Travel and education are enlarging tastes all over the continent, but regional differences remain strong. Without currencies to define boundaries, marketing regions will be less tied to national borders than today, following instead the logic of distribution, or of culture. Those products that are universally adored, such as Coca-Cola or Bruce Willis, tend to be global, not exclusively European. Firms risk losing a key source of their profitability if their power to charge different amounts in different markets is eroded. Pricing strategy needs care if firms are not to throw away the profits they make through higher margins in some markets than others.
Some advisers baldly counsel trying to fight price transparency.
Possible strategems include offering complex deals that package service with a product and make it harder to compare the true costs in different places, or loyalty programmes that obscure the true value of a particular purchase. Yet it is increasingly difficult to keep customers in the dark, as communication technology sheds light on everything going on next door. American car dealers are being boxed in by customers brandishing price-lists for particular models found by searching the Internet. The more that a firm can signal to its competitors that this is what it is doing, and induce them to raise prices too, the better from its point of view, although it has to avoid active collusion and the attentions of EU competition authorities. Even without moving to a single European price list, currency conversion and a period of dual labelling pose difficulties as the psychologically important threshold price-points such as 1.99 are unlikely to convert neatly into euros.