On 2nd April 2016 VGSoM had the pleasure of hosting Mr. Arunabh Das Sharma, President of the Times Group under its guest lecture series Vaarta. Mr. Sharma has worked in different markets around the globe like India, China and the US. He has emerged as a great business leader after working in the media, consumer packaged goods and consumer durables industries and learning the intricacies of the businesses. Having being involved in activities ranging from M&A to JV formulations to new market entry, he has gained an intimate working knowledge of brand, product and sales management.
With such a vast pool of experience and knowledge, Mr. Sharma talked about the abstruse concept of Pricing. He rightly pointed out in the beginning that neither is a good pricing practice recognized with any awards nor is there any subject dedicated to Pricing in any B-school around the world. Yet, Pricing (or Price) is one of the most important aspects of any marketing strategy. As buyers and sellers both will agree, prices can make or break their products. Mr. Sharma rightly pointed out that with advancements in technology, price comparisons and price wars have become much more fierce and buyers are much ahead of the curve than the sellers. The traditional channels of marketing and distribution have been sidelined and in the contemporary times everything is more accessible and easily comparable. According to him, the need of the hour is to strategically manage pricing in an organization. Prices determine profit and profitability in turn accelerates growth and drives a company towards success.
While emphasizing on the importance of pricing, Mr. Sharma explained that price determination and price setting is as much a science as an art. He pointed out that currently price setting, price diagnostics and price governance are outdated and highly standardized. The techniques, tools and systems used for pricing are too elementary. With the advent of the Internet, social media, mobile technology, Internet of things, big data, cloud and SaaS, there is a humongous amount of information available for analysis and modeling. Mr. Sharma rightly described these as the inevitable tools of the foreseeable future. To incorporate such advancements, he believes that there needs to be a shift in the way price is managed. Companies need to adopt less standardized and more adaptive and dynamic algorithms for price setting. Price diagnosis and governance should be made more interactive and intuitive. Elementary tools and systems need to be replaced by automated and integrated ones. Mr. Sharma gave an example of how a real time algorithmic pricing engine could use multiple factors along with machine learning to prescribe prices to its sales force. He stressed on the importance of a future oriented, dynamic pricing strategy if business wanted to grow and flourish in the coming times.
Towards the end of the session, Mr. Sharma explained how businesses would need to become more algorithmic, employ big data and machine learning, and develop analytical skills among its workforce to gain and early mover advantage in the rapidly changing environment. Soon after, the floor was thrown open to questions and the audience asked questions ranging from volatility of pricing, consumer oriented pricing, behavioral economics, and the future trends in the industry. All in all, it was a very insightful and interesting session and at VGSoM, IIT Kharagpur we look forward to hosting him again in the future.