Business scholars and marketing professionals have long argued that prices should reflect value. In recent years, sales consultants and trainers in the graphic communications industry have admonished salespeople to “sell on value, not on price.” In order to maximize profits, a graphic communications company must capture a reasonable portion of the value it creates for customers in the prices it charges. For all of these reasons, effective selling and pricing are inevitably value-based selling and pricing. However, value-based selling and pricing have not been widely implemented by graphic communications companies, despite the compelling arguments in their favor.

One reason for the slow adoption of value-based pricing and selling is that these philosophies and techniques represent a huge departure from the traditional approaches that most graphic communications companies have used for years. Most graphic communications firms practice feature-oriented selling. Salespeople using feature-oriented selling focus their sales pitches on the features of their products and services. They stress attributes like print quality, job turnaround time, on-time delivery, personal service, and price. Value-based selling focuses more on the benefits the customer will gain by purchasing the seller’s product or service than on the inherent attributes or features of that product or service.

Most graphic communications companies also practice tactical pricing. Managers calculate and set asking prices based on estimates of production costs and the amount of profit desired and then often cut their prices to match what customers say they are willing to pay or to match prices offered by competitors. Therefore, tactical pricing views pricing primarily as a tool for closing a sale. In contrast, value-based pricing sees pricing as one component of a coordinated set of strategic decisions and marketing/selling activities, all of which focus on a common objective—selling products and services at prices that maximize profits.