| A company should provide alternative products or services to meet the different requirements of the high-, middle- and low-class customers, if it wants to gain a larger proportion of the market in business competition. Thus it needs to apply discriminative pricing strategy. In the logistical field, products or services with a demand-leading time are more popular, because the demand-leading time is not only one of the assessing factors, but also a way to accomplish the discriminative strategy and enhance the market share for the company. This paper first introduces the characteristics of the logistical products or services with a demand-leading time, analyzes its effect in manufacture and inventory. Then, considering that different customers have different requirements on price and demanding time, this paper suggests a time-based discriminative pricing strategy, gives out a utility-oriented pricing concept and formulates a price-programming procedure. Based on the above qualitative analysis, it constructs an inventory optimizing model for manufacturer and storing company respectively, fingers out an optional result of the cost decision variable. In the pricing model, some sub-strategies of time and price have been put forward, which further analyzes the relationship between pricing strategy and demand frequency, and also between supply frequency and demand frequency. To optimize the profit rate of the system, it constructs a single pricing model and a discriminative pricing model, and compares the profits between them. Finally, it concludes that the latter is much better than the former. So, this paper provides some advice and a basic theoretical study for the application of discriminative pricing strategy in logistical field. |
