As summer draws to a close, many brands are in the thick of their planning and campaign-building for the upcoming holiday season. The brands that will win are armed with the most up-to-date understanding of the consumer landscape and a keen sense of why their customers buy.
According to Resonate data, intent to spend this holiday season is flat year-over-year. The same number of consumers plan to travel, spend more, or skip gift-buying all together this year as in 2025.
But flat doesn’t mean static. It just means that the shifts aren’t visible through demographics or transaction data alone. Luckily, Resonate’s predictive consumer intelligence can help you uncover those hidden motivations and values that translate to purchases.
In our final Summer Series session, Lisa Villano, Vice President of Brand and Product Marketing, and Elizabeth Drenning, Director of Managed Services, walked through the key predictions in Resonate’s newly released 2026 Holiday Spending Guide, and what brands should actually do about each one.
Here are the three biggest takeaways from the session.
Takeaway 1: Full-price buyers are hiding in plain sight
Most brands are still planning off last year’s demographics and buying patterns, which means every customer gets the same offer, the same timing, the same message. That approach treats a bargain hunter and a full-price buyer as the same person, because on paper, they look the same.
They aren’t. Resonate’s data shows meaningful percentages of customers, across categories that matter for holiday brands, aren’t changing their buying habits based on price at all: 31% are keeping travel and leisure spending the same, 30% aren’t planning to cut household spending over the next six months, and 28% aren’t touching electronics-purchasing habits. Even in discretionary categories that are usually first to get cut, like dining out and personal care, 17% are holding steady.
Villano says that without an ability to know who these full-price payers are, brands end up “undercutting their own value with discounts customers never asked for.” Meanwhile, they miss out on messaging that would have actually earned the sale.
“Let’s treat that full-price buyer differently than the sales-anticipating buyer, because they are different,” says Drenning. Her team treats this as a sequencing problem, not just a targeting one. Segment the audience by values and motivations first, not demographics. Then reach the full-price buyer before any promotional messaging goes out, with creative that has nothing to do with a sale.
Takeaway 2: Price sets the budget. It doesn’t decide the purchase.
Consumer sentiment about the economy is overwhelmingly negative right now. Yet actual spending has barely moved since the first part of the year. If people felt as squeezed as they say they do, spending would show it. It isn’t showing it, which means affordability concerns are real but incomplete as an explanation.
The share of people planning to spend more is edging down across nearly every category: groceries dropped from 42% to 40%, along with transportation, travel, and household goods. Villano’s read: this isn’t fresh belt-tightening, it’s a budget that already adjusted earlier in the year when inflation and gas prices climbed, and has now become the new normal.
“Price still matters, don’t get us wrong,” she explains, “But it matters the way it always has: people set a budget based on price; but how they spend within that budget, what they actually choose to buy, comes down to what they value, not the price tag.”
Holiday travel makes the point concretely. The same number of people plan to travel this year as last year, spread across every spending bracket, from under $500 to $10,000 and up. A high-intent traveler shows up in the budget bracket and the luxury bracket alike. What separates them isn’t what they can afford.
Travelers planning to spend $2,000 or more are motivated by excitement, tradition, and a sense of status. Travelers spending less are driven by independence, environmental values, and a desire to fit in with people around them. Same trip. Different reason for booking it.
“It’s easy to miss reachable segments when you base targeting on the wrong assumptions,” says Drenning. “The fix here is to build campaigns around what a segment values, not what they are assumed to be sensitive to.” Drenning’s team builds campaigns around that distinction directly: pressure-test the media plan category by category, split high-intent audiences into value-based sub-segments (tradition-and-status versus independence-and-nature, for example), and shift budget toward whichever value-led positioning the data shows is resilient.
Takeaway 3: The loudest channels aren’t where your customers are shopping
Social media influencers pull a disproportionate share of attention right now, and a lot of ad budgets follow that attention on assumption alone. But Resonate data shows that might be a risky bet: 58.5% of holiday shoppers say they’ll shop in-store. Fifty-four percent will shop through a marketplace site like Amazon or eBay, and 34% will go directly to a manufacturer’s website. Social media accounts for just 10%.
The gap holds even among online shoppers specifically: just 6% engage with podcasts, and only 7% use social media frequently. For comparison, 29% of these shoppers watch more than 21 hours of TV a week.
Drenning’s approach starts by confirming where a segment actually shops before a media budget gets greenlit, not after. She also recommends thinking of shopping experiences almost as their own categories. “We would segment the holiday shopper into at least 3 groups, so online shopper, manufacturer site shopper, in-person shopper, and then treat them as separate campaigns,” she says.
With these segments, Drenning then recommends rebalancing your media spend to match each group’s real channel behavior. You can also align creative to the values of those audiences instead of trying to capture distinct customer groups with the same generic message.
Where this leaves brands heading into the holidays
Villano closed the session with the four moves that come out of these predictions: find and reach full-price buyers before the sale window opens, build campaigns around what people value rather than assumptions about price sensitivity, start sale-anticipation messaging six to eight weeks before the discount becomes the headline, and put media dollars where each shopper segment actually is, not where the industry conversation is loudest.
The 2026 Holiday Spending Guide covers this season’s predictions in more depth, including the specific data behind each one and an audio version for anyone who’d rather listen. Missed the live session? You can catch the whole thing on-demand. And if flat spending has your team defaulting to last year’s playbook, reach out and we can walk through which of these three shifts matters most for your holiday plan.
