Pricing

Blog 4

What are the 3 strongest and weakest aspects of your firm’s product strategy?  –  Is your firm addressing all three aspects of the pricing “stool?” How do you know?

Strengths:

1. Innovation is dynamically continuous because it's in an emerging market cognitive computing. (behavioral change for businesses)

2. Brand recognition and all the other assets that come with IBM. For example IBM acquiring medical companies to expand their data and knowledge.

3. Watson is the newest Artificial Intelligent computer introduced into the market and therefore, has the chance to bring interest back to IBM.

Weaknesses:

1. High customer involvement- needs a high investment in learning and implementing Watson into a business
2. Customer experience is low making comfort level and efficiency more difficult to learn and then use.
3. IBM in general, has fallen to the wayside with strong competitors in the market

Pricing Stool: Yes or No.

The IBM Watson project is currently not addressing all three aspects of the pricing stool. The first leg of the pricing stool is cost-driven pricing. Watson’s price is multi-tiered, there is a low end system starting at $30, a professional system starting $80, and then there is a multi-million dollar system. IBM pricing of Watson seems somewhat illogical when related to costs. Competitor-driven pricing is the second leg of the pricing stool. Watson’s pricing scheme does not seem to incorporate one of their most important differential advantages. The thousands of IBM affiliates that could profit from the benefits of IBM Watson. The last last leg of the stool is customer driven pricing. On this leg of the stool IBM rests most of the metaphorical balance. The IBM pricing system reveals some of their desired customer segments. IBM created the multi-tiered pricing system for Watson based off the number of capabilities Watson comes with… ie. number of users, number of rows and columns of data, GB storage space and access to social media platforms.