- 19
- Episodes
- 5
- Ratings
- 2025
- First episode
About Pricing Evolution Podcast
Weekly insights into the world of pricing from professional pricer Brendan Hodge of Pricing Evolution. www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com/s/pricing-evolution-podcast?utm_medium=podcast)
- Publisher
- Brendan Hodge
- Category
- business · business
- Language
- en
- Explicit
- No
- First episode
- 11 Jan 2025
- Latest episode
- 5 Dec 2025
Latest episodes
19 episodes in the feed.
5 Dec 2025
Prices Are Falling
It’s the most discounted time of the year, and so in this 19th episode of the Pricing Evolution Podcast, we look at why brands and retailers run discounts. I list eight reasons why businesses have discounts and talk about the benefits and pitfalls of each. Thanks for reading PricingEvolution! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
7 Jul 2025
Pricing the Last Piece of the Puzzle
The host discusses how being the final component needed to complete a larger project generates significant pricing power, using examples from real estate to programmers.
3 Jun 2025
Interview: Value-based Pricing with Doug Mullett of Forthright LED
Doug Mullett of Forthright LED discusses value-based pricing strategies for commercial LED lighting, emphasizing customer savings and avoiding price-focused clients in this interview on the Pricing Evolution Podcast.
23 May 2025
The Model T: How Pricing Created the Auto Industry
This episode explores how Ford's Model T revolutionized the auto industry by strategically using pricing to transform a luxury item into a mass-market product.
6 May 2025
You've Got (Tariff) Trouble
This pricer has seen too many pundits pontificating that the economy had adjusted to tariffs and we can see that because the stock market is back to where it was on April 2nd before President Trump announced his reciprocal tariffs on countries across the world. I discuss the speed at which companies are actually adjusting to tariffs and how it will be 3-6 months before you can really expect to see the effect of tariffs on what’s on store shelves and price tags. I also describe how companies are still in the process of figuring out what the full impact of tariffs is on their costs because there are many layers of suppliers many of whom have not yet responded to the tariffs. This is a little closer to opinion journalism than most of the podcast episodes, and I’ll try to be back at the end of the week with another episode that has fun and interesting insights into pricing dynamics, but in the meantime, this is a pretty real view into the things that pricers and other people at the center of the tariff maelstrom are seeing. Please share this post with others who might be interested! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
25 Apr 2025
How to Take a Price Increase – And Whether You Need To
With tariffs and other market changes going on, a lot of companies are trying to decide whether they need to take a price increase. In this week’s episode, I dive into how you should evaluate whether you need to take a price increase, and — it you do need to take one — how to segment your product and customers rather than simply taking the same price increase on all products and customers. I address: Four questions you should ask yourself when deciding whether you need to increase prices. Two fears that often prevent companies from taking a price increase. And then I break down how to think about segmenting your products and your customers when determining how to take your price increase. As always, if you enjoy the podcast, I’d appreciate it if you’d give it a rating and review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
14 Apr 2025
Last Mile Pricing: Spring Mulch Sale Edition
It’s been a week since I last posted, and I didn’t want to let it stretch to longer. That’s because things have been really busy, both at work (tariffs being a huge part of the issue there) and in life otherwise. However, I didn’t want to leave things entirely empty here, so I sat down after a long weekend of running the annual mulch sale fundraiser for my sons’ Boy Scout troop to talk about “last mile pricing” and why mulch delivered to your door is a lot more expensive than mulch you pick up down at the local big box home center.\ This is a slightly more informal episode than most, but I hope it provide a few interesting insights into the world of mulch (who knew there was so much to know!) and the idea of delivered vs pick-up pricing. Also, a quick link: You can hear the episode of the Kahnversations podcast on which I was a guest here, (https://www.khanversationpod.com/p/khanversation-37-brendan-hodge-of) we talked about tariffs (of course) and other elements of the current political moment. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
6 Apr 2025
Tariffs and the Price of Uncertainty
I’d been looking at a few different fun topics for this episode, but in the end, there’s one topic which is dominating price discussions at the moment, and I couldn’t ignore it. So, this week’s podcast is about tariffs. In the first half of the episode, I look at the more general questions: How to tariffs work? How were these particular tariff rates calculated? Will these tariffs cause companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US? In the process, I talk about the key role of uncertainty: Companies are hesitant to make major changes and investments in response to conditions which seem temporary. And these tariffs seem like they may be very termporary. The Canada and Mexico tariffs have been announced and delayed and modified several times, and this newest “Liberation Day” round of tariffs announced on April 2nd already appear to be the subject of further negotiations. This generally makes companies less likely to make major investments (such as moving factories) as a result. Then, in the second half, I talk about the specific things that companies should consider doing from a pricing perspective as they deal with tariffs: * Don’t panic, and don’t predict. It’s a rapidly changing situation so give yourself the time to see what is happening and respond to the things that have actually happened to you cost thus far. Don’t try to guess what may be happening next in a fluid situation. * Base your prices on what your current cost to replace inventory is: the price to buy or build new product. Your current inventory was built up at older prices, but you’ll want to base your prices on what it will cost you to refill your inventory, not those old costs. * Focus on communicating clearly to your customers. Good pricing requires good communication. This means that if you are changing prices due to tariff-driven costs, you need to communicate that clealry to your customers. And if you’ve decided it’s important for you to absorb some or all of those costs, communicate that decision to absorb the costs to your customers as well. If you stay silent, they won’t see the value your sacrifice is giving them. * And as the tariffs disrupt your industry (which, after all, is what they are designed to do) be ready to talk to your own customers about lower cost substitute products you can help them trade down to if they are no longer willing to buy the same produce you’ve been selling them. And also, be ready to address possible opportunities as a result of previously lower-priced competitors suffering a bigger tariff impact than you have. All together, this is the longest Pricing Evolution episode we’ve had yet, but it’s tackling an important issue and I hope you find it interesting and useful. If you do, please share it with others who may also find it interesting. A recommendation from a friend is the best way for a podcast to find new listeners! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
22 Mar 2025
How Companies Make Money From Free Products
Especially in the online world, you see a lot of companies that offer products for free. How do they make money doing that? In this episode, we dive into the economics of free products and examine three different business models where companies make money while offering a product for free. We look a the following: You Are The Product For services such as Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn, the user is the product, and advertisers are the actual customers. Freemium: Free Product with Paid Upgrades From games to Candy Crush and FortNite to services like DropBox and software like Slack, Zoom, and GitHub, many companies by make money by offering a free version of their software and then offering additional features that you have to pay for. Land and Expand: Free Entry to a Paid Ecosystem Hubspot offers a fully featured free CRM system to its users, but if they want to expand into the other products which integrate with it (MarkingHub, ServiceHub, OperationsHub, etc.) the cost can increase rapidly. It’s a lengthy investigation of the economics of free. And, as always, I hope that if you enjoy the episode you’ll share it with your friends. It’s the best way for us to find new users. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
15 Mar 2025
Spotify: The $2 Price Change Which Turned a Company Profitable
Spotify launched its premium plan in 2009 for $9.99/mo and thirteen years later in 2022 they had 205 million premium subscribers at that same price, but had never turned a profit. Then, over the course of 18 months in 2023 and 2024 they took two price increases, taking their standard premium plan from $9.99 to $11.99. And in the process, they went from losing €500 million in 2023 to making €1.1 billion in 2024. Not only did they not lose customers, but they continued to increase their number of premium customers despite the price increases. In this episode, I look at Spotify’s pricing history, the way in which they went from following Apple’s pricing to being a pricing leader in their category, and I examine how much of their move to profitability came from price changes versus cost cutting. More broadly, I look at the power of low dollar pricing, and the way that on a small ticket item it’s sometimes possible to take a large percentage increase which customers barely notice. Thanks for reading PricingEvolution! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
8 Mar 2025
$5 Footlong: Success or Failure?
Subway was in the news last week with the announcement that they have a $6.99 Footlong promotion through their app. I took the opportunity to discuss one of the most well known fast food promotions of all time, the $5 Footlong campaign, which became an everyday price for almost nine years. And yet, the price promotion which Subway described as driving $4 billion in incremental annual sales when it launched in 2008, became so unpopular with franchisees that by 2018 when Subway briefly brought back the price point some franchise owners threatening legal action. What happens when you make a promotional price point permanent? How do you manage moving beyond a well known “threshold price”? And what were the cost dynamics that turned this famous promotion sour?Listen in to the latest Pricing Evolution Podcast. And if you enoy it, please do share with others, subscribe, and give the show a five star rating on Apple Podcasts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
27 Feb 2025
Trust What Customers Do, Not What They Say
If you’re thinking about making a major change in your pricing, products, merchandising, or store operations in a retail chain, it makes sense that you would want to find out first if customers would like it. One obvious approach would be to do focus groups and surveys to find out what customers say they want. The problem is: often what customers say they want does not predict well what they will do in real life when faced with a change in the prices or products they see in front of them. For instance, customers often say they would like more healthy options on the restaurant menu, but then when they’re actually making a purchase decision, they go for the bacon cheeseburger over the salad. The solution is to conduct a controlled experiment. In this week’s episode I dive into how we conducted controlled experiments in the Quick Service Restaurant industry, and what sort of considerations you might take into account if you’re trying to figure out testing in a retail environment. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
20 Feb 2025
Pricing at Amazon vs Brick & Mortar
In today’s episode, I talk about the challenge faced by retailers — from fledgling startups to large Consumer Packaged Goods brands — trying to sell through Amazon when Amazon simultaneously wants to match the lowest price available through brick and mortar retailers and also receive a low enough wholesale price to compensate them for their shipping costs to consumers. The issue that that the consumer actually does some very valuable work in picking up the shelf from the store shelf and driving it home. You can see this if you look at the cost of having a gig economy driver go pick up that product at the store for you and drive it to your porch. Amazon is trying to recoup the cost of taking your product off the warehouse shelf, putting it in a box, and sending it out with a delivery drive to be dropped at your door. For a consumer packaged goods type item, that can easily cost 30% to 40% of the retail price of the item. And yet, the customary prices in retail stores are not designed to cover such heavy delivery costs. The solution is to differentiate the product you sell on Amazon from the one you sell to retailers, such as having a larger multi-pack size you sell on Amazon. Tune in to hear all about it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
12 Feb 2025
Disruptive Pricing
Companies often claim that they are disrupting some particular market, however in his classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen talks about market disruption in a very specific way that has a lot to do with pricing. Market disruption is when a new player enters a market with a new product which is lower quality than the dominant products, but still good enough to meet the needs of some current or potential customers. However, it’s also much cheaper than the existing products. At first it seems to the dominant players in the market like this entrant is no threat because their product is much lower quality and they are only picking off the least profitably business in the market. But as their technology improves, the take over the whole market. I discuss some of the classic examples from Christensen’s book, talk about personal computers disrupting the market for mainframes and minicomputers, and then branch off into something Christensen doesn’t talk about: the disruptive effect of Chinese manufacturers on the US manufacturing market. Here the disruption is cost based, not technology based, and I talk about some ways the US manufacturers might fight back against that threat with their pricing and value positioning. All this was in part inspired by all the discussion of tariffs the last couple weeks. If you’d like to read my recent article on tariff pricing, you can see it here (https://www.pricing-evolution.com/p/how-to-price-for-tariffs). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
5 Feb 2025
Video Games Pricing and Discounting
A listener asked why video game makers sometimes discount as much as 50% to 75%. Are they making money? Why don’t they just lower the everyday price? I’m not a video game player myself, but I enjoyed diving into the research about how games are priced. In this episode I talk briefly about the “freemium” model that many mobile games use, where the game itself is free but the user is then encouraged to make in-app purchases. I chart out the lifecycle pricing which major video games follow, and how that lifecycle varies for successful games like Elden Ring vs less successful ones like Battlefield 2042. Then we discuss lifecycle pricing (and discounting) is different for a product like a video game which has no or low margin cost as compared to other product that have lifecycle pricing such as fashion, home goods, and electronics, but where there is still a significant cost to manufacturing more units to sell, even as the product moves into the lower priced later stages of the lifecycle. Thanks for listening to PricingEvolution! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
31 Jan 2025
How Pricing Created and Destroyed Publishing
How did mega-bookstores disrupt the world of local bookshops only to be destroyed in turn by Amazon? How did we reach a point where the #1 selling book on the Amazon kindle store was not published through a publisher? The travails of the modern book industry have a lot to do with pricing. In this episode, I look at the multiple pricing driven disruptions of the bookselling and publishing world. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
23 Jan 2025
OpenAI's Pricing Struggle
OpenAI’s pricing was in the news last week, after CEO Sam Altman admitted on X that he had personally set the price for the company’s Chat GPT Pro package at $200/mo, and that he was surprised to discover that they were losing money on it. Many professional pricers questioned both why the CEO was personally setting prices and also why the company was not using a pricing model which billed more directly for usage rather than offering a virtually unlimited top tier for the relatively modest price of $200/month. But OpenAI is not just pricing a product, they’re trying to nurture a whole new industry. The viability of AI will be determined not by what OpenAI charges for the top product tier right now, but rather how quickly other businesses using the OpenAI platform develop new products that produce huge amounts of value. Once there are thriving industries making money from OpenAI’s products, it will be easy for them to charge those customers based on the value they are getting. But until customers spend enough time with OpenAI’s products to figure out how to make lots of money using it, OpenAI will have limited ability to truly monetize their products. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
17 Jan 2025
Podcast 002: The three layers of pricing
In Episode 2, I expand on my explanation of the three layers of pricing: Macro, Strategic, and Transactional These were the topic of a recent text post: Three Levels of Pricing (https://www.pricing-evolution.com/p/three-levels-of-pricing) However, I expand the the discussion in the podcast and use additional examples. If you haven’t had a chance to read the post, this a great chance to catch up on it. But if you have, I don’t think you’ll find it’s just a repeat. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pricing-evolution.com (https://www.pricing-evolution.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)
11 Jan 2025
Podcast 001: How I got here and what I love about pricing
Pricing expert [Host Name] shares the story of her career journey from Classics major to VP of Global Pricing, revealing why she's passionate about pricing and how it can deliver real value to customers.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
- Apple Podcasts (US)
- 5.0 / 5
- 5 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 27 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
- Quality
- 41
- Social presence
- 0
- YouTube
- 0
- Engagement
- 32
Host of Pricing Evolution Podcast?
Claim your podcast to manage its listing and keep your show details accurate.
Pod Engine is an independent podcast discovery and analytics service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by this podcast. Artwork and show content belong to their owners. Full legal notice.
Explore this show
Podcast research with Pod Engine