Shadowing Practice: What Is a Pricing Analyst? - Responsibilities, Career Path & Skills - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Hey everyone, it's Jay here and today we're going to be diving into this little under the radar job called pricing analysts.
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Hey everyone, it's Jay here and today we're going to be diving into this little under the radar job called pricing analysts.
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What do they actually do?
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How do they help businesses make pricing decisions?
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Well, today we'll find out.
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All right, pricing analysts are like the superheroes of the business world, kind of.
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They make sure that businesses just charge the right prices for their products
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and this is a core concept of business if you might imagine because they have to make money.
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And you might be thinking,
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you know, how hard could that actually be?
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Well, it's actually pretty darn tough.
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On a daily basis, pricing analysts have to take in tons of information.
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They have to analyze market trends,
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customer preferences, understand competitor pricing as well,
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all to create the perfect pricing model or dynamic pricing model that can work in any situation or season.
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They also keep a close eye on supply and demand, right?
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Because that affects how much they should price their products as well.
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And of course, they have to integrate with different departments like marketing
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and sales so everyone can be on the same page when it comes to pricing.
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One of the main tasks for an advanced pricing analyst is to create advanced pricing models.
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For example, if you're looking at distribution costs,
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production costs, and market demand of a new product,
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all of that will feature into the actual price that then gets adjusted on a continuous basis.
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So enough talking about this,
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let's just dive into a fun example to make it a little clearer.
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Picture that you're a pricing analyst for an airline, right?
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If you've ever bought an airline ticket,
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which I'm sure most of you have,
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you've seen that the prices for airline tickets changes depending on when you buy it and when you're trying to travel.
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As an airline price analyst,
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you have to make sure that your prices are competitive against every other airline because there's a ton of them.
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And you also need to make sure that the margin actually makes sense so you're not losing money at the end.
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What you do is you create a model by gathering data.
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You get the data on available seats on each plane,
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current flight prices across different airlines and general seasonal demand as well.
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And you use that to develop a pricing strategy and a model
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that allows an airline to remain competitive for any point of time
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and have this dynamic pricing model that changes depending on when you buy it.
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And of course, pricing models for airlines are more discriminatory in terms of the fact
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that if you buy a flight a day before you're actually traveling,
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it's gonna be way more expensive than if you're buying it two weeks or two months beforehand.
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It's also about trying to figure out ways to maximize profits for these companies.
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And that means offering discounts or working with a marketing department to offer sales.
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But in general, it's a delicate balance.
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And so the pricing analytics job is actually very, very important.
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Now, a lot of people get confused with pricing analysts and data analysts.
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And in my opinion, pricing analysts actually fall within the umbrella of data analysts.
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For example, if we take another scenario,
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like let's say you're a pricing analyst at a software company that just sells B2B software.
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So this could be Salesforce,
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this could be Microsoft, et cetera.
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While a data analyst would probably focus more on general kind of longer term goals and user behavior,
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such as looking at customer churn analysis,
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looking at retention, understanding exactly how customers interact with the software at whole.
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Like if I'm using Microsoft Excel,
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how am I using it?
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Or Google Docs, such like that.
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Pricing analysts focus a lot more on the actual price part of it.
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So they could be also looking at user retention,
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let's say, or customer retention on their products,
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but looking at it at different price points or looking at for different size of companies that are also buying their products.
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Right.
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And so we'd have a pricing analyst that might notice that,
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you know, customers churn more based on this specific price than another price.
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All the data analysts would be looking at customer churn based on user behavior on their platform
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and so they may want to introduce new features.
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So the core concept really is that just pricing analysts do all the analytics that just focus on pricing.
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If you're a data analyst at a company,
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you could also be focused on pricing for most of your time.
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As companies grow and the need for specialization develops,
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that's where you get pricing analysts as its own core job.
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Now let's see what it takes to become an actual pricing analyst.
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A lot of the times it's very similar to with data analysts.
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So this means skills in Excel,
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SQL, Tableau, other data visualization tools,
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basically anything that combines that business plus analytics mindset.
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For example, SQL is super popular for pricing analysts
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because you have to understand that pricing analysts dig through a lot of data.
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We're talking about thousands, millions,
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or even billions of rows of different kinds of pricing data points that they need to use for their models.
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Other more intangible skills are things kind of like analytical thinking and critical thinking.
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So this would be effectively what's used for almost any kind
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of analytical position where you have to understand frameworks to create these models and introduce new initiatives for different prices.
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Then we're also talking about communication as being really important because as a pricing analyst,
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you're going to be working with a lot of product stakeholders
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and executives because price is such a big part of the job and of the business.
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So how do you become a pricing analyst?
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Well, if you are already in your career and you're looking to become a pricing analyst,
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then the easiest way would be to start working on data analytics types projects.
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So if you're a data analyst,
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it's pretty easy to transition over to pricing.
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But if you're not already an analyst,
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then it's worth maybe looking at education backgrounds that you could potentially use.
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So if you're starting out,
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let's say you're in college,
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then just studying something like economics,
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math, business, you know, computer science,
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data science would all be helpful towards becoming a pricing analysts.
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And if you're looking to make a career transition then getting a master's degree in data science
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or analytics is also super helpful as well additionally just learning sql
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and coding can also put you on that path
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if you work for example in customer success
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or maybe you're completely in a different field such as you're
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a teacher then just understanding the skills of sql data visualization
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is going to be a huge step forward towards having those qualifications to become a pricing analyst.
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The interview process also depends on what kind of skill level you are as a analyst.
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So if you're transitioning into the field and you're going for a more junior role,
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they might not ask you that many technical questions
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and kind of teach you on the job
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because they might have a lot more custom formulas or implementations
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that you need to know that it's very specific for the industry at large.
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For example, airline pricing is a lot more different than retail pricing at Walmart.
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And a lot of that is going to be industry specific knowledge that you might pick up on the job.
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Now, if you are more advanced and you are kind of looking to transition for a more senior level role,
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it's going to be a lot more technical heavy in terms of understanding
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that you can program in Python potentially or SQL and
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that you've had experience using data visualization tools that they might have used or just data visualization in general, right?
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Because a lot of it is about presenting your insights and communicating with these business stakeholders.
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All right, that wraps up our overview of the pricing analytics field and pricing analysts at a whole.
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I hope that you learned exactly what a pricing analyst does and a couple examples about pricing analytics.
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If you're interested in the field and you don't know where to start,
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I'd highly recommend checking out also interview query to learn a little bit about SQL,
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Python, and practice a different couple questions there.
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Otherwise, you know, there's tons of resources and please,
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you know, comment below if if you have any more additional questions that I can respond to,
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and I'll catch you all later.
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Bye.
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Why practice speaking with this video?
This video provides an excellent opportunity for English learners to enhance their speaking skills in a business context. By practicing speaking with content focused on a specific profession—pricing analysts—viewers can familiarize themselves with industry-related vocabulary and sentence structures. Engaging with this material allows learners to understand how to discuss complex ideas clearly and confidently. As you shadow the speaker, you not only improve your pronunciation but also gain insights into how to articulate your thoughts about roles and responsibilities in various careers. Utilizing a shadowing site or shadowing app while watching this video can greatly enhance your English speaking practice and make learning more interactive.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
In the video, the speaker uses several key sentence structures and expressions that are pivotal for describing professional roles. Here are a few notable ones:
- “They make sure that businesses charge the right prices…” - This structure is useful for expressing responsibilities in the workplace.
- “On a daily basis, pricing analysts have to take in tons of information.” - The phrase "on a daily basis" is an important time expression that signals routine actions.
- “To create the perfect pricing model…” - this phrase exemplifies how to describe tasks and goals in a professional setting.
- “They also keep a close eye on…” - This idiomatic expression helps convey the idea of monitoring or being vigilant about something.
By mimicking these structures in your own speech, you can improve your fluency and ability to convey detailed information.
Common Pronunciation Traps
As you practice speaking alongside the video, pay attention to certain tricky words and phrases that can be challenging. Here are a few examples:
- "Analyst" - This word can be pronounced incorrectly if not practiced; focus on the stress in the first syllable: ‘AN-alyst.’
- "Competitive" - Make sure to emphasize the second syllable: com-PET-itive, which is often mispronounced.
- "Discriminatory” - A long word that can be difficult; practice breaking it down: dis-CRI-min-a-tor-y.
Shadowing the speaker while paying attention to these pronunciation traps will improve your clarity in speech. Utilizing techniques from a shadow speech practice can help pinpoint and correct these challenging sounds.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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