Pricing Books
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Table Of Contents
Top 10 Pricing Books [Updated 2023]
We have a collection of books on pricing that can set/advance the pricing foundation. And that means picking up a book or two or reading all of them to ensure that you charge the right price for your products/services. Below is the list of such books on pricing that you must read in 2023:
- No B.S. Price Strategy
- The 1% Windfall
- The Art of Pricing, New Edition
- The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing
- The Price Advantage
- Power Pricing
- Pricing with Confidence
- Value-Based Pricing
- Pricing Done Right
- The Psychology of Price
Let us discuss each pricing book in detail, along with its key takeaways and reviews.
#1 - No B.S. Price Strategy
The Ultimate No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoner Guide to Profits, Power, and Prosperity
by Dan S. Kennedy & Jason Marrs
This top-pricing book is a no-brainer if you are a business owner. However, it would be best to only charge a price after reading this book first.
Book Review
The readers of this book have praised the book profusely. One of the readers mentioned that one should read every chapter of this book at least three times. This book is so popular among readers because of its pricing approach. While most books are written from the perspective of theory, this pricing book is written from the account of experimentation. If you’re familiar with Dan S. Kennedy’s work, you would know that you would receive value in every chapter. And the book is full of useful information, stories, examples, and lessons you can directly translate into your business. From business coaches to sellers of lawns, from business owners to students who have been studying business management, this top book would add tremendous value to everyone who makes an effort to read the book. The only pitfall of this book is you need to read another book on pricing to create a strategy. This book is all about the fundamentals of pricing. Read this book along with something focused on pricing strategy, and you will be on your way to becoming a pricing superstar.
Key takeaways
- You will learn a lot from the book – the 9 ultimate price and fee failures, the trick about discounting without devaluing, the million-dollar secret behind “free,” the secret to price elasticity, and more.
- You will also receive access to the website – simplepricingsystem.com, which will provide tools and techniques to set a pricing strategy for your business.
#2 - The 1% Windfall
How Successful Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow
by Rafi Mohammed
This pricing book is a great foundational book on pricing.
Book Review
If you are a first-time entrepreneur and need guidance on pricing and setting the right pricing for your products/services, this book will be the right choice. Many readers who have gone through this book have remarked that this book has been their ultimate resource for creating pricing strategies. The book is for big businesses, but small businesses can use the fundamentals easily and can improve their bottom lines. The author is a pricing consultant and knows his stuff. You will find great information in every chapter with relevant and meaningful examples. Many pricing books talk about how to price your products/services right, but this book approaches the concepts from the perspective of profit and growth, without which pricing strategies have no value at all. If you’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time, consider reading this book at least once. You will find new information that you can add to your already doing. This book is a great refresher for business owners and people who have been in business for a short/long time.
Key takeaways
- This pricing book talks about a framework by using which you can bulletproof your business. And as a result, you’ll continue to grow and profit from favorable/adverse situations.
- This book also talks about how you can price the products/services in the case of recession, inflation, and the entry of new competitors.
#3 - The Art of Pricing, New Edition
How to Find the Hidden Profits to Grow Your Business
by Rafi Mohammed
Pricing isn’t only about a pricing strategy – you’ll get to know a lot of “behind-the-talk” about pricing.
Book Review
If you like the 1% windfall, you would definitely like this top-pricing book. You will learn a great deal from this single book, from positioning to pricing. According to a few readers, this book has been more valuable than a 1% windfall. Many readers remarked that at each chapter, you would pause and say, why didn’t you think about this idea before? Each chapter has useful information that you can use in your pricing strategy immediately. You will also learn the difference between perceived value and actual value and how these two affect every pricing strategy and, as a result, attract more/fewer customers. And this is not a technical book. It is for people continuously struggling with setting the right price to attract more customers and earn more revenue. You can be a business owner or a pricing professional, pick up this book, and all your worries about pricing will be gone.
Key takeaways
- To set the right price, you need to find out the positioning of your products/services and how the customers view your products/services compared with other products. You will find out how to set the right price.
- Along with providing easy-to-use strategies, this top pricing book gives a range of examples that help you find many options for your customers and activate any dormant customer base you have.
#4 - The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing:
A Guide to Growing More Profitably
by Thomas T. Nagle, John Hogan, and Joseph Zale
This book is right for you if you are a student and want to know about pricing and pricing strategy.
Book Review
This top pricing book is one of the best books on pricing if you’re a student and you’ve signed up for an Economics/Pricing course at your university. Even at MIT OpenCourseWare, this book is a must-read for understanding pricing. The best part of this book is that the theories and concepts are laid out so well that, as a student, you don’t need to go to the next book to search for another concept on pricing. This book is comprehensive in itself. You do not need another textbook if you want to pass the course. From product differentiation to pricing structures, from pricing in expanding the market to creating meaningful pricing strategies, you will learn all and more. After reading this book, you would be able to put yourself in the buyer’s position and could see why the stores you shop from offer you discounts and how the whole thing of pricing works out in real life.
Key takeaways
- Along with old examples of pricing, you will also receive examples of new pricing models. You would know how iPhone prices, how new models for pricing music work, and how to strategize for service pricing.
- You will also learn much about value creation and managing price changes regarding discounts, price reductions in the recession period, and an increase in cost-based prices.
- You will also learn how to communicate value through your pricing, which is one of the biggest challenges of new entrepreneurs.
#5 - The Price Advantage
by Walter L. Baker, Michael V. Marn and Craig C. Zawada
This best pricing book primarily focuses on pricing strategies for good and bad times.
Book Review
If you always need clarification about how you can think about pricing, pick up this book. This book will teach you a framework of pricing that will solve all your pricing issues. This book teaches you three particular things. First, this book will teach you the framework of pricing strategy that will help you create a product/market strategy and will give you a transactional pricing perspective to attack many pricing challenges. Second, it’s a great book on the pricing challenges you face after a merger; very few books talk about this specific issue. Third, you will also learn how to drive price change from this book, which is another good topic but is not widely discussed. If you’re a student of Economics or a business owner, or a pricing professional, this book should be on your “must-read” list. Moreover, for any giant company that wants to improve its bottom line, reading this book will certainly help the company leap.
Key takeaways
- The authors are pricing experts at McKinsey & Company. This book has shown how to identify, capture, and stick to substantial pricing gains in new businesses.
- You will also learn about pricing, custom-configured, tiered products, and service pricing.
- Along with this book, you will receive McKinsey pricing tools, pocket price waterfall, and value maps.
#6 - Power Pricing
How Managing Price Transforms the Bottom Line
by Robert J. Dolan and Hermann Simon
This top-pricing book is slightly different from the rest of the books.
Book Review
This best pricing book will certainly strengthen your bottom line, but this book isn’t a comprehensive guide on B2B pricing. Yes, it will serve the purpose of solving a few challenges of business that are not talked about widely. The best parts of this book are the three chapters. In Chapter 6, the authors discuss international pricing. In international pricing, the authors talk about globalization, price transparency, the internet, firms of all types, and how to set the price by considering all of these factors. In Chapter 12, the authors have become candid about how one can organize power pricing and how to understand the underlying concepts and overview. Finally, in Chapter 13, the authors discuss the basic elements required to improve pricing. For these three chapters only, you can buy the book. The rest of the chapters talk about value communication, quantifying customer value, offering strategy, the rise of economic buyers, and so on. Use this book as a reference for pricing and a textbook on pricing.
Key takeaways
- The authors underline the main concept of pricing and how incorrect pricing can make or break an organization’s bottom line in this hyper-competitive market.
- You will also get to know about a lot of concepts. For example, market segmentation, competitive strategic pricing, international pricing, non-linear pricing, time-customized pricing, etc.
#7 - Pricing with Confidence
10 Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table
by Reed Holden and Mark Burton
This book is a step-by-step guide to pricing your product without compromising.
Book Review
There are three things about this book. First, this book on pricing is very useful to those with no management degree or business training and who want to charge premium pricing on their products/services. Second, this book is very much easy to understand. Any layman interested in knowing the subject will easily read through the entire book within a very short period. And third, this book is very actionable. Most of the pricing textbooks are jargon, making things impossible to apply. This book has given the frameworks so that you can close a chapter and immediately apply what you’ve learned. Pricing is not an easy subject to master. It’s often confusing to business owners how to charge the optimum pricing. This book has taken all the assumptions out of the way and gives you a step-by-step guide based on distilled information on pricing. The authors mentioned that good/optimized pricing is a good strategy, segmentation, marketing, sales, competitors, processes, controls, tools, and organizational culture.
Key takeaways
- If you cannot price your products/services well, you will ultimately destroy your company's values, revenues, and profits. Before you ever set your price, give this book a read and stop assuming about optimum pricing.
- This top book on pricing is based on conventional pricing methods. Rather, the authors give you a proven plan for increasing your revenue without sacrificing profit margins.
#8 - Value-Based Pricing:
Drive Sales and Boost Your Bottom Line by Creating, Communicating, and Capturing Customer Value
by Harry Macdivitt and Mike Wilkinson
Why should customers choose your brand and not others? Is it because you couldn’t price your products/services well? Let’s find out.
Book Review
Today's customers are wise. They know what they're buying and leaving on the table. They also understand the opportunity cost. So, as business owners, you also need to uplift your game and offer customers exactly what they want. And a value-based pricing model will help you offer the exact pricing customers want. If you sell a product, there are also multiple brands other than yours. So, learning value-based pricing is essential for you to run your business smoothly. This book will teach you the exact process of developing a value-based pricing model with minimum risk. You will know how to set up a selling distribution channel, provide the value proposition to the sales channel, and utilize revenue generation while reducing business costs and providing emotional value to customers. Moreover, this book isn't about all theories and no practical application; rather, it's quite the opposite. You will find a little explanation and many strategies to apply immediately in your business.
Key takeaways
- There are four things you will learn from this best pricing book. You will learn to understand your customers' needs; you will get to know how you can make your company different. You will learn to quantify the differences between your business from other businesses and build a value-based strategy. Finally, you will learn to communicate value directly to your customers.
- The whole book is on three fundamentals that every business owner should learn – revenue gain, cost reduction, and emotional contribution, all at the same time.
#9 - Pricing Done Right
The Pricing Framework Proven Successful by the World's Most Profitable Companies (Bloomberg Financial)
by Tim J. Smith
Getting a snapshot of the world’s best companies may guide you to do your pricing right. Here’s why.
Book Review
Few things make a pricing strategy dynamic. These components of this dynamic pricing strategy are business strategy, pricing strategy, price variance policy, market pricing, and price execution. In this book, the author has explained why these components align with a dynamic pricing strategy and why value-based pricing triumphs over all other pricing strategies. For example, we use Parker pens regularly, even though it's a luxury item. Why? Because Parker pens are very durable, they write exceedingly well, and while refilling, we don't need to incur many costs. As a result, even if we pay a premium price for Parker pens, we regularly use these. It is the power of value-based pricing. Moreover, this book teaches a valuable lesson – pricing adjustments drastically impact any organization's bottom line. Thus, if you ever set your foot forward in creating a pricing strategy, read this book and how things work for big organizations. No matter what sort of entrepreneur you are – a newbie or a big shot, this book will teach you a great deal about pricing.
Key takeaways
There are four most important things you will learn from this best pricing book –
- Before you ever do pricing analyses, identify the right questions.
- Applying the strategies mentioned in this book can improve your pricing strategy and decision-making process.
- You will learn value-based pricing in detail, and
- Align the pricing strategy with your long-term organizational goals and vision.
#10 - The Psychology of Price
How to use price to increase demand, profit and customer satisfaction
by Leigh Caldwell
In this book, you will understand the psychology behind pricing and why few things work like magic, and few never do.
Book Review
This best pricing book is a great quick read on pricing. This book can be a great additional resource for pricing new products/services. There's one issue with the book which the readers mentioned. The author explained the book by taking hypothetical situations instead of real incidents. However, that doesn't make the book dull. The author wrote the book in a literary style while making every chapter interesting and sequential. You will learn a great deal about why pricing is one of the most important components of the business, why you can use price to dictate the market, what perceived value you can create for the customers, and how to focus on the pricing to generate more revenue for your business. This book is a partial guide. It only covers some aspects of pricing. But it does a great job of introducing the fundamentals to those without experience in pricing. This book is perfect for beginners and those with experience crafting business pricing strategies.
Key takeaways
- Pricing is a practical science. This best pricing book will prove why. If you can understand the science behind pricing, you can apply its components to any product/service.
- This book is for those who don't want to wait to read the whole book before applying. Just read one chapter and apply it, and then repeat it. This book is for people who love to experiment with their learning.
Recommended Articles
This article guided the Top 10 Pricing Books to read in 2021. Here, we discuss what these books propose, their reviews, and key takeaways. You can learn more from the following books: -
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