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In this chapter, we follow the growth of the pricing discipline, especially through the ideas of one of the earliest of pricing's pioneers: Dan Nimer. The Nimer influence on pricing has been foundational, sewing seeds for the growth and development of various pricing fields and subfields – pricing objectives and pricing strategy, value-based pricing, costing and pricing, financial analysis of pricing, and price sensitivity. The ideas we present in this chapter originated largely with Nimer, many in his own voice. We interweave them with the ideas of other contributors to the pricing discipline to show the development of the field. Dan taught many foundational pricing concepts; they are captured in seminars and articles kept through the years. Founding pioneer to pricing, Nimer's influence will remain long into the new century as pricing enters a new phase as a strategic capability of the firm.

In terms of the life cycle, pricing certainly would be considered a young and emerging discipline, only a few decades old. Even marketing is only 50 years old as a business discipline; Jerome McCarthy of Michigan State University introduced the Four P's classification (product, promotion, price, and place-distribution) in 1960. Peter Drucker's influential The Practice of Management hailed the twentieth century as a “marketing revolution” in 1954, but mentions pricing fewer than a dozen times, even then only in passing.

Many companies have made progress in pricing – instituting pricing rules, creating pricing organizations, and getting high-level visibility on pricing performance. Few, however, have truly turned pricing into a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the growing complexity of pricing demands that companies take their pricing capabilities to the next level of performance. This chapter outlines some of the ways that companies can take their pricing capabilities to a higher level of performance. Managers should look at these ideas and identify one or two areas where they will take their capabilities not just to good but to a level of world class. Those that do will increasingly be able to outperform their competitors and drive significant value to the company's bottom line.

Advances in technology, operations research, and data driven pricing and marketing are leading pricing strategy into new and untested waters – toward dynamic pricing, and variable pricing strategies, which ultimately require changes in how we view pricing strategy. The dominant view of pricing strategy is that pricing goals, objectives, and strategies should be formulated a priori, and should be consistent with marketing and corporate strategies – deliberate pricing strategy. This chapter argues that firms need to develop new strategic pricing skills that lead to more improvisational, innovative, or adaptive pricing strategies. I call this type of price strategy-making emergent pricing strategy. Innovative pricing strategies that the organization judges, or senses to be effective, are repeated, shared, expanded, and refined into successful pricing patterns that, over time and across situations, become pricing strategy. Thus, rather than specifically designing pricing strategy to achieve a goal, here the organization acts upon a price innovation that seems to make sense for this customer, this market segment, this setting, and this situation, then interprets the outcomes, signals, and reactions that seem to flow from the pricing action, and shares and encourages adoption and adaption by others in the organization. Emergent pricing strategy is particularly useful in unstable, turbulent, and complex product and market environments in which price-sensitive buyers wield significant power and influence.

Although critical to profitable pricing, competitive strategy is often overlooked in the pricing process. This often leads to poorly developed competitive actions with profitability suffering. This paper provides a comprehensive integrated process for the strategic management of the connection between pricing and competitive strategy. The use of the process proposed here provides active management of competitive interactions and significantly improves profitability.

There must have been a time when Dan Nimer was not interested in prices, but obviously that was long ago. He was already well into his favorite subject in 1959, when as manager of budgets and sales forecasting for Zenith Sales Corp. (a division of Zenith Radio) he got his first chance to act on his conviction that pricing offers far more opportunities for managerial ingenuity than most businessmen realize. His move in 1963 to Canteen Corp., which is in the food service business, may seem surprising at first glance but fits in perfectly with another principle in the Nimer canon: that the rules of intelligent pricing, as of intelligent management in general, are sufficiently basic to apply with equal validity to radios and to hot dogs (which is what Canteen sells at Yankee Stadium).

A rare and valuable combination of practical advice, theoretical modeling, and descriptive explanation of pricing decisions is the summary thought that best captures the overall contribution of Visionary Pricing (VP). VP builds principally on Dan Nimer's great foresight that pricing cannot be the sole domain of finance or any singe functional area and in offering a paradigm shift from cost-plus pricing to customer-value-based pricing.

This chapter describes and discusses the coming of age of price consulting from the perspective of Simon, Kucher, and Partners, today the world’s leading price consultancy. Starting with modest beginnings of a predominantly theoretical and methodological nature, the field has evolved into many specializations along measurement, model building, and structural and industry lines. The current stage of development is characterized by an advanced integration of theory and practice. In spite of the big progress, large growth potentials are previewed for the future. Price consulting is today seen as a young adult who still has a lot to learn and can further contribute to the professionalization of price management.