The rise of dynamic pricing
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2024
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The retail strategy allows companies to constantly tweak their prices in response to changes in the market.
In the first of two programmes, we look at how dynamic pricing works in the airline industry, at ride-hailing companies like Uber and on India’s sprawling rail network.
And we speak to a director of e-commerce at US electronics firm Harman International, who tells us how dynamic pricing has enhanced its business, increasing revenue, margins and making the company more efficient.
Archive of India: Our trains, electric, used courtesy of Made In Manchester.
Presented and produced by: Gideon Long
(Image: The Mumbai to Solapur Vande Bharat Express at Pune India. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Una Chaplin and I'm the host of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles. |
| 0:05.7 | It tells the story of how my grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others, were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. |
| 0:15.3 | Hollywood Exiles from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:23.2 | Hello, I'm Gideon Long and welcome to Business Daily, where we're looking at dynamic pricing, |
| 0:29.2 | a strategy where companies constantly change the prices of their goods to reflect supply and |
| 0:34.3 | demand. Lots of companies love it, saying it helps create the perfect free market between buyer and |
| 0:40.3 | seller. |
| 0:40.8 | Dynamic pricing is very important for us. |
| 0:44.1 | It has helped us improve our revenue. |
| 0:46.9 | It has helped us also to improve our margin. |
| 0:50.3 | And it has also helped us to be much more efficient. |
| 0:53.4 | But consumer groups worry about it, saying it allows companies to squeeze more money from |
| 0:57.7 | their customers without necessarily offering them better service, while all the time bamboozling |
| 1:03.3 | them with constantly changing prices. |
| 1:05.8 | There are no boundaries really around this at the moment, and there's no transparency around |
| 1:10.0 | what's going into these pricing algorithms. The prices are jumping around all the moment. And there's no transparency around what's going into these pricing |
| 1:11.4 | algorithms. The prices are jumping around all the time. How on earth can customers make informed |
| 1:16.4 | decisions? That's dynamic pricing. Today, we're looking at its use in the travel industry, |
| 1:21.9 | and we'll hear from an electronics firm that has benefited from it. That's on Business Daily, |
| 1:27.1 | from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:31.2 | It's another cold start today. Once again, temperatures overnight. It's widely got down to |
| 1:36.0 | minus three to minus five degrees Celsius. So yeah, pretty frosty out there. It's the middle of |
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