Corporate Strategies: Marketing and Price Discrimination
INTRODUCTION – COMPANIES WITH “MARKET POWER” The focus of this essay is on corporations that sell products or services to final consumers. A common strategy is price discrimination. Retailing is somewhat different than most market transactions. Retailers sell to a large number of consumers. They negotiate prices and terms of sales with a wide variety of suppliers, both in size and products offered. Retailers and distributors are market-makers. They bring buyers (consumers) and sellers (manufacturers) together. Some companies have their own bricks-and-mortar stores (Sherwin-Williams) or their own websites. Many online retail sites such as Amazon are market-makers. This discussion assumes that sellers and retailers have “market power.” This may be a result of past strategies of branding, advertising, developing loyal or return customers, developing market niches by product line extension, or any other strategy that differentiates its produc...