What If Value Didn't Have To Mean Cheaper?

By Kelly de Silva, Global Director of Demand Generation at TLC Worldwide

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

They work.

Taking a dollar off, offering 20% back, or running a BOGO offer 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 away at 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 lift on a promotion can look great, but how many of those are genuinely new sales, and how many have just been brought forward from next week or next month?

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

Which raises a fundamental question.

I would much rather see promotional spend working in tandem with the brand we've invested in building.

Philadelphia is a great example – we've recently been working with the team in Europe, where Mondelēz owns the brand.

It operates in a category where private label competition is fierce. Instead of discounting, 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%.

Unilever's detergent brand in Indonesia, Rinso took that idea even further.

Unilever has spent years building around its “Dirt is Good” philosophy: kids should be free to explore, play, learn, and, inevitably, get dirty.

So instead of making detergent cheaper, why not give parents more reasons to let their kids do exactly that?

Families who bought Rinso received a free kids’ admission voucher valid at over 150 premium attractions across Indonesia.

That's such a simple connection.

The product cleans the clothes. The brand gives your kids another reason to get them dirty.

And it delivered a 15% sales lift, with 30% of people who redeemed a reward repurchasing.

Then there's an award-winning campaign for SNICKERS in Brazil.

Completely different brand. Completely different audience.

SNICKERS went into the world of popular mobile game Free Fire, rewarding purchases with official codes and exclusive in-game content, including a SNICKERS-themed skin. The campaign delivered sell-out 10 percentage points above the category, put SNICKERS on the top 10 best-selling items list at Easter, and doubled audience attention.

Could a discount have sold some extra bars?

Of course.

But it couldn't have put SNICKERS inside a game its audience already loved.

And that's the difference I keep coming back to – your promotional budget can do more than promote.

We all spend an enormous amount of time, money, and energy building brands. We define their purpose. We agonize over positioning. We invest in distinctive assets, innovation, and advertising so that, ideally, the premium is already justified before someone reaches the shelf.

Then the promotional calendar comes around and we revert to:

How much are we discounting?

There's a disconnect there.

Surely the better challenge is to make the promotional strategy work just as hard for the brand as everything else does.

Use innovation to give people a reason to pay the price you're asking.

Use the brand's purpose to find ways to make your products stand out on a crowded shelf.

Find the things your audience genuinely values and create access to them in a way your competitors can't just copy by knocking another dollar off their price tag.

The problem with competing primarily on price is that someone can always go lower. And if everyone’s 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 our brand stands for?

And, critically, have we given consumers a reason to buy again when the deal isn't there?

That's the part 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.