Consumers Want More Value. That Doesn't Mean CPG Brands Need More Promotions.

Consumers are looking harder for value, but that does not automatically mean CPG brands should respond with more promotions.

New research from Iridio by RRD shows how much grocery-shopping behaviour has changed under sustained cost pressure. Their August 2026 study surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults and 300 U.S. grocery, CPG and mass retail decision-makers. Mass Market Retailers recently covered the findings.

The picture is pretty clear. According to the study, 79% of adults say they spend more time each week trying to save money on groceries than they did three years ago. Another 73% say they have changed their shopping habits to manage rising costs, while 42% regularly visit multiple grocery stores looking for lower prices and 36% rely more on print or digital coupons than they did a year ago.

The appetite for value is real. When consumers were asked what they would want from a retailer or brand that understood their shopping habits well, 52% said they wanted alerts when preferred products went on sale and 50% wanted personalized discounts.

For a CPG brand, the reaction seems obvious: run more promotions.

I think that is where the conclusion becomes too easy.

More promotions do not mean better promotions

Consumers looking for more value does not mean every slowing product needs a discount. A promotion is one commercial action among several, and whether it makes sense depends on what is actually happening around the product, account, retailer and channel.

A SKU slowing down in one account may genuinely need promotional support. In another, the same decline may simply come from a missed reorder, an assortment gap, an availability issue or a change in normal buying cadence.

Somewhere else, underlying demand may still be strong enough that discounting only gives margin away on units that would have sold anyway.

At first glance, all of those situations can look like the same thing: declining sales.

That is why the real question should not simply be: What should we promote?

A better question is:

Where is promotion actually the right next action?

Diagnose before you discount

For a brand managing hundreds of SKUs across distributors, retailers, wholesale, ecommerce and field sales, a sales decline is not a diagnosis. It is only a signal that something changed.

The brand still has to understand why.

A retailer may be late compared with its normal reorder cycle. The product may still be selling, but replenishment is not keeping up. An account may carry three SKUs from a line while comparable accounts carry seven. A promotion may have ended and demand may simply be returning to its normal baseline.

There may also be inventory available upstream while the product is difficult to find downstream.

Those situations do not call for the same response. In some cases, a promotion will make sense. In others, the better next step may be a rep follow-up, an assortment discussion, a replenishment action, an execution review or a new product introduction. Before treating a SKU as a slow mover, it also helps to check merchandising execution and sell-through.

That is where account history, SKU behaviour, reorder cadence, inventory, margin, seasonality and assortment give much more meaning to the sales number. It is also what it means to make every account more forecastable: understand buying rhythm before intervening.

Promotions also help launch new brands and new SKUs

Promotion is not only something brands use when demand is slowing. It also plays an important role when creating trial for a new SKU, entering a new account or introducing a new brand into distribution.

That creates a very different operating problem.

With an established product, there is already some history to work from. The brand usually knows what normal volume looks like, how often accounts reorder, where seasonality matters and which customers tend to perform well or poorly.

With a new SKU, that baseline does not exist yet.

The promotion creates the first signal. Initial orders come in, some accounts respond quickly and the launch may create a meaningful spike in sales.

But that first spike is not necessarily the most important part.

What becomes interesting is what happens after.

Do the same accounts reorder once the promotion ends? Does demand drop immediately or does part of the lift remain? Over time, does the SKU begin to establish its own buying pattern? Does the retailer keep the product in the assortment once promotional support disappears?

That is when a launch starts becoming something more than a launch.

A promotion can create trial. Post-promotion behaviour tells you whether the product is actually starting to stick.

Promotional lift only tells part of the story

Promotion analysis often starts with lift. Sales before the promotion are compared with sales during the promotional period and the difference is measured.

That is useful, but it can also be misleading if the analysis stops there.

A product might spike sharply for a few weeks and return almost immediately to its previous level. Another promotion may produce a smaller increase, but demand stays elevated for the next two months and more accounts continue reordering the product.

Those are very different commercial outcomes.

The second situation may actually be more valuable because the promotion appears to have changed some of the underlying demand rather than simply moving sales into a discounted period.

That is why the post-promotion period matters so much.

The brand needs to understand whether demand holds, whether it slowly decays or whether the product establishes a new normal. It also matters whether that behaviour is consistent across the business or concentrated in only a handful of accounts.

The same promotion may create lasting behaviour in one retailer and almost no residual demand in another.

That is where promotion analysis becomes operational.

A promotion does not end when the promotion ends

This is one of the more useful ways to rethink promotion.

Promotions are often treated like campaigns with a start date and an end date. Operationally, they should probably be viewed as a longer cycle.

You prepare the accounts and inventory. You run the promotion. You watch the lift. Then you keep watching after the discount is gone.

That last part is easy to underestimate, but it is often the most revealing.

The following weeks show whether trial turned into repeat demand, whether certain accounts need follow-up and whether the product deserves additional support. For a new SKU, they also show where the product is starting to earn a permanent place in the assortment and where it never really gained traction.

This is also where sales and operations begin to overlap.

If demand remains strong but replenishment does not follow, the problem may no longer be marketing. If one group of accounts keeps buying and another stops, the next action may be commercial follow-up rather than another discount.

The promotion creates the moment.

What happens around that moment determines what the brand learns and what it should do next.

The promotion calendar is still useful. It is just not enough.

Promotion calendars are not going away. Retailers plan around them, sales teams negotiate them and marketing teams build programs around them.

But a calendar is still a plan created at a specific point in time.

Meanwhile, the market, accounts and products keep changing.

That means CPG brands can complement planned promotions with a more continuous view of what is actually happening across their accounts and products.

Instead of only looking ahead to the next scheduled event, the brand can also look back at what happened after the previous one. Did the lift stay? Did customers reorder? Did a new SKU begin to establish its own pattern? Did the promotion help expand distribution, or did it only create temporary volume?

And sometimes the result will show that the next action should not be another promotion at all.

That is the difference between managing a promotion calendar and managing promotion as part of Commerce Operations.

Iridio’s research also points to an execution problem

One of the most interesting parts of the Iridio research is not directly about consumer preferences. It is about what happens behind the promotion when brands and retailers actually have to meet the demand they create.

According to the study, 35% of retail decision-makers say slow inventory data can lead to products being sold online even though they are already unavailable on physical shelves. Another 28% identify inventory inaccuracy between digital and physical shelves as their biggest operational obstacle to omnichannel execution.

Another 30% point to the inability to agree on consistent data across inventory, digital interactions and physical checkout as the biggest obstacle to real-time brand-retailer collaboration.

That matters because the promotion problem does not stop at pricing or targeting.

A promotion still has to be executed.

The product has to be available. Inventory has to be understood well enough to support the demand being created. Sales, operations, distributors and retailers need enough shared context to react when something changes.

That becomes even more important when introducing a new product. A promotion can successfully generate trial, but if availability is inconsistent or replenishment does not follow, the demand signal becomes difficult to interpret.

The brand may conclude that the product underperformed when consumers simply could not buy it consistently.

That is no longer just a marketing problem.

It is a Commerce Operations problem.

The systems already contain pieces of the answer

Most growing product businesses do not lack systems.

The ERP contains transactions and some inventory data. Ecommerce holds orders. Retailers have another layer of information. Distributors have their own data. Sales teams know the accounts, while marketing owns the promotion calendar and campaign plan.

The problem is that each of those systems usually answers only part of the question.

What should happen next?

A report may show that a SKU is down 18%. That number still does not tell the team whether the next action should be a promotion, a replenishment follow-up, a rep visit or an assortment discussion.

The same problem exists after a successful promotion. Knowing that sales increased during the event is useful, but that result alone does not explain what will remain afterward, which accounts will reorder or how long the promotional effect will last.

The challenge is reconnecting enough context around the signal to understand what should happen next.

Promotion should remain one action among several

I think this is a better way to approach promotion in a CPG business.

Start with what changed. Understand the account, product and channel context. Determine what actually requires action. Then choose the commercial response.

Sometimes that response will clearly be a promotion.

But the promotion itself should also be managed as an operating cycle. Understand what is happening before, during and after the event, then watch how demand behaves once promotional support disappears.

For a new product, this matters even more. The promotion creates the opportunity for trial. What happens afterward shows whether the SKU is beginning to earn a permanent place in the assortment.

A slowing product may only need replenishment. An underdeveloped account may need an assortment discussion. A sales decline may hide a fulfillment issue. Another account may deserve a rep visit because buying behaviour is shifting across several products at once.

Promotion becomes one lever inside a much broader operating loop: sell, order, fulfill, replenish and continue growing the account.

This is where Grabb fits

Grabb is Commerce Operations software for CPG brands, distributors and manufacturers.

Its role is not to replace the ERP, CRM, ecommerce platform or retailer systems already running the business. Grabb acts as a System of Action across those systems, helping interpret what is changing across customers, orders, products and channels and determine what needs attention next.

For a sales team, that could mean identifying a missed reorder, an assortment opportunity or an account whose behaviour is changing. For operations, the signal may come from a fulfillment issue or an order exception. For demand, it could be a change in product velocity or purchasing behaviour.

Promotions and new product introductions can sit inside the same operating context.

A brand can look at behaviour before the promotion, measure the lift during it and then continue watching what happens afterward. Does demand hold? Does it gradually decay? Does a new level of demand begin to form? Which accounts reorder and which ones need attention?

Sometimes the next action will be another promotion.

Sometimes it will be replenishment, a rep visit, broader distribution, another SKU introduction or simply no intervention.

What matters is understanding why.

To go further on that positioning, see also Grabb for CPG brands.

The advantage is not more discounts. It is better context.

Iridio’s research describes a consumer who is spending more time searching for value and increasingly expects relevant offers from the brands and retailers they buy from.

The temptation is obvious: answer with more discounts.

But if every sign of price sensitivity becomes another promotion, brands end up depending on one of the easiest commercial levers for competitors to copy.

The better opportunity is precision.

Understanding which product actually needs support. Seeing which new SKUs are beginning to create durable demand. Identifying accounts that are simply late on replenishment. Knowing where an assortment is incomplete, where inventory can support more demand and where promotional lift is still present several weeks later.

Those are much more interesting questions.

And they require operational context.

A consumer looking for value does not automatically create a promotion opportunity.

It creates a decision.

The brands that can understand that decision across products, accounts, inventory, promotions, demand and channels will be in a much better position to protect both velocity and margin.

Source

This article was inspired by Iridio by RRD’s 2026 State of Grocery + CPG Report, based on an August 2026 survey of 1,000 U.S. adults and 300 U.S. grocery, CPG and mass retail decision-makers, along with the September 21, 2026 article published by Mass Market Retailers.