Slow Is the New Dead: Why Speed Matters More Than Budget
You know that sinking feeling. Your competitor's products are TikTok viral, with UGC out their ears. Meanwhile, you're stuck in endless meetings trying to get approval for basic social content.
"We need more creator content," your boss insists during your weekly review. "Our competitors are dominating the retail space with authentic user content, and we're still using the same studio shots from last quarter."
You try the usual routes. The brand team is swamped. Your agency wants six weeks and a budget that would make your CFO faint. And that "approved" list of influencers the brand haphazardly threw across your desk? They're charging Super Bowl commercial rates for a single TikTok.
While you're navigating this corporate maze, nimble brands are eating your lunch. Literally.
The Numbers Don't Lie
Let's talk about what's really happening in the market. In the first half of 2024, the world's top 50 CPG companies barely squeezed out 1.2% year-over-year revenue growth. Meanwhile, insurgent brands — the scrappy newcomers — captured 40% of overall growth in consumer products. That's not a typo.
In the beverage aisle, brands like Celsius, Prime, and Ghost held just 3.4% of market share but snatched up over 35% of category growth. In personal care, Insurgent brands owned 2% of the market but grabbed 16% of the growth. Even in food, where barriers to entry are highest, brands with less than 1% market share captured more than 7% of category growth. (Sources: Bain report published February 2025, Bain's Insurgent Brands Review)
Why Goliath Is Losing to David
The truth is, most established brands are stuck in a content creation model that died years ago. It's not just a bottleneck — it's a fundamental mismatch with today's retail reality.
Traditional brands are fighting with one hand tied behind their back:
- Marketing teams split between brand and retail, each with their own agencies, budgets and KPIs.
- Expensive, slow-moving influencer partnerships that eat up budgets without moving the needle.
- Content teams drowning in requests, trying to serve everyone from social to retail with limited resources.
- Creative processes designed for TV commercials trying to adapt to the speed of TikTok.
The irony is — emerging brands are winning precisely because they have less. Less bureaucracy. Less legacy systems. Less retailer control. This translates into maximum nimbleness and thoughtful spending. When you can't afford to waste money, you tend to spend it better.
The New Playbook: Real Examples of Brands Getting It Right
Have you been following David Protein's launch strategy? Instead of following the traditional playbook of glossy ads and immediate mass retail distribution, they went guerrilla. They sent 20,000 samples to micro-creators, prioritized TikTok Shop and Amazon, and generated unique content for specific retailers and regions. The result? $1 million in first-week sales and organic social reach that had legacy brands scratching their heads.
Bloom Nutrition took an even bolder stance. They flipped the traditional marketing budget on its head, putting 75% into creator partnerships. Today, they're the top-selling greens supplement on Amazon in a category dominated by legacy brands.
Lastly, I want to highlight unMEAT's hyper-local approach. Working with Crafted, this new-to-market vegan brand was able to harness the power of local creators driving to retail in record time and CPMs. No national TV spots. No celebrity endorsements. Just authentic, local content that drove a 30% sales lift at Walmart.
Building Your Modern Content Engine
The key to winning in today's retail environment isn't just making more content — it's building a system that can consistently deliver the right content to the right channels. Here's what that looks like in practice:
- Rethink creator partnerships. Stop obsessing over celebrities. Tap nano and micro-creators who can turn around authentic content quickly and affordably. Their engagement rates are often higher, and they're more likely to drive actual retail sales.
- Get retailer-specific. Generic brand content is dead. Your content needs to align with retail promotions, seasonal displays and local market nuances. This means creating flexible content that can be customized for different retail environments.
- Break down the silos. The old division between brand and retail marketing is obsolete. Your content needs to work across all channels — from awareness-driving social posts to retail media networks to in-store displays.
The Path Forward
The future of commerce media isn't just about better content — it's about faster, smarter and more integrated content systems. Winning brands will:
- Build content engines that can fuel everything from TikTok to retail media to in-store displays.
- Focus on conversion metrics over vanity metrics.
- Create flexible content that works across the entire shopper journey.
- Bridge the gap between brand building and retail performance.
- Lower their working capital and stretch their budgets further.
The Bottom Line
With consumer preferences shifting (50% now say they want to eat less processed food), private label growth surging, and GLP-1 drugs changing consumption patterns, big brands face more threats than ever. But content strategy is something you can control today.
The commerce media landscape isn't just evolving — it's completely transforming. Brands clinging to traditional content models already are falling behind. The winners will be those who build agile, scalable content systems that can keep pace with modern retail.
The question isn't whether to adapt — it's how quickly you can make the shift.
About the Author
Sarah Nesheim is the co-founder of Crafted, a social-first retail marketing platform that helps brands link social engagement data to in-store purchases, solving the broken attribution gap. We work with brands like Jack Daniel's, Entenmann's, Good Culture and Michelin, lifting sales by as much as 70%.
