The Pricing Compass

The Pricing Compass, originally titled Pricing Compass: Finding the Solution to Your Pricing Puzzle, is a hands-on pricing guide by pricing expert Yang Yi'an, senior executive director at Simon-Kucher & Partners, written for product managers, pricing managers, and entrepreneurs. Rather than dwelling on complex theoretical pricing models, the book first offers a simple framework for assessing a company's pricing maturity, then systematically sorts through the different pricing challenges companies face in the startup, growth, and maturity stages, and discusses typical reasons for pricing failure and success. The book covers the most critical links in the pricing chain: how to find the pricing starting point for product innovation, how to identify unique selling points, how to measure customers' willingness to pay, and then how to build customer profiles, price differentially, manage price elasticity, design promotional campaigns, and manage distribution channels and channel price systems from a pricing perspective. For the two things companies fear most—price increases and price wars—the author also offers executable responses, and devotes special discussion to the trade-offs among dynamic pricing, behavioral pricing, and value-based pricing. The book provides practical tools such as the KANO model, pricing sandbox, ABCD analysis, systematic product classification, and the three-matrix promotion optimization, which readers can apply directly to their own business. The structure is clear, with a summary at the end of each chapter for easy implementation while reading. The book does not aim to train readers into pricing theory experts but to help companies at different stages of development find, under their own real constraints, a pricing method that can be continuously optimized and that protects profits in competition.