Your pricing is not a strategy. It is an accident you have stopped noticing.

It starts reasonably. You drop a price to win a key account. You run a deeper promotion to save a soft quarter. You hold a price flat because a competitor moved and you did not want to lose the shelf. Each decision made sense on the day. None of them were wrong.

Then a few years pass, and you look up, and nobody in the building can explain the whole picture anymore. You have list prices that no customer actually pays. You have promotions running because they ran last year. You have two accounts buying the same product at prices that would embarrass you if they ever compared notes. The strategy, if you asked five people to describe it, would come back as five different answers.

That is not a pricing strategy. That is sediment. And the reason it matters is that sediment leaks money quietly, in places nobody is looking, which makes it the most expensive kind of problem you can have.

How to tell if yours has drifted?

You do not need a study to find out. A few questions usually settle it.

Ask your commercial team why a particular pack sits at the price it does. If the honest answer is some version of that is just where it has always been, you have your answer.

Look at how many of your promotions you could defend with a number. Not a feeling that it works, an actual read on what it returned. In most businesses I have walked into, a large share of the promotional calendar runs on habit, and a meaningful slice of it loses money outright.

Look at the spread of prices for the same product across your customers. A little variation is healthy and earned. A lot of it, with no logic anyone can articulate, means the floor has gone, and once the floor goes, every negotiation starts lower than the last.

If two or three of those land uncomfortably, the pricing is not working for you. It is just happening to you.

Where to start

The instinct is to fix the prices. That is the wrong first move. The first move is to make the current picture visible, because you cannot rebuild what you cannot see.

I start by laying the whole thing out. What you charge, to whom, after every discount and rebate and promotion, all the way down to what actually lands. Pocket price, not list price. The number is almost always lower than people expect, and the gap between the two is where the conversation really begins.

From there the work is structural, not tactical. You build a pricing architecture that has a logic anyone can follow, so a new hire could look at it and understand why each price sits where it does. You set a pack and price ladder across the range so that each size earns its place and the steps between them nudge shoppers up rather than down. And you put a small number of clear rules around promotions, so the spend goes to what pays back and the rest stops quietly, without a fight every quarter.

None of this is exotic. It is just deliberate, where before it was accidental. That is the whole shift.

Why it is worth doing?

Pricing is the most powerful lever you have, and the cheapest to pull. You are not building a factory or hiring a sales force. You are taking margin that is already leaking and stopping the leak. The last time I built this discipline from the ground up, it added around 8 percent net revenue growth in a year, and very little of that came from charging more. Most of it came from charging with intent.

The accident has been working against you for years. The point is to put it to work for you instead.