Target pricing

Target costing is an approach to determine a product’s life-cycle cost which should be sufficient to develop specified functionality and quality, while ensuring its desired profit. It involves setting a target cost by subtracting a desired profit margin from a competitive market price. A target cost is the maximum amount of cost that can be incurred on a product, however, the firm can still earn the required profit margin from that product at a particular selling price. Target costing decomposes the target cost from product level to component level. Through this decomposition, target costing spread the competitive pressure faced by the company to product’s designers and suppliers. Target costing consists of cost planning in the design phase of production as well as cost control throughout the resulting product life cycle. The cardinal rule of target costing is to never exceed the target cost. However, the focus of target costing is not to minimize costs, but to achieve a desired level of cost reduction determined by target costing process.

Target costing is defined as "a disciplined process for determining and achieving a full-stream cost at which a proposed product with specified functionality, performance, and quality must be produced in order to generate the desired profitability at the product’s anticipated selling price over a specified period of time in the future." This definition encompasses the principal concepts: products should be based on an accurate assessment of the wants and needs of customers in different market segments, and cost targets should be what result after a sustainable profit margin is subtracted from what customers are willing to pay at the time of product introduction and afterwards.

The fundamental objective of target costing is to manage the business to be profitable in a highly competitive marketplace. In effect, target costing is a proactive cost planning, cost management, and cost reduction practice whereby costs are planned and managed out of a product and business early in the design and development cycle, rather than during the later stages of product development and production.

Target costing was developed independently in both USA and Japan in different time periods. Target costing was adopted earlier by American companies to reduce cost and improve productivity, such as Ford Motor from 1900s, American Motors from 1950s-1960s. Although the ideas of target costing were also applied by a number of other American companies including Boeing, Caterpillar, Northern Telecom, few of them apply target costing as comprehensively and intensively as top Japanese companies such as Nissan, Toyota, Nippondenso. Target costing emerged from Japan from 1960s to early 1970s with the particular effort of Japanese automobile industry, including Toyota and Nissan. It did not receive global attention until late 1980s to 1990s when some authors such as Monden (1992), Sakurai (1989), Tanaka (1993), and Cooper (1992) described the way that Japanese companies applied target costing to thrive in their business (IMA 1994). With superior implementation system, Japanese manufacturers is more successful than the American companies in developing target costing. Traditional cost-plus pricing strategy has been impeding the productivity and profitability for a long time. As a new strategy, target costing is replacing traditional cost-plus pricing strategy by maximizing customer satisfaction by accepted level of quality and functionality while minimizing costs.

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