Chris Burggraeve, former Global CMO of AB InBev: “ROI follows Pricing Power discussions. Not before.”

Why CFOs and CMOs need a shared language for brand strength, margins and enterprise value.

In an era of persistent inflation, geopolitical uncertainty and pressure on margins, pricing has moved from a commercial topic to a boardroom priority. For CFOs, finance leaders, CMOs and marketing directors, the question is no longer whether pricing power matters. The question is how to build it, measure it and defend it.

Chris Burggraeve, former first-ever Global CMO of AB InBev and a globally recognized marketing and business transformation expert, believes pricing power offers a practical common language for marketing and finance. It links brand strength, customer value, margins, cash flow and enterprise value in a way both CFOs and CMOs can understand. It prioritizes effectiveness over efficiency. Do the right things first, before doing things right.

In the executive masterclass Making Pricing Power Happen, developed in close partnership with Alex van Groningen, CFO.nl, Adformatie.nl, and the Institute for Real Growth, Burggraeve explores why the strongest companies win on pricing, not discounts, and why sustainable pricing power is rarely created by finance or marketing alone. It helps CEOs to truly integrate CFO and CMO, instead of the company suffering from “double CFO syndrome”, i.e. the CEO acts as a second CFO in a “two against one” fight with the CMO. In that case, everybody loses.

“ROI follows Pricing Power discussions. Not before.”
– Chris Burggraeve, founder of Vicomte LLC and former Global CMO of AB InBev

Pricing Power as a boardroom priority

Financially speaking, companies want to create strong profit and loss statements, strong cash flow statements and, especially, strong balance sheets. On the balance sheet, boards compare assets and liabilities. But in today’s tech-driven world, Chris Burggraeve argues, most of the value creation is increasingly driven by intangible assets rather than tangible assets, such as factories, cars or offices.

“In the eyes of investors, whether they invest in public or private companies, value is created much more by intangibles,” he says. “First, by what a company knows, such as intellectual capital, including intellectual property, brands and talent. And second, by who it knows and who it matters to, through relationship capital. The issue is that for finance and accounting, and for a board that is traditionally stacked with more finance-driven profiles, intangibles are much more complex to deal with.”

The default for decades has been a focus on tangibles. “There are clear rules on how to value them. They have a clean place in the balance sheet. Intangibles like brands, and how one assesses their strength, do not fit the DNA of the finance-driven community.”

“Buying is easy. Smart buying is tough. Building your own brand organically is the toughest of all.”

The brand paradox on the balance sheet

Brand strength is usually not visible on the asset side of the balance sheet, except in goodwill after a brand has been acquired. That explains part of the paradox he sees in boardrooms. “CEOs and CFOs love to buy brands, somebody else’s blood, sweat and tears. There is a price they can negotiate and the reward appears clear. But buying is easy. Smart buying is tough. Building your own brand organically is the toughest of all.”

Pricing power offers a way out of that complexity. It gives the C-suite and board a simple, proven, money-based language to assess the strength of a company’s key brand assets and, by extension, the relative strength of its balance sheet.

That language is also critical in mergers and acquisitions, either as a better prepared seller benefiting from better multiples, or to avoid buyer’s remorse. Burggraeve points out that this happens in many cases, often because the brand strength of the seller has not been assessed correctly.

“Marketing needs to speak better Wall Street, and Finance needs to speak better Main Street.”

Why CFOs and CMOs need a shared language

The divide between marketing and finance is not new. Academia has long described it as “The Managerial Marketing-Finance Gap.” Finance often starts from cash flow, margins, valuation, and capital allocation, while marketing starts from brand, customer value and positioning. And as most CEOs have risen from finance and operations, it is in their DNA to act de facto as a second CFO in the budget fights. The challenge is to understand where those worlds disconnect, and what both sides need to learn to create Sustainable Pricing Power together.

“CMOs and their teams pride themselves on understanding audiences, like consumers, customers and other external stakeholders. However, their least understood and most important internal stakeholder is Finance.”

In his view, few marketers truly understand, or make the effort to understand, corporate finance and the interplay between pricing, cash flow, margin and valuation. Marketing often fails to understand that, for Finance, the “why” of marketing is about seeding and harvesting sustainable cash flow.

However, the problem works both ways. Very few finance professionals understand the 4P marketing mix: product, place, promotion and price. For many, marketing still equates to TikTok, a perception that marketers themselves have helped create. “The result is that the CFO sees marketing very narrowly, and more as a black box, resulting in black magic. Being naturally more risk-averse, they hesitate, as it feels like any marketing investment is throwing money into a black hole.”

That is why one of Burggraeve’s central ideas is simple: “Marketing needs to speak better Wall Street, and Finance needs to speak better Main Street.”

But even when they find a common financial language, he observes, marketing and finance mostly frame the discussion in efficiency terms. ROI becomes a comparison of input versus output: I give you one euro, you show me the return of your activity or allocation. Burggraeve has sat in many of those meetings. They can easily become frustrating, because both sides can attack the input and output assumptions of the other.

“As my ‘Creating Marketing Miracle$’ model shows, the best brand-building companies focus on effectiveness first, then on efficiency. Effectiveness is about outcomes, not input versus output. For marketing, those outcomes are captured in the concept of ‘brand health’: measurable changes in attitudes (or mental availability), behavior (usage and buying), and value perception (willingness to pay). Only material changes in brand health can ultimately be taken to the bank through price changes in a company’s offering.”

Price is where the conversation becomes concrete. It is the indisputable objective number on the invoice. “Neither the CMO, CFO nor CEO can argue the price, or its evolution. Neither can argue the inflation costs. They are what they are. So the start of the debate is indisputable, unlike in ROI discussions.”

“A strong brand is a brand with sustainable pricing power.”

From marketing budget to enterprise value

The shift Burggraeve wants to make is from marketing as a cost center to marketing as a driver of pricing power, profitability and enterprise value.

His model starts from the company’s own financial reality, then defines the marketing investment needed to build or rebuild a strong intangible asset. In that view, a brand is not primarily a communications concept. It is a financial asset when it creates sustainable pricing power.

“A strong brand is a brand with sustainable pricing power,” he says. “That is what top investors like Warren Buffett have understood so well. In his definition, the number one question for a CEO, CMO, CFO and board is the company’s ability to price at or above its own input cost inflation, repeatedly, to protect or grow margins and build better cash flow, without losing volume or market share to competition. The answer is red, orange or green.”

Start any discussion between marketing and finance there, Burggraeve says, and then work your way back to solve what marketing investment is needed to fix things or keep a good thing going. Only after that, and not before, can the organization talk about the efficiency of the investments needed. As he states firmly: “ROI follows pricing power discussions. Not before.”

That changes the tone of the boardroom conversation. It moves the discussion away from defending a marketing budget line by line and toward a broader question of value creation: how strong is the company’s brand asset, how much pricing power does it generate and what does that mean for margins, cash flow and valuation?

For Burggraeve, the message is clear: “Eat, sleep, drink pricing power first. Think like Buffett.”

FIFA, World Cup tickets, and the ethics of Pricing Power

When asked for a recent example that made him think differently about pricing power, Burggraeve points to the World Cup. With the tournament taking place in the United States, Canada and Mexico, he sees a striking case of pricing power in a market defined by limited supply and massive demand.

“Fans were in uproar because FIFA applied dynamic pricing to the tickets for the first time, resulting in unbelievable ticket prices for any seat. Unlike previous World Cups, FIFA figured out how to maximally benefit from the unique asset it owns and offers, rather than leaving the upside to scalpers and ticket flippers who profited from democratically priced tickets.”

Strictly financially speaking, he says, love it or hate it, but FIFA cannot be blamed for trying to extract all the value it can from its unique global asset, for the benefit of its limited set of shareholders: the federations of each nation. “Fans have a choice to buy or not. They can vote with their wallet.”

Well over 6 million did, out of a claimed global demand over half a billion. He did too. “I got tickets for the eight games in my backyard in New York. FIFA leveraged my own ‘willingness to pay’ successfully, pricing at the true pain level. Given that stadiums are full for most of the 104 games, dynamic pricing may have been the right policy decision, based on the strength of the value proposition in the minds of fans.”

But the case also shows the other side of pricing power. “Fans grumbled more than ever, and society criticized FIFA for lack of ethics. From a broader stakeholder point of view, FIFA seemed to have scored a short-term goal, but possibly a long-term own goal. But did they?”

Burggraeve is curious to see what may happen at the 2030 World Cup, in the very different political, cultural, and sports environment of Spain, Morocco and Portugal.

“A fascinating pricing policy debate will likely ensue – with arguments pro and con, depending on where you sit. Of course, not all brands have the unique pull of a World Cup, yet it is a great case for companies to reflect on the true pricing power of their own brand portfolio. How much money might you be leaving on the table?”

Deep dive: Making Pricing Power Happen

Meet the expert

Chris Burggraeve is founder of Vicomte LLC, former Global CMO of AB InBev and a globally recognized marketing and business transformation expert. He has held senior leadership roles at Coca-Cola and P&G, and is an experienced board member, chairman, investor, entrepreneur, academic and author.

Chris is known for helping organizations bridge the gap between marketing effectiveness and financial performance, with a strong focus on growth, pricing power and value creation. He combines strategic insight and academic rigor with practical frameworks for both commercial and financial leaders.
Read more about his expertise and program.