1. Understand your costs

This is simple. You have to have a margin if you are in commerce. If you have a number of products serviced on one territory and with the same equipment, your overheads will fall equally to all of the products in terms of cost. Here you can play with the pricing – you can cut on the product where you need to compete on prices and add that cost to the price of the more fancy product.

2. Investigate the competition

You don’t have to compete on prices but you will anyway need to know what is happening around. Compare yourself to the similar products and try to find something that will put you forward and give you a chance to step aside from price competition.

3. Understand you customer.

That is who you work for after all. Find as much information as possible and act on it accordingly.

4. Review your costs regularly

Keep ignoring the changes of your suppliers’ prices and overhead costs and you’ll find yourself loosing your margin. Constant review of direct and indirect costs is a must.

5. Don’t cut your prices if you intend to raise them back.

If your intention is to temporarily boost your sales, this is a wring strategy. You will have a hard time raising your prices. Instead, try to offer an additional value that will not affect your costs too much. Communicated properly, this will help boost the sales for some time.

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1. People of business talk about flexibility and its importance in proper responding to the market needs. With the constantly increasing speed of life, this thesis proves to be more true every day.
2. When you stick to traditions, you tend to repeat your behaviour. This makes you a very good and easy target for the guys that confront you in the market competition. So, it’s better if you should that target first and do something they’d never expect.
3. If being conservative means doing things you always do, you’ll never create anything really new. Think out of the box, do some brainstorming, hire people from outside, break some of your rules and you’ll find yourself a creative inventor you never were.

You can come up with many more examples that would prove the point I am trying to make. You can come up with as many that would fairly contradict these. Both ways are true, you just need to start thinking from the position you are in at a certain moment. You just need to think. Instead of blindly sticking to rules…

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The idea of the project is great and it has been very successful, claiming millions of registered users. How many of them are fake is another story but anyway, the number of visits is very impressive – claiming the figures of around 50 million people over the last month.

However, what I have noticed is that people who are being interviewed seem to be quite careless about what is going on around. The striking point: the owner is very certain about the fact that his project and the rival site Vkontakte will be the leaders in the near future, with the competition lagging behind. Honestly, I hope (for his own good) that his choice of words and tone is not as confident when talking to the investors. Be confident but careful, and remember to look around for competition.

The same people managing Odnoklassniki project would in another article comment on Myspace expanding to Russia: these guys have nothing to do here, the market is shared by the two projects (I mentioned them above), and there’s no more room for Myspace. Come on, just have a look at Myspace’s concept to find that they are different. And have a look at their investors to find that they can find some space for themselves here in Russia. I would say, if you are a Myspace, a Facebook, a Badoo or anything of the kind, do not waste your time – the leaders here are very willing to give away their users.

Unfortunately, Myspace have been really slow so far. Their post about a single vacancy has been on for months, and God knows how long it will keep hanging there. I wonder what their HR policy is…

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