Executives beware ‐ Are you the next Ron Johnson of JC Penney? Is your company’s low pricing IQ putting your survivability at risk?

Each year, companies spend billions of dollars on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to help better manage their costs. Curiously, many of these same companies dedicate little corporate resource to the management of their revenue decisions, instead treating pricing and revenue management as a qualitative ‘art’ rather than a quantitative science. This article uses the recent failed JC Penney pricing experiment as an example of the dangers of a qualitative pricing approach, examines why companies have avoided investments in pricing, and offers recommendations on how to overcome corporate pricing inertia.