5 Strategic Shifts That Help Small CPG Brands Compete Like Industry Giants

Small and medium CPG food brands face unprecedented pressure. Lean teams juggle multiple responsibilities while managing tight budgets. Retailer expectations continue to rise as retail media networks explode across the landscape. Marketing teams are held accountable for every dollar while lacking the time to become experts in every channel – underscoring the need for marketing shifts for mid-size CPG food brands to stay competitive.

Many brands respond by sticking with “safe” approaches that worked years ago but fall short in today’s landscape.

The overwhelm is real, but there’s a silver lining: while the marketing landscape has become much more complex, it also offers a wealth of new opportunities for brands willing to evolve their approach. From retail media networks offering unprecedented access to shopper data and sophisticated attribution tools that can prove marketing impact to production partnerships that deliver quality creative efficiently – the tools exist for smaller brands to compete more effectively than ever before.

The problem isn’t budget size; it’s that brands are approaching this new landscape with old playbooks. Success requires strategic thinking about how to leverage these new capabilities while working within real-world constraints. 

Five Strategic Shifts to Turn Pressure Into Advantage

You don’t need a huge marketing budget to achieve impact, you just need to think creatively about how to tailor your strategy and spend to maximize your marketing impact. 

1. Turn Your Off-Season Into a Competitive Advantage

Very few small and medium CPG food brands maintain always-on marketing programs. Instead, they funnel the bulk of their efforts toward “peak” campaign moments – think the holiday season for baking products or the hottest part of the summer for frozen treats. But if you lean too far in this direction, you miss taking advantage of critical, cost-effective “off-season” opportunities.   

Consider taking a more nuanced seasonal strategy: During peak seasons, your objective might be to drive incremental sales among known buyers who are already in purchasing mode. But during off-season periods when your category isn’t top of mind, your objective shifts to awareness and consideration among light and medium users. The same media tactics generally apply throughout the year, but how you set objectives, build targeting, and allocate resources differs significantly based on your goals.

Investing in off-season marketing delivers two benefits. First, off-season campaigns cost less because you’re not competing against everyone else flooding the market. Second, even modest incremental lift during slower periods can tip the scales significantly, potentially encouraging retailers to merchandise your products more frequently throughout the year.

2. Don’t Ignore the Top of the Funnel 

You can’t rely on one tactic or funnel stage anymore. Today’s consumers need multiple touchpoints before making purchase decisions. Yet many small and medium brands get trapped focusing primarily on lower-funnel conversion tactics because they feel safer and more directly tied to sales.

Part of what drives this narrow focus is that brands already have significant required spending with retailers – mandatory investments to maintain distribution, shelf space, and positive relationships. Because this retail spending demands attention and optimization, upper-funnel activities often get forgotten about or executed using outdated approaches with limited targeting and questionable attribution.

This creates a problem: while you’re optimizing the bottom of the funnel, you’re missing opportunities to influence consumers earlier in their journey when they’re forming preferences and consideration sets.

The solution isn’t abandoning your retail commitments…it’s ensuring your marketing strategy extends beyond these requirements to cover more of the shopper journey. Yes, there’s a premium cost to implementing sophisticated attribution and targeting for upper-funnel activities. But this premium shouldn’t outweigh the benefits when you’re seeing true return on ad spend, incremental lift, and actionable insights about which audience segments are working.

This approach allows you to move beyond traditional marketing metrics like impressions and reach. Instead, you can demonstrate specific return on ad spend and incremental sales lift that executive leadership can directly connect to retail performance.

3. Leverage Retail Media Data Beyond E-Commerce

Retail media networks represent the most significant shift in the CPG food marketing landscape. Every major retailer, from Kroger and Target to Instacart, now has their own media network, monetizing their first-party shopper data through advertising units both on their properties and through offsite partnerships.

Initially, brands used these networks primarily for driving direct online sales through lower-funnel conversion tactics like sponsored products and search targeting. But the data and targeting available via retail media networks can now be applied beyond driving sales. Smart brands are taking retail media insights and applying them to higher-funnel initiatives across multiple channels.

For example, Chicory’s partnership with Walmart Connect now allows brands to use Walmart’s first-party data for contextual recipe advertising across thousands of food websites. This isn’t just e-commerce, it’s mid-funnel content that captures consumers in a purchasing mindset while providing sophisticated attribution on the back end. Even better, CPG food brands can often allocate this spend toward their Joint Business Plan (JBP) budgets with the retailer, meaning the same investment fuels shopper engagement and supports retailer partnership goals. It’s a rare chance to maximize dollars on both sides of the equation.

Look at the full spectrum of tools and capabilities these partnerships offer. Many retail media networks are expanding beyond basic sponsored products to include video advertising, brand shop pages, and display ads with product carousels. If you’re still only using search targeting and sponsored products, it’s time to expand your toolkit.

4. Invest in Strategic Creative Partnerships

You’ve probably heard the maxim that “cheap content looks cheap.” If you’re trying to build a relevant brand, your creative output needs to reflect that quality. But this doesn’t mean you need an unlimited production budget. It means you need partners who can deliver both smart creative strategy and efficient production processes.

Before you set a budget for creative, put it in proper perspective. Your creative output is working media that should be measured alongside your other marketing investments. Many brands mistakenly categorize creative as “just” production costs rather than including it in their ROAS calculations. When you view creative as working dollars that need to generate returns, it changes how you approach the investment.

That said, the right production partner is the key to unlocking premium creative that also fits within your budget. Quality partners bring two essential elements: strategic thinking that aligns creative with your brand and campaign objectives and streamlined processes that eliminate waste. Plenty of production houses will create whatever you request, but without a strong strategic foundation, your content won’t earn its keep.

Working with partners who understand the constraints of smaller budgets means finding production efficiency without sacrificing the strategic thinking that makes creative effective. This is often more cost-effective than building the same capabilities in-house, especially when you consider the depth of expertise required across strategy, production, and performance optimization.

5. Position Brand-Building as a Sales Enabler

Don’t let sales be the tail that wags the dog. While sales teams understandably focus on immediate revenue needs, marketing teams should feel empowered to own their strategic role while still supporting sales objectives.

The most effective approach is for sales and marketing to work as a cohesive team, rowing in the same direction with a clear understanding of shared objectives. This creates efficiency and eliminates the internal friction that wastes resources and confuses messaging.

Reframe the conversation: Brand-building isn’t separate from sales –  it feeds sales. Upper-funnel awareness and consideration activities create the market conditions that make lower-funnel conversion tactics more effective. When consumers are already familiar with and favorably disposed toward your brand, your retail media and promotional investments work harder.

This requires clear communication about campaign objectives and business goals, not just marketing expectations. Define success metrics that matter to the entire organization — sales lift, velocity improvements, awareness growth, or distribution expansion  and demonstrate how marketing activities contribute to these outcomes.

Making the Shift

The marketing landscape has fundamentally changed. Brands that recognize these shifts and adapt their strategies accordingly can consistently punch above their weight, competing effectively with much larger competitors.

The five strategic shifts covered here, leveraging off-season opportunities, covering the full shopper journey, expanding retail media beyond e-commerce, investing in strategic creative partnerships, and positioning brand-building as a sales enabler,  represent a new playbook for smaller CPG brands.

The key is abandoning outdated approaches and embracing the sophisticated capabilities now available. This doesn’t require massive budget increases. It requires strategic thinking about how to leverage new tools while working within real-world constraints.