The Commoditization

What this pack runs.

A product has become ordinary when a rival sells the same thing, to the same customer, at a price you cannot match on cost, and the customer knows it. It is not a judgment on the product. What has changed is that the thing you charge for no longer carries the price, and by the time it reaches an agenda the product has usually been reclassified in the room from the business into a cost problem. The conversation becomes how to defend the premium, because at the ordinary price the product loses money on every unit. That is not the comparison. Holding the premium loses customers, and every customer who leaves takes whatever they bought beyond the product with them: the service, the consumables, the software, the financing, the cash left on account. This pack turns it into three answers and one division. Hold the premium, and a share of customers leave with the product's margin and their share of the complement. Price the product at the ordinary price, and every customer stays. Let the product go, and you keep only what survives without it. The point where holding and giving away are equal is the break-even complement, what a customer must earn you beyond the product before giving it away pays, and the distance from it to the complement you actually earn is what a board can watch. It stops on six conditions: no price per customer, no product cost, no ordinary price, no complement costed on its own, no figure for how much of it leaves with the product, and no share of customers who would leave if the premium were held.

The casebooks these cases come from.

The pack reads nine sourced decisions through the framework. They are drawn from these casebooks, each one a set of verified records on a single decision type.

A verified record has passed a mechanical claim-versus-source check, a second model's read, and human approval. The count is what exists today, not a target.