’s podcast is about tariffs. In the first half of the episode, I look at the more general questions: How to tariffs work? How were these particular tariff rates calculated? Will these tariffs cause companies t...

Especially in the online world, you see a lot of companies that offer products for free. How do they make money doing that? In this episode, we dive into the economics of free products and examine three different business models where companies make money while offering a product for free. We look a the following: You Are The Product For services such as Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn, the user is...

Spotify launched its premium plan in 2009 for $9.99/mo and thirteen years later in 2022 they had 205 million premium subscribers at that same price, but had never turned a profit. Then, over the course of 18 months in 2023 and 2024 they took two price increases, taking their standard premium plan from $9.99 to $11.99. And in the process, they went from losing €500 million in 2023 to making €1.1 bi...

Subway was in the news last week with the announcement that they have a $6.99 Footlong promotion through their app. I took the opportunity to discuss one of the most well known fast food promotions of all time, the $5 Footlong campaign, which became an everyday price for almost nine years. And yet, the price promotion which Subway described as driving $4 billion in incremental annual sales when it...

If you’re thinking about making a major change in your pricing, products, merchandising, or store operations in a retail chain, it makes sense that you would want to find out first if customers would like it. One obvious approach would be to do focus groups and surveys to find out what customers say they want. The problem is: often what customers say they want does not predict well what they will...

In today’s episode, I talk about the challenge faced by retailers — from fledgling startups to large Consumer Packaged Goods brands — trying to sell through Amazon when Amazon simultaneously wants to match the lowest price available through brick and mortar retailers and also receive a low enough wholesale price to compensate them for their shipping costs to consumers. The issue that that the cons...

Companies often claim that they are disrupting some particular market, however in his classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen talks about market disruption in a very specific way that has a lot to do with pricing. Market disruption is when a new player enters a market with a new product which is lower quality than the dominant products, but still good enough to meet the needs of...

A listener asked why video game makers sometimes discount as much as 50% to 75%. Are they making money? Why don’t they just lower the everyday price? I’m not a video game player myself, but I enjoyed diving into the research about how games are priced. In this episode I talk briefly about the “freemium” model that many mobile games use, where the game itself is free but the user is then encouraged...

How did mega-bookstores disrupt the world of local bookshops only to be destroyed in turn by Amazon? How did we reach a point where the #1 selling book on the Amazon kindle store was not published through a publisher? The travails of the modern book industry have a lot to do with pricing. In this episode, I look at the multiple pricing driven disruptions of the bookselling and publishing world. Th...

OpenAI’s pricing was in the news last week, after CEO Sam Altman admitted on X that he had personally set the price for the company’s Chat GPT Pro package at $200/mo, and that he was surprised to discover that they were losing money on it. Many professional pricers questioned both why the CEO was personally setting prices and also why the company was not using a pricing model which billed more dir...

In Episode 2, I expand on my explanation of the three layers of pricing: Macro, Strategic, and Transactional These were the topic of a recent text post: Three Levels of Pricing However, I expand the the discussion in the podcast and use additional examples. If you haven’t had a chance to read the post, this a great chance to catch up on it. But if you have, I don’t think you’ll find it’s just a re...

In the first episode of the Pricing Evolution Podcast, I tell the story of how I went from a Classics major studying Greek and Latin to a VP of Global Pricing. I also talk about why I’ve come to love pricing and you should too: because in order to do pricing well you need to understand both how your own company creates its products and also how much value those products truly deliver to customers....