Even back in “the good old days” of the very early 1970s, industrial marketers found pricing to be a great challenge. Then both customers and competitors were applying pressure, and since that time government price controls, double-digit inflation, a sudden recession, and finally an economic malaise combining some amount of inflation and recession have simply caused the situation to get worse. A cover article in Business Week stressed these changes:

A version of this article appeared in the November 1978 issue of Harvard Business Review.