Methodology:
Building a more robust measure of real value
The methodology of the the Worth it! Awards™ is rooted in credible consumer research and grows out of the well-established BrandSpark Most Trusted® Awards and BrandSpark’s brand and shopper expertise, which has included studying the relationship of quality to price for over 2 decades. The objective is to credibly determine which brands are genuinely “worth it” across many different categories.
The Process at a Glance:
Brand lists were generated from unaided brand mentions
in the BrandSpark Most Trusted Survey, ensuring national consumer-driven input at the category level.
Price and quality were measured separately
to avoid the “discount bias” that arises when asking directly about “value”
Evaluations were made within a relevant defined competitive set
Consumers assessed brands in the context of the real choices they make in the category
A proprietary normalization index
Category bias was eliminated and accounted for variations in baseline responses
A clearly defined threshold for recognition was created
Only brands that surpassed a meaningful benchmark derived from consumer insights will receive a Worth it! Award
Methodology
The Worth it! Awards Identify Higher Quality Brands at a Fair Price
The 2025 Worth it! Awards include 104 categories across Baby & Kids, Health & Personal Care, Durable Goods & Footwear, Food & Beverage, Household, Petcare, and Services. BrandSpark’s analysis identified 290 brands that exceeded the Worth it! category benchmarks, recognizing higher quality for a fair price. The award was earned by only 41% of the leading brands nominated to the survey.
The total sample size for the BrandSpark Worth it! Study was 14,369 (providing 262,337 brand evaluations) and represented a national American shopper population.
Approach: Measuring What’s “Worth it!” With Rigor
The Worth It! methodology is rooted in rigorous consumer research and builds on BrandSpark’s well-established Most Trusted Awards, Best New Product Awards, and broader shopper insights expertise developed over the last 20+ years. The goal is simple: to credibly identify which higher quality brands are genuinely “worth it” across select categories.
Category Qualification:
Responding consumers (Americans 18+ recruited via direct invitation from independent research panels) confirm their participation in household purchase decisions by segment before being directed toward specific categories. Specific categories are qualified if the respondent reports making a purchase in the past 12 months (or past two years for durable goods).
Separate category qualification questions are asked in random order for each qualified segment, including Food & Beverage, Baby & Kids, Health & Personal Care, Household or Pet Care, and Durable Goods & Footwear (based on home furnishings, kitchenware, appliances, and footwear). All respondents were qualified for Services.
Four categories are selected among all qualified (based on prior purchase) and presented in random order.
Brand Ratings:
For a brand to be nominated, it must have received a 2% or greater share of relevant unaided brand citations as the Most Trusted brand in the specific category in the BrandSpark American Trust Study.
Respondents must be familiar with a nominated brand in the context of the category to rate it and must be familiar with at least three of the nominated brands to participate in the category. This ensures that relative brands ratings are meaningful, based on real consumer knowledge and experience.
Each respondent is asked to rate each nominated brand they are familiar with on perceived quality from 0 (much worse) to 10 (much better) relative to other brands in the category. Next, each respondent rates the perceived price point of these brands from 0 (much lower) to 10 (much higher) relative to other brands in the category. Price and quality are assessed independently to avoid the bias of equating “value” with low price. Rather, the Worth it! Scores are derived from these separate quality and price ratings.
Worth It! Scoring:
From each brand rating, a differential score is calculated for quality and for price: the difference of a brand’s rating from the average rating provided by that consumer for brands in the category. Thus each respondent’s ratings are ‘normalized’ to comparable averages. In each category, these differential quality and price scores are aggregated by brand.
To be declared Worth it! a brand must score above the category average on both Quality and BrandSpark’s measure of real value: the Worth it! Score, a weighted combination of the aggregate Quality and Price ratings, derived to ensure that Worth It! recognizes brands offering superior products at a fair price.