Industrial Marketing
Management
Call for Papers
Organizing for pricing excellence,
Deadline for submission: May 1st, 2018
Overview and Purpose
Organizing
for effective pricing has been a central research topic since the inception of
research on pricing: In 1958 in Pricing
in Big Business Kaplan dedicates an entire chapter to pricing organization
(Kaplan, Dirlam, and Lanzillotti 1958). What started as descriptive research is
now a growing, albeit small, body of increasingly prescriptive research on
price delegation (Frenzen et al. 2010; Stephenson, Cron, and Frazier 1979), on
the interdepartmental centralization of pricing (Homburg, Jensen, and Hahn
2012), on the organizational configuration of price management (Burkert et al.
2017), on the role of CEOs in organizing pricing (Liozu and Hinterhuber 2013),
on pricing capabilities (Töytäri and Rajala 2015) and on other related issues.
Nevertheless, compared to other salient aspects
of industrial marketing, our understanding of what constitutes excellence in
organizing the pricing function is arguably shallow. To cite a
few examples, we know little about how to configure the pricing function so as
to increase overall firm performance, we know little about the origins and
evolution of pricing capabilities, we know little about pricing metrics and
about psychological or behavioral traits of effective pricing managers.
How to
organize pricing is clearly a key issue for executives: Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric,
comments: “When it comes to the prices we pay, we study them, we map them, we
work them. But with the prices we charge, we're too sloppy” (Stewart 2006, p.
62). Nowadays, however, executives at General Electric have recognized the
importance of pricing: “Many of our
mornings begin with meetings to review working capital or pricing. We “sweat”
the details required to run a successful company” (Immelt 2007, p. 4). The high
practitioner interest and the paucity of current research seem to call for
further studies.
Topics of
interest include but are not limited to the following:
·
The
pricing function: How does the pricing function contribute to overall firm
performance? Does the presence of a Chief Pricing Officer (CPO) improve firm
performance? What are the specific activities that effective CPOs do that are
most strongly linked to an improvement in firm performance? Do effective CPOs
have formal authority, akin to heavyweight product managers in the Toyota
product development system (Sobek, Liker, and Ward 1998)?
·
What are
cultural values of the pricing function (overlap with cultural values of other
functions in the firm vs. overlap with cultural values of pricing professionals
outside the firm)? How does the pricing function mediate between different
interests (between, for example, company interests for higher prices and
customer interests for lower prices)? Do reporting relationships of the pricing
function – to marketing, sales, finance, or to the CEO – affect performance?
·
CEO
involvement: Under which conditions is CEO involvement in pricing beneficial
for firm performance? Can senior executives be too involved in pricing?
·
Pricing
capabilities: What are they? What is their origin and evolution over time? What
capabilities are foundational, which ones are advanced and do these
capabilities differently affect firm performance? Are there pricing routines?
·
Pricing
metrics: Which pricing metrics are most closely aligned with overall firm
performance? What are metrics to evaluate the performance of the pricing
function itself?
·
Micro-foundations:
What are the psychological or behavioral traits of effective CPOs?
·
Ethics:
Does the adherence to ethical standards in organizing pricing affect short-term
and long-term performance differently?
Manuscript Preparation and
Submission
We are
open to a wide number of research methods and expect all papers to make a
strong empirical contribution: Some of the above mentioned research
questions lend themselves naturally more towards qualitative, others more
towards quantitative research approaches. We do not encourage theoretical
papers which, for this special issue,
will probably struggle to make meaningful contributions.
Manuscripts
should comply with the scope, standards, format and editorial policy of the
Industrial Marketing Management. All papers must be submitted through the
official IMM submission system. When you get to the step in the process that
asks you for the type of paper, select SI:
Organizing for pricing excellence. All papers will be reviewed through a
double-blind peer review process. In preparation of their manuscripts, authors
are asked to follow the Author Guidelines closely. A guide for authors, sample
articles and other relevant information for submitting papers are available at:
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/indmarman
All queries about the special issue
should be sent to the Guest Editors (see below).
Guest Editors
Andreas Hinterhuber
Partner, Hinterhuber & Partners
Strategy Pricing Leadership
Innsbruck, Austria
Phone: +43 664 402 7 402