Caught Between Structural Cost Inflation and a Market That Wouldn't Accept More Price
After years of sustained inflation, the commercial environment for Lindemans had shifted fundamentally. Costs had risen structurally — input costs, energy, logistics — but pricing in the market was beginning to normalise again. Retailers were pushing back. Further price increases risked triggering the one outcome that would make the margin problem even worse: volume decline.
The result was a clear commercial problem. Margins had eroded significantly over recent years. The team didn't have a clear framework for where to push on price and where to hold, or how to rethink the promotional approach that had become a structurally expensive way to sustain volume rather than grow it.
Falcon was brought in to define a margin recovery plan — one that balanced price, volume and promotional intensity without breaking the commercial relationships that underpinned the business.
The challenge wasn't just pricing strategy. It was giving a commercial team the confidence and the arguments to hold the line in rooms where retailers don't make it easy.
Three Levers, One Coherent Commercial Strategy
We anchored the work in Falcon's Pricing Framework — a structured approach to margin recovery that starts not from "what can we get away with" but from "what do we need, what can we defend, and how do we build the commercial story around it."
The engagement unfolded across three interconnected workstreams:
01 — Pricing Architecture
We started from a clear view of the required margin recovery and translated it into concrete pricing guidance — grounded in historic margin performance, cost evolution and market positioning. This meant avoiding the trap of blanket increases and instead defining where differentiated, customer-specific price moves could be executed and defended. Every price decision had to be buildable in a negotiation room.
02 — Promotion Redesign
The bigger issue, in many ways, was the promotional structure. Lindemans — like many FMCG brands — had fallen into the pattern of using frequent, deep promotions to protect volume. The result was a trade investment that was both expensive and increasingly ineffective at driving true incremental demand.
We redesigned the approach: fewer activations, more targeted, with clearer criteria for what justified a promotional investment and what didn't. This freed up trade budget that could be redirected to moments that actually drove distribution, visibility and trial.
03 — Negotiation Framework
Strategy without execution is a slide deck. We translated the pricing and promotional work into a clear trade story and negotiation framework — giving the commercial team concrete arguments, defined boundaries and the confidence to land increases in a market environment that had become resistant to them.
Margin Restored. Volume Held. Commercial Discipline Built to Last.
Pricing decisions are now grounded in cost, value and customer dynamics — not inertia or gut feel. The promotional calendar has shifted from frequent support to targeted activation. And the commercial team has the confidence and the framework to defend that approach — not just once, but consistently, every negotiation season.