What if value didn't have to mean cheaper?

There’s a reason marketers keep coming back to price promotions. They work.

If you need to shift product, offering 20% back or running a multi-buy is familiar territory. Everyone understands the mechanic and you have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to do.

But I think we need to be much more honest about what it can also do.

It eats your margin. It can mortgage future sales. And over time, it can teach shoppers that the price worth paying for your brand isn't the one on the shelf. It's the one they should wait for.

That last point bothers me. The sales uplift on a promotion can look great, but how many of those are genuinely new sales, and how many have simply been brought forward from next week or next month?

Then your competitor promotes. You promote again. Everyone gets dragged into competing on price and it becomes harder and harder for the shopper to see a meaningful difference between you.

Which raises a fairly fundamental question?

If we've spent years and millions building a brand, why are we so quick to make price the reason to choose it?

I'd much rather see promotional spend working with the brand we've invested in creating. Melendez's is a great example we've been working with recently.

It operates in a category where private-label competition is fierce. Rather than simply taking money off, the brand offered dining experiences that tapped into something Philadelphia already stood for: food as a reason to come together. That's not just a reward bolted onto a pack, the promotion is telling the same story as the brand.And commercially, it's working. In Spain, the latest campaign delivered 2x the ROI of the previous year. In Portugal, ROI increased 70%.

Mondelez Philadelphia - for every Philadelphia pack purchased, they can get lift promotional credits to redeem at more than 800 restaurants

The problem with competing primarily on price is that someone can always go lower, and if everyone is offering 20% off, how exactly are you standing out?

This isn't about pretending discounts don't work. They clearly do.

It's about looking beyond the immediate spike and asking what else that promotional investment could achieve.

- Did we generate genuinely incremental sales?

- Did we give people a reason to choose us over private label?

- Did we strengthen what the brand stands for?

And, perhaps most importantly, have we given them a reason to buy again when the deal isn't there? That's the bit I'd want to know. Because making something cheaper and making it feel more valuable are two very different things. And if I'm spending the money anyway, I'd rather it did both jobs: sell the product today and make the brand worth choosing tomorrow.

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