Basing on a success factor analysis, the strongly increasing role of information on markets, customers and competitors for financial service provider in the retail sector is shown. Within a selected topic area - price management - the author continues with a description and comparative analysis of the important applicable market research instruments. Concrete recommendations are derived for the financial industry.

Such an complete but parsimonious analysis was up to now still lacking in the literature, for this as well as for other topic areas. Non-methodological literature focuses either on strategic or marketing oriented aspects, lacking the answer to how to realize a market oriented pricing policy in concrete terms. In contrast, most market research publications have a much too detailed focus on single methods, sometimes comparisons of two to three methods, and fail both to give a complete overview of available methods as well as to integrate the discussion of market research methods into the framework of a best-practice approach.

The results of the analysis show, that a very differentiated and complex method portfolio is available for price management to marketers in the financial industry. Depending on background and situation - as discussed in the article -some forms of simple choice tests or more complex conjoint analysis tests, especially the discrete choice analysis (DCA) are applicable. To a certain degree, price sensitivity tests basing on test markets are equally favored for the financial industry.