Pricing Strategy Framer

What you need to provide

The prompt asks for 6 inputs. Have these ready before you paste it in:

1. 1Category + Brand Positioning — premium, mainstream, value
2. 2Ladder — packs, sizes, shelf prices
3. 3Promo History — depth, frequency, share of volume; directional is fine
4. 4Competitor Behavior
5. 5Margin/Budget Notes
6. 6Retailer Context — EDLP banner, Hi-Lo grocer

How to use it

1. 1Drop the prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
2. 2Fill in the bracketed inputs (price ladder, promo history, competitors, margins).
3. 3Answer its clarifying questions about volume on deal and retailer posture.
4. 4Ask it to simulate the first competitor undercut and your scripted response.

See it in action

Posture recommendation for Trailhead — meat snacks:

Diagnosis
- Forty percent of volume on deep deal against a shallow-promoting competitor is a Hi-Lo habit, not a Hi-Lo strategy — and it is training premium shoppers to wait. The base price has quietly stopped being a real price. Validate with your baseline-versus-promoted volume split.

Recommended posture
- Hybrid, tilted toward everyday stability: fewer, shallower promotions concentrated in 2-3 high-traffic windows (grilling season, big-game, holiday travel), with the base price defended in between.

Guardrails
- Depth: never below the point where the deal price becomes the reference price — set the threshold from your elasticity read and treat it as an assumption to validate.
- Frequency: cap promo weeks per quarter; no back-to-back events at the same retailer.

Ladder coherence
- The multipack must beat the single-bag price per ounce even on promo, or the promotion cannibalizes your own ladder.

Rules of engagement
- Competitor goes deep: hold price, respond with display presence and bonus-pack value instead.

Transition
- Step promo depth down over two cycles rather than one cliff; brief every buyer on the new calendar before it starts.

Want the internal one-pager to align sales and finance?

The prompt

This is the actual prompt, not a teaser. Read the opening below, then unlock the free bundle with your email for the full version plus the installable Claude Skill and Custom-GPT instructions.

# Role
You are a senior revenue and pricing strategist for food and beverage brands who has moved businesses off reactive discounting without losing distribution. You believe a pricing strategy is a set of rules people can follow under pressure — not a deck — and you refuse postures a brand's margin cannot sustain.

# Context I'll provide
- Category and brand position: [CATEGORY + BRAND POSITIONING e.g. premium, mainstream, value]
- Price-pack ladder: [LADDER — packs, sizes, shelf prices]
- Promo history and current volume on deal: [PROMO HISTORY — depth, frequency, share of volume; directional is fine]
- Key competitors' pricing behavior: [COMPETITOR BEHAVIOR]
- Margin constraints and trade budget reality: [MARGIN/BUDGET NOTES]
- Retailer postures that constrain me (optional): [RETAILER CONTEXT e.g. EDLP banner, Hi-Lo grocer]

# Your task
1. If the ladder, promo history, or competitor behavior is missing or vague, ask up to 3 clarifying questions BEFORE writing anything.
2. Diagnose the current de facto posture — what my accumulated promo decisions have actually taught shoppers, competitors, and buyers — before recommending anything.

What's in the free download

Frequently asked questions

What is a pricing posture in CPG?

A pricing posture is a brand's standing rule set for price and promotion in a category: whether it runs everyday low price, Hi-Lo promotion cycles, or a hybrid; how deep and how often it promotes; and how it responds when competitors move. This skill diagnoses the posture your past promos actually created and replaces it with rules you choose deliberately.

How is this different from the Price Pack Architecture Planner?

The Price Pack Architecture Planner designs the pack lineup — which sizes and price points exist on the ladder. This skill sets how you price and promote whatever ladder you have: posture, guardrails, and competitive rules of engagement. Architecture decides the rungs; this decides the behavior. Run architecture first if the ladder itself is broken.

What AI tools does the prompt run on?

Any capable chat model: ChatGPT, Claude, or Google Gemini. The prompt is model-agnostic plain text, so it also works saved as a Custom GPT or a reusable Claude Skill — useful when you want sales, finance, and category to debate posture from one shared framework.

Can it help me break a discount habit?

Yes — that is its core case. It diagnoses what deep, frequent promotion has trained shoppers and buyers to expect, then builds a stepped transition: shallower depth over defined cycles, concentrated promo windows, non-price responses to competitor moves, and the buyer communication that keeps the change from reading as a stealth price increase.