I closed a deal recently for one of my clients with a major consumer products brand. I quoted a rate that I knew ran high. I expected a counter.
The brand came back lower, exactly as planned on their end. Their lower number landed almost exactly where I would have priced the deal from the start. That price was based on my client’s real deliverables and usage terms.
I got what I wanted for my client. But we both spent an extra round of back and forth getting to a number that could have been the opening offer.
That is not a story about a brand losing a negotiation. It is a story about two sides performing a ritual neither one actually needed.
Every time a brand negotiates an influencer’s rate down, it teaches that influencer to quote higher next time. That single habit, repeated across thousands of deals, is the real reason influencer rates keep climbing. Brands built the cycle. Now they are the ones calling the results inflated.
The Cycle That Keeps Repeating
Here is how it typically plays out. A brand asks an influencer for a rate. The influencer quotes a number. The brand pushes for a discount and gets one.
The next time that influencer works with a brand, the rate is higher. The influencer, or their manager, already expects to be talked down.
In most cases, the influencer did not invent an unreasonable price. The market taught them to price that way.
A Familiar Pattern From Health Care
This dynamic is not unique to influencer marketing. Health care providers went through something similar when insurance companies began pushing for discounted rates. Providers responded by listing one rate for a paying customer and a separate, higher rate to negotiate down with an insurer.
This is not just a loose comparison. A 2023 study in the journal Health Affairs examined the numbers directly. It was led by Johns Hopkins researcher Yang Wang and coauthored with Mark Katz Meiselbach, John Cox, Gerard Anderson and Ge Bai.
The study, titled “The Relationships Among Cash Prices, Negotiated Rates, And Chargemaster Prices For Shoppable Hospital Services,” examined pricing at 2,379 hospitals under the federal price transparency rule. It found that a hospital’s cash price and its negotiated commercial rate both tended to land at a consistent discount off that hospital’s chargemaster price. On average, those numbers were 64 percent and 58 percent of that baseline.
In other words, the top-line price and the negotiated price move together. That is exactly the pattern this piece is describing in influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing is settling into the same two-tier structure, whether brands realize it or not.
What Brands Can Do Differently
There is a simpler way to negotiate. Instead of asking an influencer to guess what a brand can afford, a brand can share its budget range up front.
That single change turns the interaction into an actual negotiation about deliverables, scope and results. It stops being a guessing game about a number. Influencers are not selecting rates at random. They are responding to a system that has trained them to expect a counteroffer.
The evidence backs this up. In its guide “How to Negotiate Influencer Rates So That Everybody Wins,” Sprout Social advises brands to be upfront and honest about their budget ceiling. Doing so, the guide notes, can persuade an influencer toward a bundled content discount or added flexibility they would not otherwise offer. Being honest about the number first, not last, is what unlocks the better outcome.
In practice, this looks simple. A brand states its actual range for the deliverable at the start of the conversation, not after three rounds of back and forth. The influencer or their manager can then quote a real number instead of a padded one. There is no longer a reason to build in room for a counter that may never come. The conversation moves to what actually matters: usage rights, exclusivity, deliverable count and timeline.
Justin Moore, a sponsorship coach who wrote the industry playbook “Sponsor Magnet,” teaches creators the same fix from the other side of the table. Rather than naming a rate first, he advises asking the brand for its budget range before putting together a proposal. In his own negotiations and coaching, he found that “75% of the time the brand will tell you their budget range” once asked that way. That gives the creator a real number to build packages around instead of guessing at one.
None of this requires a brand to reveal its full budget for the campaign. A range is enough. Even a rough one shortens the negotiation and produces a fairer number for both sides.
Where Some Platforms Make This Worse
Some influencer marketing platforms cut off direct communication between brands and influencers, or between their teams. Once that dialogue disappears, so does the ability to negotiate. Deliverables cannot be adjusted, scope cannot be tailored and both sides lose the chance to reach an agreement that works for the campaign.
Why Some Executives Avoid Represented Talent
Some influencer marketing executives will not work with a creator who has a manager or an agent.
An unrepresented creator usually does not know market rate and might take whatever number is offered. A manager knows the market rate and negotiates toward it.
Refusing represented talent has nothing to do with a creator’s quality. It is usually low-balling deals where representatives would have flagged this immediately. Some of my bigger creators constantly get offered deals for 1/25 of their going rate.
Speed plays a role too. A manager slows a deal down on purpose, flagging unpaid exclusivity, missing usage limits and other terms an unrepresented creator would sign without noticing. From the other side of the table, that friction can look like difficulty. In reality, it is the manager doing exactly the job they were hired to do.
Where This Leaves Brands And Agencies
Influencer marketing was never about finding the lowest possible price. It works best when both sides are negotiating toward the best result for the campaign, not the smallest number on an invoice.
Brands that keep playing the discount game will keep getting quotes built to withstand it. Nothing about that number is dishonest. It is simply the price of a system that punishes straightforward pricing and rewards padding.
The brands that break the pattern first will get something better than a lower rate. They will get a faster negotiation and a more accurate number. They will also get a partner who does not have to guess what they are actually working with.
