Pay What You Want!

The concept of "pay what you want" has gathered attention in recent times. A group of three professors from the University of California decided to see how much this pricing concept really worked, and set up their research at a roller-coaster ride in an amusement park. Another twist they added was to examine how much the revenues varied if part of the price was communicated as being donated to charity.

The results are interesting - the revenue earned was higher when customers were given the option of deciding their price (even after accounting for those who opted not to pay anything), and far higher (triple!) once the charity option was added. Read details about the entire experiment here.

How NOT to compete

As businesses try and do something "different" in order to capture the consumer's attention, it seems like they are all in fact doing the same thing - minor tweaking to breakthrough innovations and then terming those to be "brand new" products.

These kind of innovation-less improvements do nothing other than adding to a growing pile of mediocre products. This post at HBR Blogs talks about how such kind of strategy contributes nothing to the world. One startling statistic quoted: A recent Consumer Electronics Show (an annual affair) saw the unveiling of 20,000 products... Woah! 20,000 products within the consumer electronics segment alone. How many of these are we actually interested in?