[Marketing and Pricing] Tools for Bundling and Upselling

Bundles are everywhere. While one is usually inclined to think of the more notorious examples of software bundles or copiers and paper, essentially every product is a bundle of features and services. The art of bundling consists in knowing which parts to sell together and which to sell separately. Be careful! Bundling projects are just as common as unbundling (aka "add-on pricing") projects. [pdf presentation]

[Marketing and Pricing] Calculating tariff scenarios

Many industries (Telcos, Banks, Utilities) work with two-part tariffs, consisting of a fixed access fee and a usage component. While this allows to specifically target different customer segments (think of prepaid tariffs vs. flat fees in mobile telephony), it also makes the assessment of the effects of tariff changes very complex. [pdf presentation]

[Business analytics] Internal benchmarking systems

The usefulness of transaction based benchmarking systems is often hampered by a lack of comparability. No two transactions are the same, specific conditions for the product, the client or the market seem to apply everytime you try to make a comparison. Our method consists in constructing fair reference lines taking into account all major influences. While our main examples are pricing-related the same methods can be applied for performance-, quality- or other measures. [pdf presentation]

[Strategy and Planning] Business plans with Bayes nets

Bayes nets give a systematic approach to creating business plans or to sizing markets. The methodology can not only be used when building a tool for your business plan, the graphical representation also simplifies the internal discussion of its structure and the hypotheses involved. [pdf presentation]

[Strategy and planning] Setting up new reports

Good reports are an essential ingredient for any efficient management organization. Many good frontends for datawarehouses exist, permitting flexible setup and distribution of reports. However, the identification of those areas needing special attention, the right choice of indicators to track or the definition of warning thresholds require massive analytical input. Read our [pdf presentation] to learn more.

[Customer analytics] Customer analytics: Fitness club example

Analyze your customers' behavior to tailor your offer to their needs. In all those subscibtion type business situations, where your customers are known to you, a wealth of data can be used e.g. to predict and avoid churn. Typical examples are telecommunications, insurances or even fitness clubs. Have a look at our example here: [pdf presentation]

[Marketing and Pricing] Some pricing propaganda

Pricing of the products in a company ranks among the tasks with the strongest influence on profitability. If you are operating on a 10% margin, increasing your prices by 5% leads to a profit increase of 50%! Let's look at some examples. [more online]

[Marketing and Pricing] The basics of pricing

Pricing of the products in a company ranks among the tasks with the strongest influence on profitability. If you are operating on a 10% margin, increasing your prices by 5% leads to a profit increase of 50%! That is, if your customers are not running away. [more online]

[Business analytics] Forecasting

Whenever planning future activities of your business, you will almost immediately be confronted with the problem of predicting the development of your major business parameters. [more online]

[Marketing and Pricing] Measuring marketing effects

So you have decided to do something about that dwindling favorite product of yours. You have decreased the price to spurn its sales, or maybe you have started a nationwide ad-campaign. After a while you are asked to report on the success of that activity. [more online]

[Training] Dos and Don'ts in Excel

There's no denying it. As much as quantitative consultants would wish that dedicated statistics tools like R, Splus, SAS or business intelligence tools like BO and Cognos played a more prominent role, the program that is virtually ubiquitous when it comes to analyzing business data is Excel. [more online]