Marketers believe strong brands command price premiums, but struggle to quantify this relationship to the rest of the organisation.

According to Marketing Week’s 2025 Language of Effectiveness research, in partnership with Kantar and Google, there is strong belief among marketers about the connection between brand and pricing power. Some 87.9% of the marketers surveyed agree or strongly agree with the statement ‘stronger brands are able to charge customers higher prices’.

However, under three in five (58.9%) of the more than 1,000 brand marketers surveyed agree their organisation can charge higher prices than its competitors due to a stronger brand. This reveals a notable gap between belief in the principle and ability to command a price premium.

Concerningly, most marketers do not believe that their organisation can quantify the relationship between brand strength and price elasticity, with just 40.3% agreeing with this statement.

Just two-fifths of marketers ‘can quantify’ link between brand and price elasticity

When it comes to making the case for investment in brand building, being able to draw a line between the power of brand and the ability to drive a price premium is something of a gamechanger, notes interim head of group marketing at B2B business Flowtech, Jon White.

“In that whole big debate of the power of brand, if we could quantify something as tangible as pricing, that debate in the boardroom with the executive team would be so much easier, because there’s nothing as rational and tangible as pricing,” he says.

Mary Kyriakidi, global thought leader at Kantar, agrees. “Quantifying pricing power lets marketers speak the language of profit,” she says, helping to “bridge the marketing-finance divide”.

Kyriakidi defines pricing power simply as “a brand’s ability to raise, or in fact, maintain prices without losing significant sales”.

This definition of pricing power was something demonstrated during 2022 and 2023, when high rates of inflation and rising costs of raw goods meant many brands increased prices.

While linking pricing power to brand can be a powerful way to make the case for marketing investment, the Language of Effectiveness data suggests few marketers are confident in their ability to make this relationship clear.

It’s less of a well-trodden path around brand equity, never mind attaching it to pricing elasticity in the B2B world.

Jon White, Flowtech

For Yilmaz Erceyes, former CMO of Premier Foods, pricing power starts from brands being able to drive mental availability.

“The stronger the brand means the first thing that comes to my mind is that brand,” he says. “If that happens, then you’re already slightly ahead of the game versus all the other options. Now, value and price come into play, but if you’re first in mind then people need to find a reason not to buy you, rather than find a reason to buy you.”

Brands that do not have strong mental availability may have to compete hard through other levers – particularly low pricing – to drive purchase.

Erceyes acknowledges the economic backdrop can curtail a brand’s ability to drive a premium, while competitor activity can act as a constraint.

If everything else remains constant, any brand that pushes prices too far will lose volume, he says. This may be where the gap between belief in pricing power as a concept and the ability to execute it comes from.

Sector differences

Jon White now works in B2B businesses, having previously served as CMO at industrial distribution business RS Group. However, he cut his teeth in the B2C world, spending 20 years at Kimberly-Clark, leading brands like Andrex.

Andrex is an example of a brand that is very clearly able to command a price premium. Operating in an everyday, commoditised category where it is difficult to offer extra product features, the brand manages to command up to a 30% price premium versus private label competitors.

“We could 100% align price elasticity to not even just brand equity, to even share of voice,” White says.

This was relatively simple to do, given the nature of toilet roll as a “must-buy” product and also due to the “well-trodden path” of the FMCG category.

You need purpose and pricing power, not one or the other 

By contrast, B2B brands typically find drawing the connection between brand strength and pricing power harder to do.

This is reflected in the Language of Effectiveness data. When compared to the total sample, a similar proportion of B2B respondents agree strong brands can command a price premium (87.2%) and are more likely to agree their own organisation can command a price premium due to a strong brand (61.9%). However, less than one in three (31.2%) B2B marketers feel able to quantify the relationship between brand equity and pricing power.

White attributes this to less established work around that link in the B2B world.

“It’s less of a well-trodden path around brand equity, never mind attaching it to pricing elasticity in the B2B world,” he says. “There are fewer people who’ve done it. There’s less data and there’s absolutely less empirical data around it.”

He also points to the complexity of B2B buying cycles and the multiple stakeholders involved, all of which make it extremely difficult to capture data and make that link.

It’s still the case that pricing is seen, more often than not, as finance’s domain.

Mary Kyriakidi, Kantar

B2B is not the only sector that faces complexities in demonstrating a relationship between brand equity and price premium. Unlike in FMCG, for example, where prices are normally fixed, in most of the travel sector price is variable.

Former Premier Inn global customer director, Tamara Strauss, has worked at travel brands for most of her career. She explains the pricing equation is slightly different from other sectors, where it is easier to demonstrate a price premium.

“Hospitality behaves differently to other categories, because it’s all based on surges and availability. So, the pricing model isn’t driven so much by marketing, but by demand,” she says.

While in a category like ketchup, you may have very similar products sat on a shelf beside each other with a straightforward choice between one brand or another, in the hospitality sector, it’s rare two hotels offer the same location or proposition. Choice, therefore, ends up being much less price-driven in many scenarios, she says, making it difficult to measure marketing’s impact on driving a premium.

For that reason, Strauss explains price perception is often based as much on a consumer’s particular circumstances as it is on brand power. 

Out of marketing’s reach

Given the influence of demand within travel businesses, pricing tends to sit with revenue teams rather than marketing, Strauss adds.

According to Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey just a third (34.1%) of marketers say they or their team have influence or control over their business’s pricing strategy.

“It’s even more in B2B that marketers are not necessarily in control of pricing,” says White, explaining this often precludes marketers from making the link between brand and price.

Why do only a third of marketers have influence over pricing?

Kyriakidi agrees it’s difficult for marketing to link pricing and brand power given the former sits out of reach for so many marketing teams.

“It’s still the case that pricing is seen, more often than not, as finance’s domain,” she says.

However, she notes a focus on delivering pricing power can often drive a more long-term mindset for marketers. Marketing’s KPIs are often volume-centric and based around things like impressions, penetration and units sold.

“That leads to a bias towards volume over value and the result is, obviously, that we erode margins and then gradually we dilute our brand equity,” says Kyriakidi.

Marketers often “fear” pricing power out of concern it will drive consumers away, something she says is not necessarily the case if pricing power is used properly and backed by investment in brand. Secondly, there’s a reluctance to target pricing power because of its difficulty to measure.

She recommends marketers invest in price elasticity studies to be able to lean on pricing power as an indicator of their impact.

“Marketers are avoiding pricing conversations and they stick to what’s easy to measure,” says Kyriakidi. “Even though marketers believe in pricing power, they often lack the data to prove that it’s actually true for their own brand.”

How to drive pricing power

While more than four in five marketers agree strong brands drive pricing power, what exactly does strong brand mean in this context?

For Erceyes, any attempt to build pricing power or break out of a harmful promotional cycle must take a holistic approach to building brand equity, meaning investing in multiple drivers of brand equity.

“When you have a brand that’s struggling and you want to turn it around, it needs more elements than just raising the price and pumping in some more media investment,” he says.

For Strauss, any ability to price must be matched by the proposition itself, not just the brand’s reputation.

“The brand is only as strong as what it delivers,” she argues. “It’s much easier to price if you know the product that you’re delivering or the service is of the expected quality.”

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The power of communications, in combination with a strong brand proposition, shouldn’t be underestimated, says Kyriakidi. She points to examples like McCain and Direct Line, both awarded by IPA Effectiveness Awards for their investment in brand campaigns to build pricing power.

Some activities are easier to link brand to driving a price premium than others, notes White. While at RS Group, he had very productive conversations around the more “tangible” elements of brand, like customer service, delivery capability and product range.

The issues come with less tangible elements like upper funnel brand building, where it is harder to illustrate outcome. Again a lack of data is a limitation.

“If I was able to bring some robust, quantifiable data that said ‘By doing that, I can see empirically that that’s going to strengthen our pricing position’ I’d have had a whole different conversation,” White says.

He’s pleasantly surprised so many marketers believe their organisation is able to charge higher prices because of brand power, especially those working within B2B. However, when it comes to making the case for brand investment, belief in the ability to drive price premium without evidence is not enough.

“[Businesses will say] if you can’t prove it then we’ll get on with all the things that we believe we are more tangibly connected to that price premium,” White adds.

Meaning, using price premium as a reason to invest in brand building requires real evidence.