Pricing Strategy Of E-books Based On Consumer Preference

The development of internet economy is changing people’s life style while improving people’s living efficiency. With the popularity of the Internet and mobile reading device, e-books have become a new way of reading, gradually changing people’s reading habits. Driven by the upsurge of e-books, more and more companies join the market competition. As e-books continuously expand the market, the entire industry has not formed an effective way to gain profit. The fuzzy understanding of the pricing mode makes the price competition chaotic, and the profit of publishing company is difficult to be guaranteed. From the point of characteristics, e-books are more like digital products. E-books and traditional books have a series of prominent differences that leads to the difficulty in e-book pricing. For e-book market, a practical and effective pricing idea is of great significance to the long-term benign development of the market.This paper starts from the product characteristics of e-books, suggests the idea that the price of e-books should be based on consumer preference. By applying the empirical method, this paper analyzes the consumer preference of e-books, and combines the results with e-book pricing to put forward specific e-book pricing strategies. This paper is divided into 6 chapters:The first chapter is an introduction of the problem to be studied. In this section, we discuss the background of the topic, the theoretical and practical significance of the topic, the framework of this paper and the innovation points. The first chapter establishes the direction of the full text, lays the foundation for the study.The second chapter is the literature review. We summarize the related literature at home and abroad and highlight the development of this paper on the basis of the previous. This chapter is divided into three sections:the methods of consumer preference, the methods of e-book preference and the pricing study based on preference.The third chapter is the analysis of the characteristics of e-books. First of all, we start from e-book product itself, define the concept and clarify its product range. Secondly, this section analyzes the differences between e-books and traditional books in publishing link, the storage and reading media, consumer experience and reading experience. The discussion highlights the special nature of e-books as reading products. Finally, we analyze the economics characteristics of e-books, including the special cost structure, the empirical product, and the dependence of preference.The fourth chapter is the empirical analysis of the consumer preference of e-books. First of all, conjoint analysis method is introduced into the research of preference. We divide e-books into 6 kinds of attributes and distinguish different attribute levels to design 16 kinds of simulation products for consumers to evaluate. Secondly, we collect data by the questionnaire survey and make a preliminary descriptive statistical analysis. Finally, the conjoint analysis method is used for the specific product evaluation scores. According to the econometric analysis result, we obtain the overall preference and the differences between people. Furthermore, we classify consumers to find the features of different groups.The fifth chapter is the pricing strategy of e-books. First of all, we summarize the consumer perceived value of e-books and the market positioning of e-books to find the point of pricing. Secondly, three pricing strategies are put forward based on the combination of preference characteristics:low-price strategy, differential pricing and service pricing. We discuss the adaptability of each pricing strategy.The sixth chapter is the conclusion part of the full text. We first draw a conclusion, and then refer the inadequacies of the paper. This section also includes the outlook of the further study.From the conclusion of this paper, it is of practical significance to formulate the pricing of e-books based on consumer preference. Through the analysis of preference, we can conclude that consumers in the purchase of e-books consider the main attributes for the reader’s recommendation, book content, price and the author’s reputation, the secondary factors for the corresponding paper books and product form. Meanwhile, consumer willingness to pay for the e-book is relatively low, the price ceiling is 10.From the perspective of e-book consumers, there are three types of consumers in the market:preference consumers, neutral consumers and loathing consumers.The first pricing goal for e-books is to cultivate consumer awareness of the payment. Therefore, we should use the low price strategy for market cultivation, and take advantage of low price level and variety of discount promotions to highlight the "price ratio". Secondly, we should give full consideration to consumer preference when making e-book price, and coordinate the price and the difference of e-book itself to attract more consumers. Differential pricing is the combination of price and specific preference by differentiating the price of different e-book products. The purpose is to attract different types of consumers through differential pricing and to gain profit. Service pricing is to transform the ownership of the book sales for the access to sales, by selling the reading service to achieve consumer locking, cultivate the habit of reading e-books, and eventually make consumers to become preference type.The main contribution of this paper is to study the pricing problem of e-books from the perspective of consumer preference, to analyze the characteristics of the e-books, and to put forward the dependence of the price of e-books on consumer preference. This view is rarely mentioned in the previous studies. Secondly, this paper introduces conjoint analysis as the empirical method to study preference, and uses the questionnaire survey to obtain the consumer’s direct data, which really start the research from the perspective of demand. Thirdly, this paper establishes the relationship between preference and pricing, and finds out the reference value of preference in the price setting, and puts forward three corresponding pricing strategies. These have important significance in fully understanding the market demand of e-books and using price mechanism to promote the e-book market.