The Q1 pricing review ran ninety minutes and I was in the room as a courtesy. I know it was a courtesy because the deck was already built when the invite went out. Slide four had the new tiers. Slide five had the margin impact. Slide six had a line called messaging with a placeholder that said TBD, brand to advise.
Nobody was being sneaky. Finance had done exactly the job finance is asked to do, which is find the number that holds the model together. They ran the elasticity, they looked at the two competitors we always look at, they landed on a figure ending in ninety-nine cents because figures usually do.
Then they asked me to write words that made the number sound intentional.
That is the sequence almost everywhere. Price gets decided, brand gets handed the sentence to justify it, and we call the whole arrangement collaboration.
A price is the shortest sentence your brand ever writes, and most brand teams have never once read it out loud.
Think about what a number communicates before a single word of copy attaches to it. Ending in ninety-nine says we are competing on the shelf and we would like you to squint. A flat round number says we are not haggling with you. A price visibly higher than the category, never apologized for, says the thing in your hand was made differently, and you already suspected that, which is why you picked it up.
Salt & Straw charges more for a scoop than anyone reasonably should and has never run a discount to fix it. The price is the argument. Patagonia will quote you a repair cost rather than sell you a replacement, which is a pricing decision doing more brand work than most campaigns manage in a year. Liquid Death put a tallboy of water at beer money instead of water money, and the entire joke, the entire positioning, collapses if that number drifts down.
None of those came out of an elasticity model. They came out of somebody deciding what the company was, then letting the number say it.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I have watched it brand-side, and the failure is identical both times. We show up after. We treat price as a constraint to be dressed rather than a message to be authored. Then we spend the campaign budget talking our way out of a sentence we let someone else write.
We treat price as a constraint to be dressed rather than a message to be authored.
So ask for the pricing calendar. Not the deck, the calendar, the one that says when modeling starts. Get yourself on it eight weeks earlier than feels appropriate.
Barnaby is currently asleep on the printed deck, which is the most honest review it has received.