Linda Rendle
Chair and Chief Executive Officer at Clorox
Sure. We're seeing pressure across all consumer groups, and we're seeing behaviors broadly outside of our categories changing for nearly everyone as they evaluate what's going on and as they think about what's happening in the future, whether that come down to the interest rate environment, etc., cost of housing, a cost of a basket of groceries when they go to the store. So we're seeing that behavior quite broadly, and we've called it value seeking. People are buying larger sizes, they're buying smaller sizes, and they're thinking about the trips they take, etc.
I would say, in particular, we always have our eyes focused on the lower income consumer as they are more pressured. And to date, we've stood very well with them. And we tend to do it during times, tough economic times for low income consumers because we deliver products at a great value that work really well and they can't afford to make a mistake in our categories. And so we've typically fared well. And we continue to see that we are doing well with low income consumers and we haven't seen a material trade to private label that isn't due to the cyber attack. And of course, we're watching that closely, as we get our distribution and our merchandising back. But we largely believe private labels growth is due to the fact that we weren't on the shelf.
And, we're seeing Q3, their share was lower than it was in Q2, we're seeing all the right indicators, our households were coming back that might have tried private label during that time when we were off the shelf. So we're watching all income tiers, always focused on low income. But that was a very general comment to say that all consumers are under more pressure and are certainly evaluating their behaviors and how they're spending their wallet.
And then when it comes to our spending plans, we had always anticipated that we would return to pre-pandemic merchandising levels before we even saw a more stressed consumer, because we just thought that was the right level of spending to ensure we were introducing people to new innovation, making sure that we're capturing new behaviors in times where consumers are open to that, for example, when they send their kids back to school or when they send the kid to college. And so we'd always anticipated that.
And this promo, though, does also support our return to share growth and our return from a distribution perspective. So we like that it works doubly hard for us. But I wouldn't say we're doing this because of our recovery from cyber. We just always anticipated that this merchandising level would return. And then from an advertising and sales promotion level, we did increase that this year because we saw a pressured consumer and wanted to make sure that we were communicating our superior value, etc. But these are all within the range of normal spending for us in a given year.
We typically spend around 10% in advertising and sales promotion. It'll be closer to 11% this year and we're returning to a level of reduced revenue spending that we've had in the past. So we don't see any need to go further or deeper than that. We feel like we have the right level, but this really is about more normal course of business than it is, that we're seeing consumer behaviors that we need to react to.
