By Lisa Bratkovich | Partner, The CMO Syndicate
We hear a version of the same question from CPG CEOs almost every quarter: why are our best customers suddenly shopping around?
They’re not. The basket is just changing.
According to Deloitte's 2026 Retail and Consumer Products Industry Global Outlook, 47% of consumers globally are now active value-seekers. That includes 35% of high-income households. If you’ve been assuming your premium customer base is insulated from value pressure, that number is telling you otherwise.
This isn’t a post-pandemic hangover. It is a structural reset in how people decide what earns a place in their lives. Your customer hasn’t gotten cheaper. They’ve gotten more intentional. If your response so far has been to discount, you’re solving the wrong problem.
"Your customer hasn’t gotten cheaper. They’ve gotten more intentional. If your response has been to discount, you’re solving the wrong problem."
While your consumers are getting more deliberate, pressure is building from the other direction too. 79% of CPG executives expect retailer power to shift further over the next two to three years, driven by private label growth, retailer scale, and data advantages you don’t have access to.
We’ve sat in trade planning meetings where the brand team is essentially negotiating against itself, spending promotion dollars to buy back access to customers they should own directly. It’s one of the most expensive and least discussed problems in CPG right now.
Your retail partners are no longer simply a distribution channel. They are a competing brand, a proprietary data asset, and a marketing platform that charges you for access to your own consumers. Every trade promotion dollar you spend, ask yourself what you are actually getting in return and whether it is building anything you own.
If most of your revenue runs through retail, you’re sitting on a structural dependency that belongs in your next board conversation as a risk, not buried in a channel strategy review.
The instinctive response to value-seeking consumers is to compete on price. It is also one of the fastest ways to train your best customers to wait for a deal before they buy.
We see this play out differently across the health and beauty brands we work with. The ones holding position right now are not the cheapest. They’re the ones making value concrete and visible at every touchpoint, every renewal, every repurchase decision. There is a real difference between your customer perceiving you as good value and perceiving you as cheap. If you’re not actively managing that distinction, you’re probably losing ground on it.
In health and beauty specifically, the brands with the strongest retention are doing three things consistently. Ask your team how you stack up on each:
None of this requires discounting. All of it requires treating value communication as a leadership decision before it becomes a marketing one.
Here is the asymmetry worth sitting with: your retail partners have transaction data, shelf control, and scale. What they cannot replicate is a direct, permission-based relationship with your specific customer. If you do not own that relationship today, you are operating on rented ground.
We have watched brands go into annual planning without a single piece of owned behavioral data. They are making product decisions based on syndicated panel estimates, forecasting demand from sell-in numbers rather than sell-through, and justifying acquisition spend with attribution models their CFO does not trust. Every one of those problems gets solved when you own a direct customer relationship. None of them get solved by spending more on retail.
If you are running a subscription or DTC business, that channel is not a side experiment. It is your hedge against retailer dependency and your most direct investment in customer lifetime value. If your planning and resourcing decisions do not reflect that, your strategy has a gap in it.
"If you do not own a direct relationship with your customer, you are operating on rented ground. Your retail partners already know this. The question is whether you are acting on it."
A promotional push will not reverse this. The shift toward intentional value-seeking is permanent, and the decisions that address it belong at your level, not your marketing team's level. Three questions your leadership team should be able to answer right now:
The brands treating value as a boardroom-level decision rather than a line in the promotional budget are the ones building positions that hold. If you are waiting for your retail partners or your marketing team to solve this, you are waiting too long.
The CMO Syndicate
Trusted by CEOs who understand that speed, insight, and execution, not certainty, define market leadership.
📩 Contact us here to learn more.
About the Author
Lisa Bratkovich
Partner, The CMO Syndicate
Lisa is an accomplished Chief Marketing Officer known for driving significant growth for e-commerce, direct-to- consumer, and omnichannel CPG brands. With an over 30-year track record of proven results, Lisa works with CEOS and CMOs to unlock revenue and profit for large-cap to early-stage start-up brands.
She has led the launch, optimization, and scale for many brands and is also an expert in subscription business models, DRTV, and celebrity-based brands. With her P&L, general management, and AI-focused experience, Lisa also helps companies better monetize their marketing efforts and internal expenditures.
Q: My sales team is telling me the drop in repeat purchases is a pricing problem. Is discounting the right fix?
Probably not, and here is why that framing is expensive. When a customer stops repurchasing, price is rarely the whole story. More often, they have made a deliberate decision that the value no longer justifies the spend. Discounting can recover a transaction. It does not recover the perception of value, and it trains your best customers to wait for a deal before they buy again. Before you adjust your pricing strategy, ask whether your customer can clearly articulate what they are getting for what they pay. If the answer is no, that is a communication and experience problem, not a price problem.
Q: We sell primarily through major retail partners. What is the actual risk if that does not change?
The risk is structural and it compounds. Your retail partners already have your transaction data, your shelf placement, and growing private label lines competing directly with your products. What they do not share with you is meaningful customer-level data you can act on. Every year you grow revenue through retail without building a parallel direct relationship is a year your dependency deepens and your negotiating position weakens. The floor on that risk is higher trade promotion costs and tighter margins. The ceiling is a retailer deciding your shelf space is better used for their own brand.
Q: We have a subscription business but retention is soft. Where do most brands get this wrong?
The most common mistake is treating the subscription as a fulfillment model rather than a relationship model. Retention breaks down in one of three places: the product stops feeling relevant to that specific customer, the value is not visible enough to justify the ongoing spend, or the experience becomes routine rather than reinforcing. If your renewal rates are soft, the first question to ask is whether your customers can tell you exactly what they are getting and why it is worth more than the retail alternative. If they cannot, your retention problem is actually a value communication problem.
Q: How do we know if our DTC channel is actually a strategic asset or just a small revenue line?
Ask what you are learning from it that you cannot get anywhere else. A DTC or subscription channel that is generating first-party behavioral data, informing your product roadmap, and reducing your cost to retain a customer over time is a strategic asset regardless of its revenue size. A DTC channel that is essentially a standalone storefront with no data feedback loop back into the business is a revenue line. The difference is not the channel itself. It is whether your leadership team is treating the customer relationship and the data it generates as commercially valuable, and making resourcing and product decisions accordingly.