No one intends to start a price war, and yet price wars get started. See how strategy simulations and business war games help strategists prevent all-too-human blunders and boost the bottom line.

The solution to our business woes is almost never in more-detailed spreadsheets, more-statistical forecasts, or more-timely data. Those remedies lead to precision in, garbage out; they don’t solve deeper problems. Instead, we can get much better ROI by improving our thinking and our decision-making skills. With 30 years’ global experience in strategy simulation and business war games, the speaker brings a unique perspective to critical strategic challenges. Attendees will participate in a miniature war game in this interactive, challenging, and provocative workshop. This session is not about pricing trends or fads; it is about breaking through thinking-as-usual. As they say: if you want to change your life, change your mind.

Attendees will learn how to:

• Avoid why humans (including pricers) fall into decision-making traps
  
• Think differently, and to gain competitive advantage by doing so
  
• Use techniques, big and small, to foster better strategy decisions, including pricing

Mark Chussil, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Advanced Competitive Strategies Inc.

1:00
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4:00

The first part of the workshop will involve finding gold in the data. With the increasing availability of data, pricers can access that data to create knowledge about their customers’ and markets’ responses to pricing initiatives. In this part of the workshop, Alain will highlight some approaches to analyzing data and provide examples of how this has led to the development of pricing strategies.

Among the techniques covered will be:

• Regression analysis
• Factor analysis
• Correspondence analysis
• Clustering

But, internal data may not exist or suffice, so it has to be obtained to establish the value of a product or service. Two approaches will be discussed. The first, conjoint or discrete choice analysis, powerful to identify the trade-offs between price and other product attributes, will be reviewed. The second, value chain analysis, especially powerful in identifying the value that suppliers may provide to their business clients will then be highlighted.

Putting these factors together in the real-world of the competitive marketplace will be covered in the third part of the workshop.

Specifically:

• Decision tree analysis principles will be covered
  
• An example of the use of decision trees in developing a pricing strategy will be given
  
• Game theory basics will be presented
  
• Participants will be asked to play a pricing game

Alain Meloche, Partner, Strategic Pricing Management