Always On: How Price Sensitivity Is Reshaping Consumer Behavior

Welcome to Always On. Each week, we’ll dig into a brand or audience trend you need to know about, tapping into Morning Consult Intelligence, our always-on insights platform powered by 15,000 daily surveys across 40+ countries. That means thousands of brands, audience deep dives, and enough fresh data to make your spreadsheets jealous. Sign-up here to get this email sent to you directly every week.

Consumers are increasingly cost-conscious amid a volatile market, reshaping demand across categories and income tiers. We see this play out in a tendency towards affordability: More low-and middle-income consumers say they’re looking for the less expensive option when shopping. This trend has been steadily increasing since 2021.

But this isn’t the only place we’ve noticed this trend. We’ve seen the cost-conscious consumer come up again and again in our surveys, so we compiled those insights together into a nice chart pack available here with nearly 20 slides of analysis and charts. We’re going to explore some of those charts today.

Going Deeper

Increasing costs — particularly for food purchases — are putting pressure on consumers and forcing them to cut back. In some instances, this is driving consumers to change brands. Our Losing Loyalty report earlier this year found that the categories where shoppers reported having to spend more are the same categories where they switch up the brands they shop from.

Relationships with brands are increasingly transactional. With inflation fatigue growing, consumers are less willing to pay premiums for "Made in America" products and more open to switching brands that no longer deliver perceived value. Our 2025 report on “Made in America” goods found that fewer adults are willing to pay more for those products.

For more on how price sensitivities drive consumer behavior, download our full chart pack here.

Exploring Morning Consult’s Economic Data

Despite a volatile market, Morning Consult’s economic data indicates a resilient consumer. But, there are some warning signs, including:

• There is a growing gap in sentiment between low-income and higher-income consumers
• Our unemployment index for prime-age men is ticking up
• Back-to-school shoppers are noticing higher costs across the boar

Morning Consult delivers the speed and scale that traditional economic indicators can’t. We track consumer sentiment, spending, inflation and more in real time — giving leaders the early signals to act before the market moves. Learn more about our economic data here.

Extra Credit

Morning Consult Pro offers many different trackers that update at least monthly (or more often), capturing economic conditions. Here’s a round-up, in case you haven’t explored these before:

• U.S. Consumer Confidence: Our daily Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) is a real-time indicator of the economic impact of major events, capturing consumers’ views regarding personal finances and business conditions
• Global Consumer Confidence Dashboard: A monthly reading on consumer sentiment in more than 40 markets across the globe
• Jobs and Labor: High-frequency labor market data collected daily since 2020, tracking employment status and job search activity using the same definitions as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
• U.S. Consumer Spending: A monthly, inflation- and seasonally-adjusted view of household spending and allocation — capturing granular category, demographic, and income-level detail
• U.S. Inflation & Supply Chains Tracker: Six proprietary indexes tracking how U.S. consumers respond to price changes and supply disruptions — covering price surprise, sensitivity, substitutability, unavailability, purchasing difficulty, and delivery delays
• Tracking U.S. Consumers’ Views on Tariffs: A comprehensive look at U.S. consumers’ attitudes, including topline support, inflation expectations, spending behavior, corporate messaging and political sentiment