You can see the repricing first in the quote inbox.
A buyer who has paid the same price for three years asks for a re-quote. Procurement is on the thread this time, and there is a target number in the second paragraph, polite the way a parking ticket is polite. The product is identical. The service is identical. Belief is the line item that repriced: anyone can make this, so price is the only conversation worth having.
The supplier agrees, and that's the tell. He has heard the word commodity so many times he prices like it's true. When you let the buyer define the category, you take the category's price.
Commoditization is a decision, made by default, one quote at a time.
A shipper brought me in to look at their program, and I audited roughly 50,000 shipments with a room of eight or ten senior leaders. The logic underneath their packaging spec had been built with their vendors, year over year, and nobody had priced what it was costing them. We found a path to cutting reships by more than 90%. In hard costs, $5 a box. Nobody in that room asked what a box costs per unit. They were doing different math: volume times five dollars, straight to the earnings line. And by the third slide the room had stopped talking about boxes and started talking about enterprise value.
The buyers I sold paid a premium for years, because we never talked about the price of a box. We talked about what a failed box costs: the product inside it, the second truck, the customer deciding whether to reorder. The box is the smallest number in that chain. Sell price per unit and you rent your revenue one quote at a time, and the buyer is right to squeeze you; there is nothing else for them to weigh. Sell what the product does inside their P&L and the relationship starts compounding, because the cheapest supplier now looks expensive.
The conversation is a skill, which means it starts with a rep. Take your ten largest accounts and write one number next to each: what it costs that buyer when your product fails. If you cannot fill in the number, neither can your buyer.
The market is whatever you teach your buyers to believe.