Shoppers are savvy. They travel and research. They have learned to notice the depths of margins during protracted discounted campaigns and they clearly favor companies able to express a true value proposition, rather than just a ‘positioning’ based pricing.

Some accessible vertical brands have introduced high quality products at lower prices.
Quoting Calvin Klein, the label founder, in 2016: "The really smart retailers — Europeans like Zara, Asians like Uniqlo — they're not using the word luxury, but I can tell you, I know denim really well, and the same denim that Uniqlo uses is $1,000 in a designer store on 57th Street."

In e-commerce, EVERLANE enjoyed instant success for promoting pricing transparency, and DECIEM prospered with its 'bare' approach to beauty. In culinary terms food halls are (once more) increasingly popular for their casual, unfussy restaurants and eateries offering quality food at reasonable prices.

As reported by Wang Zehua, an analyst at Horizon Insights, in Bloomberg, even in China, a market known for its love of bling, "Consumers are now more sensitive to price increases than they were, and are really taking a more pragmatic 'more bang for buck' approach to spending, as the outlook for the economy becomes less optimistic". Think about the growing popularity of the Chinese PING DUO DUO within this 'consumption downgrade'.

Inadequate pricing policies can damage and, sometimes, kill brands and retailers.

Particularly in this economic climate, prices need to be substantiated by content, materials, workmanship.

Whether it is a fashion item, a phone or a meal in a restaurant, customers don’t want to feel cheated.

Data analytics is giving us exceptional tools to manage pricing. What we need now are foresight and integrity in policies.