They Help Companies Set Prices. Tariffs Are Making It Trickier.

As companies scramble to respond to President Trump’s ever-changing tariff policies, some of the pressure has fallen directly on a tiny corner of the consulting world.

Known as pricing strategy, it uses tools like customer research, historical data, economic modeling and competitive analysis to recommend not only what price tag to put on items but how to structure prices to maximize revenue and profit.

Often a pricing strategist’s work involves simulating how different pricing strategies and prices could affect sales. But brand rules and psychology can also come into play. It’s part art, part science.

And lately, it’s been trickier.

Nobody knows how Trump’s tariff policies will change, how those tariffs will affect the overall economy or how consumers will adjust their spending as a result — all of which can be key metrics when determining pricing.

“It’s some of the highest levels of uncertainty that I’ve seen over my 25-year career,” Robert Haslehurst, who leads the global pricing practice at L.E.K. Consulting, told DealBook. Only the first weeks of Covid lockdowns and the start of the 2007-8 financial crisis came close.

Times like these can be a “golden opportunity,” said William Humsi, a partner at the consumer strategy firm Simon-Kucher who mostly works with B2B companies. A brand that imports less from countries with high tariffs than its competitors may be able to defend its market share by keeping prices lower, or use other players’ need to raise prices as cover for its own price increases, known as “taking price” in industry parlance.