Free-priced digital products are generally limited in use time, frequency or function. For example, we often download and use WinRAR decompression software for free, and the service period is usually only one month. After this time, you will be reminded to buy. Some free downloaded word memorizing software, consumers can only enjoy browsing memory of some words, and they need to buy and obtain a registration code before they can continue to use it. By providing such free products, suppliers, on the one hand, expand the popularity of products and give consumers the feeling of being one step ahead; On the other hand, it also uses this form to advertise products. If we carefully observe the back of the free products, we can find that the purpose of most suppliers to provide free products is to finally lock in consumers and make them feel dependent on the company's products and services. When this lock-in of consumers becomes a universal reality, it is very unlikely that consumers will transfer to other similar products, which may lead to monopoly and bring high monopoly profits to manufacturers. However, charging for some digital products that were previously implemented free of charge may also arouse consumers' resentment, thus shifting to substitute products or services. Differential pricing strategy means that manufacturers sell a product or service at two or more different prices that reflect the difference in cost and expense ratio. The differential pricing strategy of digital products can be realized through the differences between consumers and products themselves.
In the digital product market, there are usually performance-oriented consumers and price-oriented consumers. When there are high-performance and high-price products and low-performance and low-price products in the market, consumers with rational performance tend to choose the former, while consumers with rational price tend to choose the latter. That is to say, consumers with rational performance have higher preference for the performance of digital products than consumers with rational price, while consumers with rational price are more sensitive to the price of digital products than consumers with rational performance. In this case, differential pricing strategy can be adopted. For example, free online stock quotation information is usually lagging quotation. If consumers expect to get real-time quotation information, they must pay the service provider. This differential pricing is based on the different desires of different consumers to obtain quotations.
In terms of digital product differentiation, manufacturers can customize digital products individually because of the variety of digital products. That is, manufacturers launch different versions of digital products at different times and set different prices for different versions of digital products. This strategy is more effective for digital products with extremely high fixed cost and extremely low marginal cost. For example, software vendors release the lower version of the software first, and then release the higher version after a period of time, so that consumers who have low demand for the software can buy the lower version and pay the lower price. This strategy actually gives consumers an opportunity to choose between time and price, allowing consumers to choose freely according to their own needs. At the same time, for enterprises, it also takes care of the needs of consumers at all levels. Bundle selling is a special type of product differentiation. Because bundling is easy to operate, it plays a very important role in the product differentiation strategy of manufacturers. At the same time, bundling is also an important strategy for manufacturers to sell digital products and services, and it is becoming more and more important in the network environment. In the network environment, the purpose of bundling some digital products is to promote new products or expand market share. For example, Microsoft's office software is bundled by word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint, and its successful bundling makes it occupy 90% of the global office software market. The bundling pricing strategy of digital products refers to the method that consumers must buy other products and services at the same time when buying a certain product or service. For example, at the beginning, Microsoft bundled the Windows operating system with IE browser, so that customers who bought Windows had IE, which quickly occupied this market.
Bundle pricing is an extremely effective two-level differential pricing method. For the manufacturers of digital product bundling pricing, they can not only get more surplus, but also have the function of creating new products. It can weaken the comparability between products and make it difficult for consumers to turn to other manufacturers, thus occupying more market share. Cross-subsidy pricing strategy originated from the management philosophy of "knife rest blade" in Gillette Company. Cross-subsidy pricing is a pricing method based on the interdependence of demand caused by product complementarity. By selling the basic products to consumers at low prices, consumers have great demand for supporting auxiliary products, and then sell the corresponding auxiliary products at high prices. For example, if we buy a digital camera, the capacity of the random memory card is generally 64 megabytes. In order to make the purchased digital camera exert the maximum effect, consumers must purchase additional memory cards with the capacity of 128 megabytes or more. The memory card selected by consumers is usually the product of the same manufacturer who produces digital cameras, so it is easy to be locked by manufacturers. Manufacturers can use this locking effect to set a high enough price for memory cards, which is more conducive to cross-subsidy pricing.
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