The effect of marketing on profitability and pricing power

I used to think marketing was the megaphone you switch on when sales slows or fundraising looms. Get louder, buy reach, push discounts. It felt practical. It also quietly trained our buyers to expect more for less, and it trained our team to confuse movement with progress. That is how you build revenue without building a business. The lesson I learned, and the lesson I keep teaching younger founders, is simple. If marketing does not raise willingness to pay, it is only running in place.

Pricing power is not a tagline. It is a behavior you create in your market. It shows up when customers accept a premium without stalling, when renewals stick despite cheaper alternatives, and when your team stops using price as the only lever in negotiation. The shift begins with how you define your product truth. You cannot manufacture pricing power around a commodity promise. You can, however, surface value that buyers were already feeling but could not name. That is a marketing job, not a discounting job.

Early in my second company, we sold the same core feature as three competitors. We kept losing deals at the last mile because procurement anchored on a crowded feature table. We reacted with a short campaign about speed and savings. It generated demos and hope. It did not change our closing math. The moment of clarity came from a customer success call, not a brainstorming session. A head of operations told us our weekly rollout notes cut his risk review time in half. He was not buying speed. He was buying less cross-team friction and fewer Friday approvals. We rebuilt our story around reduced coordination cost. The product did not change much. The narrative did, and so did our buyer. We stopped selling to tool evaluators and started selling to owners of outcomes. The price held. Margins improved. Support tickets fell because the right person signed the contract.

This is what I mean by value beyond volume. You cannot out-discount an undifferentiated space forever. You can, however, reframe the job your product actually does and then build the entire customer experience to prove it fast. Marketing's impact on pricing power begins with selecting the right moment to demonstrate truth. That moment is rarely the homepage hero line. It is the first five minutes of trial, the first weekly summary email, the first time your onboarding removes a task from the buyer’s plate without asking for extra inputs. Buyers do not pay for your roadmap. They pay for the next reliable relief.

If you want marketing to lift profitability, align your narrative, your segment, and your proof. Start by choosing the buyer who feels your value most intensely. Not the largest logo. Not the loudest lead source. The buyer whose day you can measurably improve within a short window. Then remove every element in your funnel that puts that proof behind a calendar link. This is uncomfortable if your team thrives on demos and decks. It is necessary if you want to charge more without apologizing. A premium is not a number. It is a speed of belief.

Founders often ask where brand fits in this. Brand is your memory in the market. You create it by repeating one evidence-backed promise until it becomes lazy shorthand for buyers. Consistency is the hard part when you feel pressure to chase every segment. Say less and prove more. Once your core promise lands, tie your price to the risk you remove or the revenue you unlock. If your product reduces error rates for a regulated industry, your price should reference avoided penalties and saved headcount. If your product lifts conversion on high-intent traffic, your price should travel with the uplift, not with your server cost. You are not selling features. You are selling a transfer of risk and a transfer of work.

There is also the cultural side inside your company. Teams that rely on discounts create a habit loop. Marketing promises big, sales negotiates down, product builds wide, support absorbs the gap. Everyone works harder. No one earns simpler. Break that loop by making margin a shared win. Celebrate profitable renewals the same way you celebrate new logos. Share the math behind why a smaller contract at full price may be worth more than a big one on a heavy concession. When the team sees margin as the scoreboard, your campaigns change by instinct. You highlight proof, not promos. You spotlight customers who pay for outcomes, not users who churn quietly after an incentive.

There is a temptation to copy enterprise playbooks to look premium. Longer sales cycles, bigger decks, more stakeholders. Be careful. Complexity can look like maturity while it drains your unit economics. Real pricing power means the buyer understands your value faster, not slower. Keep the buying motion short where you can. Remove unnecessary negotiation steps. Document your value realization moments and move them earlier. Every day you shave off time to value raises price tolerance. Recency of relief matters. Buyers pay more when the benefit is vivid.

I have seen founders in Malaysia and Singapore price timidly because they fear losing regional deals to global brands. Do not import your competitor’s confidence. Earn your own. Start with a narrow slice where your local context is an advantage. Local compliance, language nuance, payment rails, service-level expectations. Build your marketing around these truths and keep your proof public. Publish the implementation time, the adoption rate by role, the first three metrics that move. Specifics create authority. Authority hardens prices.

In Saudi, I mentor teams that scale faster than their story. Government programs and ecosystem momentum can create volume quickly. Without a clear narrative tied to executive outcomes, that volume does not convert into durable margins. The remedy is focus. Decide the one operating metric you will own inside your customer’s business. It might be time to permit, time to payout, failed delivery percentage, or complaint resolution cycle. Make the first month with you change that number. Then give the CFO a simple report that shows cash impact. You will feel the price conversation shift. Marketing earns the right to a premium when finance can repeat the claim.

There is another trap worth naming. Some founders manufacture scarcity to justify higher price. Waitlists, limited tiers, vague enterprise labels. This can work once, but it erodes trust. Sustainable pricing power is boring. It is the compounding effect of consistent delivery, simple language, and brave segmentation. Say who your product is not for. Turn down misaligned deals. Use your community and content to educate the market you actually want. When people feel seen and served, they do not ask you to be cheaper. They ask you to be available.

Let me leave you with a simple path you can start this week. List the top three reasons customers tell you your product made their life easier. Not why they bought, but why they stayed. Choose the reason that maps to a measurable business outcome within 30 days. Rewrite your positioning to lead with that outcome and the shortest path to it. Cut one step from onboarding to make that path quicker. Equip sales with two plain-language proof points and one story from a customer who saw the outcome fast. Remove any discount authority below a clear margin threshold and replace it with an extra proof session, not an extra concession. Run this for one full cycle. Watch what happens to your confidence at the table.

The point is not to be expensive. The point is to be clear and valuable, then priced accordingly. When your marketing helps the right buyer experience the right relief at the right moment, your price stops feeling like a debate. It starts feeling like a fair exchange. That is value beyond volume. That is how marketing’s impact on pricing power becomes visible in your bank account and calmer in your team. And that is how you build a company that lasts.