Every consumer business reaches the same wall. Revenue grows when you discount, margin falls when you discount, and nobody can say cleanly which promotions paid back and which just gave money away. Pricing strategy consulting, done in plain commercial terms, is the work of growing revenue without cutting margin, and it starts with measuring what your discounts actually bought.
Promotion ROI, measured not assumed
Most promotions are judged on the uplift on the dispatch report. That number is misleading, because a large part of it is volume you would have sold anyway, and another part is buyers stocking up now and going quiet next month. Real promotion ROI splits the observed uplift into baseline, the bit you would have sold regardless, and true incremental, the bit the promotion actually added. Only the true incremental part can pay back the trade spend. When you measure it, a meaningful share of promotions turn out to be margin-negative.
Where discount money leaks
Discount leakage tends to come from four places: subsidising buyers who would have paid full price, cannibalising your own higher-margin packs, pulling forward demand you already had, and running schemes in places where they had no measurable effect. Naming the leak per scheme, in rupees, turns a vague worry into a list of decisions.
Packaging and price-point decisions
Pricing is not one number. It is a ladder of packs and price points, and the right move is often a packaging and price-point change rather than a discount: a smaller entry pack to hold a price-sensitive shopper, or a larger value pack to lift the basket. These choices grow revenue and protect margin at the same time, which a blanket discount never does.
Margin improvement analytics
Margin improvement analytics ties it together: it shows, by product and channel, where price can move up without losing volume, where promotions are destroying value, and where the mix is quietly dragging the average down. The output is a short list of priced decisions, not a theory.
Where to start
Take your last three months of promotions and decompose them into baseline and true incremental. That one exercise usually finds enough margin-negative spend to fund the rest of the work, and it reframes the pricing conversation from instinct to evidence.