مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد استراتژی قیمت گذاری (الزویر)

Pricing has always been an integral component of marketing (Borden, 1964); of the traditional marketing elements, only pricing creates revenue (LaPlaca, 1997; Shipley & Jobber, 2001). As Morris (1987, p. 79) notes, “one of the more basic, yet critical decisions facing a business is what price to charge customers for products and services.” This decision is particularly critical in what The Economist (2013) calls the “age of austerity”—an era characterized by sales stagnation, no reasonable possibility of cutting costs further, and price as the only remaining lever. In this competitive environment, more than ever, a sound pricing strategy is required to facilitate customer value creation, structure price decisions, and earn a profit (see Lancioni, Schau, & Smith, 2005); Hinterhuber and Bertini (2011) caution that a deficient pricing strategy inhibits profitability. According to Gijsbrechts (1993, p. 115) though, “developing an appropriate pricing strategy is both crucial and highly complex.” Prior research emphasizes its dependence on various factors, such as the environment (Diamantopoulos, 1991), firm objectives, customer characteristics (Tellis, 1986), and the pricing situation (Noble & Gruca, 1999). Different pricing strategies in turn reflect these contingencies, such as price skimming, penetration pricing (Noble & Gruca, 1999; Tellis, 1986), price bundling, price promotion, or complementary pricing (Gijsbrechts, 1993). For the current study, a pricing strategy is the mean to determine relative price levels by considering influential factors and thereby realizing certain business objectives in a specific situation (Noble & Gruca, 1999; Tellis, 1986). Accordingly, “a pricing strategy provides a systematic delineation of the elements that must be managed to achieve profitable performance in a business” (Cressman, 2012, p. 246). Generally, these elements include the intended pricing objective (e.g., profit maximization), the relative target price level (associated with cost, competition, and/or customer value), and the internal and external factors (e.g., market environment) that face the business (Noble & Gruca, 1999). Noting the topic’s general relevance for marketing, this article provides a pertinent literature review, motivated by three key arguments. First, existing reviews adopt either a business-to-consumer (B2C) (Gijsbrechts, 1993; Tellis, 1986) or business-to-business (B2B) (Noble & Gruca, 1999) perspective, making it difficult to assess marketing’s overall contribution to pricing strategy research (PSR). Second, more recent reviews focus on specific pricing aspects, such as behavioral pricing (Somervuori, 2014) or value-based pricing (Cressman, 2012), or address pricing research in general without examining pricing strategy literature in particular (Leone, Robinson, Bragge, & Somervuori, 2012). Third, more wide-ranging reviews have been conducted but were published several decades ago (Diamantopoulos, 1991; Rao, 1984), clinching the compelling case for a more contemporary literature review. Formally, this review therefore assesses the development and current state of PSR in marketing on five dimensions: (1) market and offering focus, (2) topic, (3) theoretical foundation, (4) research design, and (5) respondent profile. It highlights enduring features and critical developments in the field; ultimately, the main contribution of this review is a set of takeaways that suggest directions for further research.1 Similar to comparable reviews of other topics (e.g., Williams & Plouffe, 2007), it also offers an efficient starting point to acquaint readers with the theoretical and methodological foundations of PSR.