Which comes first: setting price or marketing?

_{[Read time: 3 minutes]}

I ran a LinkedIn poll with a simple question:

Does price shape how you market?

Or…Does your marketing define how you price?

58% voted for the latter: marketing should define how you price.

I’ll admit the sample size is tiny and hardly scientific. But the question has been rattling around in my head for a while.

On the surface, marketing-first feels safe: identify the pain, find your audience, build the offer, then pick a fee the market will bear. But I’ve learned that sequence often caps your margin. Where you start becomes a powerful anchor. And anchors are notoriously hard to lift.

And besides, how do you know the direction of marketing if you don’t know the price (the marketing is supposed to attract)?

I toyed with this thought experiments to test this concept. This one was particularly interesting:

• If you market like a luxury brand but charge $100, you’re not seen as luxury brand.

• If you charge $100,000 (even without luxury-brand marketing) you can still be perceived as one.

In other words, price carries more “umph” in your buyer’s mind than marketing alone.

To be fair, I’m using the term ‘marketing’ without defining it properly.

Marketing is the set of activities intended to find, frame, and fuel demand for what you do, so the right prospects buy from you (and rebuy). Things like:

• Market research: interviews, pain-point discovery, competitive landscape

• Brand identity: visuals, tone of voice, trust cues

• Demand generation: content, events, partnerships, paid media

• Lead nurture: email campaigns, webinars, sequences

• Sales enablement: proposals, case studies, ROI tools

• Client expansion: onboarding, upsells, referral programs

• Analytics: metrics, win/loss analysis, conversions

(I’m deliberately excluding “positioning” which, like price, I see as more business-strategy than marketing-function.)

…which brings me to a question I want more people to start asking:

Should I let the market set my price, or set the market with my price?

Maybe it sounds radical. Maybe it feels like noise. Despite your POV (before reading this), I’d ask you to at the very least consider the rationale.

And as for how to do this price-first (re-price-first) approach, well that’s for another day.

Thank you for reading.

This is my POV. I’d love to hear yours. Send me a quick note.

See you next week.

— Peter

P.S. When you’re ready to rethink your fees, start with a pricing audit to know exactly where pricing is limiting growth…plus some immediate action steps to fix it.