Why Do So Few Companies Really Manage Their Prices?
Pricing is the most profitable and quickest-to-implement lever in the marketing mix; yet very few companies assign it a dedicated role or governance structure—it remains scattered across sales, marketing, and finance, with no identified person in charge. Breaking free from this ad-hoc approach doesn’t require hiring an entire department: a clear mandate, a review schedule, and centralized data are enough to get started.
That is exactly the purpose of BOOPER's " Operational Pricing Consulting " module: to move beyond flying by sight without having to wait to hire an entire department.
This guide explains why this gap persists, what it actually costs, and what it means to “take pricing seriously”—without waiting until you have the resources of a large corporation to get started.
The Most Cost-Effective Tool in the Marketing Mix
Product, price, distribution, and communication: the four traditional pillars of the marketing mix do not all have the same implementation costs. Improving a product requires time and investment. Securing a new distribution channel involves months of negotiations. A communication campaign ties up a budget even before it’s clear whether it will generate results.
As for the price, changing it costs nothing. An adjustment can be decided one morning and have an immediate effect on the margin as early as the next sale. No other lever in the marketing mix offers this balance between ease of implementation and direct impact on the bottom line.
Of the companies that improved their margins in 2024, 38% did so primarily through pricing, rather than volume. However, only 31% view pricing as the primary driver of their future profits
(Simon-Kucher, Global Pricing Study 2025, 2,200 executives surveyed).
That is precisely what is striking: price was the primary driver of margins over the past year, yet it remains secondary to volume in management’s priorities. Most companies continue to invest heavily in customer acquisition and retention (two legitimate levers) while letting price—the most profitable of the four—run on autopilot.
This paradox is not a matter of competence. The marketing and sales teams that lead these companies are experienced. It is a matter of governance: unlike the product or communications, pricing usually has no clearly designated owner.
You only need to compare the budgets to see the imbalance. An acquisition campaign, a media plan, a packaging redesign: each of these projects has its own dedicated budget, a designated manager, and its own performance metrics. Pricing, on the other hand, generally has neither its own budget line item nor its own standalone performance metric; it is treated as a consequence of other decisions rather than as a decision in its own right. This asymmetry in treatment—more than the actual complexity of the subject—explains why the most profitable lever in the marketing mix remains the one that receives the least investment.
What "no one owns the price" means
In many companies, a price exists simply because it was set at some point (often when a product or product line was launched), and since then, no one has formally taken on the responsibility of keeping it current. It’s listed in a spreadsheet, a product sheet, or an ERP system. It is changed on an ad hoc basis: a discount granted to close a sale, an adjustment decided in a meeting without a clear framework, or a price increase automatically passed on to reflect a rise in material costs.
This isn't negligence. It's the result of an organizational structure in which pricing is treated as a technical detail rather than a strategic decision. It falls partly under sales, partly under marketing, partly under finance—and so, in practice, under no one's specific responsibility.
Large corporations have often solved this problem by creating a dedicated pricing function—sometimes an entire team reporting to the sales or finance department. Mid-sized companies and SMEs, however, generally do not have this option—neither the volume of business that would justify it at first glance nor the budget for specialized hiring. The issue therefore remains sidelined, and it is precisely this sidelining that proves most costly, since pricing continues to exist and weigh on margins without anyone actively managing it.
Three Reasons Why Price Remains a Blind Spot
This lack of oversight is no accident. Three mechanisms—either individually or in combination—recur in virtually all organizations that have never established a structured pricing governance framework.
An immediately visible effect
A price reduction is reflected in the margin immediately upon the first sale. The increase in volume that it is supposed to generate, however, takes weeks to materialize—if it materializes at all. This asymmetry makes it more tempting to leave things as they are rather than risk a certain loss for an uncertain gain.
A price that has never been revised
The price set at launch becomes the default benchmark. It changes automatically (cost indexation, competitor alignment) but is almost never reevaluated from scratch in light of the value the customer actually perceives today.
No one is responsible
Sales, marketing, and finance each influence pricing without an overarching mandate. Without a designated decision-maker, each department optimizes its own metrics (volume, brand image, margin) without a coherent big-picture view.
Constant visual navigation
These three mechanisms reinforce one another: fear fuels tradition, tradition fuels the silo, and the silo prevents fear from being addressed. The price remains fixed, not because it is optimal, but because no one has the authority to question it.
French retailers do not truly factor their customers' price sensitivity into their decisions, even though 83% consider it important. And nearly 30% have still not invested in a dedicated pricing solution
(Diamart Group and PricingHUB, 2026 study).
This figure should be interpreted with the caution it warrants: it does not mean that these retailers “have no pricing function,” but rather that the gap between intention and practice remains wide. All of them know that customers react to price; very few translate this reaction into a decision-making rule, due to a lack of tools, methods, or a designated person in charge. And this gap persists even though 72% of the retailers surveyed now consider pricing a strategic priority.
The Cost of an Uncontrolled Price
The cost of an uncontrolled price is never reflected in a single line item on the income statement. It spreads, unseen, across multiple fronts at once.
- Profit lost in silence. Every price point that could have been captured without losing volume (but wasn't, due to a lack of analysis) is profit lost forever—never recorded as an identifiable loss of revenue.
- A pricing strategy that drifts. Without regular review, some prices become too high in the eyes of the market without the company realizing it, while others become too low without the company reaping a measurable commercial benefit.
- Slow decision-making in the face of market fluctuations. Rising material costs, a competitor making moves, inflation picking up again: without a review process, the response always comes too late, decided in a rush rather than anticipated.
- An internal debt of trust. When no one can explain why a price is what it is, every department feels justified in challenging it, which further fuels the silo described above.
What makes this cost particularly insidious is its cumulative nature. A margin point lost in one year isn’t made up the following year; it adds to the loss the year after that, and so on, as long as no one revisits the issue. Over five or ten years, the gap between a company that has managed its pricing and one that has let it slip becomes considerable, without any single event ever being the identifiable cause.
The topic of the inherited price—which has never been revised since the program’s launch—deserves a discussion of its own; it is the subject of another article in this series.
What does a company that takes pricing seriously look like?
You don't need a ten-person pricing department to move beyond flying by the seat of your pants. Four key indicators distinguish an organization that has structured its approach to pricing from one that is still reacting to it.
| Dimension | Pass-through price | Price-led |
|---|---|---|
| Cadence | Changed on a case-by-case basis, with no set schedule | Revised according to a schedule familiar to everyone |
| Data | Intuition: A Brief History | Documented Margin, Competition, and Elasticity |
| Liability | Spread across several departments | A designated person in charge, even if part-time |
| Traceability | Verbal, undocumented decisions | Every change is justified and documented |
To put it this way: none of these four columns on the right requires dedicated software or a dedicated team. They require a simple organizational decision: someone must be able to answer, at any time, the question, “Why is this price what it is?”
Build a pricing function without waiting to hire
Appoint a designated person in charge
Even if they work part-time, even if they don't hold the title of "pricing manager," someone who can be asked about any price and who has the authority to answer that question.
Set a review schedule
Quarterly for the core product line, more frequently for products that are sensitive to competition or costs—but a consistent schedule, rather than just “checking in from time to time.”
Centralize the data that matters
Margin by SKU, competitor prices, sales history: all in one place, accessible to the person in charge, rather than scattered across multiple spreadsheets and departments.
Document every decision
One line is all it takes: what price, why, and what effect is expected. This record, accumulated over time, becomes the company’s pricing history and the foundation for any future improvements.
These four steps are enough to move beyond flying by the seat of your pants, even without hiring new staff. For the next step—defining roles precisely, creating a RACI matrix, and establishing the processes for a structured pricing organization (typically once the function is already up and running)—Booper has published a dedicated guide: Structuring an Effective Pricing Organization. This guide stops at the earlier stage, focusing on the initial assessment and realization; the other guide picks up where this one leaves off, covering the organizational mechanics.
Pricing governance without hiring an entire department
The BOOPER MPS platform brings together everything these four steps require in practice: GENIUS Price centralizes pricing, business rules, and simulations in one place, while GENIUS Admin tracks who approved, modified, or adjusted each price; documenting the decision becomes automatic rather than an extra task.
The AI Center, Booper’s cross-functional conversational assistant, allows the person in charge of pricing (even without advanced Pricing Training ) to use natural language to check the status of their product line, competitor price gaps, or margin alerts, without relying on a dedicated full-time analyst.
Check out the platform on our MPS page —the Booper " Modular Pricing Solution ."
Four Common Misconceptions That Hinder Awareness
- “We don’t have the critical mass for a pricing function.” False: The mandate and the pace matter more than the size of the team. Having just one person in charge already makes all the difference.
- “Our price is already good; we don’t have a problem.” A price that has never been challenged is neither good nor bad—it’s simply unverified. That’s exactly what ends up costing a lot without anyone realizing it.
- “Changing the price is risky.” Leaving it unchanged is just as risky, but in a less obvious way: the silent loss of margin never triggers an alert.
- “This is an issue for large corporations.” The gap in pricing maturity is not primarily a matter of company size but of organizational decision-making; see the Diamart and PricingHUB study cited above, which surveyed major French retailers.
- “We’ll see about that next year, once we have a clearer picture.” This delay occurs every year for the same reasons, and each year of delay has a cumulative cost, as detailed above.
The question of who should be involved in this decision once the mandate is in place —and why it should never rest with a single individual—is the subject of another article in this series. Similarly, the question of how to test a price change without alarming customers is discussed in detail there.
A Checklist Before You Say Your Price Is Driven by the Market
- Is there anyone in your organization who can explain, without hesitation, why each price is what it is?
- Are your prices adjusted on a regular basis, or only when a problem arises?
- Are the margin and competition data centralized, or scattered across multiple spreadsheets?
- Are pricing decisions documented, or do they get lost in verbal discussions?
- Is anyone explicitly assigned the task of pricing, even on a part-time basis?
Want to know how your pricing strategy is performing?
Spend 30 minutes with our team to objectively identify—backed by data—what factors within your organization are currently preventing you from effectively managing pricing.
FAQ
To learn more:What does a typical week look like for a pricing team?
It is a clearly assigned responsibility (entrusted to an individual or a small team) tasked with defining, implementing, and challenging the company’s pricing policy, with a specific mandate, data, and a set review schedule. It is not necessarily a full-time position or a large department: in an SME, this responsibility can be clearly assigned to someone already on staff, as long as the mandate exists and the issue is not left to be handled by multiple departments without a single point of accountability.
Three reasons come up most often: the fear of making a mistake with a lever whose effect is immediately visible, a price set at launch that is never revisited, and the lack of a designated person in charge of the issue, with everyone dabbling in it a little without anyone really taking the lead.
Yes. In Simon-Kucher’s 2025 Global Pricing Study (surveying more than 2,200 executives in 28 countries), price was the top driver cited by companies that improved their margins in 2024 (44%), ahead of volume (38%). A price adjustment has an almost entirely direct impact on margins, without requiring any prior investment: structurally, it is the most profitable lever in the marketing mix.
No. What matters is not the job title but the existence of a clear mandate, a review schedule, and access to the right data. A medium-sized company can establish a robust pricing governance framework by explicitly assigning the responsibility to someone already on staff—supported by the right tools—before considering hiring a dedicated employee.
A passive price is set once and then ignored, adjusted on a whim without any data or methodology, and no one is able to explain why it is what it is. An active price is revised at a known interval, based on margin and competitive data, and linked to an identified manager who can justify each change.
By appointing a designated manager—even on a part-time basis—and then establishing a regular review schedule, centralized access to margin and competitive data, and a written record of decisions made. These four building blocks are enough to move pricing away from a “fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants” approach, even before investing in a dedicated tool.
See also in this feature
- The price isn't set in stone: why it's a dynamic variable
- Testing Your Prices Without Losing Customers: The Method
- Pricing: Why Pricing Decisions Should Never Be Left to a Single Person
Sources: Simon-Kucher, Global Pricing Study 2025, June 2025 · Diamart Group and PricingHUB, How Are Retailers Managing Their Prices in 2026?, 2026
A franchisor cannot impose a resale price: the law prohibits it from doing so; it can only recommend a price or set a maximum. A franchisee’s margin is therefore governed by a documented target, defined by network segment rather than on a store-by-store basis, and applied uniformly to all retail locations within the same segment. Three tiers are usually sufficient: aggressive pricing online, geopricing in-store, and an optimized margin for the franchisee.
Optimix merged with Maxxing in July 2025, and PricingHUB was acquired by Akeneo in June 2026. In less than a year, two of the three software providers most frequently used by French retailers underwent changes in ownership, raising the question of alternatives for their customers.
This comparison evaluates Optimix XPA, PricingHUB, Mercio, Yieldigo, and BOOPER based on what truly sets a pricing solution apart in France: native support for French regulations, pricing by store or by zone, the approval process before a price changes at the register, and roadmap independence.
A manufacturer that raises its list price does not set the price on the shelf. Between the negotiated list price and the displayed price lie the retailer, its markup, and its promotions. What is measured is the price elasticity of each product, retailer by retailer.