Many dealers in your network might benefit from a pricing war, but your brand might not survive unscathed. Pricing wars can ruin the market’s perception of your brand, and this can be after your sales and customer loyalty.
It might come as a surprise, but enforcing a MAP policy is an effective way to protect your brand image. More than letting you track the pricing of your products on the market, the plan lets you avoid pricing wars. It’s common for dealers to lower prices to gain an edge on the market. Drastic lowering of prices can lead to the disastrous pricing wars that damage many brands.
Make your products desirable to resellers
Resellers are in it for the money and will only carry a range of products that help them achieve this goal without bending over backwards. You’ll do well to make sure that all resellers carrying your products meet their goals. Having a firm grip on product pricing is a great way to increase the appeal of your product line and grow the number of resellers.
Unregulated pricing often creates an uneven playing field that is quite susceptible to pricing wars. In such cases, distributors often resort to undercutting each other to gain an edge and increase sales. Keeping tight control over the minimum advertised prices is a great way to avoid costly pricing wars.
When you take away pricing advantage as a bargaining chip, it forces distributors to seek out other ways to differentiate their businesses. It also means that they will not sell your products at steeply discounted prices. This keeps your brand from being on the receiving end of a costly price war.
Safeguard your brand image
Regardless of whether you operate an online or a brick and mortar store, you need to refine your ability to attract new customers while retaining the current ones. Businesses often pull out all the stops to grow foot traffic to their stores or visitors to their online stores. Lowering prices is an age-old technique that is quite useful in achieving this goal.
Unfortunately, haphazard lowering of prices works out in favor of the merchant but can harm the reputation of your brand. You might find that your products are suddenly available on the market at half the recommended selling price. This can lead most of your customers to question the quality of your products while feeling exploited after paying the full asking price.
Given that creating a large following of customers who trust and are loyal to your brand is key to your success, such developments can deal you a terrible blow. You might have unprecedented levels of customer churn, resulting in reduced sales and declining product popularity. You might have customers preferring to buy from the rogue sellers.
Preserve your brand image
It may seem cruel and unusual for prominent clothing brands to destroy their old stock instead of shipping them down to thrift stores or donating them. The need to preserve brand image is the primary driver for the destruction of excess inventory. Having your products flooding the market at low prices water down a premium brand, especially when catering to the luxury market.
Many customers are happy to pay premium prices for items they like and those that help them to make a statement about their tastes and preferences. When your premium products hit the market en mass, you take away the edge. That ruins the appeal of the product on the market, leading to customer churn.