Markup is just plain gross, not Gross Margin

An anonymous commenter on my previous post wrote,

maybe you need a refresher in the most basic tenets of finance and accounting because gross margin is a percentage, not an absolute dollar figure. you’re referring to GROSS PROFIT, but calling it gross margin.

First correction on this comment is – Gross Margin can be expressed as either absolute dollar value or as percentage. In most situations it is understood by context – especially by the practitioners. Gross Profit and Gross Margin are used interchangeably as well. See for example Apple’s earnings release

But when Google Finance shows Apple’s financials they refer to it as Gross Profit.

Sometimes we see Gross Margin Percentage explicitly used to indicate percentage margin. Again practitioners are not confused by any of the terms even when two of them are used interchangeably.

What is Gross Margin? (or Gross Profit)

Expressed as dollar value it  revenue less cost of goods sold. Expressed as a percentage it is this difference divided by revenue.

The anonymous commenter (who seem to have inexplicably routed his IP traffic through Fool.com, because I know MotleyFool is not afraid of making comments) added,

gross margin is the percentage that a company nets on the sale of a good after dividing it by its cost of goods sold.

That is not true. What this person is confusing with is  Markup. While Gross Margin (etc.) are financial accounting terms Markup is not. Its origins are in cost based pricing. You compute the cost to make a widget, add your preset margin you want to extract and call it the price.

Which you, my right tail readers, know is simply gross way to set prices. It would serve us all well if we banish the  ”Mark Brothers” – Mark Up and Mark Down.

Another note on Gross Margin – it is a financial accounting term used for financial reporting purposes. The intended audience are investors and regulators. Since competitors can also see this companies do not want to signal their exact cost structure. So they  confound this number with a share of fixed cost allocation from manufacturing.

If you as a product manager or marketer going to worry about margin, worry about customer margin.

The Lego Pricing Puzzle

In a recent Wired blog post, physicist Rhett Allain asks

Why Are LEGO Sets Expensive?

and answers his own question by stating,

I’m not sure I would say LEGO blocks are that expensive, but the statement is that they are expensive because they are so well made.

To his credit he immediately qualifies his claim by adding

Really, this has to at least be partially true.

Then professor Allain goes on to make his case based on size variances in Lego pieces and compares it with variances in other blocks used for “play constructions”. Finding no statistically significant difference with other plastic blocks he adds,

but the LEGO blocks appear to be created from harder plastic. Maybe this would lead them to maintain their size over a long period of time. (but no data)

Finally he builds a regression model of price of Lego sets  to number of pieces in each set.

In essence, Allain made up his mind that Lego is expensive because of the intricacies in manufacturing, its cost of materials and number of pieces. He then collects data that would support his claim but quickly discards them with alternative explanation when data doesn’t fit his claim.

But lost in all this are some published hard numbers from Lego. They have 70% gross margin and 30% operating margin. Note that I am using gross margin reported in financial statements that usually include other fixed cost allocations to confound the numbers. That is Lego’s real contribution margin (price less true marginal cost) could be higher than 70%.

Even if Lego were to cut is price in half they would make as much gross margin as MegaBloks that makes Lego compatible pieces. Intricacies in manufacturing and cost of hard plastic do not contribute to Lego’s costs (or prices as Allain claims). That is Lego does not incur any additional costs because, “they are so very well made”.

Lego is priced thusly because they identified customers who value its offering and are willing to pay the price premium despite the presence of cheaper alternatives. All the reasons about details of pieces and their size variance are post purchase rationalizations we tell ourselves to justify the price we paid.

Your costs are just that, your costs. Costs are not something you pass on to your customers (unless you use that as ploy to pass on price increases).

Pricing Flash Storage in Tablets – Don’t Call This As Markup

The New York Times Bits blog laments about the giant markup Apple and Amazon charge on flash storage. Bits blog not only complains about the price vs. cost difference but also caught on to the price difference between Kindle and iPad for the same storage.

Kindle: 16 gigabytes for $300 and 32GB for $370; to enjoy 16 extra gigabytes of storage, a customer pays $70 more. For its smaller 7-inch tablets, Amazon charges $50 more for an extra 16 gigabytes.

iPad: You can get a 16GB model for $500, a 32GB model for $600 or a 64GB one for $700. That’s $100 extra for that first 16GB bump, then a relatively cheap $100 to get from there to 64GB.

At the outset let me point out I have lamented on the same topic as well but mostly admired it and only lamented it a bit as a consumer. Let me point out how the flash storage prices vary even within Apple’s different product lines,

Yes both Kindle and iPad are able to extract lot more consumer surplus with their flash pricing. That is because they figured out their customers value the additional capacity lot more and are willing to pay the additional $100 (or $70) for doubling capacity. This is not markup and the fact that flash costs 50 cents per gigabyte should not matter.

Using words like markup comes from cost based pricing (add up all the costs then mark it up to get the price, hence markup), as is shown by this text in the same Bits blog post,

Of course, when you buy a new gadget, you’re not just paying for a slab of components. The maker of the product is trying to get you to cover the cost of research and development, manufacturing and advertising, and still rake in some profit.

Note how sure the author is – “Of course, you understand the price you pay is …”.

Let me do my own convincing and point out that – of course  customers are not concerned about your costs. They are not paying the price to defray your costs. Besides R&D, Manufacturing and Advertising costs are sunk and are not attributed on a per unit basis.

Customers pay for what they value and marketers charge for that value. If marketers figured out a way to deliver the value at  the lowest possible price it does not mean they have to pass on the savings as lower prices unless they are forced (by market forces) to do so.

Call this effective pricing and don’t call it as markup.

As a customer do I lament alongside Bits blog? I do. But as a product guy I admire their pricing.

For extra credit see my articles on

1. Nexus 7 flash pricing
2. Second degree price discrimination infographic
3. Why Apple does not include earphones with iPad?

Pricing Beer in Ballparks

Think of the last time you were at a ballpark and paid for beer. You likely remember paying at least twice as much as what you pay in a restaurant and four times as much what you pay in retail stores.

Which ballpark in the country has the most expensive beer? According to the NPR story it is the Marlin’s ballpark.

According to an analysis by TheStreet.com, the most expensive beer of any baseball stadium is sold at the new Marlins Park, where baseball fans pay $8 for a Bud Light draft.

Why do baseball parks charge you a “small fortune” for a beer?

If you asked the Marlin’s officials, their company line is

“Well, when you look at it, the pricing reflects basically the total cost of the operations including our players,”

Well said. Don’t mistake this statement for pricing naiveté of Marlin’ pricing managers. They understand pricing at customer’s willingness to pay and not based on cost. They simply are using cost argument to justify the pricing. Seriously, no pricing manager worth his salt will believe for a moment the cost of ball players is included in the price of beer. So will the price go up when they sign an expensive player or go down when they fire one? (See here for an example)

The cost based argument is to justify the higher prices and nothing more (like we saw with Starbucks story).

If you read my Groupon book, there is a chapter on how different customers are willing to pay different prices for the same product. One of the example I used is the price of beer at ballparks. Some are willing to pay the set price to enjoy the beer and some aren’t. Ballparks, with so much data about their customers in their hands, can easily find the price at which their profit from beer is maximized. They don’t have to sell beer to most number of people, they only have to maximize their profit.

Take for example, one of the baseball fans interviewed for the story,

“I’m used to, like, $3 pitcher nights and, like, dollar beers and stuff. But I have no choice.”

Marinelli works a part-time job at a sporting goods store where an $8 beer is “an hour of work, on average,” he says. “It’s expensive, man!”

This fan may not buy all the time but does a few times. From the ballpark’s perspective people like Marinelli don’t have to buy beer on every visit, because there are lot more fans like him and there are lot others who are willing to pay every time. An additional thing going for the ballparks is there are no alternatives. You cannot bring beer from outside.

This is the reason why even at the peak of recession, beer prices at ballparks went up. See here for a detailed explanation of demand curve shifts.

Still not convinced how Marlins price beer? Here is a clear indication that they get pricing – Marlin’s EVP of operations says,

the Marlins could be charging a lot more — customers in Miami have been trained to expect expensive drinks. You go to a nightclub and the markup on a bottle of vodka might be 4,000 percent. In that sense, the 800 percent markup on Bud Light at Marlins Park could be much worse

They understand reference price of their customers (remember the famous willingness to pay for beer experiment by Richard Thaler). Customers have been trained to expect higher prices in such public venues and Marlins is merely building on it.

How do you price your products? And how do you communicate how you price your products to your customers?

How can I offer $140 shirt for only $39.50?

I received an Ad insert for Charles Tyrwhitt shirts with Saturday’s WSJ. Yes, as a matter of fact I still get the real paper newspaper, but we digress.

The Ad offered all kinds of dress shirts for a single price of $39.50 (normally $140 to $160). The Ad, speaking in the voice of the shirt company founder, then poses the question you see in the post title and answers it for us.

As expected the answer starts with cost, “because our buyers are great, we deal direct and no middlemen”

You can see at play some of the behavioral pricing tactics – price anchoring  with stated high price and signaling great value with marked down prices. Besides the  tactics the explanation does not answer the original question. In fact that is not the right question at all.

If the cost argument is accurate, then the question a customer should ask is,

How is it a shirt that likely costs less than $39.50 to make is normally priced at $140-$160?

As a regular reader of this blog and a fellow practitioner of value based pricing you may be tempted to answer this pricing question  with,

“because there exist a customer segment that is willing to pay that price for whatever job they are hiring the shirt for”

Unfortunately it is not the case with apparel pricing.  Pricing is not as sophisticated as you believe it is. It is steadfastly stuck in the land of cost based pricing with standard markups.

The data for this comes from an article in WSJ that analyzes pricing of $155 polo shirts. Almost the same, down to the sub-category level and price point.

Great cost analysis,atrocious pricing – using standard markups #pricing on.wsj.com/xqjHhv—
Rags Srinivasan (@rags) February 02, 2012

The article does a marvelous job of marginal cost analysis. Most articles on cost analysis commit cost allocation error – allocating a share of all fixed costs to every unit made. This analysis gives us a true marginal cost of $29.57 for a polo shirt. We won’t be far off to assume that Tyrwhitt shirts have the same cost structure.

Then we see how they arrive at $155 price tag,

Using standard industry markups, the MacLanes set the wholesale price for the women’s polo at $65 and the retail price at $155. (Retailers in the U.S. mark up wholesale prices of ready-to-wear by roughly 2.2 to 2.5 times.)

Here are your answers for both the original wrong question and the right question.

How can a producer offer a $140 shirt for only $39.50?
Because it likely  costs them less than $39.50 to make one so they can still make  profit per unit and the $140 price is based on wholesale and retail markups.

How is it a shirt that likely costs less than $39.50 to make is normally priced at $140-$160?
Because of the antiquated way of setting wholesale and retail prices of apparels.

It is one thing to charge four  or forty times the marginal cost based on customer willingness to pay (Apple) but to charge four times the marginal cost based on standard markups  is …

What do you charge for a service that you just made up?

We all would like to believe there is nothing like our product or service. After all we are innovators and our vision is to change the way people do things. The investor pitch deck from a startup, Everest, sums up this attitude

Let us take all such claims at face value and treat every one of these products and services as new. Then we face the key monetization question
What do we charge for a service that we just made up?

To make this question more meaningful let us use a simple yet real life case study instead of talking about hypothetical product. The case study comes to us from NPR Planet Money, (Don’t read the full story yet, I will take you to the middle of the story to set up the case)

Two guys offer visa form printing services in front of the New York Chinese consulate.Visa applicants, turned away at the visa counter for filling they wrong forms, come to these guys who have computer and printer in a RV parked right outside the consulate. No such service existed before. They just made this up. How do you think they should price this innovative service?

As I wrote in the past, there are two places to start to answer the pricing question – even for something we’re building just now, Product or Customers. My recommended starting point is, Customers.

Even if the product is innovative and what you are building doesn’t exist yet, the needs are not.  The needs are why the customers are hiring your products for (Christensen). If needs indeed exist then they are currently addressed by different customers differently.

In general there are always different customer segments. For some  the needs may go unaddressed for others the needs may be addressed through alternatives, however sub-optimal they may be. There may not be a competitor product but there are always incumbents. In some sense, doing nothing is an alternative too (for Intuit’s TurboTax, they defined their incumbent as paper and pencil).

In the Chinese visa case the alternative is walking to the closest internet cafe and paying for printing or coming back another day (like those with low opportunity cost for their time).

You can’t serve all segments, at least not initially. You need to choose your segments, those that offer the best return with your limited resources. After all strategy is about making choices.

Say you choose the segment that used to walk to nearest internet cafe.  By choosing this segment you already know they are willing to pay for printing the forms at the internet cafe and they incur additional pain to make the round trip.

Your next step  is to position the product in the minds of the target segment. Positioning your product is not about how innovative it is but about what job you want them to hire it for and why your product is better than anything else that customers hire now. If you can’t position your product you can’t control its pricing.

Once you perfect the positioning, pricing is the next logical step. Hiring your product over the alternative adds incremental value to customers (like avoiding round-trip walk) and you price your service to capture your share of the value created.

How do you quantify the value created and how do you know your right share that customer will willingly part with? Some customers know, some don’t. It is up to you to do the value creation math and show it to them. Then you rely on quantitative methods, pricing experiments and signaling to find your fair share – the price customer is willing to pay without pain.

In general,  cases where you have repeat customers it is important to get the first pricing correct. Choose too low, you forgo profits. Choose two high and continue to drop prices, you lose credibility. That said, if you have done the Segmentation right, Targeting right and Positioning right, the pricing can’t be far from right.

Let us come back to the case study. They had no repeat customers. They chose to experiment. They charged $10, the same price charged by internet cafe and found the demand overwhelming. Next they went to $40 and found drop in sales. Now they charge $20.

Be it a software product,  magical delivery service or Visa form printing service – you need to worry about monetization. Otherwise why do it, however innovative the service is?

So what do you charge for a service that you just made up?

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Readings:

1. NPR Planet Money Story http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/04/144636898/a-man-a-van-a-surprising-business-plan
2. Segmentation
3. Startups and Segmentation
4. An entrepreneur will not always succeed in positioning his latest innovation the next “new thing.” http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/oct09/5.aspx

Note 1: Note that the pricing for the service did not take into account the cost to rent the van, opportunity cost of the two guys operating it, or the cost of printing. Pricing comes before costing. If you cannot deliver the service profitably at the price customer is willing to pay you need to explore options.

Note 2: The price $10 set by internet cafe is the reference price in the minds of customers. Even if that price is wrong (cost based) you are stuck with it unless you can shift the reference.