Marketing that wins the shelf,
digital and physical.
Consumer brands now fight on two shelves at once. Amazon takes 15% referral fees plus FBA costs and ad spend just to stay visible in your own category, while your DTC site competes with your own retail listings for the same search. And the research layer is shifting again: shoppers ask ChatGPT "what's the best protein powder for women" and get a comparison your brand may not appear in.
We build search and demand systems for CPG and consumer brands selling through retail and online. SEO that wins category and comparison searches, Google Ads that protect your brand terms from resellers, and social proof engines that feed both DTC conversion and the AI answers now shaping shortlists. Channel mix managed for margin, not just volume.
Why Consumer Products businesses choose SBG
Why consumer products marketing is harder than it used to be.
Amazon vs DTC is a margin war you fight with yourself
Amazon delivers volume but takes a 15% referral fee, FBA fulfilment costs, and rising ad spend — often 30–40% of revenue all-in — while owning the customer data. DTC keeps margin and data but carries acquisition costs that climbed 50%+ since iOS 14. The answer isn't picking one; it's deliberate channel roles: Amazon for discovery and convenience, DTC for subscriptions, bundles, and the customer relationship.
Retail media costs are becoming a second trade-spend line
Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, and Instacart now function as pay-to-play shelf fees — brands report giving up 10–20% of marketplace revenue to retail media just to hold organic rank. Every dollar there buys placement you never own. Organic search visibility on Google for your category and comparison terms is the counterweight: traffic that arrives before the marketplace search box ever loads.
Resellers and rivals are bidding on your brand name
Search your own brand and you'll often find Amazon resellers, price scrapers, and competitors bidding on it — taking margin or the sale itself from demand you created. Brand search protection is unglamorous and high-ROI: brand-term campaigns that cost cents on the dollar, organic dominance of your brand SERP including "review" and "vs" queries, and a DTC offer that gives brand searchers a reason to buy direct.
AI shopping assistants are summarizing the comparison for you
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews now answer "best [category] for [need]" with synthesized comparisons drawn from reviews, editorial roundups, Reddit threads, and structured product data. Brands present in those sources get recommended; brands absent get skipped regardless of shelf strength. Almost no CPG team is tracking its share of AI answers yet — which is exactly why it's the cheapest visibility to win right now.
Six channels, tuned for consumer products.
Every SBG engagement runs as one integrated system — here's how each channel earns its place for consumer products businesses.
The consumer products growth playbook.
Digital Shelf Audit
We map your visibility across Google, Amazon-adjacent searches, and AI answers — including who's bidding on your brand, where comparison queries go, and what your channel mix actually earns after fees.
Foundation Sprint
Brand SERP defence, product feed and schema cleanup, conversion tracking across DTC and marketplace touchpoints, and the brand-term campaigns that stop margin leaking to resellers. First 60 days protect demand you already own.
Demand Build-Out
Category and comparison content, UGC production systems, and AI visibility work launch in priority order — highest-margin SKUs and strongest-velocity categories first.
Scale What Compounds
Monthly reporting on blended revenue by channel, brand search volume growth, and AI answer share. Budget shifts toward whatever grows contribution margin, not just topline.
An agency that knows
your market.
Consumer brands get pulled apart by channel specialists: an Amazon agency that ignores DTC, a paid social shop that ignores search, a brand team that ignores all of it. The result is channels competing for the same customer with no one managing the blended margin. We run search, paid, and social as one system with one P&L view — the way an operator would.
We've managed $1M+ in ad budgets across 4 countries, and the lesson that survives every platform change is the same: owned visibility compounds, rented visibility inflates. Retail media costs rise every year; a category page that ranks or an AI answer that names your brand keeps producing at zero marginal cost. Our job is shifting your mix toward the assets that compound.
And we're early where it counts. AI shopping assistants are already shaping shortlists in supplements, skincare, electronics accessories, and household goods — categories where review-driven comparison was the norm. Brands building citation and review footprints now will own those answers the way early movers owned Google rankings. Most CPG marketing teams haven't started. That's the gap we exploit.
Consumer Products marketing questions, answered.
Should a consumer brand focus on Amazon or DTC?
What is brand search protection and why does it matter?
How do consumer brands show up in ChatGPT and AI shopping answers?
How much should a CPG brand spend on digital marketing?
Does SEO work for product brands when marketplaces dominate results?
How do UGC and social proof actually drive sales?
See where your consumer products business
is losing visibility.
The free Visibility Audit covers your rankings, ad waste, review profile, and AI citation opportunities against your top consumer products competitors. Specific findings, whether you work with us or not.