The value of price audits

For a business to remain competitive and make informed decisions about its product pricing or the business’ pricing strategy, it needs information. It needs insight and understanding of its competitors’ strategies and activities out there. A starting point in gaining that information and understanding would be benchmarking your prices against competitors by means of a price audit.

In our modern times, customers are constantly looking for better pricing on the items they love to buy. Everyone is shopping around. While there will always be a portion of the population that remains loyal to specific retail outlets or products regardless of the prevailing economic conditions, most people will shop around to try to manage their budgets. Therefore, distributors and manufacturers need to be aware of product prices in the market to remain competitive.

Regularly reviewing price, promotions and stock availability of Key Value Categories (KVC) and Key Value Items (KVI) is a wise business strategy. Through having this information or data on the same products at different stores, enables wholesalers or agencies to manage the Recommended Selling Price (RSP) as well as making sure that outlets are properly merchandised and promotions are being executed and visible to consumers.

When normal price audit reads are combined with qualitative research such as focus groups (to gather actual customer insights) and for example mystery shops (to accurately perceive the customer experience in the retailer that sells your product), pricing audits offer you a near-complete portrait of a customer’s in-store experience.

At Vision Africa, we can customize your research plan to fit your business. Customizable competitive price audits can be as granular as you need – providing pricing information on a few product lines or as much as you need to cover.

We have the expertise. Talk to us at Vision Africa. Let us be your research partner.

– Libertina Shiweva and Anéle Molzahn