Reduce Price to Improve Revenues and Margins
CHOICE 1 OBJECTIVE: RETAIN CUSTOMERS
CHOICE 2 SEGMENTS: TARGETED COMPETITOR SEGMENT / STANDARD LEADER PRICE AGAINST ANOTHER LOW-END COMPETITOR
CHOICE 3 COMPONENT: CHANGE CONVENIENCE AND PRICE TOGETHER
| No. | SIC | Year | Notes |
| 1 | 4813 | 2003 | Rattled by growing competition from cheap phone services relying on a technology called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), big regional Bell companies say they're getting ready to offer their own discounted services. VoIP technology threatens to eventually smash the established order in telecommunications, making much of today's infrastructure obsolete and stripping big companies of many of their advantages of scale. While the calls many not always offer the clarity and freedom from static of regular phone service, and some such services require customers to use special telephones, many users find this an acceptable trade-off for the lower price. Some of these upstarts are offering VoIP services at discounts of 25% to 30% from normal land-line charges. |
| 2 | 5812 | 1997 | The DTO (drive-thru only) stores were slowed considerably by the fact that virtually every competitor in the market adopted 99 cent offerings to counter the DTO's 95 cent burger. In addition, drive-thru times dropped from 289 seconds in 1994 to 210 seconds in 1997, offsetting another advantage of the DTOs. |
| 3 | 6211 | 2000 | Merrill Lynch's Unlimited Advantage account offers human advice and unlimited Web phone or broker-based trading for an annual fee of 1% of assets (minimum fee $1,000). |
| 4 | 7372 | 2008 | Microsoft in November began offering Exchange and SharePoint as a Web service for a monthly fee. Customers like the change because they usually end up paying less to subscribe to the software than they spent buying the program and paying for the staff and hardware to run it. |
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