Why 2026 Is About Pricing Power, Not Growth
The tariff squeeze rarely shows up in dashboards all at once.
It first moves quietly through supply chains. Procurement flags higher input costs. Finance starts running scenarios. And long before inflation technically peaks, buyers begin asking harder questions about value.
Marketing tends to feel this shift early.
Buyers hesitate. Deal cycles stretch. Conversations change.
“What makes you different?” becomes “Why now?”
Then, eventually: “Do we need this at all?”
And when pressure builds internally, marketing is often the first budget leaders scrutinize because while marketing remains effective, its impact is perceived as less immediate than rising costs or shrinking margins.
The Discretionary Budget Illusion
In many organizations, the same logic repeats itself: if something doesn’t produce near-term ROI, it’s treated as optional. Demand generation blurs with brand, while performance marketing is evaluated through the wrong lens. The entire function starts to look like something that can be paused until conditions improve.
That framing makes sense on paper, but in practice, it creates risk.
When costs rise and margins tighten, marketing isn’t discretionary. It becomes part of the infrastructure that supports pricing. Cutting it doesn’t remove pressure; it concentrates it elsewhere.
The Growth Playbook Meets Its Limits
For the past decade, the dominant marketing strategy was straightforward: grow volume, expand reach, and fill the top of the funnel. If performance softened, widen the aperture.
That approach worked in a low-friction environment.
It works less well when buyers are cautious, and decisions carry more downside. As sales cycles lengthen and committees expand, the cost of a wrong decision rises.
There’s also a quieter side effect that’s easy to miss: demand optimized purely for volume often attracts the least price-tolerant buyers. In inflationary periods, this can weaken your ability to hold pricing when you need it most.
The result is familiar: higher acquisition costs, lower resilience, and customers who churn as soon as prices adjust. The math stops working even if demand stays stable, because the wrong demand shows up.
Marketing’s Role Shifts
Pricing power is about the ability to hold or raise prices without losing trust.
This is where marketing’s job changes.
Instead of focusing on scale, the emphasis moves to helping buyers understand why a premium is reasonable, stable, and defensible. In uncertain environments, buyers are comparing features and comparing exposure.
They want to know:
Will this partner deliver consistently?
Are their prices rational or reactive?
Will this decision still make sense six months from now?
In moments like these, positioning matters more than volume. Buyers optimize for safety before upside.
What Resonates When Uncertainty Is High
Two themes consistently anchor B2B decisions when trade and pricing volatility rise: reliability and stability.
Reliability shows up as fewer surprises:
Clear expectations
Delivery that matches the promise
Communication that resists the urge to oversell
Buyers want confidence that choosing you won’t create problems they’ll have to explain internally later.
Stability is closely related:
Predictable supply chains
Clear accountability
Lower exposure to external shocks
This doesn’t mean every buyer demands domestic production, but it does mean supply chain risk carries more weight than it did a few years ago.
These signals don’t eliminate price sensitivity, but they help contextualize it.
What This Means Going Into 2026
Growth will return. But it won’t arrive on command, and it won’t respond to the same playbook that worked in easier conditions.
The companies that emerge strongest from this period are those that preserved trust and margins while others chased volume. They didn’t panic and slash prices. They didn’t disappear from the market, hoping demand would wait. They adjusted their positioning early, before pressure forced their hand.
Marketing teams that make this shift now won’t look cautious in hindsight. They’ll look deliberate.
Because when everything costs more, credibility becomes the most valuable asset you have, and protecting it is the real work this year.
