In this module we will look at strategies that can help us maintain our customer base. For this, we will take an analytical approach that helps us understand the point at which our customers will switch to a competitors and the amount of money a competitor is willing to spend to acquire our customers. Based on this understanding, we will derive applicable strategies that can help us lock in our customers strategically. We will do this by keeping in mind that also customers may apply their own strategies to avoid lock in and further, that our competitors will seek to apply strategies in the pursuit of making our customers theirs.

We will look at the benefits of price discrimination as a strategic tool that can help us to skim off our customer’s willingness to pay and increase our utility accordingly. We are then going to learn the different ways of aligning a price discrimination strategy with successful product design and the three different ways in which a price discrimination strategy can be formulated.

In this module we will demonstrate that if you want to operate a business you have to keep in mind that there are some powerful external entities, so-called competition authorities, that highly value and safeguard competition. While this supports and opens up opportunities for your business if it is new or relatively small and would otherwise simply be crushed by larger incumbent firms – it can also put you in danger if you have already achieved a certain size, have acquired more market power are already in a rather powerful position.

In this module, we are going to discover two very important new concepts with which you can increase your business’s returns: Network effects and boundaries of the firm. We will find that considering these two concepts in formulating our business strategy can help us improve our strategy’s effectiveness and eventually increase our returns.