Latest news with #JohnWanamaker
UPI
31-07-2025
- Business
- UPI
What is personalized pricing, and how do you avoid it?
Delta Air Lines recently announced it would expand its use of artificial intelligence to provide individualized prices to customers. But personalized pricing can be found ion many industries. Photo by OrnaW/ Pixabay Delta Air Lines recently announced it would expand its use of artificial intelligence to provide individualized prices to customers. This move sparked concern among flyers and politicians. But Delta isn't the only business interested in using AI this way. Personalized pricing has already spread across a range of industries, from finance to online gaming. Customized pricing -- where each customer receives a different price for the same product -- is a holy grail for businesses because it boosts profits. With customized pricing, free-spending people pay more, while the price-sensitive pay less. Just as clothes can be tailored to each person, custom pricing fits each person's ability and desire to pay. I am a professor who teaches business school students how to set prices. My latest book, The Power of Cash: Why Using Paper Money is Good for You and Society, highlights problems with custom pricing. Specifically, I'm worried that AI pricing models lack transparency and could unfairly take advantage of financially unsophisticated people. The history of custom pricing For much of history, customized pricing was the normal way things happened. In the past, business owners sized up each customer and then bargained face-to-face. The price paid depended on the buyer's and seller's bargaining skills -- and desperation. An old joke illustrates this process. Once, a very rich man was riding in his carriage at breakfast time. Hungry, he told his driver to stop at the next restaurant. He went inside, ordered some eggs and asked for the bill. When the owner handed him the check, the rich man was shocked at the price. "Are eggs rare in this neighborhood?" he asked. "No," the owner said. "Eggs are plentiful, but very rich men are quite rare." Custom pricing through bargaining still exists in some industries. For example, car dealerships often negotiate a different price for each vehicle they sell. Economists refer to this as "first-degree" or "perfect" price discrimination, which is "perfect" from the seller's perspective because it allows them to charge each customer the maximum amount they're willing to pay. Currently, most American shoppers don't bargain, but instead see set prices. Many scholars trace the rise of set prices to John Wanamaker's Philadelphia department store, which opened in 1876. In his store, each item had a nonnegotiable price tag. These set prices made it simpler for customers to shop and became very popular. Why uniform pricing caught on Set prices have several advantages for businesses. For one thing, they allow stores to hire low-paid retail workers instead of employees who are experts in negotiation. Historically, they also made it easier for stores to decide how much to charge. Before the advent of AI pricing, many companies determined prices using a "cost-plus" rule. Cost-plus means a business adds a fixed percentage or markup to an item's cost. The markup is the percentage added to a product's cost that covers a company's profits and overhead. The big-box retailer Costco still uses this rule. It determines prices by adding a roughly 15% maximum markup to each item on the warehouse floor. If something costs Costco $100, they sell it for about $115. The problem with cost-plus is that it treats all items the same. For example, Costco sells wine in many stores. People buying expensive champagne typically are willing to pay a much higher markup than customers purchasing inexpensive boxed wine. Using AI gets around this problem by letting a computer determine the optimal markup item by item. What personalized pricing means for shoppers AI needs a lot of data to operate effectively. The shift from cash to electronic payments has enabled businesses to collect what's been called a "gold mine" of information. For example, Mastercard says its data lets companies "determine optimal pricing strategies." So much information is collected when you pay electronically that in 2024, the Federal Trade Commission issued civil subpoenas to Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase and other financial companies demanding to know "how artificial intelligence and other technological tools may allow companies to vary prices using data they collect about individual consumers' finances and shopping habits." Experiments at the FTC show that AI programs can even collude among themselves to raise prices without human intervention. To prevent customized pricing, some states have laws requiring retailers to display a single price for each product for sale. Even with these laws, it's simple to do custom pricing by using targeted digital coupons, which vary each shopper's discount. How you can outsmart AI pricing There are ways to get around customized pricing. All depend on denying AI programs data on past purchases and knowledge of who you are. First, when shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, use paper money. Yes, good old-fashioned cash is private and leaves no data trail that follows you online. Second, once online, clear your cache. Your search history and cookies provide algorithms with extensive amounts of information. Many articles say the protective power of clearing your cache is an urban myth. However, this information was based on how airlines used to price tickets. Recent analysis by the FTC shows the newest AI algorithms are changing prices based on this cached information. Third, many computer pricing algorithms look at your location, since location is a good proxy for income. I was once in Botswana and needed to buy a plane ticket. The price on my computer was about $200. Unfortunately, before booking I was called away to dinner. After dinner my computer showed the cost was $1,000 −- five times higher. It turned out after dinner I used my university's VPN, which told the airline I was located in a rich American neighborhood. Before dinner I was located in a poor African town. Shutting off the VPN reduced the price. Last, often to get a better price in face-to-face negotiations, you need to walk away. To do this online, put something in your basket and then wait before hitting purchase. I recently bought eyeglasses online. As a cash payer, I didn't have my credit card handy. It took five minutes to find it, and the delay caused the site to offer a large discount to complete the purchase. The computer revolution has created the ability to create custom products cheaply. The cashless society combined with AI is setting us up for customized prices. In a custom-pricing situation, seeing a high price doesn't mean something is higher quality. Instead, a high price simply means a business views the customer as willing to part with more money. Using cash more often can help defeat custom pricing. In my view, however, rapid advances in AI mean we need to start talking now about how prices are determined, before customized pricing takes over completely. Jay L. Zagorsky is an associate professor at the Questrom School of Business of Boston University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. the views and opinions in this commentary are solely those of the author.
Al Arabiya
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Al Arabiya
Famed Wanamaker Organ will again be heard by the public in fall art series in Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA – One of the most famous organs in the world, which graces one of Philadelphia's favorite public spaces, was at risk of going quiet this spring when Macy's closed up shop in the city's storied Wanamaker Building. But countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, the avant-garde opera star hired last year to run Opera Philadelphia, is leading an effort to let the public again enjoy the Wanamaker Organ, a National Historic Landmark-designated treasure. The organ boasts more than 28,000 wood and metal pipes hidden behind a soaring wall of gold-leaf pipes that frame the building's seven-story marble atrium. Costanzo, with 1 million in philanthropic funding, is organizing a series of public performances this fall – including opera, ballet, theater, and drag – before renovations begin next year on the building's conversion to a retail and residential hub. The first event is set for Sunday, Sept. 7. 'John Wanamaker, when he built this Grand Court, said he wanted it to be the intersection of arts and commerce, and that's why he put the world's largest pipe organ into it,' Costanzo told The Associated Press in an onsite interview Thursday evening. 'This space is operatic,' he said. 'So I thought it was a perfect umbrella to bring in every arts organization I could and all these different collaborators.' The organ was made for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Wanamaker, a successful merchant and civic leader, had it moved to his new emporium next to City Hall in 1909 and then hired a crew of 40 pipe makers to enlarge it so the sound filled the vast space. A decade later, famed conductor Leopold Anthony Stokowski performed there with the Philadelphia Orchestra as 15,000 people crowded into the great hall and mezzanines. With the merchandise now gone, the acoustics rival those of the great cathedrals, Costanzo said. 'The organ for the first time is in perfect cathedral acoustic condition, so it will be the best way to hear this instrument in the history of the space because there's actually nothing in there,' he said. The building's new owner hopes to continue to incorporate art and culture into their plans, which include retail on the lower floors and office and residential space above. The organ adds unique challenges. 'You've got this organ music going in the grand atrium, but meanwhile you've got other uses on these upper floors looking into that space, so you have to figure out how to make that work for everybody,' said Jon McMillan, a senior vice president of TF Cornerstone, the New York-based development firm. Local civic groups in an announcement Friday said they hope to raise funds to bring back one of the city's most beloved annual events, a holiday light show that drew generations of families to the store. Costanzo, who continues to perform around the world, believes he can build enthusiasm for the arts by bringing it to the places where people gather, including the Wanamaker Building. And he hopes that in turn will help people find a way to connect with each other. 'This space is so deeply embedded in the emotion of Philadelphia,' Costanzo said. 'I want them to come to Wanamaker and discover something they've never seen before.'
Yahoo
10-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
20 Extremely Rare, Mind-Blowing Photos From The 1950s That Show How Wildly Different Things Used To Be
1958 credit card: Text says: "It is our pleasure to inform you that a charge account has been opened for your convenience. This is available to you in all of the John Wanamaker Stores, where we hope to have the privilege of serving you often." 1954 hospital bill for $99 for a baby delivery: 1957-established McDonald's that never updated their sign: 1950s bathroom with an ashtray atop the toilet paper dispenser: '50s barber shop ad that displayed popular men's haircuts: 1957 thermostat: 1950s bathroom with a built-in toilet phone: 1957 wall-mount fridge: 1950s smoking ad: Text says: "People are always telling me that smoking causes low birth weight. Talk about a win-win-win! An easy labor, a slim baby, and the Full Flavor of Winstons!" waffle iron from the 1950s: 1956 refridgerator: 1952 ad for a typewriter: 1950s airline-brand cigarettes: surgery bill from a six-day hospital stay in 1956: stove from the 1950s that has a built-in soup pot: 1950s tie that gave people fashion advice: double oven from the 1970s: birth announcement card from 1950: 1954 beer can: finally, this 1951 banned children's toy science kit that wanted kids to find uranium deposits:
Forbes
11-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Tracksuit's $25 Million Raise Shows How Brand Metrics Drive Growth
Brands are the moat. getty Where product-led growth was the growth hacker's mantra of the 2010s, brand-led growth is the moat for the 2020s. Yet most dashboards still focus only on the bottom of the funnel, measuring the five percent of buyers ready to purchase now and ignoring the 95 percent of the market who are ripe for conversion tomorrow. The underutilized state of brand measurement is not because companies don't understand how important brands are in today's economy. On the contrary, Nielsen's surveys have for years shown that the vast majority of marketers agree that brand awareness is the single most important metric in judging marketing success. Marq's State of Brand Consistency reports offer a validating corollary, noting how brand consistency across channels can lift revenue by almost a third. Instead of ignorance, the issue is rooted in uncertainty. 'Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half.' The line, usually credited to U.S. department-store pioneer John Wanamaker, resonates particularly strongly when it comes to brand building, not least because of how most executives can quote their CAC to the cent yet are forced to a shrug when asked what moved the needle on brand love. Given the obvious demand for better brand metrics, it's no surprise to see startups and established companies alike venture deeper into the field. One sign of this transformation is Tracksuit's recent $25 million Series B that puts brand measurement front and center. 'Our goal is to create a common language that helps marketers, boards and agencies all understand how their initiatives are performing and contributing to business growth,' said Matt Herbert, Co-Founder of Tracksuit. Zoom out and you'll see the latest funding is part of a broader shift. We are entering an era where brand will no longer be judged by feel or familiarity alone, but by data. Just as HR evolved from gut instinct to people analytics, branding is now heading into its own enlightenment. What follows may well redefine what it means to grow, because if you can measure what people remember, you can shape what they choose. From the Edelman Trust Barometer which is now in its 25th year of tallying public confidence to real-time platforms like Morning Consult, which polls more than 2,000 brands across 40-plus markets, the ecosystem of measurement providers has long been at work to close marketing's most expensive blind spot: knowing whether brand spend actually compounds. The most prominent trend at play today is the adoption of a data-first mindset. Where CROs have Salesforce and CFOs have Datarails, venture capitalists such as VMG Partners are betting on CMOs soon finding brand measurement companies like Tracksuit equally indispensable. 'We see brand performance management as the next must-have system of record for consumer-facing businesses,' Sam Shapiro, Partner at VMG Partners, begins. 'Brand is a company's most important asset, and there's no excuse for not quantifying it accordingly,' Shapiro continues, reflecting VMG's bullish thesis on the market research services industry which it expects to grow in importance in the coming years. With a portfolio ranging from KIND Snacks to Spindrift, VMG has long backed companies build around brand equity, and the technology companies that support the VC industry is making increasingly bold bets on consumer-facing startups as exemplified by Kirsten Green who recently made Forbes' 2025 Midas List, reflecting a broader shift towards what BCG sees as the consumer's growing appetite for brands tailored to their lifestyle. As the money is beginning to pour in, measurement startups are racing to meet the moment. 'Marketing measurement was broken for too long, as most modern tools don't offer a full picture, leaving them without the holistic view they need to understand their brand's true impact and position in the market,' Herbert says. 'The VC interest in our industry is coinciding with a new reality on the client side where not having metrics on how your brand is doing is no longer acceptable. This is where companies like ours are finding our opportunity to strike, as we're meeting a growing demand from brands for the insights they need to make better business decisions,' Herbert continues. The commercial traction seems to validate Herbert's argument, with Tracksuit claiming 1,000 paying customers and 240 percent YoY U.S. growth, serving names from Steve Madden to Opendoor. Moreover, the round's oversubscription signals how institutional investors are ready to underwrite a new category altogether: brand performance management. At its core, the resurgence of brand measurement is a response to structural shifts in how growth is built and defended. As product features become easier to copy thanks to AI and the Tiktok economy makes attention spans shorter, the strength and clarity of a brand increasingly decide who wins. Matthew Kerbel, Global Brand Strategy Director of Turo, the car-sharing marketplace, puts it plainly: 'We believe the idea that brand isn't measurable is a myth. Connecting brand efforts to business results and speaking the language of company leadership has become imperative, and requires a clear understanding of how our brand resonates with consumers.' Caleb Pearson, VP of Media and Digital at McDonald's, agrees. ' If you're just using data for marketing, you're leaving a lot of growth on the table. Companies should be using customer data throughout the whole customer experience, with brand awareness and consideration being a key component thereof.' What we're witnessing now is the early-stage statistification of the brand. Just as HR teams once moved from gut-based hiring to competency frameworks, pulse surveys, and predictive analytics, brand is now undergoing its own transformation from instinct and intuition to repeatable, comparative metrics. 'Brand marketing has traditionally been out of reach, especially for mid-market companies, because of the cost and complexity, making it difficult for them to know where to focus and prove the ROI,' Herbert noted. Daily polling and real-time dashboards are essentially doing for brand what SAP and Workday did for people operations: turning the invisible into numbers you can act on. In many ways this is only the beginning, given how statistification tends to lead to scientification. As the industry continues to collect more consistent, high-quality longitudinal data, we'll begin to see patterns of observations from what kinds of campaigns build salience faster, how emotional affinity affects pricing power, to why certain brand archetypes outperform in specific markets. This new generation of insight will help generate testable theories about how brands behave over time, under pressure, across categories. In short, we'll start to understand brand performance with the same rigour and predictive power that finance teams bring to cash flow and margin. For business leaders, this data-driven shift demands a mindset change. The first shift is acknowledging that brands are no longer soft assets. Instead, they're performance engines for which we finally have dashboards. Here's how to start using it. Making the shift to a brand performance mindset doesn't require a complete overhaul, what you need is a clearer lens and a willingness to look. The place to start is a brand audit. Map your awareness, consideration, and perception levels compared to your competitive set. Where are you losing memory share? Where are you punching above your weight? Next, set internal goals and metrics that bring brand performance into the boardroom. Treat salience, sentiment, and top-of-funnel engagement like you would retention or CAC, key business levers that deserve quarterly tracking and cross-functional accountability. Finally, invest in measurement with the same seriousness as media spend. Great brand activity without measurement is a loud party with no guest list, you won't know who showed up, what they remember, or if they'll come back. Herbert emphasizes, 'It's not just about tracking individual campaigns, but always measuring brand health to understand how every activity contributes to long-term growth.' And remember, thanks to AI all of the features your engineers are proud of can be cloned, and consumer attention is more fleeting than ever. What sticks is the brand, and it's your job to prove it.
Forbes
11-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Tracksuit's $25M Raise Shows Why Brand Metrics Are The Next Growth Engine
Brands are the moat. Where product-led growth was the growth hacker's mantra of the 2010s, brand-led growth is the moat for the 2020s. Yet most dashboards still focus only on the bottom of the funnel, measuring the five percent of buyers ready to purchase now and ignoring the 95 percent of the market who are ripe for conversion tomorrow. The underutilized state of brand measurement is not because companies don't understand how important brands are in today's economy. On the contrary, Nielsen's surveys have for years shown that the vast majority of marketers agree that brand awareness is the single most important metric in judging marketing success. Marq's State of Brand Consistency reports offer a validating corollary, noting how brand consistency across channels can lift revenue by almost a third. Instead of ignorance, the issue is rooted in uncertainty. 'Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half.' The line, usually credited to U.S. department-store pioneer John Wanamaker, resonates particularly strongly when it comes to brand building, not least because of how most executives can quote their CAC to the cent yet are forced to a shrug when asked what moved the needle on brand love. Given the obvious demand for better brand metrics, it's no surprise to see startups and established companies alike venture deeper into the field. One sign of this transformation is Tracksuit's recent $25 million Series B that puts brand measurement front and center. 'Our goal is to create a common language that helps marketers, boards and agencies all understand how their initiatives are performing and contributing to business growth,' said Matt Herbert, Co-Founder of Tracksuit. Zoom out and you'll see the latest funding is part of a broader shift. We are entering an era where brand will no longer be judged by feel or familiarity alone, but by data. Just as HR evolved from gut instinct to people analytics, branding is now heading into its own enlightenment. What follows may well redefine what it means to grow, because if you can measure what people remember, you can shape what they choose. From the Edelman Trust Barometer which is now in its 25th year of tallying public confidence to real-time platforms like Morning Consult, which polls more than 2,000 brands across 40-plus markets, the ecosystem of measurement providers has long been at work to close marketing's most expensive blind spot: knowing whether brand spend actually compounds. The most prominent trend at play today is the adoption of a data-first mindset. Where CROs have Salesforce and CFOs have Datarails, venture capitalists such as VMG Partners are betting on CMOs soon finding brand measurement companies like Tracksuit equally indispensable. 'We see brand performance management as the next must-have system of record for consumer-facing businesses,' Sam Shapiro, Partner at VMG Partners, begins. 'Brand is a company's most important asset, and there's no excuse for not quantifying it accordingly,' Shapiro continues, reflecting VMG's bullish thesis on the market research services industry which it expects to grow in importance in the coming years. With a portfolio ranging from KIND Snacks to Spindrift, VMG has long backed companies build around brand equity, and the technology companies that support the VC industry is making increasingly bold bets on consumer-facing startups as exemplified by Kirsten Green who recently made Forbes' 2025 Midas List, reflecting a broader shift towards what BCG sees as the consumer's growing appetite for brands tailored to their lifestyle. As the money is beginning to pour in, measurement startups are racing to meet the moment. 'Marketing measurement was broken for too long, as most modern tools don't offer a full picture, leaving them without the holistic view they need to understand their brand's true impact and position in the market,' Herbert says. 'The VC interest in our industry is coinciding with a new reality on the client side where not having metrics on how your brand is doing is no longer acceptable. This is where companies like ours are finding our opportunity to strike, as we're meeting a growing demand from brands for the insights they need to make better business decisions,' Herbert continues. The commercial traction seems to validate Herbert's argument, with Tracksuit claiming 1,000 paying customers and 240 percent YoY U.S. growth, serving names from Steve Madden to Opendoor. Moreover, the round's oversubscription signals how institutional investors are ready to underwrite a new category altogether: brand performance management. At its core, the resurgence of brand measurement is a response to structural shifts in how growth is built and defended. As product features become easier to copy thanks to AI and the Tiktok economy makes attention spans shorter, the strength and clarity of a brand increasingly decide who wins. Matthew Kerbel, Global Brand Strategy Director of Turo, the car-sharing marketplace, puts it plainly: 'We believe the idea that brand isn't measurable is a myth. Connecting brand efforts to business results and speaking the language of company leadership has become imperative, and requires a clear understanding of how our brand resonates with consumers.' Caleb Pearson, VP of Media and Digital at McDonald's, agrees. ' If you're just using data for marketing, you're leaving a lot of growth on the table. Companies should be using customer data throughout the whole customer experience, with brand awareness and consideration being a key component thereof.' What we're witnessing now is the early-stage statistification of the brand. Just as HR teams once moved from gut-based hiring to competency frameworks, pulse surveys, and predictive analytics, brand is now undergoing its own transformation from instinct and intuition to repeatable, comparative metrics. 'Brand marketing has traditionally been out of reach, especially for mid-market companies, because of the cost and complexity, making it difficult for them to know where to focus and prove the ROI,' Herbert noted. Daily polling and real-time dashboards are essentially doing for brand what SAP and Workday did for people operations: turning the invisible into numbers you can act on. In many ways this is only the beginning, given how statistification tends to lead to scientification. As the industry continues to collect more consistent, high-quality longitudinal data, we'll begin to see patterns of observations from what kinds of campaigns build salience faster, how emotional affinity affects pricing power, to why certain brand archetypes outperform in specific markets. This new generation of insight will help generate testable theories about how brands behave over time, under pressure, across categories. In short, we'll start to understand brand performance with the same rigour and predictive power that finance teams bring to cash flow and margin. For business leaders, this data-driven shift demands a mindset change. The first shift is acknowledging that brands are no longer soft assets. Instead, they're performance engines for which we finally have dashboards. Here's how to start using it. Making the shift to a brand performance mindset doesn't require a complete overhaul, what you need is a clearer lens and a willingness to look. The place to start is a brand audit. Map your awareness, consideration, and perception levels compared to your competitive set. Where are you losing memory share? Where are you punching above your weight? Next, set internal goals and metrics that bring brand performance into the boardroom. Treat salience, sentiment, and top-of-funnel engagement like you would retention or CAC, key business levers that deserve quarterly tracking and cross-functional accountability. Finally, invest in measurement with the same seriousness as media spend. Great brand activity without measurement is a loud party with no guest list, you won't know who showed up, what they remember, or if they'll come back. Herbert emphasizes, 'It's not just about tracking individual campaigns, but always measuring brand health to understand how every activity contributes to long-term growth.' And remember, thanks to AI all of the features your engineers are proud of can be cloned, and consumer attention is more fleeting than ever. What sticks is the brand, and it's your job to prove it.
