The Mercer Management Journal is dead. If you click through you will be taken to the Internet Archive site to find an archived copy.
Many sales and marketing managers continue to have faith that price cuts can “fix” problems such as undifferentiated products or an obscure brand image. Their faith is misplaced. Price decreases are easy to implement–especially compared to changes in product attributes or customer service, for instance–but extremely difficult to reverse. It often takes years, to bring a price back to its original level. What’s most regrettable is that price often isn’t the driver that instinct or history or a manager’s whim might say it is.
We find that when asked directly, customers regularly overstate the importance of price. But when they are asked, using a series of choice matrices, to trade off product and service features against price, their ranking of price drops steeply.
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