Took over as project manager with six weeks left of an eight-week engagement, and delivered both the channel strategy and the price point.
I took the engagement over as project manager with six weeks of an eight-week timeline remaining. The first decision was what to stop doing: the scope in front of me was wider than the time available, so I cut it to the two questions the client could actually act on. Which channel, and at what price.
Fifty-five competitors benchmarked on positioning, channel and price, which is the part that has to be exhaustive because a channel recommendation is only as good as the map it sits on.
The recommendation was a new channel the client was not using. The argument was not that the channel was better in the abstract, it was that the client’s existing channels were crowded by the incumbents in the benchmark, and the new one was where their product characteristics stopped being a disadvantage.
The benchmark put the market mean for premium cards at around £2.50. That number is the whole problem in one figure: price at the mean and you are competing on brand against incumbents with more of it. Price far below it and you sacrifice the premium positioning the product was built for.
We recommended £2.00. It is a deliberate discount to the mean, roughly 20% below it, large enough to be a reason to switch and small enough to keep the product inside the premium bracket rather than dropping it into the mid-market where a different set of competitors live.
The pricing and the channel are one decision, not two. A 20% discount only buys entry if it lands in front of buyers who are not already anchored on an incumbent, which is why the channel recommendation had to come first and the price had to follow it.
Six weeks is enough to benchmark and to price. It is not enough to test the price. The recommendation rests on a competitive benchmark and positioning logic, not on willingness-to-pay research, and I said so in the room rather than letting the number carry more weight than it had earned.