Pricing Is a Marketing Job. We Just Don't Own It.

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Pricing is the most leveraged marketing decision a company makes. Marketing stopped fighting for it around 2010. Getting it back is the single highest-ROI scope expansion in the CMO job. Most CMOs will never ask.

The math is old

Marn and Rosiello at McKinsey wrote it into Harvard Business Review in 1992. A 1% price increase, holding volume constant, lifts operating profit by 11.1% for the average S&P 1500 company. A 1% volume increase, same conditions, moves profit by 3.3%. Simon-Kucher has been updating the chart for thirty years since. The multiplier at mid-market B2B SaaS typically lands between six and eleven percent depending on cost structure.

Every CMO has seen a version of this chart in an MBA class. Few of them have acted on it.

Why? They don't have the pen.

How marketing lost it

Two things happened between 2000 and 2010.

SaaS rose as a category and SaaS priced by feature tier. Starter plan, Business plan, Enterprise. The pricing followed the bundling, which was owned by product. Product got pricing by default. Marketing, which had owned pricing in the 1990s CPG era, watched it migrate across the org chart one quarterly review at a time.

Finance got better tools. By 2012 the CFO's office could model pricing outcomes in a way marketing couldn't, because pricing analysis is mostly a transaction-data problem and finance owned the transaction data. The CFO claimed pricing. The CMO couldn't argue back. Finance set up "pricing committees" with product in a secondary position and marketing in an advisory role that over time became ceremonial.

The committee structure is where pricing dies now.

Why finance and product can't do it well

Finance optimizes for margin defensibility. A finance-led committee thinks about pricing as COGS plus a margin target, with sensitivity testing on competitor benchmarks. This is cost-plus pricing dressed up in a spreadsheet. It systematically undercharges in categories where willingness-to-pay exceeds cost plus a normal margin, which is most premium categories. It systematically overcharges in categories where competitors have cut prices for reasons finance didn't model. Finance-led pricing produces prices that are defensible to the board and wrong for the market.

Product optimizes for feature packaging. A product-led committee thinks about which features go in which tier, where the break happens between self-serve and enterprise. This produces coherent tier structures and misses the question underneath, which is whether any tier is priced against what a customer is actually willing to pay for the bundle. Product-led pricing is internally consistent and externally uncalibrated.

Neither optimizes for what a customer is willing to pay.

Because willingness-to-pay isn't a margin question or a feature question. It's a customer research question.

Customer research is marketing's job.

The reframe

Here's the frame to hold onto.

Pricing is a demand signal disguised as a number.

A $99/month product attracts a line manager with a credit card. A $499/month product attracts a VP with a budget owner's sign-off. Same features. Different customer. The pricing decided the customer. That's positioning. Marketing owns positioning. Marketing should own the lever that sets positioning.

Byron Sharp and Ehrenberg-Bass have spent decades arguing that most of what marketers credit for their results is uncorrelated with what actually moves share. What they also say, less loudly, is that price is one of the few levers that genuinely does move share, and it's almost never owned by the people whose job is share. I wrote about adjacent ground in The Deal You Lost Was Never Real. The scoreboard is fiction, but the pricing lever is real. Most CMOs are watching the fictional scoreboard and not touching the real lever.

What it looks like when marketing owns pricing

The work is specific. I want to describe it because the usual objection is "great, but what would I actually do?"

Run a willingness-to-pay study every two years. $50K to $150K depending on segmentation. Asks a sample of ideal customers what they'd pay at different feature levels. Output: real willingness-to-pay curves by segment. The reason CMOs don't run these is political, not financial. Commissioning one stakes a claim on pricing that finance will notice. Most CMOs haven't decided to make the claim.

Run an elasticity test each quarter. A/B test a different price point against a matched cohort. Measure conversion, LTV, churn. You don't need a pricing committee. You need a willing product leader and a PM you trust. The data is the most credible elasticity data your company has, because it comes from your customers, not a model.

Own the tier architecture. Not the marketing of tiers. The actual decision about what's in each one. The mechanism is usually a product marketer on your team who sits on the product org's tier review and has a standing veto over any restructure that hasn't been willingness-to-pay-tested. Product doesn't love this arrangement. Product also doesn't know how to price the tiers without help. The arrangement holds.

Connect pricing to narrative. When the price moves, the positioning has to move with it. Sales enablement, case studies, launch comms all have to ladder up to why the new price is the right price. When the price moves and the narrative doesn't, you get customer revolt. When the narrative moves first, you get pricing power. CMOs who own pricing move the narrative first. CMOs who don't find out about price changes from a product change log.

The career math

If you own pricing, you own the lever most correlated with EBITDA. Every other thing you run as a CMO is politically vulnerable in any quarter when the board wants costs taken out. Pricing isn't. Pricing is the opposite. It's the lever the CFO would kill to have a real handle on.

A CMO who owns pricing becomes the CFO's favorite CMO.

Counter-positioned against every CMO who only owns demand gen, this is a different role. It also maps naturally to the next promotion, whether that's a CRO title or a CEO succession path.

The Monday email

The pitch to your CEO is three sentences.

"I'd like to propose that marketing take shared ownership of pricing, starting with a willingness-to-pay study this quarter. I think we're leaving eight to fifteen percent of operating margin on the table because we haven't priced against demand. I'll co-lead with the CFO and we can present a revised pricing framework at the Q3 board meeting."

That's the whole email. Ten minutes of conversation. The answer is almost always yes, because most CEOs have secretly wanted somebody to own pricing end to end for years and haven't had a candidate.

Most CMOs will read this essay and do nothing. They'll nod along. Agree with the logic. Not send the Monday email.

Some will send it and quietly withdraw when the CFO pushes back.

A few will send it and hold through the pushback. Those few, in eighteen months, will be running the single highest-impact project at their company.

The dead proposal from the top of this essay would have paid for the entire marketing function for a year. It died in a committee that didn't have a marketing seat.

You have a choice about whether the next one does.