Meaningful innovation is a community effort. As a contribution to the Vancouver innovation community Ibbaka is sponsoring a new meetup on value innovation and pricing. We will meet about four times a year in Vancouver and may have meetups in Victoria and Kelowna as well.

Primary research for B2B pricing requires a focus on how the offer creates value for different types of prospective customer and how the customers buy. It is important to combine surveys with interviews and to avoid confirmation bias. Direct questions about willingness to pay (WTP) give misleading results.

Customer lifetime value (LTV or CLV) is a critical metric for many companies in the subscription economy. But before your LTV comes V2C (Value to Customer). Understanding how you will create value to your customers over time should come before estimates of LTV and LTV and V2C need to be kept aligned.

Emotional and economic value drivers are both important in market segmentation and pricing design. This is especially true where goods like water is involved. WaterTrax (part of Aquatics Informatics) has been thoughtful and effective in designing its pricing.

Ibbaka is a value-based pricing company. To do value-based pricing, one has to ask who the value is being created for. This impacts everything from product and services deign, to pricing to communication and sales strategy. A holistic view of value and stakeholders can transform how one thinks about pricing.

Value-based pricing requires trust. Trust between buyer and seller and trust between the sales force, product and service development, marketing and leadership. Trust is based on consistency, transparency, fairness.

We interview Kevin Mitchell of the Professional Pricing Society to get insight into how they have been building a community of pricing professionals.

We see a lot of b2b market segmentation in our work. Often these are the weakest part of the marketing plan. Many segmentation is typically limited to firmographic data and in some cases are simply a list of industry verticals. They are meant to find a market that fits the offer. Instead, we should segment based on emotional and economic value creation to build an offer that fits a market.

Ibbaka intern reflects on what she has learned while at Ibbaka as she prepares to head back to school.

Innovation is only sustainable if part of the value can be captured in price. How does your organization price innovations?

Price elasticity of demand and cross-price elasticity interact in important ways. Learn how these two critical determinants of demand interact and how this conditions your pricing strategy.

There are many ways to innovate on your pricing metric to get a closer correlation with your value metrics and business model. Heathrow Airport provides an interesting case study. Note how they use different pricing metrics for inbound and outbound flights!

Ibbaka intern Joyce Yam reminisces about her time spent as an intern at Ibbaka and what she learned about pricing and data analysis.

Customer centricity as defined by Peter Fader is emerging as a strong alternative to product led strategies. To win with this strategy you need to pay close attention to customer segmentation and then price with an eye on the value you create for your best customers.

Ibbaka is focussed on the pricing of innovations, so we get to see a lot of innovative organizations. One thing we study is how organizations are designed to support agile and sustained innovation. Here is an example of one organizational design pattern that works

Viral business models are among the most compelling, when they work. Value and pricing are key variables here. Design value into the interactions and make sure that pricing is enhancing virality.

Pricing transparency and fair pricing are becoming hot issues. Buyers want to believe their pricing is fair and reflects the value they receive. What does it mean for pricing to be fair and how do you communicate fairness?

Embracing the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, this blog explores beauty in imperfection and impermanence. It challenges the pursuit of perfection in a world that often overlooks the unexpected and unaligned. Through reflections on art, innovation, and competency models, it advocates for valuing the unique and remarkable over the flawless and standardized.

While appealing to emotions may seem intuitive within the B2C environment, there are often questions around whether emotional value creation really matters within the B2B environment. That is, is there room for emotions if it is “just business”?

Kyle Poyar of OpenView Ventures moved from top pricing consulting firm Simon-Kucher to the venture capital firm OpenView. He shares what he has learned about pricing in high growth rapidly moving companies.