Growing price pressure is becoming an increasingly daunting challenge for many companies in the machinery industry. The reasons are manifold: Saturated markets, more demanding customers, rapid technological progress and low-price competition from emerging markets.
Agilty is the new management buzzword. It says that organizations should react quickly and flexibly to a changing environment or – ideally – that they should drive the change themselves before others do so. If they react too late, their very existence will sooner or later be at stake.
Companies which ask themselves how they can strengthen their position amid ever stronger competition should take a look at their culture. Unlike hard competitive factors like, e.g., the price-performance ratio, technical product parameters or outstanding service and consulting, culture is invisible and difficult to measure.
Strategy tools are used to take decisions and to simplify and visualize complex situations. They are ´intelligence boosters´ which help us to do the right things - e.g. to decide whether a particular product should be discontinued or if entering a new market makes sense or not.
Increasing price pressure is a universal phenomenon and many companies struggle to get their prices accepted by increasingly demanding buyers. An effective way to counter this trend is Value-based Pricing. The underlying logic is that if a company can convincingly demonstrate the unique value of its offering to the customer, it is in a far stronger position to charge a price that reflects this value.
