Using Cost Argument In Pricing

Pricing is about capturing a fair share of the value you add to your customers.  This method of pricing is called value based pricing. The opposite of this is called cost based pricing that is  internally focused and ignores  customers.  Your costs are irrelevant to pricing, as long as you are not selling below marginal cost and beyond break even point. After all if you are making a loss on every sale or on the whole operation then it makes no sense to be in that line business.

That said, a marketer can use costs signals to introduce price increases while assuaging customer concerns about fairness. I do want to stress that this is a pricing tactic and not a strategy. In their paper titled, Perceptions of Price Fairness, researchers Gielissen, Dutilh,and Graafland  validated their hypothesis,

Hypothesis 2: Options to pass on production costs are perceived to be fair.

When customers see the price increase is a result of cost increases, they are  willing to accept the new prices. Once the high prices become established, these become the new reference price and can remain sticky even when the original cause (production cost increase) is no longer valid.  We see that in the earnings results of CPG brands that used commodity price increase in 2008 to push through their price increases. Since they hit their peak in 2008, prices of food and utilities have come down but the CPG price increases remain.

Brands, despite their current pricing strategy, should implement tactics that take advantage of short-term market conditions. While we saw how P&G, Nestle, Cadbury, Heinz and Unilever taking  advantage of cost increases we also saw Lindt’s not using the increase in cocoa prices to increase its prices. The result is a 90% drop in their profits.

The net of this is, your costs are immaterial to your pricing strategy but short term price increases can be used as effective signals to fix faults in your pricing.