The Growth You Are Borrowing From Your Own Brand

Every marketer has been in the meeting. The plan is short, the quarter is closing, and someone says the sentence that ends the discussion: we can take another three points on price.

It is the most reasonable idea in the room. It requires no new customers, no new product, no new campaign, and it lands inside the quarter. You simply charge more for what you already sell, to the people who already buy it.

It is also a loan, and the business rarely records it as one.

What gets spent in that meeting is the brand's price premium: the difference between what people will pay for your product and what they will pay for the nearest substitute. That premium took years to build. It is the residue of every consistent thing the business ever did, and it can be drawn down in an afternoon, repeatedly, by people who are being entirely sensible.

I have come to call this borrowed growth: revenue this year, taken from the brand's capacity to command a price next year.

The proof is easiest to see where the numbers are public

American food and drink bought for the home is the cleanest available example, because the national accounts measure the same basket twice: once in dollars paid, and once with price stripped out.

Between 2019 and 2025, spending on that basket rose 41.2%. The volume people actually took home rose 10.8%. Roughly seventy cents of every additional dollar was price rather than demand. Narrow the window to the four years from 2021 and it is starker: spending up 18.5%, volume down 1.0%. Both series are US Bureau of Economic Analysis personal consumption expenditures from FRED.

Six years of revenue growth. Very little of it growth in what anyone wanted.

It is not a food story

The same move, in the same years, in sectors that share nothing else:

Software. Renewal uplifts and repackaged tiers. Revenue per account rises while the number of accounts does not.

Airlines. Unbundling. The seat, the bag and the boarding order become separate charges. The fare looks flat, but the trip costs more.

Streaming and media. Price ladders, ad tiers, and the end of shared passwords.

Hospitality and retail. Resort fees, delivery minimums, smaller pack sizes at the same shelf price.

Each one is defensible on its own terms, and each one raises revenue without creating demand. But all are paid for out of the same account: the customer's belief that what they pay is fair for what they get.

That account has no line in the reporting.

Why nobody sees the bill

This is the part that makes borrowed growth so easy to keep taking.

A brand a company built itself does not appear on its balance sheet. Under both US and international accounting standards, internally generated brands cannot be capitalized. There is no carrying value, so there is nothing to write down. A company's most valuable asset can weaken for a decade and the accounts will not register a single dollar of it.

Acquired brands are not much better. Major ones are typically classified as indefinite-lived intangibles and carry no amortization. They are tested for impairment. Where amortization does run, it follows a schedule set at acquisition: a brand getting stronger amortizes at exactly the same rate as one falling apart. A clock, not a signal.

So the only line that ever reflects real decay is impairment: the late, lumpy write-down that arrives years after the damage began.

Which means the business gets a monthly report on the borrowing and no report on the debt.

Two ways of reading the same revenue

"Investment" is now doing two jobs

The language has turned. Price realization has given way to volume-driven growth, consumer value and brand investment, and money is genuinely moving back toward brands.

But read what is described as reinvestment and much of it is price: rollbacks, narrower gaps to own-label, deeper promotions, more value on shelf.

The filings say it more quietly. Kraft Heinz, Hershey, J.M. Smucker, Campbell's and Mondelēz each report an advertising line in their annual reports, In their most recent fiscal years, three of the five moved by less than 5% in either direction: Kraft Heinz up 4.1% to $1,073 million, Hershey up 2.0% to $612 million, Smucker down 0.9% to $179.3 million. Campbell's rose 14.3% to $400 million. Mondelēz fell 21.6%, to $1,655 million from $2,112 million. These are Form 10-K figures for fiscal years ending between August 2025 and April 2026. For most of them, reinvestment did not mean a step change in advertising.

And the two instruments are often reported as one. Mondelēz's own margin commentary names "advertising and consumer promotion" as a single line: the spend that compounds and the spend that does not, in one number.

A dollar returned to the customer as a lower price and a dollar spent building the reason they choose you are not the same instrument. A price cut buys this quarter and stops working the moment it stops. Brand spend is how the premium gets rebuilt. When both reach a board as brand investment, the board cannot tell which one it is funding. The company can then spend heavily, watch nothing move, and conclude that brand investment does not work. Most of what it bought was never designed to compound.

Repayment takes longer than borrowing did

The premium does not come back the moment it is funded again.

What makes a brand the easy choice decays when it is not maintained, and it rebuilds more slowly than it fades. The people, the partners and the internal permission to spend on work that pays back in two years all weakened while price was doing the growing. Funding returns faster than capability does.

This is why reinvestment so often misses the timeline in the plan. Money is not the problem. The plan assumes a switch, and what it is actually restarting is a flywheel.

Auditing your borrowed growth

Four things worth establishing, whatever sector you are in.

1. Decompose last year's growth. How much came from price and mix, and how much from more people buying more often? If nobody in the business can answer that in a meeting, that is the finding.

2. Separate the two kinds of investment. Report the spend that lowers the price apart from the spend that builds preference. They have different payback and deserve different judgment. One number covering both tells a board nothing.

3. Find your substitute for an impairment. Since the accounts will not tell you the premium is eroding, something else has to. Price gap to the nearest substitute, repeat rate among your best customers, share of people who choose you without a promotion: pick one, track it quarterly, and put it in front of the same people who see the revenue.

4. Agree the window before the spend. If the board expects a response within two quarters and the work pays back over two years, the program will be judged a failure before it has had a chance to work.

Pricing was not a mistake. Input costs were real, margins were under real pressure, and many leaders made the defensible call. But the cost was deferred, not avoided, and deferred costs arrive with interest. The businesses paying most now are the ones that treated years of price as a strategy rather than a bridge.

So, the question I would put to other marketing and commercial leaders: