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ESSO Discount Promotion: Fill up for EXACTLY 70 € – who comes up with such a thing?

It is an old wisdom in pricing: many discount strategies are anything but well thought out – for example when Deutsche Bahn tries to dissuade me from buying a Flex-Ticket with a price advantage of 1.25 euros. A current example of a hardly comprehensible discount idea is the ESSO discount promotion: anyone who fills up for EXACTLY 70 euros receives a discount of 5 euros on the next refuelling.

What is actually being rewarded in this ESSO discount promotion? The customers’ play instinct? The sensitivity in handling the fuel pump? Should I refrain from filling up completely in order to be able to redeem the 5 euros? Will I become an ESSO regular customer as a result? How annoyed would I be if the tank is already full at 67 euros? And with our Toyota, we have never filled up for 70 euros, the little one doesn’t have such a huge tank. Am I being discriminated against because I don’t drive an SUV?

It seems to be true what pricing expert Hermann Simon said many years ago: very many discount systems are not really well thought out. This ESSO action apparently belongs to them.

Pricing-Newsletter No. 58 (2022): When does it make sense to align pricing with the competition?

Unsere Studien zeigen seit Jahren immer wieder klar: die meisten Unternehmen richten ihre Preise an den eigenen Kosten oder aber am Wettbewerb aus. Doch für nur ganz wenige Unternehmen macht es wirklich Sinn, sich an der Konkurrenz zu orientieren. Das ist das Thema dieses Pricing-Newsletters.

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