5 Pricing Mistakes to Avoid During Economic Uncertainty
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Is your price testing strategy unlocking maximum value? Avoid 5 common pricing mistakes and elevate your brand with smarter insights.
As inflation continues to pressure consumers' wallets, brands face a dual challenge: balancing profitability with consumer affordability. Many consumers are cutting back on non-essential purchases and seeking out more affordable options for essential purchases, making pricing strategies a critical lever for maintaining market share and customer loyalty. Yet, in their quest to adapt, brands often make critical mistakes in price testing that exacerbate rather than alleviate financial strain.
Here’s how to avoid common pitfalls and use robust price testing methodologies to thrive in an inflationary market.
Mistake 1: Insufficient Data Collection
Rushed decisions often lead to incomplete or unreliable data, especially during volatile economic times. Without a representative sample size, businesses risk basing their pricing strategies on flawed insights. This can result in alienating key customer segments, leaving brands ill-equipped to address the diverse needs of their market. Effective price testing requires not just a robust sample size, but also nuanced understanding of the varying behaviors, preferences, and sensitivities within your audience.
How Suzy Helps:
Suzy’s platform empowers brands to collect well-rounded data by leveraging flexible audience solutions. Our always-on, self-owned panel of US consumers allows for precise targeting and retargeting based on your needs, and the process of identifying audiences within our panel is made even easier with AI Screener Generation.
To truly understand your audience, Suzy’s Dynamic Segmentation goes beyond surface-level data. Unlike traditional, static segmentation models that remain fixed over time, our dynamic approach evolves with real-time consumer behavior, preferences, and market conditions. By integrating segmentation directly into the data collection process, Suzy enables businesses to:
Capture Nuanced Insights: Break down your audience into actionable subgroups based on evolving purchasing behaviors, price sensitivity, and value perceptions.
Tailor Pricing Strategies: Identify and address the unique needs of different segments, such as budget-conscious shoppers versus value-driven loyalists.
Iterate in Real Time: Continuously refine your audience segments to stay relevant in shifting economic conditions, such as inflationary pressures or changing consumer priorities.
Mistake 2: Ignoring External Factors and Competitor Pricing
One common pricing misstep is neglecting the external forces that shape consumer expectations and market dynamics. Many brands fail to factor in competitor pricing strategies and overall market conditions, leading to unrealistic price points. Customers constantly compare options, considering not only price but also perceived value, which includes quality, reliability, and brand reputation. Ignoring these competitive and contextual elements can make your brand appear out of touch and damage its market positioning.
In inflationary times, brands often misjudge how rising prices influence perceptions of value. Consumers are more focused on justifying purchases, emphasizing quality and reliability as reasons to spend. Failing to acknowledge these shifts can lead to erosion in both short-term sales and long-term loyalty.
How Suzy helps:
With Suzy’s connected platform you can conduct price testing and track the health of your brand and category to stay on top of shifts in consumer perceptions and habits--all in one place. Our Center of Excellence team has a group dedicated to supporting tracker insights, equipped to design and execute trackers that can help your brand monitor and expand your market share by identifying key signals related to price sensitivity, changing perceptions and competitive players in your category.
By leveraging methodologies like Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter, brands can identify price thresholds where perceived value aligns with affordability. When paired with Dynamic Segmentation, these results become even more precise and actionable. This combination allows you to create tailored pricing strategies that resonate across varying consumer segments and adjust dynamically to inflation-driven shifts in consumer behavior.
Mistake 3: Limited Price Point Testing
Relying on a narrow range of price points might feel efficient and cost-effective in the short term, but it significantly limits your ability to understand price elasticity—the relationship between price changes and demand. This narrow approach prevents brands from identifying the full range of customer willingness to pay, which can vary greatly across different market segments and economic conditions. Without comprehensive price testing, businesses risk undervaluing their product, leaving potential revenue on the table, or overpricing it, which could drive away price-sensitive consumers. This lack of insight can be particularly costly during economic uncertainty when consumer spending habits are more volatile, and optimizing pricing strategies is critical for maintaining market share and profitability.
How Suzy Helps:
Suzy empowers brands to overcome this challenge by removing cost barriers to thorough price point testing. Unlike traditional methods where costs can escalate with each concept tested, Suzy’s platform eliminates per-concept charges. This encourages brands to test a broader range of price points without hesitation, enabling a deeper and more accurate understanding of price elasticity.
Using methodologies such as monadic testing or Gabor-Granger price testing, Suzy helps brands explore price sensitivity across diverse customer segments. With Gabor-Granger, for instance, brands can identify the price ranges where demand remains steady and pinpoint price thresholds that maximize revenue potential. Similarly, monadic testing allows brands to test up to 10 price points at once, where you are never charged per concept.
Mistake 4: Neglecting to Test Pricing Regularly
Pricing is not a “set-it-and-forget-it” strategy—especially during periods of inflation and economic volatility. Consumer behaviors, market dynamics, and competitive landscapes are constantly evolving, and brands that fail to reassess pricing regularly miss opportunities to adapt. What worked yesterday may not resonate today as customers recalibrate their spending habits, perceptions of value, and price sensitivities in response to economic uncertainty. By neglecting to test pricing on an ongoing basis, businesses risk losing relevance, eroding market share, and leaving revenue on the table.
How Suzy Helps:
Suzy simplifies the process of iterative price testing, ensuring your pricing strategies remain aligned with real-time consumer behavior and market shifts. With Suzy’s platform, brands can continuously evaluate price perceptions, elasticity, and competitive benchmarks without the time and resource constraints of traditional research methods.
Through tools like brand and category trackers, Suzy enables you to monitor ongoing changes in consumer sentiment, willingness to pay, and value perceptions. These insights help you quickly identify when price adjustments are necessary—whether to respond to inflation, competitive pressures, or shifting customer priorities. By reacting to these shifts as they emerge, brands can remain agile and competitive, maintaining consumer loyalty while optimizing revenue.
Mistake 5: Oversimplification
Relying on pricing that simply “feels right” can lead to costly missteps, as it often overlooks critical variables like shifting consumer behavior, competitive pressures, and rising operational costs. When prices are set too high, brands risk alienating customers and stifling demand; when set too low, they erode margins and undervalue their product. In uncertain economic times, the consequences of these pricing missteps are amplified, making it essential to base pricing decisions on more than intuition alone.
How Suzy Helps:
Suzy combines the power of quantitative and qualitative research to provide a holistic understanding of pricing dynamics, enabling brands to identify not only the what—the optimal price points—but also the why—the reasoning and motivations behind consumer price perceptions.
Using proven quantitative methodologies like the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter and Gabor-Granger price testing, Suzy helps brands determine price thresholds, identify ranges that maximize demand, and map out clear demand curves. This data provides the foundation for making informed pricing decisions.
To go deeper, Suzy integrates these findings with qualitative insights from tools like Suzy Live interviews and Voice of the Consumer (VoC) research. This qualitative layer uncovers the emotional drivers and perceptions influencing price sensitivity—why customers view certain prices as fair, premium, or unacceptable. Understanding these insights is particularly crucial in economic uncertainty when consumer value perceptions are in flux.
By blending quant and qual, Suzy equips brands with a robust, actionable pricing strategy that aligns with market realities and consumer expectations. This approach ensures pricing decisions are grounded in data, optimizing margins, sustaining demand, and fostering long-term customer satisfaction.
Thriving Through Inflation with Smart Pricing
Brands must recognize that successful pricing strategies during inflationary periods require more than just reactive measures. Avoiding common price testing mistakes, understanding customer perceptions of value, and accounting for competitive dynamics are critical steps toward building resilience, optimizing profitability, and maintaining customer loyalty.
With Suzy’s Center of Excellence, you can access advanced methodologies and real-time consumer insights to navigate these challenges with confidence. Whether you prefer a DIY approach—empowering your team to independently conduct research through our intuitive platform—or a hybrid model that combines self-service with strategic support from Suzy’s research experts, we provide the flexibility to meet your specific needs.
Suzy’s blend of quantitative and qualitative solutions ensures you gain a complete understanding of the “why” behind the “what,” so you can create pricing strategies that maximize profitability, sustain brand equity, and adapt to your customers’ evolving needs—no matter the economic climate. Let Suzy help you stay agile, competitive, and connected to the voice of your customer.
Contact us today to learn how Suzy can help your brand succeed in today’s inflation-driven marketplace.
