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Marketing earns credibility with finance when its value is expressed through business outcomes, not isolated activity metrics. Drawing on Chris Burggraeve’s Marketing IS Finance IS Business, this article connects brand health, intangible assets, pricing power, and budget conversations. The framework gives CMOs and CFOs a shared way to discuss investment, margin, and long-term enterprise value.
Marketing metrics do not always travel well into the CFO’s office. Impressions, clicks, and engagement may describe activity, but they do not automatically explain how marketing supports margin, resilience, or enterprise value.
Chris Burggraeve, founder of Vicomte and author of Marketing IS Finance IS Business, offers pricing power as a bridge between the two functions.
Pricing power measures whether a company can raise its net price without losing volume or value to competitors. It connects customer preference and brand strength to an outcome finance already understands.
Brand investment often produces value over time, making it difficult to reduce to a short-term input and output equation.
“Pricing power is a notion for people who are serious about building an intangible asset.”
A stronger brand can increase willingness to pay, reduce reliance on discounting, and protect margin when costs rise. In B2B markets, that strength may be visible at the customer or contract level.
Marketing and finance can examine whether prices increased, whether volume held, and where discounting weakened the expected return. The findings create a practical starting point for discussing brand health.
Finance is accustomed to measuring tangible assets such as property, inventory, and equipment. Much of marketing’s contribution appears in intangible assets:
These assets can influence retention, pricing, competitive preference, and valuation even when they do not appear neatly in an attribution report.
Chris’s framework connects brand equity to pricing power and pricing power to financial performance. It gives marketing a way to discuss long-term value without pretending every investment creates immediate revenue.
Chris described the communication gap directly:
“When you sell budgets, you need to speak the language of money.”
This does not require marketing to abandon customer or brand language. It creates an opportunity to connect those ideas to margin, risk, pricing, and future enterprise value.
A budget discussion might examine:
Chris connected that market signal to the company’s core offer:
“If you feel that you can’t ask the price you want, my lesson is you need to go back to the drawing board on the value proposition.”
The resulting discussion is broader than whether marketing generated enough leads. It asks whether the business has created enough perceived value to protect its economics.
Pricing power is the ability to raise net prices without losing meaningful volume or value to competitors.
Brand trust and differentiation can increase willingness to pay and reduce dependence on discounting.
It connects customer perception and brand strength to margin, revenue quality, and enterprise value.
It generally develops over time through sustained value creation, customer trust, product strength, and brand investment.
Listen to the full conversation with Chris Burggraeve.
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