Before defending the price, establish what the price is being compared against and what is genuinely different rather than merely present. Most of what feels like a price problem is a reference-price problem.
8 tools across 2 of the 9 questions
The practice of claiming a single defensible place in the prospect's mind relative to competitors, rather than competing on product attributes.
Breaks when Fails when you do not control the category definition, or when the category does not exist yet. And unless the mental position is actually measured, it decays into an argument about taglines.
PositionThe distinction between attributes on which a brand must merely match competitors and the attribute on which it must differ.
Breaks when Let the parity list grow and the product becomes a me-too. Matching is not free — most budgets disappear into it without anyone noticing.
PositionThe maximum a rational buyer should pay: the cost of their best alternative plus the quantified value of the difference you provide.
Breaks when Strong in B2B, meaningless for emotional or status goods. And pricing at the full calculated value leaves the customer no reason to move.
Set a priceAn account of choice in which outcomes are judged as gains or losses against a reference point, with losses weighted more heavily than equivalent gains.
Breaks when Laboratory effect sizes shrink markedly in the field, and popular derivatives like the decoy effect replicate poorly. Trust the core asymmetry, not the ornaments.
Set a priceA tiered price structure with deliberate constraints — fences — that stop customers in one tier from buying at another tier's price.
Breaks when If the difference between tiers is not perceived, everyone takes the middle one and total revenue falls. A tier without a fence is just a discount list.
Set a priceA set of asymmetric strategies for brands that are not the category leader and cannot win by matching the leader's resources.
Breaks when Backfires if you are the leader — challenger posture is the market leader's most expensive mistake. Note also that Avis “We try harder” is the pre-framework archetype Morgan draws on, not a case of his method.
PositionThe percentage change in sales produced by a 1% change in price, generalised across studies into a single magnitude.
Breaks when It is an average drawn mostly from packaged-goods research and it hides exactly the variance a single decision turns on. The estimate also moves with method rather than with the market — correcting for price endogeneity increases measured elasticity substantially, so two studies of the same category can disagree because of the model. And an elasticity measured on promotional variation says nothing about a permanent list-price change, which is the decision most teams are actually making.
Set a priceAn analysis of the structural pressure on profit in an industry from five directions: rivalry, new entrants, substitutes, supplier power and buyer power.
Breaks when It is the smaller half of the story, and Porter's own data says so: industry effects account for 19% of the variance in US public-company profitability, business-specific effects for 32%. The frame is also static and boundary-dependent — the industry has to be defined before the analysis starts, and the definition decides the answer. Applied to a young category, where the boundary is the thing being contested, it produces a confident reading of a structure that does not exist yet.
Position