Walmart’s Value Shopper Has Outgrown Your Promotional Playbook
Walmart’s own first-party data, published through Scintilla in January 2025, confirms what most suppliers already suspect: affordability is the dominant factor in purchase decisions for 61% of Walmart shoppers. What the same research makes harder to ignore is what sits directly alongside that number. More than 55% of those same shoppers say personalization plays a key role in their brand choices. Nearly a quarter say personalized email newsletters shape their brand relationships. These are not the behaviors of a price-only audience. They are the behaviors of a trust-driven one.
The distinction carries real consequences for how suppliers and sellers build their activation strategies at Walmart. A plan built around price alone tends to produce temporary velocity that evaporates when the promotion ends, not the trial and repeat purchase that justifies shelf space through the next modular review.
Walmart’s Value Shopper Is Not Who Most Brands Think
The assumption baked into many Walmart activation plans is that the value shopper responds primarily to price signals, that deep discounts, prominent promotional placements, and aggressive markdown schedules are the tools that move this audience. The data no longer supports that framing.
YouGov BrandIndex data published in early 2025 shows Walmart’s consideration metric has risen more than eight points to 63.8 over five years, a gain that substantially outpaces the reference retail sector’s 2.4-point increase over the same period. Satisfaction scores rose from the mid-30s to 42.3 while the sector declined. These are brand health metrics, not price metrics. They reflect a shopper who is choosing Walmart with more conviction, not just defaulting to it on price.
The income composition of that shopper has also shifted in ways that matter for brand strategy. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon disclosed on the company’s fiscal third quarter earnings call that households earning more than $100,000 accounted for 75% of Walmart’s market share gains during that period. These are shoppers who have options. They are at Walmart because they perceive value, but value for this group is a more complex calculation than the lowest unit price. They are responsive to quality signals, credible recommendations, and content that helps them shop with confidence.
For 1P suppliers, this matters at the line review and at the shelf. A brand that has positioned itself as purely promotional teaches Walmart’s buyer and the shopper alike to expect the discount as the only reason to buy. That is a difficult perception to unwind when promotional funding tightens or when a private label alternative arrives at a lower price point. For 3P Marketplace sellers, the same dynamic plays out in the Buy Box and in search: price is a factor, but so is trust, and trust is harder to manufacture through ad spend alone.
Brand Preference Forms Long Before the Shelf
Walmart Connect reported 31% year-over-year growth in Q1 of fiscal year 2026, and the platform reaches 150 million customers weekly across online and in-store touchpoints. The closed-loop measurement Walmart Connect provides, connecting media exposure directly to purchase outcomes, has made it an increasingly important part of how suppliers and sellers plan their media investment.
But reach and conversion are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most promotional strategies lose their effectiveness. A study of 2,850 US consumers conducted by Amazon Ads and GWI, published by Retail Dive in November 2025, found that brand preferences develop long before the moment of purchase, shaped by recommendations and previous brand encounters. More than half of shoppers arrive at the store with a brand already in mind. The shelf, physical or digital, is where that preference is confirmed, not where it is created.
Kantar’s 2024 PoweRanking report, in which Walmart claimed the top retailer position for the 28th consecutive year, identified a specific growth challenge for manufacturers heading into 2025: driving incremental category purchases requires greater presence and shopper engagement during the path to purchase, not just at the moment of purchase. Kellanova noted in its November 2025 CPG outlook that growth will come not just from products, but from how brands meet consumers where they spend time and earn trust.
That path runs through the content shoppers consult when they are planning meals, restocking household essentials, and deciding which products fit their lives and budgets. Hip2Save, a lifestyle and deals platform that reaches more than 13.2 million shoppers monthly, describes its editorial standard as sharing only products its team has genuinely vetted, with readers treating each post as a personal recommendation. The platform’s average session engagement of 4.49 minutes sits in notable contrast to a media environment where Instagram’s organic engagement rate has declined 24% year over year, according to data analyzed by Socialinsider, and Facebook’s organic reach sits below 1.5%.
Promotional Conditioning Creates the Repeat Purchase Problem Most Brands Ignore
The categories where Walmart suppliers face the most pressure on repeat purchase are also the categories most vulnerable to promotional conditioning: grocery, household essentials, laundry, beauty, and everyday consumables. These are categories where the purchase cycle is short, the private label alternative is always on the shelf next door, and the shopper’s default behavior is to buy whatever was on deal last time.
Walmart’s Great Value line spans more than 100 product categories, and Bettergoods, which launched in 2024, grew sales volume by 200% in the months following its launch, according to Numerator data reported by Talk Business and Politics. A national brand competing in these categories that has trained its shopper to wait for the promotion has, in effect, taught that shopper to consider the private label every time the promoted price is not available.
The research on what breaks that cycle points toward trust and relevance. The Amazon Ads and GWI study found that even among shoppers who arrive at the store with a brand preference already formed, a meaningful share remain open to switching at the point of purchase, particularly in categories like baby care and fragrance, where 16% and 14% of shoppers respectively change their choice at the shelf. What holds a shopper to a brand across purchase cycles is confidence in the product, formed through exposure to content that made it feel useful, credible, and worth buying again.
The practical implication for suppliers is not that promotional spend should be abandoned. Promotional mechanics serve a real purpose in driving trial and supporting Walmart’s everyday low price positioning. The question is what happens after the trial purchase, and whether the brand has done anything to earn the repeat before the next promotion runs.
The JBP Metric That Promotional Spend Struggles to Move
The most important metric in most supplier JBP conversations at Walmart is not trial. It is repeat. A product that generates strong initial velocity but fails to build a returning customer base will not hold shelf space through the next modular review, regardless of how well the launch performed.
Walmart’s Scintilla data shows that 42% of Walmart shoppers are drawn to brands through in-store engagements, while 23% are drawn through personalized email newsletters, both of which reflect a shopper who responds to relationship-based touchpoints more than transactional ones. The implication for how suppliers allocate their activation mix is that the channels building those relationships deserve more deliberate planning than they typically receive relative to promotional spend.
The Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2025 State of Influencer Marketing report puts the content and creator industry on a trajectory to reach $24 billion in value this year, with 73% of brands now prioritizing engagement rate over follower count when selecting content partners. That reallocation of attention reflects a broader recognition that passive reach does not reliably produce the repeat purchase behavior that sustains velocity at Walmart. It also reflects a more honest accounting of what the promotional dollar actually buys, and what it does not.
For suppliers and sellers, Walmart’s own shopper data and the independent research on how brand preference forms both point toward the same conclusion: the value shopper is making decisions in windows that most activation plans do not reach. Kantar noted heading into 2025 that shoppers are becoming more selective and less loyal, and that driving growth will require brands and retailers to partner in meeting shoppers’ evolving needs. The promotional playbook remains part of that equation. It is just no longer the whole of it.
Mike McDowell
Mike McDowell is Head of Sales for CPG at Hip2Save, where he helps Walmart suppliers turn shopper attention into measurable action by connecting brands with high-intent audiences through trusted, performance-driven content.
With more than two decades of experience across CPG, shopper marketing, and digital commerce media, Mike has built his career around driving growth at the intersection of retail strategy and shopper behavior. He has held senior sales and leadership roles at companies including Sara Lee, MaxPoint, inMarket, The Krazy Coupon Lady, and Tyson Foods, working closely with Walmart-focused brands to increase trial, velocity, and in-store and online conversion.