CPG marketing is how consumer packaged goods brands get more people to notice them, find them on the shelf or online, and buy them again. CPG covers the products people use up and replace often: food, drinks, snacks, personal care, household cleaners, pet food, and over-the-counter health products.
However, the job got harder going into 2026. Store brands reached a record 21.3% of US dollar sales in 2025, up from 19.1% in 2021 (PLMA/Circana). And in 2025, new items added 4.2 points of growth to total CPG while existing items pulled it down by 1.2 points, so without new products the category would have shrunk (Circana via The Shelby Report).
This guide explains how CPG brands actually grow, how to build a CPG marketing strategy, which channels do which job, and how to tell if it’s working.
Key takeaways
- CPG marketing is how packaged goods brands get noticed, found, and bought again, mostly through retailers they don’t control.
- CPG brands grow mainly by winning more buyers, which takes being easy to remember and easy to find.
- Velocity, meaning units sold per store per week, decides whether a product keeps its shelf space.
- Each channel should have one job: build memory, drive trial, or close the sale at the shelf.
- More than 30% of a new product’s trial potential arrives after its first year, so plan year two from the start.
- Discovery now starts on social media and in AI tools: 34% of consumers use AI to explore new CPG products.
What Is CPG Marketing?
CPG marketing is every activity that moves a packaged product from the factory into a shopper’s basket, again and again. It has five parts, and most brands are weak in at least one of them.
| Part | What it does | Who it talks to |
|---|---|---|
| Brand marketing | Builds memory, so the brand comes to mind when someone needs the category | Every category buyer |
| Shopper marketing | Wins the moment of choice in store or online | People already shopping the aisle |
| Trade marketing | Earns and keeps distribution: promotions, displays, slotting | Retail buyers and distributors |
| Digital and social | Creates discovery, trial, and repeat purchase through content and creators | Consumers on their phones |
| Retail media | Buys ads inside retailer platforms like Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, and Instacart | Shoppers close to purchase |
Unlike other kinds of marketing, the sale usually happens somewhere the brand doesn’t control: a retailer’s shelf or website.
What Makes CPG Marketing Different
CPG marketing follows different rules than marketing a service, a software product, or a direct-to-consumer brand. Five of them shape every decision.
1. You don’t own the point of sale
Instead of selling direct, most CPG brands sell through retailers. The retailer decides whether you get shelf space, where, and for how long. As a result, your marketing has to work for two audiences at once: the shopper and the retail buyer.
2. Velocity decides whether you stay on the shelf
Specifically, retailers judge a product by how many units it sells per store per week. As a result, a brand with great awareness and slow velocity still gets cut at the next category review. We cover this in detail in what retail buyers care about.
3. Repeat purchase matters more than the first sale
Because the price is low, a $4 product only works if people buy it again. For example, Kendamil infant formula was the top new food and beverage product of 2025 with more than $300 million in first-year sales, even though under 1% of consumers tried it. Still, three quarters of those who tried it bought again (Circana via The Shelby Report).
4. You compete with the retailer’s own brand
Store brands grew 3.3% in 2025 while national brands grew 1.2%, and store brand unit sales rose while national brand units fell (Food Business News). Therefore, a national brand has to give shoppers a reason to pay more, every time they stand in the aisle.
5. Discovery has moved off the shelf
34% of consumers now use AI to explore new CPG products, and 25% have bought something because of a personalized AI recommendation (Circana). Many shoppers decide what to try on their phone before they reach the store.
How CPG Brands Actually Grow
CPG brands grow mainly by winning more buyers, not by getting loyal buyers to buy more. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls this the Law of Growth, and it’s the most useful idea in CPG marketing (Zappi on Ehrenberg-Bass).
The reason is how people really shop. In fact, most shoppers rotate between a few brands in a category. For instance, Byron Sharp’s research found that about 20% of a brand’s sales come from its lightest 50% of buyers. That is why those occasional buyers hold most of the growth room.
Mental and Physical Availability
To win more buyers, a brand pulls two levers:
| Lever | What it means | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Mental availability | Your brand comes to mind when someone needs the category | Tie the brand to buying moments (lunch break, game day, post-workout) and use the same colors, pack, and logo everywhere |
| Physical availability | Your product is easy to find and buy | Be in the stores and sites where the category sells, stand out on the shelf and the search results page, and offer the right pack sizes |
Speed is why the first lever matters so much. A shopper takes about one to three seconds to pick an item off a shelf. So nobody compares labels in that time. They grab the brand their memory hands them.
In 2026, availability also includes AI. Shoppers ask chatbots and shopping assistants what to buy, so your brand has to be easy for those tools to find and recommend, not only easy for people to find.
One real example: Red Bull’s Pink Edition brought three million new households into the Red Bull franchise in its first year (Circana via The Shelby Report). In other words, that’s growth by penetration: a new flavor gave people who didn’t buy Red Bull a reason to start.
A note for small and emerging brands: niche challengers often start with a smaller group of devoted buyers and widen out later. That’s fine as a starting point. However, it isn’t a long-term plan for a brand that wants national distribution.
Mini Melts: Turning Wide Distribution Into a Brand People Know
Mini Melts already had physical availability. Its frozen ice cream cups sell at more than 15,000 locations across the US. Instead, what the brand needed was mental availability: more people thinking of Mini Melts, not just walking past it.
We took over Mini Melts’ social media in February 2023, covering content, creative, community management, creator partnerships, and paid social. During the partnership, followers grew 45% across platforms, and likes, comments, and shares rose 37%. In the same period, Mini Melts was named to Bain & Company’s 2023 Insurgent Brands list and received an investment from Altamont Capital Partners in January 2024 (Mini Melts case study).
The lesson: wide distribution doesn’t grow a brand on its own. Shoppers still have to know you and think of you when they reach the freezer.
How to Build a CPG Marketing Strategy
A CPG marketing strategy answers four questions: who buys the category, when they think of it, where they buy it, and why they should pick you over the store brand. Work through it in this order.
Steps 1 to 4: Buyers, Moments, Assets, and Retail
- Define the category buyer, not just your fan. First, size the whole group of people who buy the category in a year. Your growth comes from the ones who don’t buy you yet.
- Map the buying moments. List the situations that make someone think of the category: a morning commute, a kid’s lunchbox, a post-workout craving, a game-day party. Then pick the two or three moments you can own and build your messaging around them.
- Lock your brand assets and keep them. Choose the colors, pack shape, logo, and tone you’ll use everywhere, and stop changing them. Otherwise, shoppers have to relearn what to look for after every redesign.
- Set the retail plan before the media plan. Before you buy media, decide which retailers, which shelf, and what velocity you need to keep your slot. If you’re still building distribution, start with how to find a CPG distributor.
Steps 5 to 8: Price, Channels, Budget, and Year Two
- Give shoppers a reason to pay more than the store brand. Price, pack size, taste, health claims, or a story. Since store brands are at a record share, “good quality” is not enough.
- Assign each channel one job. Some channels build memory, some drive trial, some close the sale at shelf. The next section explains this further.
- Split the budget between brand building and sales activation. Les Binet and Peter Field’s analysis of IPA effectiveness cases found the best balance is about 60% brand building and 40% activation (IPA). New brands at launch often lean harder on activation at first, then shift toward brand.
- Plan for year two on day one. Circana found that more than 30% of a new product’s trial potential builds in its second year and beyond. Of the 2023 class of top launches, more than half were declining or flat by year four (The Shelby Report). Budget for the second year before you spend the first.
If you sell food or drinks, the same steps apply with a few category-specific twists. We cover those in our guide to food and beverage marketing.
The CPG Marketing Channel Mix
Every channel in CPG marketing does one of three jobs: build memory, drive trial, or close the sale at the shelf. Problems start when a brand asks one channel to do all three.
| Channel | Main job | What it’s best at |
|---|---|---|
| TV, streaming TV, and online video | Build memory | Reaching every category buyer, including people who aren’t shopping today |
| Social media content | Build memory and drive discovery | Showing up every week with the same look and voice, so the brand stays familiar |
| Creators and influencers | Drive trial | Turning a product into something people want to try now. See influencer marketing for CPG brands |
| Social commerce (TikTok Shop, Instagram) | Drive trial and prove demand | Moving a shopper from video to checkout in one scroll, and creating sales data you can show retail buyers |
| Retail media (Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, Instacart) | Close the sale | Reaching shoppers on the retailer’s own site, close to the moment they buy |
| In-store: displays, demos, sampling, promotions | Close the sale | Winning the one-to-three-second decision at the shelf |
| Search and AI answers | Close the sale | Being the brand that Google, Amazon search, and AI assistants surface when someone asks what to buy |
Retail Media and the New Launch Path
Retail media is now a channel of its own. US advertisers are expected to spend $69.33 billion on retail media in 2026, and Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect take $9.42 billion of the $10.53 billion in new spending (EMARKETER). For most brands, then, a retail media plan starts with those two.
The launch path has flipped. Previously, brands got discovered on the shelf. Now many of the biggest launches are found on social media first, proven through online sales and reviews, and then scaled into stores. Circana found that 2025’s top new food and beverage products sold about 22% more online than their category average, and retailers now use “as seen on TikTok” shelf tags to sell products in the aisle (The Shelby Report).
For a closer look at which ad platforms work best for packaged goods, see our guide to CPG advertising. For marketplace selling, see how CPG brands win on Amazon.
CPG Brand Launch Strategy: The First 90 Days at Shelf
A new product usually gets about one review cycle to prove itself, so the first 90 days after the shelf date matter more than any other period. Overall, the goal is simple: get trial in the exact stores that carry you, then turn trial into repeat purchase before the buyer looks at your numbers.
| Phase | Timing | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Before the shelf date | 8 to 12 weeks out | Build a library of creator and social content, set up a store locator, and give the retail buyer your marketing plan with dates |
| Drive trial | Weeks 1 to 4 | Run paid social and retail media aimed at shoppers near the stores that carry you, add in-store demos or sampling, and post creator content |
| Build repeat | Weeks 5 to 12 | Retarget people who engaged, time promotions with the retailer’s calendar, and keep content going every week |
| Prove it to the buyer | Weeks 10 to 13 | Share velocity by store, repeat rate, and online demand with the buyer before the review |
Scarcity can also help. Fruit Riot, which put sour candy coatings on frozen fruit, launched with high-traffic retailers and limited drops before expanding, and reached $74 million in first-year sales (The Shelby Report).
How to Measure CPG Marketing
Measure CPG marketing by what happens at the register, not by likes or clicks. Social engagement is useful for creative decisions, but retail buyers and CFOs only care about the numbers below.
| Metric | What it tells you | Where to get it |
|---|---|---|
| Velocity (units per store per week) | Whether you keep your shelf space | Retailer portals such as Walmart Luminate and Kroger’s 84.51° Stratum, or syndicated data from Circana, NielsenIQ, or SPINS |
| Household penetration | How many households bought you this year. This is your main growth number | Household panel data from Circana or NielsenIQ |
| Repeat rate | Whether people who tried you came back | Panel data, loyalty card data, or retail media reporting |
| Distribution (% ACV) | How much of the market can physically buy you | Syndicated data or your broker |
| Category share | Whether you’re growing faster than the category and the store brand | Syndicated data |
| Incremental sales from media | Sales your ads caused, not sales that would have happened anyway | Retail media lift studies and holdout tests |
| Brand recall in buying moments | Whether shoppers think of you when they need the category | Brand tracking surveys |
Additionally, for social and content benchmarks by category, see our CPG social media benchmarks.
CPG Marketing Examples Worth Learning From
These four examples each show one of the ideas above working in the real world. Every one is dated and sourced.
Poppi: Social First, Then Shelf, Then a $1.95 Billion Exit
Poppi built its prebiotic soda brand through bright packaging, a strong social media presence, viral TikTok campaigns, and influencer partnerships aimed at Gen Z and millennials (Supermarket News). Eventually, PepsiCo closed its purchase of the brand in May 2025 for $1.95 billion (PepsiCo).
The lesson: social media can build demand fast enough to win national distribution, but the brand still had to perform on the shelf.
Doritos Triangle Tracker: Owning a Shape
Doritos built a campaign around the fact that most people link triangles with its chips. For example, a Snapchat lens turned any real-world triangle into a Doritos chip and unlocked prizes, backed by landmark takeovers and music events. WARC reports the campaign drove 26% sales growth and a 16-point rise in relevance with Gen Z (WARC).
The lesson: a distinctive brand asset is worth more than a new slogan.
Heinz Draw Ketchup: Proof of Mental Availability
Heinz asked people to draw ketchup. Surprisingly, nearly all of them drew a Heinz bottle, label included (Zappi).
The lesson: when your pack is what people picture for the whole category, you win the one-to-three-second choice at the shelf.
Snickers “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry”: Owning a Buying Moment
Instead of the usual “treat yourself” message, Snickers tied the bar to one moment: being cranky because you’re hungry. Global sales rose 15.9% in the campaign’s first year (Zappi).
The lesson: pick a buying moment competitors ignore and own it for years.
Want more? We track recent work in our best CPG ad creative examples.
CPG Marketing Trends for 2026
Five shifts from 2025 sales data will shape CPG marketing through 2026. All figures come from Circana’s study of the top 200 new products of 2025 unless noted (The Shelby Report).
- AI shopping assistants. 34% of consumers use AI to explore new CPG products, 44% use it to find the best price, and 41% read AI summaries of reviews instead of the reviews themselves. As a result, clear product facts, strong ratings, and consistent listings now feed AI answers.
- Social first, shelf second. The biggest launches are found on TikTok and Instagram, proven through online sales, then scaled into stores. Meanwhile, retailers now add “as seen on TikTok” tags at the shelf.
- Protein and less sugar. 21 of the top 200 new products carry a protein claim, worth 15.5% of their total sales. Similarly, more than a third of the top new food and beverage products are sugar-free.
- Brand collaborations. Co-branded and licensed products made up 10% of top new food and beverage sales, up from 7% a year earlier.
- Store brands keep gaining. Private label reached a record 21.3% dollar share and 23.5% unit share in 2025 (EMARKETER). Consequently, national brands need a clearer reason to cost more.
Common CPG Marketing Mistakes
Most CPG marketing problems come from a handful of repeat mistakes. Here are the ones we see most often.
- Advertising where you aren’t sold. For instance, national campaigns for a product in a few hundred stores waste most of the budget. Instead, match your media to your distribution.
- Chasing loyalty instead of new buyers. Loyalty programs and heavy discounts to existing fans rarely grow a brand. In contrast, reaching light and non-buyers does.
- Redesigning the brand too often. Your team gets bored of the pack long before shoppers learn it. So keep your colors, logo, and pack shape consistent.
- Trusting platform ROAS. Reported returns on retail media and social ads often include sales you’d have made anyway. Test for incremental sales before scaling.
- Stopping after the launch year. Year one sales are not the finish line. Most of the 2023 class of top launches were declining or flat by year four, and a big share of trial potential arrives after year one.
- Treating social media as a posting calendar. Instead, social content should feed trial and sales data you can bring to retail buyers, not just fill a feed.
- Ignoring AI search. One in three shoppers already uses AI to find new CPG products. Unless AI tools can find clear facts about your product, they won’t recommend it.
CPG Marketing FAQ
What does CPG stand for?
CPG stands for consumer packaged goods: products people use up and buy again often, like food, drinks, snacks, personal care, cleaning products, and pet food.
What is the difference between CPG and FMCG?
Basically, they mean the same thing. CPG is the common term in the US. Meanwhile, FMCG, short for fast-moving consumer goods, is more common in the UK, Europe, and Asia.
What is CPG digital marketing?
CPG digital marketing is the online side of CPG marketing: social media content, creators, retail media, Amazon and other marketplaces, search, and AI answers. Its job is to build memory and drive trial that shows up as sales in stores and online.
Should a CPG brand sell direct-to-consumer or through retail?
Most CPG brands make most of their money in retail, and use direct-to-consumer sales for testing, data, and loyal fans. We compare both in DTC vs. retail marketing strategy.
How long does CPG marketing take to work?
Promotions and retail media can move sales within weeks. However, brand building takes longer: Binet and Field found campaigns need about six months for long-term effects to appear and overtake short-term ones (System1).
Should I hire help or build a CPG marketing team in-house?
It depends on your stage, budget, and how many channels you need to run. If you’re weighing outside help, our guide to choosing a CPG marketing agency covers what to look for and the questions to ask.
Putting It Together
Good CPG marketing comes down to three things: reach more category buyers, be easy to remember and easy to find, and prove velocity to the retailer before the next review. Everything else, from TikTok creators to retail media, is a tool for one of those three jobs.
If your brand is heading into a launch, a new retailer, or a stalled year, first review the strategy steps above, then check which of the three jobs you’re underfunding.
Find Where Your Growth Is Stuck
Cool Nerds Marketing works with CPG and food and beverage brands on social media management, content creation, paid social, creator programs, and retail activation, planned as one system. Book a call and we’ll look at where your growth is stuck.
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