This week I was exposed to a pricing strategy. I wanted to subscribe to X-men comic books on the Marvel website. The way it works is that you can usually buy every issue individually every week at the local comic book store, OR you can go online and pay for a year's worth of issues for 70 % of the price. This is beneficial to Marvel because they would obviously rather have you pay for a large number of issues than one every month or so. It's like guaranteeing that they will have business for a year, whereas when they print millions of comics they have no way of knowing how many people will buy them at the stores/stands.
The site offers bundles: if you subscribe to multiple titles at once you pay a discount price. This is beneficial to me, and to them. A good use of bundle pricing.
However, there may be cannibalization in sight. I considered the fact that if they offer discounts for their mail subscriptions, they are taking business away from local comic shops. I still want to support the local comic shop because they offer some sort of utility to me when I am looking for the product [comics] individually. This gives the consumer power. Local comic shops are beneficial to me [they are conveniently located and I can head down there whenever I feel like reading] and they are beneficial to Marvel, because they attract new costumers and have loyal costumers.
It reminds me of how I signed up for Netflix and cancelled my Blockbuster, unaware that I was an accomplice in Blockbuster's bankruptcy. Now I regret it because Blockbuster offered a time and place utility Netflix does not give me, I miss having a place where I could go to and get a movie immediately from a wide selection. I hope the same fate does not come to comic book shops.
