How to define your pricing strategy
Pricing across multiple markets
Strategic pricing is a set of activities aimed at determining product prices in a way that supports specific business objectives—not just covering costs or blindly following competitors’ prices, as is often the case with non-strategic pricing.
The main goals of strategic pricing can include maximizing profit, increasing market share, entering new markets, deterring competition, or building a premium brand image.
What are the key differences between strategic pricing and unstructured pricing management?
Helps achieve business goals
Aligns teams around pricing decisions
Data-driven decision-making
Complete pricing overview
Management of 100% of products
Focus on margin and revenue
Stronger supplier relationships
A random variable in business management
Disconnected teams with no ownership of pricing
Decisions based on gut feeling
Lack of transparency on product pricing
Focus only on “A-category” products
Emphasis on irrelevant KPIs
Incomplete data for supplier negotiations
You may have already read about or even tried implementing certain pricing techniques—such as price psychology, bundling, dynamic pricing, AI-driven pricing models, price positioning, or price anchoring.
However, all of these are just small fragments of a much larger picture—individual tactics that you may or may not choose to apply. Many businesses use them without proper context, leaving them as isolated efforts with little measurable impact.
It’s like tracking warehouse restocking speed while ignoring the rest of inventory management. Or ordering a keyword analysis for SEO, then printing one of the keywords as a slogan for your office entrance—and stopping there.
Borrowing from management theory, a strategy is a long-term plan (typically at least a year ahead) that defines goals and steers the business in a specific direction. It’s a well-thought-out, interconnected system of activities aimed at achieving a goal. Tactics are the specific actions that support the strategy and help accomplish its objectives.
A simple example illustrates the connection between goals, strategy, and tactics:
We’ll cover more on crafting strategy and tactics in the next section.
Understanding the link between goals, strategy, and tactics is key to effective pricing.
At its core, strategic pricing is about setting product prices in a way that helps achieve business goals. The various pricing tactics we’ll explore in the Pricing Academy are simply tools to reach those goals. Together, we’ll learn how to identify, select, measure, and evaluate these tactics—keeping what works and discarding what doesn’t.
Before diving into specific tactics, it’s crucial to first define and choose the right pricing strategy.
