Price Image is how shoppers perceive a store’s pricing relative to its competitors. It is not the same as Price Index. Many more things go into establishing price image, including promotion programs, elasticities, seasonality, price ending numbers, and the overall design of a retailer store.
Price Index vs Price Image
Price optimization solutions that are available today are based on rules and price indices that exclude your desired image. What is needed are psychological models that measure your consumers’ perception of your pricing AND predict the impact of price changes on that image.
At its core, it is a metric that takes customer excitement into account. Whereas Price Index relies on historical data and plotting points, Price Image is predictive and non-linear – making it much more useful in making strategic pricing decisions. It incorporates psychological elements, making it a consumer-specific metric.
A Nobel Prize-Winning Approach
The calculation was inspired at Engage3 by Markowitz’s Efficient Frontier Theory. It’s a theory that has been successfully used for decades in managing financial portfolios and is now applied to retail pricing.It enables retailers to strategically manage competitive price adjustments so they can balance their profit goals with a desired image in the market.
What to Look For in a Strategic Pricing Solution
Price Image takes psychological factors and applies them to pricing data. The resulting models can be used to predict future profitability and are not reliant on historical data. Below is a list of what to look for in a strategic pricing solution:
- Integration with clean, comprehensive, and accurate competitive intelligence data
- Statistically-driven performance reporting that separates real pricing impact from market level “noise”
- Streamlined workflow for competitive price recommendations and approvals
- Alerts for incomplete or outdated competitive data for review
- A visual price modeling tool to define the impact of strategic pricing alternatives
- Competitor activity and movement callouts on highly elastic products
- Makes price recommendations based on your objectives for:
- Image
- Profitability
- Allows Merchants and Pricing Teams define their strategy and show the financial tradeoffs for different alternatives
The predictive model is especially valuable in forecasting sales, because it allows a retailer to see how its customers are responding to different pricing strategies. Greater visibility translates to higher profit margins and happier customers!
Learn more about how the Efficient Frontier Theory is applied to retail pricing in this video.
