Será que só resta cortar no preço?

O artigo "Ditch the Discounts" publicado na HBR de Janeiro de 2011 merece atenção e reflexão.
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Os sectores que vivem do mercado nacional vão, no próximo ano, passar um mau bocado dada a quebra no poder de compra dos consumidores portugueses.
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A tentação, o instinto vai ser cortar nos preços e margens.
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"On the surface, this type of price-cutting makes sense: How else to bolster sales in a time of weak demand?
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That’s unfortunate, because across-the-board price cuts unnecessarily reduce profits. Consider a company that held the line on prices during the recession and saw a 20% drop in sales. That means it made 80% of its usual sales, even at full price—so why give discounts to all those customers? More important, deep discounts devalue a product or service, limiting companies’ ability to raise prices as the economy improves.
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Some companies have avoided this trap by using adaptive pricing, which capitalizes on the fact that different customers have different needs and therefore place different values on a given product or service.
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The simplest adaptive-pricing method is called “versioning”—offering “good,” “better,” and “best” varieties of the same product. A lower-priced version (poorer quality, smaller quantity, fewer features) can be a powerful magnet for price-sensitive customers. The method worked well for consumer product companies during the recession and should be considered by all companies, especially those in markets with weak demand."