Many global companies are attempting to survive the postbubble storm by pruning costs and scaling back—even closing—businesses. But you can do only so much cutting before the pain exceeds the gain. Smart companies balance cuts with a range of high-impact marketing approaches.

Pricing is a powerful and often neglected tool that is again attracting attention. But pricing power sounds at first pass like an oxymoron for many companies today. How can they raise prices when the consumer is worried about the economy, big retailers are extracting ever more from suppliers, the Internet has made prices increasingly transparent, and manufacturers in emerging markets are so cost-competitive?

The answer, assert Michael V. Marn, Eric V. Roegner, and Craig C. Zawada in "The power of pricing," is to stop charging higher prices across the board—a nonstarter—and instead get the price right, one customer, one transaction at a time. By returning to the basics of marketing, you capture more of the price you think you already charge.

Our authors call their approach transaction pricing. In this article, they revisit a tool introduced ten years ago—the pocket price waterfall—to exploit it. The technique allows a company to determine how much of the...