Be a Standout Firm: You Can't Afford to Compete on Price Alone

Source: Golden Practices Blog

Following are excerpts, reproduced with permission, from a recent blog posting by Michelle Golden, president of Golden Marketing Inc.

Firms have a problem and it's a marketing problem. Marketing 101 taught us that Price was one of the 4 “Ps” of Marketing. Funny that most firms don't “let” marketing stick their noses in the pricing strategy and process.

Firms seem to think marketing and pricing aren't related. But they are.

Yesterday, Seth Godin picked on accountants in his post “We're the Same. We're the Same. We're the Same.” He refers to their websites and says:

Sometimes, we try so hard to fit in we give consumers no choice but to seek out the cheapest. After all, if everything is the same, why not buy what's cheap and close?

Did you “hear” that? Seth explains that we CAUSE buyers to compare us on price, alone. And he is exactly right.

When marketers are tasked with building websites, or anything that has to do with positioning, partners are prone to killing innovative ideas that would lead to true differentiation. Instead, they want the assurance their peers would say or do “that” — they want PRECEDENT. They want to know what their competitors are doing. They want “best practices.”

Guess what??? If someone, ANYone, is doing it, it's not different.

Pricing too low has deleterious effects on morale of everyone involved.

Here's a diagram to illustrate the cyclical perils of competing on price alone:

What do you think? Does this convince firms to let marketing into the pricing conversation?

To read the complete post, click here.

From Golden Practices, http://goldenmarketing.typepad.comhttp://goldenmarketing.typepad.com, May 29, 2010.