Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Train fares: The confusion pricing policies adopted by some railway companies create 
anomalies – buying two single tickets may be cheaper than a return; splitting journeys 
into segments and buying a separate ticket for each segment can often produce a cheaper 
total fare. Confusion pricing only works if customers cannot be bothered to untangle the 
confusion, and most times they cannot or will not. However, that untangling is really 
easy for a computer algorithm. The opportunity is underlined by Trainsplit.com, which 
already offers the online service of splitting journeys into legs to minimise fares, even 
though it requires a whole set of tickets for a single journey. Most consumers will not 
bother with this and will go on paying higher fares. The perverse customer is the one 
who will go for the ticket splitting, and moreover will take pleasure in beating the train 
company. Similar opportunities abound in international air travel, taken advantage of 
by numerous app platforms.
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Medicine: Writing prescriptions for medicines and diagnostic tests has long been a 
monopoly of doctors and a few other clinicians. But doctors often do not do what they 

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INNOVATION STRATEGY
are told by patients and generally make the process of getting things you want difficult – 
including waits of up to a month to get to see a GP, forcing people to sit in a waiting 
room full of ill people and making them wait weeks for test results. Most consum-
ers put up with this ‘rationing by inconvenience’. Some do not. Companies such as 
Direct Laboratory Services and WellnessFX in the United States have already leapt on 
the opportunity provided by perverse customers – they sell diagnostic tests direct to 
consumers, cutting out the barrier of the doctor. You want a battery of blood tests or 
a thyroid function measurement – there you go, all yours, no doctor interfering. Rapid 
and at-home diagnostics are a very attractive and growing niche in the global health care 
business. Similarly, 23andMe provides the consumer direct with genetic testing based 
on DNA analysis (Piercy, 2017). And that is before you even consider the potential for 
self-prescription and the growing purchase of pharmaceuticals on the Internet. This will 
grow even faster when quality assurance is more advanced. Consumers are cutting the 
doctor out. It may not be wise, but it seems to be what is happening.
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