Why Your Pricing Leader Should Have a Voice in Decisions That Aren't Specifically About Price

I have a saying I’ve used for years: “You can use price to solve a lot of different problems, but if it’s not actually a pricing problem, it’s going to be expensive.”

Too often, organizations default to adjusting price when other issues are at play. The result? Margin erosion, customer confusion, and the illusion of solving a problem while leaving the root cause untouched.

I learned this firsthand during my eight years in apparel, an industry where seasonal inventory cycles make operational precision critical. You have to buy enough product to hit sales targets, but clear it before the weather changes and the next season’s product arrives—a delicate balancing act that often leans heavily on pricing.

One company I worked for consistently priced 15–25% below our closest competitor, sometimes even below mass retailers. In theory, that gap was an opportunity: close it and you could unlock significant sales and margin gains. For example, I once showed a merchant we were $7 (or 30%) below our nearest competitor on a summer apparel item. Raising prices to narrow that gap could generate a six-figure lift.

The merchant’s response was telling:

“My inventory units are 7% above last year, my sales are 2% behind last year, and my pricing is flat. If I tell my boss I’m raising prices, they’ll laugh me out of the room.”

What looked like a pricing issue was actually a planning problem. Finance had forecasted 4% sales growth, leading the merchant to buy 4% more units despite the fact that the prior year only 62% of units sold before clearance. The net effect: an even larger clearance burden. The merchant needed lower prices just to move excess inventory. Price was being used as a band-aid for a flawed forecast.

Here’s the point for senior leaders: when pricing is excluded from upstream planning conversations, you lose the opportunity to design proactive strategies. Pricing leaders can quantify how a sales lift could be achieved with fewer units, or how minor pricing shifts early on could reduce the need for deep markdowns later.

When you integrate pricing expertise into the early stages of forecasting, merchandising, and planning, pricing becomes an offensive tool, a driver of competitive advantage, instead of a defensive reaction to missed targets.

The takeaway: Elevating pricing leadership beyond “price-tag decisions” ensures your company is solving the right problem the first time, protecting margins, and aligning execution across Finance, Merchandising, and Operations. Pricing shouldn’t just fix problems—it should help prevent them.