Value is one of those words that everyone in marketing uses and almost no one defines precisely. It tends to function as a catch-all for "worth buying," which is not the same thing for a 28-year-old managing student debt, a 45-year-old choosing between brands after a decade of greenwashing scandals, or a high-income consumer who could afford almost anything and is increasingly choosing not to.

The conversation about value has changed. And brands that are still running on a price-quality equation are communicating to a consumer that no longer quite exists.

What value actually means now

Deloitte's research into value-seeking consumer behaviour, based on data from 9,000 US consumers tracked through mid-2025, offers a useful starting point. 4 in 10 Americans are now value seekers, defined as consumers who exhibit three or more cost-conscious, deal-driven, or convenience-sacrificing behaviours each month. Value-seeking appears to be on an upward yet volatile trend. What is notable about this figure is who it includes: nearly half of Gen X and Boomers engage in value-seeking behaviours, and 23% of consumers earning $200,000 or more are value seekers. Value scrutiny is not a low-income behaviour. It is a cross-demographic one (Deloitte, 2025).

The implication is significant: communicating value is no longer primarily about justifying price to price-sensitive consumers. It is about making the case for worth to consumers who have more options, more information, and considerably less patience for brand claims that do not hold up to scrutiny.

The trust problem underneath the value problem

Inflationary spikes that peaked in 2022 appear to have taken a lasting toll on consumer mindsets, with eroding price and value perceptions that have not recovered even as inflation declined. Brands are navigating a trust deficit that predates the current economic moment and will outlast it.

According to Edelman's 2024 Trust Barometer, trust has become a "buy or boycott" factor for 71% of global consumers. 63% of respondents said they would purchase or advocate for brands based on their stance on societal issues, even if they were more expensive than competitors. (Edelman / Boston Brand Media, 2025)

This reframes the value communication challenge entirely. It is not purely a messaging problem. It is a credibility problem. A brand can communicate value clearly and still fail to persuade, if the audience does not trust the source. The brands winning this argument are not necessarily the ones with the best copy. They are the ones whose actions and communications are consistent enough that trust has accumulated over time.

The layers consumers are actually evaluating

Consumer research consistently identifies that value perception operates across multiple dimensions simultaneously: financial (is the price justified?), functional (does it work reliably?), emotional (does it make me feel good about the decision?), and social (what does this say about me?). Escalas and Bettman's foundational work on self-brand connection in the Journal of Consumer Research established that emotional resonance often operates independently of rational evaluation, and frequently outweighs it in purchase decisions (Escalas & Bettman, 2005).

McKinsey's 2025 State of the Consumer research found that consumers tell us social media is their least trusted source when making buying decisions, yet it is where they interact with family and friends, who serve as their most trusted sources. The platform and the peer are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the more persistent errors in how brands think about social communication (McKinsey, 2025).

What this means practically: the most credible value communication is not brand-authored. It is peer-authored, customer-authored, and community-authored. Everlane's radical transparency model worked not because the brand said it was transparent, but because the transparency was structural and verifiable. Dove's Real Beauty campaign endured not because it claimed authenticity but because it was specific enough to feel true.

The behavioural economics layer

Communicating value is also, inevitably, a question of cognitive framing. Behavioural economics offers three mechanisms that remain consistently effective. Anchoring, where a higher reference price makes the actual price feel like a deal, is deployed consistently by brands like Apple and The Economist through tiered pricing models designed to make the middle option feel like obvious value. Loss aversion, the tendency for people to weight losses more heavily than equivalent gains, makes "what you miss without this" framing more persuasive than "what you gain with it." The decoy effect, where a mid-tier option is introduced primarily to make a premium option look proportionally more attractive, is structural in most subscription models.

These are not manipulative novelties. They are descriptions of how human decision-making actually works, and brands that ignore them are not taking a more ethical position. They are simply communicating less effectively.

What it requires

The brands that communicate value most effectively share a quality that is harder to replicate than any technique: they are clear about what they actually are. As economic uncertainty lingers, consumers across demographics actively seek brands that deliver value, whether through quality, trust, friendly attitudes, or a combination thereof. The operative phrase is "a combination thereof." There is no single lever. Value is felt as a whole impression, formed across every interaction a consumer has with a brand, from the product itself to the packaging to the customer service to the social presence to the returns policy.

The question brands should be asking is not "how do we communicate value?" It is "what is the whole experience of our brand, and does it add up to something worth the cost?" If the answer to the second question is yes, the first becomes considerably easier.

References

• Deloitte. (2025). The Value-Seeking Consumer. Deloitte Insights. Link
• Edelman. (2024). Trust Barometer 2024. Edelman. Link
• McKinsey & Company. (2025). State of the Consumer 2025: When Disruption Becomes Permanent. McKinsey. Link
• Escalas, J. E., & Bettman, J. R. (2005). Self-Construal, Reference Groups, and Brand Meaning. Journal of Consumer Research. Link
• Accenture. (2022). Personalization Pulse Check: How Brands Win with Relevance. Accenture. Link

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