Marketing BS with Edward Nevraumont

The episode surfaces a few genuinely interesting ideas - particularly the distinction between dynamic and personalized pricing and the framing of coupons as socially acceptable personalized pricing - but most of the runtime is spent on the obvious observation that theaters should price like airlines, which is not novel. There is significant filler and mutual agreement that dilutes density.

“personalized pricing to say based on, uh, giving your characteristics, we're going to charge you differently than me, even though we're coming in to buy tickets at the same time”

“they could have just priced it at $10 and offered $2 off coupons to a whole bunch of people. Instead of pricing it at $8 for everybody and 20% of people paid 10, they could just price it at 10 for everybody and 80% of people got $2 off and everyone would have been fine with that”

The coupon-as-stealth-personalized-pricing reframe is a mildly interesting lens, but the central thesis - theaters should adopt dynamic pricing like airlines - has been a commonplace observation for years. The episode reaches no contrarian or counterintuitive conclusions; even the 'adapt or die' closing is a cliché.

“It's a Different kind of process. People adapt to it and become second nature, just as does in these other domains”

“they got to adapt or die”

Speaker B references hands-on pricing experience at Procter & Gamble (Swiffer), which gives some credibility as a practitioner, but neither speaker is identified as a senior executive or domain expert in theatrical pricing, ticketing, or revenue management. They present as informed generalists rather than operators who have done this at scale.

“When I was at Procter and Gamble, we could go to the retailer and say, hey, we want Swiffer to sell for 9.99”

“Paramount, you mentioned 80 for Brady. They can't set the price, but what they did is they went, spent a whole ton on market research and then put together a research pack”

There are real named examples - 80 for Brady, Amazon's pricing experiment, David Chappelle/Chris Rock in Seattle, StubHub, SeatGeek, Swiffer at $9.99 - but the episode lacks hard data: no revenue figures, no elasticity numbers, no study citations, and the Amazon story is vague on timing ('around the turn of the century'). Specifics are illustrative anecdote rather than rigorous evidence.

“Paramount, you mentioned 80 for Brady. They can't set the price, but what they did is they went, spent a whole ton on market research and then put together a research pack. Basically it was a sales pitch”

“Back around, right around, um, the turn of the century, Amazon experimented with that a little bit and they got caught”

The host does ask one genuinely probing question - pressing for a counter-example where dynamic pricing was a mistake - which elicits the personalized pricing distinction, the episode's best moment. However, most of the conversation is mutually agreeable, with very little pushback, no productive disagreement, and several exchanges that are little more than affirmations.

“Is there any example of a company that started moving this direction or an industry that started moving in this direction where it was a mistake?”

“But is there an example where dynamic pricing wasn't the right choice?”