Welcome, I'm Thomas Kohler with the Boston Consulting Group. I'm an expert in pricing and I help clients solving pricing problems. I'm very excited to be in this program and teach you about pricing. How does a business decide what to charge for its product? Imagine a new product in this box. And you were asked to provide a point of view of what you should charge for it. There are three main approaches to set prices. Cost-plus pricing, with a variant called marginal-cost pricing, which we'll cover separately. Value-based pricing, and we have an entire course about customer value and how this relates into pricing. And lastly, market-based pricing, and course three is talking more about this when we talk about competitors. Cost-plus pricing is a pretty straightforward approach. You take your full cost per unit, you apply a markup, and this sets your selling price. So, we also say that the seller is the price setter. And the buyer is the price taker, because he's supposed to pay your asking price. A quick example. Let's say your full cost is $100, and by full cost I mean it includes all your variable cost, as well as your fixed cost divided by the quantity. You add a 20% markup to the $100, so this gives you a selling price of $120. Cost-plus pricing is useful in four situations. Firstly, when you, as the seller, have what we call sufficient pricing power, where you can simply demand your price and the buyer, as the price taker is as described, and he will pay it. Secondly, in situations where the outcome and the specifications of your offering are very custom, you might not even know yet at the beginning what the true costs are. So you really focus on what the markup is your customer will pay you on top of the cost. Third example is industries where you have regulated prices. You want to make sure, for example, that the utilities are able to recover their cost in order to provide service for everyone like providing power. And lastly, and this is how we started, cost-plus pricing is a starting point for the journey to figure out what the right selling price for a product is. There are couple of advantages and disadvantages of cost-plus pricing. The biggest advantages, it's very simple to execute. You take your full cost, you put on top your expected margin and you know your selling price. And this leads me to the second advantage, when you sell at the selling price, it guarantees you your targeted margin. It is very intuitively understandable, and you can defend changes in your selling price quite easily to customer by pointing to your changes in cost. But there are also a number of disadvantages with full cost pricing. And this led a little bit to a reputation of cost-plus pricing. Usually, it leads to sub-optimal pricing, because it does not consider the customer value, it does not consider the market. It also promotes cost inefficiency, because the way the formula is built, the higher your cost, the higher your profits will be. And this kind of sounds counter-intuitive from an economic perspective. It also does include any opportunity costs, and it focuses too much on the historic cost, rather than on the future replacement value. There is a very related construct called target-cost pricing, which addresses one of the downfalls of cost-plus pricing. In the target-cost pricing, you start with the market price and you subtract your target margin. So, in this example, you did some research and you found out the price you should sell it is $110. You still want to make a $20 margin, so this tells you the cost should be $90 for your item. Comparing this to cost-plus, in cost plus you solve what you sell your item for and you're starting with your cost. In the target-cost you start with the market price, you subtract your margin, and it tells you what your item should cost. So in this example you see that actually the market price is $10 lower than the selling price. And if you still want to make the same amount of money per unit, you better get your cost down by $10. Now, we also say that in target-cost pricing the buyer is the price setter. And you, as a seller, are the price taker and have to make it work to sell at the market price. So next time you're asked about what should we charge for a product, you have an idea on how to get started.