Pricing strategy pdf download

Introduction to Pricing Strategies. The world of marketing has shown immense growth since its birth and is continually growing. The business companies in the market run into neck-to-neck competition with each other and thus it has become important for each and every business company to be the best. The kind of strategies that a. Lean Pricing. Again this is just one of the reasons you should have a good understanding of what risk sentiment means.

Ultimately, this depicts the behaviour of traders and investors and tells you whether they are likely to seek safety or seek risk. The lower the risk you take, the lower your returns will be — but of course the higher the risk, the higher your returns will be. Every action has a reaction. Some of the biggest impacts on the market have been COVID, the huge health crisis sweeping the world, the conflict in the Middle East and also the great financial crisis of In this instance there are usually two different moves they are able to make, these are:.

This is due to the fact that they will be a lot more secure just in case the economy does get worse. Cold hard money is thought to be one of the best safe-havens around. Having a good grasp on how risk sentiment works will help you to preserve your capital by managing any risk and emotion involved.

So with this in mind, this section of the price action trading PDF will be risk sentiment focused. To give you a good idea of why a market might be behaving the way it is, you should study the risk sentiment.

Markets will go up and down, fluctuating daily, and this will all be reflected in the risk sentiment. In order to make sense of economic data and the latest financial news, your understanding of risk sentiment should help you to avoid a financial panic in the face of instability.

Sometimes risk sentiment changes at a slow rate, sometimes expeditiously. But by utilising risk sentiment, whilst keeping an eye on the market news, you stand a much better chance of understanding the ambiguity and complexity sometimes reported in the financial media. When an economic environment data is released and it leans towards a diminishing marketplace, sector or economy, this can have a huge effect on the risk sentiment and is considered a very discouraging result.

The bearing of the news makes a big difference to the change in risk sentiment, and in that case, the market could just ignore the data published and continue to buy risky assets regardless! This could lead to your price action trading being restrained, which would prevent any significant upside.

Of course, there is also a chance that the prices will start falling at a rapid rate. With that in mind, the next section of our price action trading PDF looks at how to measure risk sentiment. They will be very helpful when it comes to understanding the risk sentiment and the impact of it can have. Out of all of the real-time points of reference to keep a careful eye on, the market indices in the US is one of the most transparent there is. Some of the most widely scrutinised US indices are as follows:.

The indexes listed above are not solely for the US market, they are for the whole global economy. If you wish to study the reports with regards to which direction these indices are going — you can tune into financial media outlets at various times a day, for example, CNBC, MarketWatch, Reuters and Bloomberg.

In order to raise money so that they can finance various projects or day to day operations, the US Treasury will issue bonds. US Government bonds are sometimes called T-Bills, releasing its bonds throughout the year.

Below we have listed 3 different types of fixed-income securities that are used to fund these operations:. Each and every fund operation pays out its interest in a contrasting way, and as you can see from our list above, each has a different maturity rate. This varies from a few months to three decades. Always look out for financial media reports on the different yields.

If yields are higher, it is highly probable that the market is selling off government debt, their yield improves the more the market falls. As a result of this, the yield will be decreased due to the prices rising. In this segment of the price action trading PDF we are going to have a quick run through the volatility index.

Commonly referred to as VIX, this index looks at the likelihood of a specific market making an abrupt or unexpected shift in price, as well as market uncertainty. For instance:. The higher that VIX is, the more the market will panic, so of course, this means that the lower the VIX is, the calmer the market will be.

Place as a Price-Segmentation Fence Interactive Pricing: Auctions and Negotiation Law, Ethics, and Social Responsibility in Pricing I returned to academics and began to carry out research on behavioral pricing topics, such as the effects of the use of 9-ending prices in retailing and the reasons why framing a price as a discount can so powerfully stimulate sales.

As I became involved in the teaching of pricing as well as the research, I began to appreciate that a business school pricing course is as important to students as it is fun to teach. This book is an attempt to make basic pricing concepts more accessible to business school students, at both the undergraduate and MBA levels. It is also intended to serve as a useful handbook for the thoughtful business manager, who may not have had the opportunity to take a college course in pricing.

There are several aspects of this book that help support these goals. A Simple, Unified System. I have made an effort in the book to present a sensible and consistent system for the setting and management of prices.

The basic tasks are to set initial prices, improve existing prices, consider different prices for different market segments, and to consider the effects of product interrelations. Intuitive Mathematical Techniques. In several ways, I have worked to make it clear to students that they can do the math necessary for making effective price-related decisions. First, I have used in the book only a small number of formulas and mathematical concepts.

Second, no mathematical knowledge beyond high school algebra is assumed. Everything necessary for carrying out each mathematical analysis is presented in the text.

Third, I make an effort to demystify the formulas used in pricing. In particular, I show that the formula for a price-change breakeven analysis is nothing more than a general form of the simple breakeven formula that most business students already know.

Focus on Customer Needs and Behavior. A theme of this book is that the practice of pricing will benefit from an attentiveness to customer needs and sensitivities as much as will marketing practices such as advertising or product design.

The issues and findings of consumer behavior research are integrated into the text, for example, in the discussions of assessing value to the customer, communicating value to the customer, predicting price- change response, and selecting an appropriate price-segmentation fence.

Small-Business Friendly. I have worked to choose business examples and illustrations that demonstrate that the basic pricing principles discussed in this book are applicable to all types of businesses. However, I have also tended toward examples involving retail business—which students can readily relate to—and have written many discussions with small businesses in mind.

Small businesses are relatively easy to understand and thus serve well to illustrate basic pricing principles. But also within virtually every small business lies the entrepreneurial spirit—the dream of becoming a larger business.

Grounding in Practical Theory. Throughout the book, I have tended to make repeated use of a small number of key concepts such as the concept of price segmentation and have favored descriptions in simple terms that seem likely to endure such as organizing legal issues into four categories: price fixing, inappropriate price levels, inappropriate price differentials, and inadequate price communication.

To the extent that these practices are considered to be bringing theory into the text, I would note that good theory is practical. The practical benefits of using a small number of concepts expressed in simple terms are that it facilitates both the ability to learn basic concepts and the ability to keep them in mind so that they can actually be used. This uncertainty makes mastery of simple principles, expressed in basic terms that are unlikely to change, all the more important.

I owe a great debt to my colleague and outstanding teacher, Alok Baveja. His help with the material on revenue management and other topics has made a substantial difference in the text. My thanks also go to David Vance, Allie Miller, and Ivo Jansen for their help with accounting-related material and to Vinay Kanetkar for his help with the discussion of conjoint analysis. Over the years, conversations with H.

I very much appreciate my conversations with Keith Spirgel, Maurice Herrara, Richard Wallin, Edward Janes, Eric Naiburg, Richard Clements, Thomas Magoffin, Jonathan Lane, and the many other businesspeople who took the time to talk with me about the pricing practices in their industries.

Also, I thank Stephanie Capps, whose research assistant work provided many useful pricing examples. They have been outstanding in their helpful expertise and supportiveness.

To my Rutgers—Camden colleagues, as well as to the administration and staff of the School of Business, my thanks go to you for your help in making the school a supportive and stimulating intellectual environment. To my wife, Jean, and our sons, Eric and Kevin, I express my deepest appreciation for your patience with the many hours I have spent working on this book and for your creating a supportive home—one full of life, love, and joy.

About the Author Robert M. He has carried out numerous studies of consumer perception and motivation, especially concerning the effects of price endings and price promotions. He has been ranked among the most published researchers in the area of pricing and has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Fordham University Pricing Center.

The focus of this book is to present concepts, principles, and techniques that provide guidance to help a seller set the best price. Our study of how to set the best prices will take the marketing approach.

In this chapter, we will describe the business context for pricing and provide an overview of how the basic principles of marketing can guide effective price setting. Marketing consists of the full range of activities involved in facilitating commercial exchanges and having all of these activities be guided by a concern for customer needs. The central idea here is that of the commercial exchange see Figure 1.

This is where a seller provides a product to a buyer in return for something in exchange usually an amount of money. The product could be something tangible, which is referred to as a good, or the product could be the result of human or mechanical effort, which is referred to as a service.

The buyer could be a consumer—an individual who purchases a product for his or her own use—or the buyer could be a business customer—an individual or group who purchases the product in order to resell it or for other business purposes.

One aspect that makes the commercial exchange a very important idea is that it describes an interaction that is voluntary. Both the buyer and seller participate in the exchange voluntarily because the exchange will lead them both to be better off. For example, consider the vending machine in the office lounge. You do that voluntarily because you would rather have the bag of candy than that dollar.

As we know, the company would rather have your dollar than that extra package of candy. Figure 1. Pride and O. Because both parties to the exchange are better off after the exchange than before, one could say that the exchange makes the world a just a little bit better place.

There is a little more happiness after the exchange than before it. Although there may be only a tiny bit of increased happiness from any one commercial exchange, these little pleasures can quickly mount up.

In a society where the distribution of most goods and services is governed by a free-market economy, every person engages in numerous commercial exchanges every day.

Each little increase in pleasure that a commercial exchange brings is then multiplied many times, and the societal benefits can become considerable. In all of this, it must be recognized that there are degrees of voluntariness, and that choices may be so limited for some buyers that they may not feel much better off after an exchange.

Also, it is possible that a product purchased voluntarily could fail to perform as expected or that a third party other than the buyer and seller may be harmed by an exchange. These illustrate the need for some governmental regulation—a free- market economy cannot be entirely free. Nevertheless, in modern free-market societies, people experience the pleasures of choice and are energized by entrepreneurial possibilities. The commercial exchange is at the heart of the free-market economic system, which, as we have seen in recent years, has become more and more widely adopted among the various nations of the world.

From this understanding of the commercial exchange, we are now able to give a formal definition of a price: that which is given in return for a product in a commercial exchange. This essential role of price in commerce is sometimes disguised by the use of traditional terms.

Kinnear and Kenneth L. Bernhardt,Principles of Marketing, 2nd ed. This is because, in this book, we will usually be taking the viewpoint of the seller. If we were taking the viewpoint of the buyer, this would not be an issue. Buyers, particularly consumers, will typically use the terms price and cost synonymously. A price is what a business charges, and a cost is what a business pays. But the manager must also attend to his costs.

These costs include, for example, what he pays the wholesaler per case of Cheerios, what he pays employees to stock it on the shelves, what he pays for the building, for heat and lights, for advertising, and so on. Note that there is an important way in which pricing differs from the other three elements of the marketing mix. This is illustrated in Figure 1. Product, distribution, and promotion are all part of the process of providing something satisfying to the customer. All three of these types of marketing activities contribute to the product being of value to customers.

In this book, the term value will refer to the benefits, or the satisfactions of needs and wants, that a product provides to customers. Pricing, on the other hand, is not primarily concerned with creating value. This is one of the reasons that a course in pricing is an important part of a business education.

The Marketing Concept The marketing approach to business involves not only engaging in a variety of marketing activities but also having these marketing activities be guided by the marketing concept. The marketing concept can be expressed as follows: The key to business success is to focus on satisfying customer needs.

What this means is that an organization that works toward satisfying customer needs in every feasible way when carrying out marketing activities is likely to see more long-run success than a company that does not have such a customer focus. Pricing and the Marketing Concept It is clear how product, distribution, and promotional activities can be guided by the marketing concept.

Through marketing research which, by the way, is a fifth important category of marketing activities , a personal computer manufacturer can learn, for example, the features and styling consumers want and then build machines to satisfy consumer preferences. A bank could determine the hours consumers would prefer walk-in service and could arrange to have those services available during those hours. A cell phone service provider may find out that many consumers are unaware of all of the convenient features of their service and may design a promotional program to communicate this information.

However, it is less clear how pricing activities can be guided by the marketing concept. Certainly, customers would prefer paying less. In fact, paying nothing at all might well be their first choice! This does not serve customers well.

Lest this endorsement of profit maximization sound somewhat extreme, rest assured that in a free-market system, competition will tend to keep maximum profits modest. Nothing attracts competitors more quickly than a highly profitable product. Both of these aspects of the marketing approach to pricing will be discussed in detail in later chapters. Consider the following: The oldest records of prices ever found are clay tablets with pictographic symbols found in a town known as Uruk, in what was ancient Sumer and what is now southern Iraq.

The documents—records of payment for barley and wheat, for sheep, and for beer—are really receipts. They are the oldest examples of human writing yet discovered. In other words, when humans first took stylus to wet clay, the first things that they were compelled to record were … prices.

For example, the price that a farmer might pay for a bolt of cloth could be a bushel of corn. This practice, termed barter, still goes on today, especially in less developed countries. Barter occurred in recent years when Shell Oil purchased sugar from a Caribbean country by giving in return one million pest control devices.

Because of such inefficiencies of barter, almost all modern commercial transactions use a medium of exchange —something that is widely accepted in exchange for goods and services in a market. However, many of these presented certain difficulties. In his book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith gives an example of this: The man who wanted to buy salt, for example, and had nothing but cattle to give in exchange for it, must have been obliged to buy salt to the value of a whole ox, or a whole sheep, at a time.

He could seldom buy less than this, because what he was to give for it could seldom be divided without loss. This use of coins and notes to represent them led to national systems of money, such as dollars, yen, or euros. It is prices expressed in such monetary terms that will be considered in this book.

Most of these issues fall into one of the following three categories: 1 buyer— seller interactivity, 2 price structure , and 3 price format. Buyer—Seller Interactivity in Determining Prices Throughout most of history, prices were not the fixed amounts displayed in stores and advertising that are so familiar today.

Rather, prices were negotiated during an interaction between the buyer and the seller. A price arrived at by the buyer—seller interactions of negotiation or the interactions of auction bidding would be referred to as an interactive price. If you find yourself a little uncomfortable with the deception involved in the process of price negotiation, you are not alone.

Religious leaders were among the earliest critics of this type of business practice. In fact, it was George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends often called the Quakers , who first suggested that an alternative was possible.

He led his followers to carry over to their businesses the principle of total honesty that they adhered to in their personal lives. As a result, Quaker merchants adopted the practice of stating to the customer the price that they actually expected to receive and sticking to it. Such a price is referred to as a fixed price. It is interesting that, rather than hurting their competitive position, the use of fixed prices actually tended to help the Quakers in their businesses.

Customers appreciated the quicker and less stressful buying process associated with fixed prices and often tended to feel more trusting of Quaker merchants. The use of fixed prices spread steadily and was strongly stimulated by the development, in the middle of the nineteenth century, of new types of retailing designed to serve mass markets. In particular, fixed prices helped make possible the large department store pioneered by entrepreneurs such as F.

Woolworth, John Wanamaker, and J. Although we take fixed prices for granted when we shop, for example, in department stores, grocery stores, drugstores, hardware stores, or bookstores, the purchase of expensive items such as automobiles or real estate still usually involves price negotiation. Also, in contrast to most retailers companies that sell directly to consumers , companies that sell to business customers are likely to make heavy use of price negotiation.

The issues involved in buyer—seller interactivity in pricing will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter. Price Structure Although there are benefits to moving from negotiated prices to fixed prices, there are also disadvantages. One strength of interactive pricing is that it makes it easy for the seller to charge different prices to different buyers. The practice of charging different customers different prices for the same item is known as price segmentation.

In order to accomplish price segmentation with fixed prices, it is necessary to have more than one price for a single product. For example, a product may have one price when purchased alone and another price when purchased in large quantity or when purchased along with other items.

The product may have one price when purchased during the week and another when purchased on a weekend. It may have one price when purchased in the city and another when purchased in a rural area. The price structure of a seller involves more than the array of prices that can be charged for the same item.

Often the various products are interrelated such that the price charged for one item should take into account the prices charged for other items sold by the organization. Price Format The third category of pricing issues involves how a price is expressed when it is communicated to potential customers.

However, by retail advertisements began to appear showing items priced at a penny or two below the round number see Figure 1. The practice of pricing an item just below a round number does not substantially affect the level of a price, but it does affect how that price level is expressed. The form of expression of a price is known as the price format. This may make the price level appear lower than it actually is and have a positive effect on sales. It is sometimes suggested that early retailers used this technique as a means of reducing dishonesty among clerks.

However, research on early price advertising has indicated that just-below prices were more likely to be used when the advertised item was claimed to be a discount or an otherwise low price. This suggests that the use of the just-below price format was, from the start, motivated by managerial intuitions about its effects on the perceptions of the consumer. For example, a price advertisement could directly show the price of a mushroom and pepperoni pizza, or it could express that price as a base price plus an additional amount for the two toppings see Figure 1.

The price of a lamp in a home furnishings catalog might be expressed as a price for the lamp that includes shipping or as a price for the lamp alone along with a separate price for the shipping of the lamp to the purchaser. The question of whether a price should be expressed as a single number or as the sum of more than one number is the issue of price partitioning. One could imagine an organization failing to carry out distribution or promotion activities and still be in business.

The activity of making decisions about prices consists of two general components. One component is price setting, which consists of decisions about individual prices. These decisions concern the price of a specific item to a specific customer or market in the current marketing environment or situation at hand.

The other component of the pricing activity is establishing pricing policy, which involves decisions that guide and regulate the setting of individual prices. It could also be more specific, such as indicating the situations when it would be permissible for the organization to offer volume discounts.

In a large business organization, it is likely that many people within the organization will play a role in pricing activities. Some of the individuals in a large organization who play a role in pricing will have very direct pricing involvement and responsibility. Here are some examples of such direct roles: In a department store, it is usually the merchandise buyer who will do most of the price setting for the items he or she buys to be sold in the store.

In companies that sell to business customers, salespeople and their managers play a crucial role in the negotiation processes by which prices are determined. In service industries, such as airlines and hotels, there will often be pricing departments with specialists trained in revenue management, a set of complex price-setting techniques that are frequently used in these industries. For example, employees in the accounting department often provide information about the costs of products and of the operations involved in getting products to the customer; accurate cost information is essential for effective price setting.

Lawyers and others in the legal department could establish legal and ethical guidelines for pricing and could adjust proposed prices to comply with relevant laws and contracts.

Analysts in the finance department may be involved in assessing the degree to which pricing schedules developed by product or sales managers are consistent with the profit goals of the organization. In many large business organizations, higher-level managers are involved in approving, and perhaps revising, proposed price schedules. Organization of Pricing Activities Particularly because of the likely involvement in pricing activities of many people within different parts of a large business organization, it is somewhat surprising that many companies do not have a means to effectively coordinate pricing-related decisions across departments in the company.

First, it is possible for a large company to experience problems in the effective implementation of pricing decisions. However, a large or longtime customer may be able to convince his or her sales representative into offering a small off-invoice discount—say, an annual volume rebate. Employees in each part of the company might be assuming that it makes sense to give a break to such a good customer. As will be seen in later chapters, pricing decisions made for immediate purposes can have consequences that are far-reaching.

For example, price cutting done in response to competition can lead to price warfare and serious erosion of profits. Recent financial difficulties among companies in the U. On the other hand, small price increases, it they continue to occur, could eventually have the effect of leading customers to find alternative types of products to serve their needs.

It is important that a person or a group with a broad view of the selling organization consider the possibility of such long-term effects of pricing decisions. Third, for a business organization to follow the marketing concept and effectively focus on satisfying customer needs, marketing activities need to be well-coordinated with each other and with the other functions of the organization. Having pricing activities managed by a central authority can help accomplish this coordination. For example, if a price decrease is expected to lead to a sales increase, then it is useful to make sure that production, procurement, customer service, and other functions of the organization are prepared to handle this price decrease.

In addition, new possibilities, such as lowering costs by purchasing a component in an Asian country, could be more effectively evaluated with the combined input of marketing research and centrally coordinated pricing decision makers. Relevance of Studying Pricing It is hoped that the previous discussion helps make clear that pricing is a relevant topic to study even if you do not expect to be directly involved in the pricing activities of an organization.

Pricing is so critical to a business organization that it affects, and is affected by, virtually every function of the organization. Correspondingly, what is effectively communicated about the product can strongly affect the price that can be charged. In addition, price setting is relevant to our personal lives. Even if we do not sell things at garage sales or on eBay, we are almost all marketers of our professional services.

Our compensation—salary, bonuses, and benefits—constitutes the price we charge employers for our services. As managers of what is most likely, over the course of our careers, a multimillion-dollar product, it makes good sense for us to be familiar with the principles of effective pricing. What should its price be? Focusing on this relatively well-defined situation will enable us to introduce some basic pricing principles and procedures.

Of course, setting an initial price is not the most commonly occurring situation. More often than not, the manager is faced with an existing product that already has a price. The question then would be, is this existing price the best price?

If it were higher, or lower, would more profits be likely to result? We will introduce a breakeven formula that can be of considerable help in decisions about modifying existing prices.

However, this breakeven formula alone does not make effective pricing decisions possible. The latter two types of factors will also shed light on issues of price format. At this point, we will have a basic ability to set a price: We will be able to set the price of a newly offered product, and we will be able to effectively modify the price of a product that is currently being offered. We first discuss the use of price structure to accomplish price segmentation.

The last section of the book addresses several other pricing issues of importance. We will discuss some of the special challenges involved in managing interactive prices, such as prices arrived at through negotiation and auctions.

Auction pricing has taken on a renewed importance with the rise of the Internet. We will become familiar with some of the basic ideas involved in considering the social and societal consequences of pricing decisions. Better understanding of these issues can not only help price setters avoid legal pitfalls but can also help us all better exercise our civic responsibilities to help make pricing policies maximally beneficial to society.

Finally, we will return to the importance of a business organization having an integrated, centrally managed pricing policy and will discuss how the many pricing considerations covered in the book can be put together in constructing an overall pricing strategy.

Early commercial transactions involved barter, but the advantages of using a medium of exchange soon became evident and modern prices are typically expressed in terms of money. The pricing activity consists of setting specific prices and developing the rules that govern price-setting decisions.

The focus of the book is then expanded to the pattern of prices set by a selling organization and to considering interactive prices, societal consequences of pricing, and the integrated management of pricing activities. Describe the two parties in a commercial exchange and what is given and received by each party. How is the voluntary nature of the commercial exchange related to its potential for creating benefits for society?

What are the four categories of marketing activities, usually referred to as the marketing mix? In what important way does pricing differ from the other three categories? What is the marketing concept? How can pricing activities be guided by the marketing concept?

What is barter? Give an example of barter, either from your reading or from your own experience. What is a medium of exchange? What is most commonly used in our society as a medium of exchange? Describe the basic elements of price negotiation. What are fixed prices? What do customers like about fixed prices? What do retailers like about fixed prices? What is price segmentation? Why might a seller want to engage in price segmentation?

Give an example of how different numbers could be used to express what would be substantially the same price. What is the difference between price setting and pricing policy? As he progresses in his life then his family extends then he ventures upon number of saving plans and schemes. As the price of a product depends on different elements and hence it is changes constantly thus the pricing should be dynamic so that it can bear the changes over duration.

Nonetheless if there is change in all the variables then generally the pricing of the product may vary accordingly. Sales promotion activities are publicity, public relations, exhibition and demonstrations etc. It is marketing manager who decides the level of marketing expenditure on promotion. Promotional activities are mainly intended to supplement personal selling, advertising and publicity.

Promotion helps the trader and sales force to represent the product t the consumers in an effective manner and induce them to buy. Advertising is a powerful element of promotion mix.

The main aim of the advertising is to create and develop the image of a product in the market. It is one of the important tools of competition which maintains the dynamism of industry. Promotion mix decides the positioning of the product in the target market.

It should be considered as expenditure and hence added to the cost of a product. If the product is a business product then a business team is required to interact with different clients and ensure the availability of the product for them. Distribution has a huge effect on the profitability therefore a firm should have excellent supply chain and logistics management plan for distribution.

All the four variables of marketing mix are interconnected. By increasing the price of the product, the demand of the product will be lessened and lesser distribution points will be required. On the other hand, the product USP can be such that maximum concentration is on creating brand cognisance hence better pricing for a product. Finally, the overall marketing mix can result in dynamic modelling based on customer feedback for improving a product and the same can be launched as the upgraded product.

Product, Price, Promotion and Place and every company has the option to design an optimum admix in order to create a trusted marketing strategy. The marketing manager has to consider the behavioural forces and then decide marketing elements in his mix considering the available resources. The manager must examine the resources of the company to decide a mix of procedures that fit the resources.

The top level management has to support their effort in supporting new ways of business through the organization. It is theoretical in nature. It has led to confusion and difficulty to understand the components of four elements. Thus it changes with the change in needs and preferences of the customers and market forces like competition, government policies and marketing situation. Proper market research, foresighted approaches are very important factors to locate target markets. Marketing mix is a greatest strategy for attaining competitive advantage for any firm.

The customer is king thus it is mandatory to employ excellent marketing mix by marketing manager is essential as these key elements will satisfy the customer needs and demands. Marketing management is about placing the right product, at the right price, at the right place, at the right time.

A product is a combination of different attributes.