Shoppers are heading into the 2025 holiday season more price-aware than ever, but they haven’t stopped spending. What has changed is how they decide where to spend, which retailers they trust, and which experiences feel worth paying for.
In our recent Holiday Value Masterclass, Georgina Nelson and Gareth Johns unpacked what millions of in-moment shopper ratings reveal about value perception, promotion effectiveness, and how execution on the frontline shapes ATV and conversion through peak.
Watch the 2025 holiday value masterclass
1. Shoppers aren’t spending less, they’re spending smarter
The narrative that consumers have “pulled back” simply isn’t true. They haven’t stopped spending, they’ve changed how they spend. Instead of browsing, experimenting, or making impulse decisions, shoppers are arriving in-store more prepared and more intentional than ever. For retailers, this means spend hasn’t disappeared, it has become harder to win.
Gareth summarised it clearly:
“Consumers aren’t spending less… they are spending more thoughtfully.”
– Gareth Johns, Chief Customer & Data Officer
This redefines the challenge for retailers. In 2025, capturing spend is less about aggressive pricing and more about removing uncertainty, reinforcing confidence, and ensuring the in-store experience validates the shopper’s pre-visit decision-making. The winners this holiday season will be the brands that make the shopper feel correct in choosing them.
2. Price sensitivity is rising, but it’s not the reason spend is dropping
Shoppers are acutely aware of pricing pressures, but increased price consciousness does not automatically translate to reduced spend. Instead, it heightens scrutiny of clarity, fairness, perceived value, and execution. This is where many retailers misinterpret the signal by assuming price sensitivity equates to cost-cutting behaviour, when in reality it’s about emotional reassurance.
“Two-thirds of consumers said prices have increased… but the message isn’t that they’ve stopped spending… they’re still feeling the pinch and making price a more top-of-mind subject.”
– Gareth Johns
When price becomes emotionally loaded, the stakes rise. Any friction like confusion at shelf, unclear promotions, or inconsistent experiences, amplifies the shopper’s mental “value check.” The retailers who will outperform this peak season are those who replace doubt with clarity and make the shopper feel they are making the right financial decision.
3. Thoughtful spending behaviours are creating hidden friction
Because shoppers are now planning more, researching more, and spreading their spend across multiple retailers, the margin for error inside the store has shrunk. Customers walk in with tightly defined missions and far less patience for anything that challenges or contradicts their expectations. Retailers are no longer competing for an open wallet. They’re competing to validate a pre-filtered decision.
“They are planning their trips more… there’s a lot more online research going on ahead of time… grocery customers are buying fewer items in any one trip, but doing more trips across the week or the month… they’re also splitting their shop across multiple retailers.”
– Gareth Johns
This introduces new operational pressure. When mission-driven shoppers encounter poor execution, unclear wayfinding, product gaps, slow service, their default response is to leave and complete the rest of their mission elsewhere. Winning these shoppers requires tighter, cleaner, faster store performance than ever before.
4. Value perception is the new battleground (and it’s not about price)
Value perception has become the emotional filter through which customers decide if a retailer is “worth it.” But retailers often make the mistake of equating value solely with price. In reality, value is the cumulative effect of service, clarity, ease, availability, experience, and the feeling of making a smart choice.
“Value perception is not just price, but it can have a real impact on whether or not customers come back.”
– Gareth Johns
This is why stores with strong service behaviours, clean environments, intuitive layouts, and confident associates outperform even when prices are equal. Shoppers reward confidence and ease, not just savings. For holiday success, retailers must treat value perception as a holistic performance metric, not a pricing strategy.
5. Mismanaged promotions and loyalty programs are hurting value
Promotions and loyalty schemes are meant to reinforce value, but executed poorly, they do the opposite , creating doubt, confusion, or perceived unfairness. Too many retailers have trained shoppers to wait for deals, or forced them to decipher complex loyalty mechanics that weaken the emotional impact of the offer.
Gareth articulated both ends of the spectrum:
“Promotions create value, but not doubt… if you have too many promotions… it trains customers to only buy on promotion. If you take all your promotions out… consumers feel they’ve really lost out on the sense of a deal…
– Gareth Johns
And on loyalty design:
“Loyalty programs work best when they’re seen as a thank you, rather than as an IOU. When the benefit gets deferred, the value perception really starts to drop off.”
– Gareth Johns
This holiday season, simplicity will outperform sophistication. Clear, immediate, emotionally satisfying value will beat points, tiers, and thresholds, because it reduces friction and boosts confidence at the exact moment of purchase.
6. Real-time feedback is the advantage this season
Despite the noise around pricing and promotions, the strongest predictor of repeat business comes from what happens in the four walls of the store. Clean aisles, friendly staff, open tills, proactive help — these human and operational behaviours carry more weight with customers than offers or discounts. They are the moments that make a visit feel easy, valued, and worth repeating.
Georgina captured the essence of this with clarity:
“They have the ability to really win that customer in that visit and that day… it’s people power. That’s where the heart of retail is.
– Georgina Nelson, CEO & Founder, TruRating
This is where experience becomes revenue. In a marketplace where no retailer truly “owns” the customer anymore, frontline behaviours are the deciding factor in who wins the next shop. The brands that empower and coach their teams effectively (and measure those behaviours) will outperform those relying solely on pricing strategy.
Meet the speakers
Georgina Nelson – CEO & Founder, TruRating
Before founding TruRating, Georgina’s career spanned psychology, law, and consumer rights. After starting out as a lawyer at Clifford Chance, she joined Which?, Europe’s largest consumer association, where she specialised in data privacy and consumer protection.
Her inspiration for TruRating came close to home: her father spent three decades in retail and watched his business lose half its trade as e-commerce took hold. Determined to help retailers compete on experience (not just price), Georgina set out to make customer feedback quick, easy, and truly representative.
That idea became TruRating, a platform that captures real-time, in-moment feedback at the point of payment, giving retailers the truth about what drives experience and spend. Under Georgina’s leadership, TruRating has grown into a trusted voice for retailers around the world, turning customer honesty into business performance.
Gareth Johns – Chief Customer & Data Officer, TruRating
Gareth is an internationally experienced product and data development leader with more than 20 years in retail analytics. He played a key role in scaling dunnhumby, the global leader in customer data science, from a 30-person startup into an international powerhouse in marketing analytics for Tier-1 retailers.
After leading strategic initiatives across the US and Europe, Gareth joined TruRating, where he’s helping businesses access real-time, transaction-tied consumer data at unprecedented scale. His expertise lies in translating complex datasets into practical strategies that drive measurable improvement.
At this year’s value masterclass, Gareth unpacked what the data reveals about holiday shopping trends in 2025, exploring shopper psychology, value perception, and how leading retailers can adapt their pricing and promotions to win confidently in a price-sensitive market.
Winning peak 2025 requires performance truth, not assumptions
This year’s holiday shoppers are harder to win without the right signal. The data shows customers are more deliberate, informed, and increasingly selective, but still willing to spend when the experience earns their confidence. Price sensitivity may be rising, but it’s the clarity of your value message, the consistency of your store performance, and the behaviours your teams deliver that will ultimately determine whether a shopper completes their mission with you or somewhere else.
The retailers who will win this season aren’t the ones shouting the loudest or discounting the deepest. They’re the ones who see clearly, store by store, shift by shift, moment by moment, what’s actually driving value perception, conversion, and repeat visits. They’re the ones who understand that promotions only work when they build trust, loyalty only works when it feels immediate, and frontline behaviour is the most reliable engine of return intent.
This is why real-time performance intelligence matters. It cuts through the assumptions, the lagging reports, and the guesswork, revealing the truth of what customers experience, and exactly how to fix what’s breaking revenue. In a peak season defined by cautious shoppers and intense competition, that truth is the single most valuable advantage a retailer can have.
If you want to understand what truly drives value perception in your stores, and how to influence spend while it still counts, let’s talk.
Book a demo with the TruRating team, and see how real-time performance intelligence can help you win every visit this holiday season and beyond.
