THE EFFECT OF PRICE AND PRICE CHANGES ON SALES OF CONSUMER GOODS
Background to the Study
Prices go by many names. It is all around us. The price of a worker is wages, incomes taxes are the price we pay for the privilege of making money. In economic theory, prices policy tends to be relegated to a secondary role and attention is devoted to other dimensions of competitive strategy. It is important to be clear what we mean by price.
According to Ode (2011), the term price simply means the amount of money that you actually pay in order to buy a good or service so that any relation between the buyer and seller is confined to the transaction itself. This definition is inadequate for marketing purposes because it ignores guarantees, after soles services, installation, maintenance, consultancy, delivery, credit, etc. which distinguish one transaction from the next but often “free” or included in the price.
Price in marketing is still broader than the economists conception. It is as much as the total product i.e the amount of money paid to acquire a good or service plus the cost of guarantees, after sales services, maintenance, consultancy, delivery, credit etc.
Price plays a central role in economy as a whole. It balance demand and supply, provide an incentive for new product distributes income between buyer and sellers, professionals consider price from two perspective which are consumer (suppliers or services of the product) and provider (services provided for a fee to product users). An organization that wants to provide a satisfactory marketing mix (product, price, place and promotion). The price of its product must be acceptable to target marketing members. Price has a direct impact on company profit and all other elements of the marketing mix. Thus, the price of a product can be on influence on how consumers perceive it and how prospective seller attempts to optimizing this return. He tries to deal with volume, cost and price but he cannot keep them all in the air at a time. If he increases the price of his product, his volume of sales will fall and if he reduces the price, the volume of sales will increase.
The main purpose of these study is to examine the activities of price and price change on the sales of consumer products in Mr. foods, it would however, highlight the problems and prospect of price changes in other to provide possible solutions that would be beneficial to the management.
The issue of pricing decision and the effect of change in price is sensitive to both firms producing homogenous consumer goods and buyers of such products. On the part of the firms, it is only price that brings about revenue, as such a slight change in cost of production lead to price increment while the buyers on the hand, price is among the major determinant of buying or buying a product or services. In spite of the sensitivity of price, business organization tend to commit common mistakes in their pricing decision. This is evident in the way some organization frequently review their prices upwardly while others fixed their prices independently of other marketing mix element as well as their competitors. This has made so many firms in the consumer goods industry to close shop due to their inability to effectively compete. Hence, the effect of price change on the sales of consumer goods has cut the attention of business managers, captains of industries, consultants and scholars. As such the researcher sees the subject matter of this research worthy of investigation.