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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/EUM0000000002751. When citing the article, please cite: Allan J. MaGrath, (1991), “Ten Timeless Truths about Pricing”, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 6 Iss: 3/4, pp. 15 - 2.

Once upon a time, marketing was the jewel in many an organizations’ crown. As television began to reach rapidly increasing audiences during the 1960s, TV advertising entered a golden age – dragging the marketing industry with it. Indeed, according to 3M Canada marketing director Allan J. Magrath, marketing became extremely influential – a “wunderkind driving corporate strategy and growth”. However, 40 years on and the golden age of marketing is a fading, blurring memory.

The 1990s may turn out to be the most testing decade since the 1930s. Severe competition, industry capacity gluts, and rapid technology transfer will not allow any firm to stay ahead of the pack for long. Depressed margins and increasing costs in benefits and office automation will put companies between the proverbial rock and a hard place. They will be severely challenged to get a payoff from their knowledge workers and upgrade total quality fast.

Middlemen can make or break a strategy. Here are two case studies that show the pivotal role that these marketers play.

This article describes the cheating that occurs among members vertically aligned in channels of distribution, the reasons behind this behaviour, the cost, and the solutions that channel partners can adopt in order to reduce the incidence or lower the consequences of their partners cheating in their channel relations.

This article describes a framework for manufacturers to predict the level of channel conflict that they will probably experience based on channel design, channel policies and differences from their resellers in key factors. Three levels of conflict are described and different management approaches are suggested for high and low levels of potential conflict.

Logitech has a management capability that a great many large companies would envy—intense linked communications, the ability to make decisions rapidly, lots of teams, a minimum of controls, maximum employee empowerment, low turnover, and high knowledge transfer. It has both excellent sources of information and a network of good people to execute innovation as well. The company even has centers of excellence by site. For example, its R&D is decentralized, and it has kept those sites small and close to its customers, with lots of local value added.

A company must decide not only which pathway of innovation to pursue but apply talented, focused management to the problem of maximizing the yield from its innovation.

Discusses ten principles applicable to pricing. Includes revenue‐generating, market share and cost strategies. Notes that astute pricing requires design of a second price discount schedule and pricing plans should not be overly complex or out of sync with efficient shipping units. Concludes that it is these principles marketers need to be cognizant of and for which they need to develop skills.

Previous research in the area of distributor performance proposed different scales, mostly in western, developed country context. These studies also lacked the consideration of dynamic interaction between variables, which determine the distributor’s performance. This paper proposes a composite Distributor Performance Index (DPI) to evaluate distributors’ performance based on at the “Enables” and “Results”, taking a system dynamics approach. The model results have been discussed and validated, in business marketing channel. The context of this study is India, an emerging market.