For brands with genuine pricing power, growth pursued through volume is frequently the more expensive path.
A brand with pricing power holds an option that most companies do not: the ability to raise price without losing the customer. The value of that option is reduced every time it is traded for volume.
Volume growth carries costs that are easy to underestimate — additional working capital, wider distribution to service, and, in premium categories, a dilution of scarcity that is itself part of the proposition.
The arithmetic usually favours price. A modest increase in realised price flows to margin almost entirely, while the equivalent contribution from volume requires investment across the supply chain.
The exception is a category where scale genuinely lowers unit cost and where the brand is not positioned on scarcity. Those cases exist; they are less common than growth plans assume.