(I recently wrote a white-paper for one of the agencies I acquired in 2024, Pull London - the brand agency for Beauty, Fashion and Luxury. Here's the supporting article. You can download the white paper at the end.)
Someone can buy supermarket own-label groceries and still spend a fortune on a watch. Wear cheap clothes and own an expensive bike. Cancel three subscriptions and refuse to compromise on their holiday.
It looks contradictory if you assume people are either premium consumers or value consumers. It makes perfect sense if you understand that different things matter to different people. The same person can be both, depending on what they are buying and why.
That is the useful idea at the heart of Pull London's white paper, The Reallocation Economy. When money comes under pressure, the question goes beyond how much people spend. It becomes what they choose to keep spending on, and what they are prepared to give up to afford it.
For brands, that is a much more uncomfortable conversation.
We like to think our competitors are the businesses selling something similar. But a customer's budget has no interest in our category definitions. Your product might be competing with a weekend away, a gym membership or the relief of leaving some money in the bank. Being better than the other brands on the shelf might not be enough to keep you in the basket.
There is an important qualification here. Some people genuinely have less to spend. There is nothing clever about pretending financial hardship is simply a change in preferences. But cutting back and protecting particular purchases can happen together. Understanding that distinction is where the paper becomes useful.
Consider a committed runner. They might happily buy a cheaper washing-up liquid while being very particular about their shoes. Someone else might protect skincare, live music or good coffee. The priority does not have to make sense to us. It has to make sense to them.
And that sense of value can come from different places. Performance. Pleasure. Confidence. Belonging. Time saved. A small part of the day that makes everything else feel more manageable.
This is why I would be careful about reducing the argument to visible consumption. People do buy things to be seen. But they also buy things because of how those things make them feel when nobody is looking. A purchase does not have to impress anyone else to be worth protecting.
The commercial question is whether your customer would feel the loss.
Would switching to a cheaper alternative make any meaningful difference to them? Would they miss the result, the experience or the reassurance? Or would they discover that they had been paying more out of habit?
That last question should make a few boardrooms nervous. If the customer cannot explain why you are worth more, another campaign saying you are premium is unlikely to settle it. The difference needs to exist in their life, somewhere beyond your positioning deck.
The paper sets out three broad responses: become worth protecting, deliver compelling value, or change how people understand the category. Each asks something substantial of the business.
Being worth protecting means knowing what people value about you and making that stronger. Delivering value means making the economics work while giving customers something they are pleased to buy. Changing how a category is understood requires a product and experience that support the new meaning. A new description alone will not do it.
There is a useful challenge for agencies here too. Before reaching for another campaign, get closer to the buying decision. Speak to people who stayed, people who switched and people who stopped buying altogether. Find out what they chose instead, what they were willing to compromise on and what they refused to lose.
You may discover that the benefit you lead with barely matters. Or that something you treat as a minor detail is the very reason customers come back. Either is more useful than another workshop spent agreeing that the brand should feel confident, human and distinctive.
I would not take this paper as proof that the middle is disappearing or that every purchase needs to express someone's identity. I would take it as a challenge to be much clearer about the place a brand earns in someone's life.
Because people have their own priorities. Our job is to understand them well enough to give them a reason to choose us, even when the choices get harder.
If your customer had to cut something tomorrow, why would they keep you?