Of the four P's, price is the single line item with the highest unit profit elasticity. A 1% price increase, all else equal, lifts operating profit far more than a 1% gain in volume. And yet, for most brand managers, pricing is the one lever they have been quietly outsourced from — handed to finance, to the retailer, or to whatever the competitor happens to be charging.
This is the belief we set out to change in Module 10 of the programme. Most marketers enter believing price is cost-plus, or competitor-matched, or someone else's job. The evidence says the opposite: price is an evidence-based decision about captured value, and the marketer's job is to defend it as deliberately as they defend the brand. Lose your pricing power and, eventually, you lose the business.2
In FY2024, The Coca-Cola Company reported net revenues of US$47.1bn, up 3%, and organic revenue up 12% — of which
11 percentage points came from "price/mix" and only 2 from concentrate sales (Coca-Cola Q4 2024 Earnings Release; SEC 8-K, 11 February 2025). Read that again. For 90% of the world's biggest beverage business, the growth engine in 2024 was not selling more litres. It was selling the same litres better.
That is what disciplined pricing looks like at scale. Coca-Cola runs the business on Revenue Growth Management, with price-pack architecture as its central lever: an affordability pack to recruit new drinkers (a 250ml can in emerging markets), single-serve immediate-consumption at a premium per-litre price, multi-serve at a lower per-litre price for the pantry, and a premium portfolio — Topo Chico, Fairlife, smartwater, Costa — capturing more revenue per occasion. In Indonesia, its bottler cut SKUs by around 60% while sharpening the price point for each occasion. Fewer products, priced with intent.
Price/mix is not a one-shot decision. It is a portfolio choice, a research output, and an execution job in the trade — run as a system, every quarter.
This is Module 10 of the programme
Pricing is one of four modules you can also take on its own. Or start with Module 1, free, and see how the whole course thinks.
If Coca-Cola shows what owning price looks like, two other cases show what losing it costs — and both are worked examples in the module.
GoPro built the action-camera category and ran it as a near-monopoly through 2014–15. Then smartphones and cheaper rivals commoditised it. Rather than defend the premium with software, ecosystem and accessory revenue, GoPro defaulted to cutting average selling prices and promotional pricing. The result compounds in the numbers: adjusted EBITDA fell from US$293.4m (21.0% of revenue) in 2014 to US$95m (9.0%) in 2022, then to negative quarterly EBITDA across 2023 — with US$24m of price-protection charges in a single quarter as the price ladder was re-cut (GoPro 8-K filings, SEC). Eroding pricing power is not a one-quarter event. By the time you cut price to defend share, the share is usually already gone.
Fitbit tells the same story through one number every marketer can watch: gross margin. As Apple Watch entered from above and Xiaomi from below, Fitbit's portfolio drifted to lower-margin smartwatches and promotional intensity rose. Non-GAAP gross margin slid from 38.7% in FY2018 to 34.2% in Q1 2019 to 32.0% by Q3 2019. By November 2019 it had agreed to sell to Google at US$7.35 a share — a fraction of its IPO peak (Fitbit 8-K filings, SEC). Gross margin is the cleanest pricing-power dashboard you have. Four quarters of decline that COGS can't explain means the cause is your pricing strategy.
None of this is guesswork. The module hands you the operating system the disciplined operators actually use: the eight common pricing methods, the 5 Cs (Cost, Customers, Channels, Competition, Compatibility), the Kotler quality-price 9-box matrix to position an offer, and the research methods that find the real number — Van Westendorp for the acceptable price band, conjoint for attribute-level willingness to pay — read alongside elasticity at the SKU and pack level.
Here is the reflection we ask participants to sit with, and it's a fair test for any brand. Take your own brand and write down three things: the last price change you made, up or down; the reason given at the time; and the actual P&L outcome over the following six months. If you cannot answer all three, your pricing is being done to you, not by you.
Taking it back is the work. That's what this module is for.
Own the most powerful lever you have
Module 10, Pricing, is available on its own (US$249) or as part of the full CPD UK Accredited certification.
Sources drawn from Module 10 of the Certified Strategic Marketer®: Coca-Cola Q4 2024 Earnings Release (SEC 8-K, 11 Feb 2025); GoPro and Fitbit 8-K filings (SEC); Kotler & Keller, Marketing Management; Van Westendorp price-sensitivity method; Sharp / Ehrenberg-Bass on availability as a defence.
