In this blog post, learn how to leverage an automated Van Westendorp Pricing Model to inform your company's pricing strategy.
Table of Contents:
- What is a Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter analysis?
- When should I use a Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter analysis?
- How to use the Price Sensitivity Meter model to find an optimal price
- Limitations of Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter
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Leverage Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter (PSM) with quantilope
- How can quantilope help?
What is a Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter analysis?
Van Westendorp (also known as Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter) is a market research methodology first introduced in 1976 by the Dutch economist Peter van Westendorp. It establishes a range of acceptable prices for a product or service and ultimately identifies an Optimal Price Point (OPP) - more on this below.
The pricing model does this by asking respondents to give their reactions to a number of specific price points. Their reactions indicate how likely they are to make a purchase depending on the price.
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When should I use a Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter analysis?
Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter is an ideal pricing method to use when you have a new product or service and you want to research where it should sit price-wise in the market.
Say for example you have a new bread product that you'd like to introduce. You already have an extensive variety of bakery products within your brand, and beyond this, your competitors have impressive product lines too. There are a lot of factors that consumers will take into account before buying from the category, including perceptions of brands, marketing messages, dietary needs, product use, and packaging. Their views on price will be driven by all of these factors and more (which you should also determine as part of your research program).
The aim when deciding on your price point is to find one that reflects how consumers perceive your product's brand credentials, quality, and relevance, but also how it will sit in relation to similar products on the market. Too cheap and it will project an image of low quality; too expensive and similar competitor products will win market share. Your Optimal Price Point (OPP) will be the one where the highest number of people will feel it offers good value for the quality and will therefore buy it.
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Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter questions to ask
A typical Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter will ask four questions about price:
- What price is so expensive that you would not purchase the product/service?
- What price is so low that you would question the quality of the product/service?
- What price is starting to get expensive but you would still purchase the product/service?
- What price is considered a bargain/great buy for the product/service?
How to use a Price Sensitivity Meter model to find an optimal price
Once respondents have been surveyed, their reactions to price points are plotted on a line graph. To find the optimal price point (OPP), the boundaries of an acceptable price range need to be defined, and this sits within the Point of Marginal Cheapness (PMC) and the Point of Marginal Expensiveness (PME).
The PMC is at the lower bound of an acceptable price range, where 'too cheap' and 'expensive' intersect on the line graph. Going lower than this price would adversely affect perceptions of product quality. The PME is where 'too expensive' and 'cheap' intersect, and is the upper bound of an acceptable price range. Going beyond this price point would lose many customers who find the price too high.
The Indifference Price Point (IPP) is where 'cheap' and 'expensive' intersect. This is the price point at which equal numbers of respondents feel the price is cheap or expensive, and although this price point isn't the advised one to set, it can help in guiding pricing if the OPP is too low for your business needs.
The Optimal Price Point (OPP) occurs at the intersection of the 'too cheap' and 'too expensive' lines. This is the point at which an equal number of respondents describe the price as too high or too low and is optimal because it would minimize the number of people who would be dissatisfied with the price.
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Limitations of a Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter
It's worth bearing in mind that the range of acceptable prices in this type of pricing analysis is entirely from the point of view of the consumer. It's helpful to know what consumers will be prepared to pay, but this also needs to be balanced with your business costs and profit margin targets to make a well-informed decision on price.
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Leverage Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter (PSM) with quantilope
quantilope's automated Van Westendorp/Price Sensitivity Meter (PSM) provides researchers and insights leaders with sophisticated pricing information to make informed business decisions.
The following video provides a short demonstration on how to set up this pricing research method on quantilope's platform and how to quickly analyze the various chart outputs:
How can quantilope help?
quantilope users can leverage the Van Westendorp/Price Sensitivity Meter method to quickly and easily understand consumer perceptions of price points and guide pricing decisions.
With quantilope, the necessary four questions needed to run a Van Westendorp analysis are automatically added to your questionnaire just by selecting the method from quantilope's method library. In doing so, you remove any guesswork in phrasing questions the right way or remembering to ask the right questions.
Once the method is added to the survey, pricing research is made simple thanks to quantilope's built-in automated analysis tools, offering a variety of chart options so that you can clearly see metrics such as: where the range of acceptable prices lies, the profile of your potential customers, and more. All these different chart types are generated with the click of a mouse, simply by selecting each type from the analysis dropdown menu.
Check out a brief Van Westendorp/Price Sensitivity Meter demo video here to see how straightforward it is to create a Van Westendorp analysis, and explore quantilope's retail study to see how a Price Sensitivity Meter was used to find the optimal price for next day shipping.
To learn more about quantilope's Van Westendorp/Price Sensitivity Meter pricing tool, get in touch below:
