This week's news that Indra Nooyi will take over the reins of PepsiCo will bring the inevitable re-focus on the ROI of female corporate leadership....


Most of the pundits will look at PepsiCo's large size, its recent financial successes, and the likelihood (or not) of this particular woman to keep moving the ball down the field.
But I'll bet their commentary will miss a nugget about the relationship between women and the way they price their services. It appears, according to Kirsten Osolind's blog post about "A Behavioral Study of Pricing Decisions: A
Focus on Gender," women do a better job of linking the price of their services to the "relationship cost." Even though the study corroborates the common perception that women make less money than men, it finds:
"The upside is that while women professionals may sacrifice some income in the short term, striving to develop customer loyalty may lead to greater income stability and profitability in the long run."
Fascinating stuff, and it all brings me back to the question of female business leadership. Will businesses allow women to re-focus them on long-term profits and relationships rather than short-term revenues (and especially in professional services, inflexible "always-up" prices)?
Is Indra Nooyi going to be the next Glass Cliff victim?


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suzanne Lowe is founder of Expertise Marketing, LLC and author of The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos – Once and For All – in Professional Service Firms and Marketplace Masters: How Professional Services Firms Compete to Win. She blogs at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix and her own blog, the Expertise Marketplace.

Before founding Expertise Marketing in 1996, Ms. Lowe spent more than a decade leading the marketing programs for top-tier management consulting and business-to-business organizations. Before that, she spent more than a decade managing and implementing strategies for political candidates and organizations.

She spearheads the only widely disseminated research initiative on strategic marketing perceptions, practices and performance of professional service firms around the globe.

In addition, Suzanne Lowe has written or been quoted in nearly 100 articles on the topic of professional services marketing strategy. Her work has appeared in the a rel="nofollow" href="https://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/hbr/hbr_home.jhtml">Harvard
Business Review, BusinessWeek.com, CMO Magazine, Harvard
Management Update
, and scores of profession-specific magazines and journals, including MarketTrends, Marketer, Marketing the Law Firm, Accounting Today, Engineering, Consultants News, Structure, Journal of Law Office Economics and Management, The Practicing CPA, Environmental Design and Construction, Massachusetts High Tech, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, and the Legal Marketing Association’s Strategy. She is a contributor to the second edition of the book Marketing
Professional Services
, by Kotler, Hayes and Bloom. She has also been instrumental in the development, writing and publication of five books and nearly 50 articles and book chapters for her consulting clients.

Suzanne speaks regularly around the world to leading trade associations, industry groups and in-house firm audiences. Her work has also been presented internationally, most recently at the American Marketing Association's annual Frontiers in Services conference. She facilitates a Roundtable of Chief Marketing Officers from some of the world's largest and most prestigious professional service firms. She has guest-lectured at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and designs and delivers customized executive education programs in marketing for professional service executives.

She advises the leaders of professional service firms, from small start-up practices to large global organizations.

Ms. Lowe received a B.A. from Duke University.