We all want our work to matter. And often this means being able to show a clear, measurable line between insight and business impact, so the chief marketing officer thinks: “Insights teams are great.”

Wanting this isn’t the same as achieving it. But I think we can reach this goal more easily than we think.

The latest GRIT Report names five top areas, of 12, where brand researchers spend the most time. These are segmentation, brand strategy, early-stage NPD, brand tracking and market structure. All very different areas, but they share one thing: it’s hard to link these areas directly to business impact.

And that’s before we count other barriers. For example, Ehrenberg-Bass marketers dismiss segmentation. Scott Galloway used the Uncensored CMO podcast to declare brand building dead.

Is pricing our route to the CMO’s heart?

There’s one area everyone in a business understands the importance of. Pricing. Most people know the claim: a 1% increase in price can lead to an 8% rise in profitability, if sales stay the same.

So, the link between a pricing insight and a financial result has the potential to be simple. Say an insights team recommends a brand raises its prices, the brand does this and sales levels stay the same (or rise) and profit increases. The link between the insight recommendation and the financial result is clear.

The problem with pricing research today

The GRIT report says only 16% of brand researchers spend significant time on pricing work,making pricing their second-lowest priority.

There are two good reasons for this. Firstly, a brand can't change its price all the time. This would confuse buyers and hurt trust. Simply put, pricing doesn't need constant research.

Secondly, we can't easily influence pricing if marketing teams don't control it either. This is partly true. A 2025 Marketing Week survey found that 30% of marketers have no say over price.

But marketers do control communication. And communication sits at the heart of good pricing, and where researchers can help marketers most.  

Pricing’s three parts 

Marketing professor Mark Ritson says there are three parts to pricing – researching the price, setting the price and communicating it.  

Within this trio, a different part of the business plays a distinct role:

• Researching the price. Learning what people will pay. This is insight’s job.
• Setting the price. Sums and margins. This is finance’s job.
• Communicating the price. How we show price to consumers. This is marketing’s job.

These roles make sense. Insight knows consumer behaviour and intent. Finance knows revenue and profit. Marketing knows communication. So surely everyone is happy?  

Insight’s tricky role in pricing

Of the three parts, insight arguably has the short straw. Understanding what people are genuinely willing to pay for something is an age-old problem.

There are two routes to this: one relies on what people say they'll pay, which has has clear flaws. The other route uses complex methods, which are often hard to explain to stakeholders.

Both issues appear in Impact Sense and Aura’s recent Research Effectiveness Review. The report says researchers trust only 67% of claimed data on average. It also calls conjoint a ‘methodological casualty'. Conjoint is the gold-standard pricing method, but it has lost faith among those who gave it that label.

In short: we doubt the simple ways of understanding price, and we think our gold-standard pricing method is fading.

Reshaping our role in pricing to win the CMO’s praise

With traditional pricing methods under scrutiny, there’s an opportunity to reshape how we support marketers on pricing. And this opportunity is to move from researching price to researching price communication.

But why now? Because we now have the knowledge regarding how to do this, thanks to behavioural science’s growing credibility and availability – especially as this has expanded what we know about pricing communication. Specifically, how small changes in how we present a price can shift how consumers see it and behave as a result.

Many insight teams already use behavioural science. The GRIT report finds this use spans 29% of brand research teams up to 66% of brand analytics teams.

So insight teams can bring marketers behavioural science ideas about pricing communication. We can then test these ideas about how to communicate price through simple A/B tests or monadic experiments. Then we can recommend changes that boost consumers’ sense of value or their willingness to pay.

Everyone is a winner

Here’s the best-case outcome from shifting our role in pricing to researching price communication:

• An insights team brings a marketer a behavioural science idea. The team explains how the marketer can use it to improve the brand’s pricing through how they communicate price.
• They run an experiment to test the idea in practice. If it works, the marketer changes how they communicate price.
• Sales stay the same, but because the price is higher, profit rises. This draws a direct line from an insight recommendation to a marketing action to business impact.
• The CMO thinks: “Insights teams are great.” Marketing gives the insights team more influence over pricing. Marketing now sees the insights team as having hybrid skills. (The recent Insight in Transition report names this as one way insight professionals can protect their role).

How do we make this happen?

To adapt our role in pricing and win the CMO’s praise, we need a mindset shift:

1. Build a hybrid set of pricing skills. Expand beyond pricing research methods into behavioural science and experimental methods.
2. Stop waiting for pricing briefs. Instead, pitch new pricing communication ideas to marketers.
3. Be willing to fail. Not every behavioural science idea about pricing will work in practice, even if it works in theory. But we must test these ideas to find out.

Jack Miles is director at Shape Insight