RSR’s recently published benchmark report on the state of Retail Pricing, Retail Pricing 2017: The Dawn Of Personalized Prices, shows that retailers continue to focus on the challenges of increased price transparency, continued price sensitivity of consumers, and continued price aggressiveness of competitors.But we also saw something new in the challenges that retailers are grappling with vis-à-vis their pricing strategies. That is, retailers now are putting greater emphasis on driving demand and creating excitement for the brand – consumer-focused pricing objectives, in contrast to what we found in our 2016 study, inventory-focused objectives.

Over-performing Retail Winners are much more focused on driving demand than average and under-performers. In fact, 18% more Winners than other retailers believe that driving demand is a top objective of their companies’ pricing strategies.But even non-Winners are more focused on consumers than they have been in the past. While Winners use terms like “demand ” or “excitement “, other retailers define price in the context of their “value proposition ” and “market share “.

This leaves us to ponder which terms are really more focused on reaching individual customers. Terms like “excitement ” speak far more toward engaging with consumers than terms like “market share. ” It’s a subtle but important difference: Winners use competitive prices to help create excitement around the Brand to drive demand, while their lesser-performing peers tend to see price as how the Brand’s value is defined.

Nowhere is this distinction more important than when looking at the impact retailers expect to see from their future price and promotion decisions. Retail Winners are far more likely to expect results that are defined in terms of customer engagement – things like driving increased frequency of purchase, getting consumers to buy more within a category, and expanding their categories of purchase.

Let’s Watch Videos!

At RSR, we’ve been experimenting with new ways to deliver key findings from our industry-leading benchmark reports.With that in mind, we developed an eBook version of this year’s benchmark report on the State of Retail Pricing (which you can download by going to this link). We’ve also developed three short videos on key findings from the report, which we hope you will enjoy!

Click on the following titles to see them!

RSR Retail Trends: Retail Pricing Puts More Pressure On Stores

RSR Retail Trends: Retail Price Execution Becomes Paramount

RSR Retail Trends: Retailers Focus On Driving Demand