- 1. First, the uncomfortable part: they are not winning on price.
- 2. What buyers compare when every tile is "good enough".
- 3. The discount spiral quietly reprices your brand.
- 4. The invisible defeat: losing before the meeting.
- 5. What restores perceived value.
- 6. When the price gap is structural — and what to do then.
Buyers do not choose the cheaper tile; they choose the cheaper tile when nothing else gives them a reason not to. Losing to low-cost competitors is usually a positioning problem wearing a price costume: the brand has stopped giving distributors and specifiers a difference worth paying for — or was never visible where that difference gets decided. Both are fixable. Neither is fixed with a discount.
1. First, the uncomfortable part: they are not winning on price
Every tile manufacturer losing volume to a cheaper competitor tells the same story: the market has gone crazy, the customer only looks at price, quality no longer matters. It is a comforting story, because none of it is the brand’s fault. It is also, in most cases, wrong.
Price only decides when everything else is a tie. If a distributor or a project buyer perceives two brands as interchangeable — similar product, similar service, similar story, similar risk — choosing the cheaper one is not irrational. It is the only rational move left. The cheap competitor did not win the comparison; the comparison never happened, because your brand gave the buyer nothing to compare.
“Buyers do not choose the cheaper tile. They choose the cheaper tile when nothing else gives them a reason not to.”
That reframing matters, because it changes what you fix. A price problem is fixed at the negotiating table, margin by margin, until there is nothing left. A perception problem is fixed upstream — in positioning, in design, in visibility — and it compounds in your favor instead of against you.
2. What buyers compare when every tile is “good enough”
Technical quality in ceramics stopped being a differentiator years ago. Presses, inks and kilns are available to everyone; a mid-tier factory in any producing country can now make a porcelain floor that passes every test a project requires. “Good enough” is everywhere, and buyers know it.
So what do they actually weigh when the spec sheets match? Risk and ease, mostly. Will this brand make me look good with my client? Will the collection still exist in three years? Is there stock, service, someone who answers? Does their material make my project photograph better? Can I find technical documentation at 11 p.m. without calling anyone?
Notice that every one of those questions is answered by the brand — its consistency, its catalogue, its design culture, its digital presence — and none of them by the factory. A buyer who cannot answer them defaults to the one variable that requires no trust at all: price.
3. The discount spiral quietly reprices your brand
The immediate response to losing a deal on price is to sharpen the next quote. It feels like defense. It is actually the most expensive message a brand can send.
“A discount is a confession: it tells the buyer your brand had nothing else to say.”
Distributors read pricing behavior the way analysts read a stock chart. A brand that concedes 8% under pressure has just told its entire channel that the list price was fiction — and that next quarter’s negotiation starts 8% lower. Meanwhile, the margin that disappeared is precisely the money that funds everything that would have justified the premium: the redesigned catalogue, the fair stand, the content, the photography, the people who answer at 11 p.m.
This is the spiral: price concessions starve the brand investments that create perceived value, whose absence forces more price concessions. Companies do not fall into commodity competition in one bad year. They discount their way into it, quietly, quote by quote.
4. The invisible defeat: losing before the meeting
Here is the part most manufacturers underestimate. B2B buyers now complete an average of 61% of their purchase journey before contacting sellers, and 94% have already ranked their shortlist by the time those conversations begin (6sense, 2025).
Forrester also reports that 68% of buyers enter the purchasing process with a front-runner already in mind, and that vendor ultimately wins 80% of the time (Forrester, 2025).
By the time your salesperson enters the conversation, the shortlist already exists, the mental ranking has been established and many of the purchase requirements have already been defined. The meeting is often less about discovering the options than validating a preference formed earlier.
If a cheaper competitor appears earlier and more clearly during that research phase through stronger search visibility, a sharper digital catalogue, more useful specification content and information that AI systems can easily find and interpret, they are not simply beating you on price. They are earning preference before price is even discussed. The negotiation you keep losing is merely where that earlier defeat becomes visible.
“You are not losing at the negotiation table. You are losing during the research phase, weeks or months earlier.”
This is also one of the most accessible places to counterattack. Rebuilding manufacturing competitiveness requires substantial time and capital. Strengthening digital presence, specification content and brand visibility is a faster, lower-capital way to influence the stage where shortlists and preferences are formed.
5. What restores perceived value
In our work with tile manufacturers across Europe, Latin America and Asia, the brands that escape price competition make three moves, in this order.
They choose a position a cheaper competitor cannot occupy. Not “quality” — a real position: a point of view about material, a segment owned completely, a service promise nobody else can keep, a design language recognizable at ten meters. The test is simple: if your claim would look plausible in the cheaper competitor’s catalogue, it is not a position.
They make the position visible in design. This industry sells to architects and designers — people who read a brand’s design culture the way engineers read a spec sheet. A coherent identity, a catalogue worth keeping, product photography with a point of view, a stand that argues something: these are not marketing costs. They are the evidence that the premium is real.
They show up before the meeting. Search visibility, specification content, presence in the AI-generated answers buyers now consult. Perceived value that nobody perceives does not exist.
6. When the price gap is structural — and what to do then
Honesty requires one final scenario. Sometimes the gap is not 8%; it is 40%, because the competitor operates with structurally lower costs that no positioning can bridge for a price-driven buyer. China is running its tile factories at 48% capacity (Ceramic World Review) and that overcapacity will keep flooding price-sensitive channels; trade barriers like the US anti-dumping case against Indian tile reshape the map but never fast enough to save a quarter.
Against a structural gap, the answer is not to fight for the buyer who only reads the price column — that customer is already gone, and winning them back would cost more than losing them. The answer is to change buyers: move the brand toward the segments, channels and markets where design, trust and specification decide. That is a repositioning project, and it is uncomfortable, because it means admitting that part of yesterday’s volume is not coming back. The manufacturers who accept this early keep their margins. The ones who deny it keep their volume for a while — at prices that slowly turn the factory into the only asset left.
