Do you work out with free weights? If you do, where do you grab the barbells? In the middle, right? In business, as in barbells, it’s the middle that gets squeezed and this has given rise to the phenomenon known as “the barbell effect.” The idea is that businesses on either extreme in a given […]
A recent headline on the investment site Seeking Alpha read, “The Honeymoon is Over for Wix.” Wix is one of several web businesses that make it easy for anyone – and the word anyone is important here – to create a good-looking and functional website. It competes with other online services like Weebly and Squarespace. […]
Whether your revenue is increasing, decreasing or holding constant, shrinking profit margins have the potential to drive you under. There are two ways that sales can pull down profitability: Your products or services can be priced too low or your cost of sales can be too high. When your price is too low, it holds […]
A friend was pumping gas the other day and paying $1.27 a gallon. He snapped a picture on his iPhone and posted it to Facebook. The comments came pouring in. Most of his friends were envious. They were envious because they had intimate knowledge of the price of gasoline. They knew it when it hit […]
In an article in Booz & Co’s strategy + business entitled “A Sweet Victory,” Reed Holden and Mark Burton highlight Hershey’s victory over Nestle in the Krackel vs. Crunch war. Using an aggressive pricing strategy, “…a 30 percent trade discount on Krackel where other brands hovered in the 5 to 10 percent range,” Hershey drove Nestle from […]