A client called in September to review fall messaging. Twenty minutes in, almost as an aside, she mentioned that her flagship product had gone up eleven percent on the first of the month.
I asked who decided that. Finance. I asked when marketing found out. The day it went live.
So we spent the rest of the hour rewriting a brand manifesto that a spreadsheet had already contradicted.
Price is the loudest sentence your brand says, and at most companies nobody responsible for the brand is in the room when it gets said.
This is a good autumn to fix that. Freight is expensive, labor is expensive, and half my clients are pushing through increases they have deferred since spring. Customers can feel it happening, which makes the increase legible in a way price moves usually are not, and legible is an opportunity.
Three things I keep saying, in order of how often they get ignored.
One. The number is a positioning claim whether you intend it or not. Salt & Straw charges what it charges because the pear and blue cheese is not competing with the freezer aisle, and everyone in that line understands the deal. Costco charges what it charges because the promise is that nobody is taking a cut off the top. Both are coherent. What is not coherent is a premium manifesto attached to a discount number, or the reverse, which is worse: customers who paid up for a story and then watched it go on sale do not come back at full price.
Two. Explain the increase in your own voice or the internet will explain it for you. The brands that handled this well said the plain thing: costs went up, here is what we chose not to cut. The brands that handled it badly said nothing and let a Reddit thread do their positioning.
Three. Do not take the increase out of the product instead. Shrinking the bag and holding the price is still a price increase, just one that arrives as a betrayal instead of an announcement. People notice. They always notice. They photograph the old bag next to the new one.
Shrinking the bag and holding the price is still a price increase, just one that arrives as a betrayal instead of an announcement.
None of this requires new brand work. It requires the brand person on the pricing call, which costs nothing and happens almost never.
My client is putting six sentences about the increase on the product page this week. No apology, no headwinds. It will do more for her positioning than anything I wrote in the spring.
Truffles and Barnaby are also absorbing an increase this quarter, the good food, the one in the pouches. No complaint registered. They also have no idea, which I suspect is the position most brands are quietly hoping their customers occupy.