| name | pricing-research |
| description | Research market pricing using current public and primary evidence on list price, packaging, discounts, usage metrics, willingness to pay, alternatives, switching cost, and perceived value. |
Pricing Research
Use when a product or business decision depends on how customers encounter and evaluate price in the market.
Procedure
- Define customer segment, use case, geography, product category, pricing decision, and the unit customers actually compare.
- Capture current competitor and substitute pricing with date, currency, taxes or fees where relevant, billing period, minimum commitment, included limits, and plan or packaging context.
- Separate list price, effective price, negotiated or promotional price, usage overage, implementation fees, and total cost of ownership.
- Research the value metric competitors charge against and how pricing changes with scale, seats, volume, outcome, or feature access.
- Gather customer evidence through interviews, surveys, sales data, win-loss, usage, or experiments when willingness to pay matters; do not infer it from competitor price alone.
- Identify reference prices, switching costs, free or manual substitutes, and budget ownership that shape price sensitivity.
- Compare ranges and tradeoffs by segment rather than averaging unlike offers into one market price.
- Hand findings to Monetization Strategist with evidence, uncertainty, and hypotheses instead of declaring the final price.
Decision rules
- Competitor list price is not the same as customer willingness to pay.
- Compare full packages and value metrics, not isolated monthly numbers.
- Pricing evidence decays; record the date.
- Research informs strategy; Monetization Strategist owns the pricing decision framework.
Quality gate
Research is ready when market offers are compared on equivalent terms, effective costs and packaging are visible, customer value or willingness-to-pay evidence is separated from competitor observation, segment differences are explicit, and current sources support the conclusions.
