You’re presenting a new brand platform that prioritizes emotional storytelling and long-term equity building, but the sales director insists you should instead focus on price promotions and aggressive discounting to hit this quarter’s volume targets. How would you handle this conflict?

Situation

In my previous role as an assistant brand manager for a household cleaning brand, the sales team pushed for a deep discounting campaign to counter a competitor’s price drop, but I believed it would erode our premium positioning.

Task

I had to persuade the leadership team that protecting brand equity would deliver better long-term results without completely disregarding short-term sales pressure.

Action

I pulled data from our brand health tracker showing that our premium perception was the key driver of repurchase, and that past discounting cycles had only yielded temporary lifts with a negative impact on baseline sales afterward. I proposed a compromise: a smaller, targeted promotional bundle that maintained perceived value without slashing prices, combined with an emotional brand campaign highlighting our product’s efficacy and sustainability credentials, timed to run after the price-sensitive period. I also aligned with the finance team to model the quarterly impact and demonstrate that the volume gap could be partially closed through incremental distribution wins.

Result

The leadership agreed to my approach. We achieved 90% of the quarter’s volume target while actually improving our brand’s equity scores for ‘worth paying more for’, which positioned us for 8% higher margins in the next year.