A price leaves the factory. What reaches the buyer is a different number
A global B2B film and overlaminate producer needed a detailed view of competitor pricing strategy, key usage trends and distributor mark ups.
It also needed to know who the decision influencers are, the people who actually drive upselling at the point the product changes hands.
Neither question is answerable from a price list. What a producer publishes and what a regional installer charges are separated by several tiers, each taking something.
Interviews at every tier, and price checks to go with them
The programme ran across the USA, Canada and Germany, combining structured interviews with transaction level price checks.
More than forty interviews covered importers, master distributors, regional installers and large B2B and fleet buyers. Every tier of the value chain, rather than the top of it.
SKU level price audits ran at each tier, mapping the gap between list price and the price actually transacted. That is the gap the whole question turns on.
Parallel import and cross border arbitrage routes were identified, since those are the routes used to bypass authorised pricing altogether. Distributor loyalty was scorecarded on tenure, exclusivity and switching triggers by geography.
Competitors were benchmarked on list pricing, discount structures and rebate programmes. A second interview round with a smaller expert panel then stress tested the pricing power conclusions before they were written up.
Where the price moves, and who moves it
The report set out SKU level competitive positioning across quality, brand loyalty and the reach strategies used in each market.
It documented the price increments taken across the value chain, tier by tier.
And it produced an incentivisation strategy for upselling, built for each market rather than as one global programme.
The distinction matters. A rebate programme that works where distributors are exclusive behaves differently where they are not, and the loyalty scorecarding is what tells you which market you are in.
