Price War is a competitive strategy where companies aggressively reduce prices to gain an edge in the market. It often occurs in the retail and airline industries, benefitting customers with lower prices. While it can lead to increased market share, challenges like profit erosion and maintaining brand image must be addressed for long-term success.
Table of Contents
Characteristics
Price-Cutting: Aggressively cutting prices to gain a competitive edge.
Intense Competition: Occurs during fierce rivalry among competitors.
Customer Benefit: Customers benefit from lower prices during the war.
Profit Erosion: May lead to reduced profit margins for companies.
Use Cases
Retail Sector: Competing retailers slashing prices to attract shoppers.
Airline Industry: Airlines offering discounted fares during peak seasons.
Examples
Smartphone Brands: Companies lowering prices to outdo competitors.
E-commerce Platforms: Online platforms offering discounts during festive seasons.
Benefits
Market Share Growth: Opportunity to gain a larger market share.
Customer Attraction: Attracting more customers with lower prices.
Sustainability: Ensuring the long-term sustainability of price cuts.
Brand Image: Preserving brand image during intense competition.
Key Highlights
Price-Cutting Strategy: Price wars involve aggressive price reductions by companies to gain a competitive advantage in the market.
Intense Competition: Price wars typically occur during periods of fierce rivalry and competition among competitors in the industry.
Customer Benefit: Customers benefit from lower prices and increased affordability of products or services during a price war.
Profit Erosion: Engaging in a price war can lead to reduced profit margins for companies, impacting their financial performance.
Use Cases: Price wars are commonly observed in the retail sector, where competitors lower prices to attract shoppers, and in the airline industry, where airlines offer discounted fares during peak travel seasons.
Examples: Price wars can be seen among smartphone brands that lower prices to outperform competitors and in e-commerce platforms that offer discounts during festive seasons.
Benefits: Companies engaging in price wars have the opportunity to grow their market share by attracting more customers with lower prices.
Challenges: Challenges associated with price wars include maintaining profitability while operating with reduced prices, ensuring the long-term sustainability of price cuts, and preserving the brand image during intense competition.
Revenue model patterns are a way for companies to monetize their business models. A revenue model pattern is a crucial building block of a business model because it informs how the company will generate short-term financial resources to invest back into the business. Thus, the way a company makes money will also influence its overall businessmodel.
A pricingstrategy or model helps companies find the pricing formula in fit with their business models. Thus aligning the customer needs with the product type while trying to enable profitability for the company. A good pricingstrategy aligns the customer with the company’s long term financial sustainability to build a solid businessmodel.
Price sensitivity can be explained using the price elasticity of demand, a concept in economics that measures the variation in product demand as the price of the product itself varies. In consumer behavior, price sensitivity describes and measures fluctuations in product demand as the price of that product changes.
A price ceiling is a price control or limit on how high a price can be charged for a product, service, or commodity. Price ceilings are limits imposed on the price of a product, service, or commodity to protect consumers from prohibitively expensive items. These limits are usually imposed by the government but can also be set in the resale price maintenance (RPM) agreement between a product manufacturer and its distributors.
Price elasticity measures the responsiveness of the quantity demanded or supplied of a good to a change in its price. It can be described as elastic, where consumers are responsive to price changes, or inelastic, where consumers are less responsive to price changes. Price elasticity, therefore, is a measure of how consumers react to the price of products and services.
In Economics, Economies of Scale is a theory for which, as companies grow, they gain cost advantages. More precisely, companies manage to benefit from these cost advantages as they grow, due to increased efficiency in production. Thus, as companies scale and increase production, a subsequent decrease in the costs associated with it will help the organizationscale further.
In Economics, a Diseconomy of Scale happens when a company has grown so large that its costs per unit will start to increase. Thus, losing the benefits of scale. That can happen due to several factors arising as a company scales. From coordination issues to management inefficiencies and lack of proper communication flows.
A network effect is a phenomenon in which as more people or users join a platform, the more the value of the service offered by the platform improves for those joining afterward.
Price skimming is primarily used to maximize profits when a new product or service is released. Price skimming is a productpricingstrategy where a company charges the highest initial price a customer is willing to pay and then lowers the price over time.
Productized services are services that are sold with clearly defined parameters and pricing. In short, that is about taking any product and transforming it into a service. This trend has been strong as the subscription-based economy developed.
Menu costs describe any cost that a business must absorb when it decides to change its prices. The term itself references restaurants that must incur the cost of reprinting their menus every time they want to increase the price of an item. In an economic context, menu costs are expenses that are incurred whenever a business decides to change its prices.
A price floor is a control placed on a good, service, or commodity to stop its price from falling below a certain limit. Therefore, a price floor is the lowest legal price a good, service, or commodity can sell for in the market. One of the best-known examples of a price floor is the minimum wage, a control set by the government to ensure employees receive an income that affords them a basic standard of living.
Predatory pricing is the act of setting prices low to eliminate competition. Industry dominant firms use predatory pricing to undercut the prices of their competitors to the point where they are making a loss in the short term. Predatory prices help incumbents keep a monopolistic position, by forcing new entrants out of the market.
A price ceiling is a price control or limit on how high a price can be charged for a product, service, or commodity. Price ceilings are limits imposed on the price of a product, service, or commodity to protect consumers from prohibitively expensive items. These limits are usually imposed by the government but can also be set in the resale price maintenance (RPM) agreement between a product manufacturer and its distributors.
The bye-now effect describes the tendency for consumers to think of the word “buy” when they read the word “bye”. In a study that tracked diners at a name-your-own-price restaurant, each diner was asked to read one of two phrases before ordering their meal. The first phrase, “so long”, resulted in diners paying an average of $32 per meal. But when diners recited the phrase “bye bye” before ordering, the average price per meal rose to $45.
The anchoring effect describes the human tendency to rely on an initial piece of information (the “anchor”) to make subsequent judgments or decisions. Price anchoring, then, is the process of establishing a price point that customers can reference when making a buying decision.
A price maker is a player who sets the price, independently from what the market does. The price setter is the firm with the influence, market power, and differentiation to be able to set the price for the whole market, thus charging more and yet still driving substantial sales without losing market shares.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
