Subject: Re: market research--what would be "cheap enough"?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 19:52:53 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3209831572620533@naggum.net>

* Kent M Pitman <pitman@world.std.com>
> They are not going to suddenly hit their foreheads and say "duh, we
> should drop our prices. we never thought of that."  or "oh my god, there
> are people out there who would buy our product if we dropped the price
> and we're losing them."  That just isn't a correct description of the
> problem.

  It may not be the new customers they lose that are the biggest problem,
  but the customers they already have who pay maintenance fees that may be
  much harder to recover than income from first sales and then probably
  much lower maintenance fees from every customer.  It is also not a good
  idea to piss off your old customers by suddenly dropping prices when they
  have had to fork over sizeable amounts of money to get what others are
  now getting at much lower prices.  That is bad for repeat business and
  customer relationships.  To be able to get away with something like this,
  one would essentially need a new brand name and a new market such that
  one could keep the old market and price level while developing a new one,
  which would be significantly more expensive than most people are willing
  to contemplate, and I for one am not sure it could be worth it, even if
  one could accurately estimate the number of lost customers and revenue in
  the lower price market.

///