If you question the influence of Conscious Consumers™ on the market place, you need to look no further than recent ads and announcements by major consumer brands. As the 2014 Conscious Consumer survey showed, many consumers look beyond price and convenience and consider how brands interact with the environment and society before committing to a relationship. Retailers are taking note and even resisting investor pressures to stay true to the values that connect with Conscious Consumers.

Exhibit A: Whole Foods Market

It has been a rocky year for Whole Foods Market, with its stock value plummeting 34 percent from January to October. This has resulted in investors calling for lower prices to better compete with Walmart and Kroger, which are growing their offerings of natural and organic foods.

Whole Foods has undertaken initiatives to lower prices, but when it launched its first ever nationwide advertising campaign the week of Halloween it did not dress up like a discount retailer. Instead, it stuck to the values that it feels matter most to the consumers who support the brand. In fact, the campaign is entitled “Values Matter” and rather than tout price, the focus is on the origin and impact of its products and the standards behind them. Part of the copy reads, “The time is ripe to champion the way food is grown, and raised, and caught… So it’s good for us… and for the greater good too.”

Exhibit B: Costco

While the post-holiday Black Friday shopping phenomenon has slowly mutated into a Thanksgiving Day ritual for some retailers, Costco is staying closed. The warehouse chain told ThinkProgress, “Our employees work especially hard during the holiday season and we simply believe that they deserve the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving with their families.”

Costco, too, has been pressured by investors but the criticisms have been about the generosity of its employee compensations. And, like Whole Foods the company is sticking to the values it believes matter most to its customers. As the Costco CEO told Bloomberg BusinessWeek, “If you treat consumers with respect and treat employees with respect, good things are going to happen to you.”

In both these cases, the brands are staying true to the values that have brought them success and are continuing to appeal to the Conscious Consumers for whom price and convenience are not the only issues that matter. As our study indicates, that should be a winning formula with the Conscious Consumers who typically care more, share more and spend more.