When Discounting Becomes the Plan, the Brand Becomes the Payment

Discounts don’t start as a strategy. They start as a relief valve.

A quarter tightens. A competitor gets loud. A sales team gets jumpy. Somebody says, “Let’s just make the number.” Price gets shaved. The deal closes. Everyone exhales.

Then it happens again.

Soon the business isn’t using discounting as a tactic. It’s using discounting as a personality. Customers learn it first. Internal teams follow right after. List price becomes a suggestion. Procurement stops negotiating and starts waiting. The market begins to treat your pricing like a bluff that cracks under pressure.

That’s when your brand becomes the collateral. Because price is never just a number. Price has meaning. Price is an indicator. Price tells your customer how to think about your value – and how much you believe in that value.

Let me put it bluntly: “Discounting is easy to start and hard to undo. Once customers learn that you’ll eventually cave, they wait you out.”

And that’s exactly what happens. Discounting trains behavior. And the behavior it trains is poisonous.

It trains the buyer to delay.
It trains your sales team to cave.
It trains marketing to rely on urgency instead of clarity.
It trains leadership to chase short-term comfort (wins) while long-term trust (success) bleeds out quietly.

Revenue may spike for a moment. Margin takes the hit immediately. But brand takes the hit later. And by the time it shows up in the numbers, you’re already deep into the habit.

The Quiet Damage Nobody Puts On The Slide Deck

Discounting feels clean on a spreadsheet. “We gave up X to win Y.”

But the long-term impact is deadly.

Lower price doesn’t just reduce what you earn. It changes who you attract. Deep discounts pull in the most price-sensitive buyers—the ones who churn faster, complain louder, demand more, and tell their friends to wait for the next deal. That isn’t growth. That’s renting demand from customers who never planned to stay.

Meanwhile, the customers you actually want—the ones who pay for outcomes, reliability, reputation start to hesitate. They don’t always say it out loud, but they feel it: if you cut the price that easily, what else are you willing to cut? Service? Quality control? Support response times? The team doing the work?

Discounting introduces doubt. Doubt is expensive.

Then the internal decay begins.

Sales starts bringing “special deals” to every pipeline call. Marketing starts pushing promotions because promotions convert faster than a careful value story. Finance starts asking for more volume to cover the margin hole the discounts created. Customer success inherits accounts that bought on price and behave like it.

Each department does what it thinks is rational. Together, they’re actually building a machine that can’t hold a line.

Our work with Precision Tune Auto Care is a great example. Years ago, someone at their corporate office got distracted by Jiffy Lube’s focus on oil changes – Jiffy Lube was still a relatively new player in the category at that time. So they shifted their attention to compete by running an aggressive coupon campaign to match Jiffy Lube’s pricing. Suddenly, Precision Tune wasn’t filling their bays with $300 brake jobs, they were filling them with $30 oil changes. Within a year, the franchisee’s were completely dependent on coupons and their average ticket price was the lowest in their company history. Getting the Precision Tune team to let go of coupons was critical, and we eventually were able to get them to pivot. But the dependency was so strong, they almost couldn’t make the turn.

That’s the trap: once the market learns you’ll flinch, every future sale begins at the discount.

The CEO Move: Stop Paying For Demand Twice

Protecting margin without killing growth requires a shift in posture. CEOs have to replace “discounting” with “adding value.”

Using discounts to drive temporary sales is a weakness. But adding value shows you care for your customer and know your worth.

Switching to an “adding value” strategy still gives buyers the additional incentive to engage, but ensures you don’t swap out ‘deal hunters’ for your Ideal Customers. For most businesses, discounting is just giving up profit for the illusion of momentum.

That isn’t to say that all discounts are bad. And, the best leaders don’t ban discounts. They ban random discounts.

They draw boundaries before the pressure hits. They build clear rules so sales isn’t improvising under stress. They make exceptions rare, visible, and earned. They force the organization to answer a simple question every time price is cut: what is the advantage of choosing to discount at this time?

Now comes the harder part, the part most companies would rather avoid – solving the underlying problem.

Most discounting is a symptom of weak messaging.

When you can’t explain why you’re worth it, you start bargaining. When your differentiation is fuzzy, price becomes the easiest lever left. When your positioning is generic, customers treat you like a commodity and demand commodity pricing.

Discounting becomes the escape hatch from having to write a sharper story.

That’s why this is a CEO issue, not a sales issue.

If the brand narrative is strong – clear outcomes, clear stakes, clear “why us,” price pressure becomes manageable. Teams can hold a line without sounding defensive. Customers can repeat your value to their boss without doing mental gymnastics. Procurement still negotiates, but they negotiate inside your frame, not theirs.

Strategic Storytelling™ matters here because pricing is storytelling, whether you like it or not.

A company that discounts constantly tells a story of doubt.
A company that holds price with clarity tells a story of value.

And the market listens.

What Actually Happens When You Hold The Line

Holding price doesn’t mean you stop competing. It means you compete on the right battlefield.

It means you stop bribing the buyer and start persuading them.
It means you stop chasing the easiest deals and start earning the best ones.
It means you stop treating price as the hook and start treating it as proof.

One client described the turning point as less dramatic than people expect. No big relaunch. No chest-thumping. Just a decision to stop flinching.

“Our customers didn’t need a better discount,” he said. “They needed a better reason to buy.”

That’s the work.

Because when discounting becomes the strategy, the brand becomes the payment.

And the bill always comes due usually after the quarter closes, when the applause fades and you’re left with thinner margins, weaker loyalty, and a market trained to wait for you out.