"Smarter ways of cutting through".
There's a lot to be said for Murray’s mentality, particularly for smaller, newer consumer packaged goods brands. After all, in an industry dominated by iconic, instantly recognisable multinationals, “less” is typically the default for new entrants: less budget, less resource, and subsequently less presence. But being small doesn’t mean thinking small. With the right strategies in place, growing and emerging (G&E) brands can still achieve incredible results—outmanoeuvring the competition and carving their own path within their category or niche.
"As a challenger brand you're looking for tactical opportunities, which more established brands might not consider to get the most from tighter budgets. It's about honing in on smarter ways of cutting through and showing up in places where your consumers are."1
Pippa Murray
Founder of Pip & Nut
When it comes to G&E, retail media gives these brands everything they need to engage with customers in a measurable and cost-effective way. In this short guide, we’ll share three key principles from how to build out your audiences to tailoring your spend, the following sections contain some great tips and tricks on how to maximise your returns with retail media.
Let's dive in.
Jodie Kenny
Media Director Tesco Media and Insight Platform
Retail media best practice.
Before we look into growth strategies for G&E brands, here are four key points every brand should keep in mind about retail media:
1. Retail media is a full-funnel activity
As the discipline has continued to evolve, so too have the opportunities for creativity and brand expression. Today, retail media is a full-funnel activity that not only drives ROAS but also awareness and consideration. As such, brands should consider how they can use retail media for both brand and shopper activity.
2. Retail media demands an omnichannel mindset
Today’s retail media networks give brands a wide range of ways to engage with shoppers. At Tesco, for instance, our “sofa-to-store” approach covers everything from Sponsored Products and SmartScreens to Scan as you Shop media. The key here is to understand what channels work best for your brand’s objectives and how to tailor your message effectively.
3. Retail media is built on data
More specifically, retail media is built on first-party data. Take Clubcard, for example. Clubcard data is accurate, compliant, and provides the insights we need to deliver advanced levels of personalisation to our customers. That data also allows us to help brands connect with highly specific audiences—something we’ll look at again shortly.
4. Retail media offers an unrivalled creative canvas
Retail media combines digital and physical inventory, giving marketers a huge creative canvas to play with. At Tesco today, you’ll find everything from Store Wraps, In-store Radio, and Whoosh Sponsorship packages through to Online Events and Brand Zones.
So, what is a Growing & Emerging brand?
“Growing & Emerging”. It’s quite a broad term—particularly when it comes to retail media. Every business wants to grow—and even an established brand could be considered G&E if it’s only just begun to experiment with retail media. For the purposes of this guide, we’re focusing specifically on the smaller brands disrupting the category. Brands in this camp tend to be relatively new to market, with lower-than-average market share given that their value proposition skews towards more niche customer needs—premium or highly specific products, for instance. And they have limited resources, their marketing budgets typically far smaller than their more established competitors. Something else unites these businesses, though, and that’s their headroom—and ambition—for growth. They have abundant potential, room to scale, and an exciting opportunity ahead, and retail media can be the perfect way to realise their goals.
Every brand is different. From the products they make through to their positioning and practices, they’re just as diverse as the shoppers they sell to. That extends to the world of retail media, too; where one business might excel, another may struggle. While there’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach there are common obstacles faced by G&E brands that retail media can help them tackle:
Knowing which audiences to engage with, and when.
Knowing how much to invest against different audiences and channels, and why.
Knowing how to balance short-term success against long-term improvements.
Let’s dive into each—and look at how G&E brands can answer those big questions.
1.
Be laser-focused when building your audience
Identifying a target audience is essential for any brand. It’s also an area in which many G&E brands struggle. Rather than being prescriptive about which shoppers they engage with, they often fall into the trap of broad targeting in the hope that it’ll help them reach a critical mass of customers. Ultimately, though, that approach typically just leads to wasted ad spend—money they usually can’t afford to lose. What’s needed here is a change in attitude. These brands need to change their attitude from ‘small fish in a big pond’ to ‘big fish in a small pond’ or even a puddle!
Even if [your story]’s extraordinary, it’s not going to make a difference if you drop it in the ocean. That doesn’t mean you give up hope. It means you walk away from the ocean and look for a large swimming pool.
Seth Godin
This is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn To See
If you want to put that into practice yourself, then you need to do two things:
Find the smallest possible pool of existing buyers that your brand needs to survive. This is your loyal, high intent audience, that needs to be prioritised.
In parallel, identify an underserved group of category buyers that big brands have overlooked, and give them a compelling reason to switch.
Allow word-of-mouth to spread then dominate, rinse and repeat with an even bigger swimming pool, broadening your reach at each stage.
The word-of-mouth element is crucial here. Not only is it comparatively cheap as a tactic, but it’s also effective too; two-thirds of shoppers say that recommendations from their friends and family play a key role in helping them decide which products to buy.2 Word of mouth is also a great vehicle for G&E brands, who often benefit from a highly loyal follower base, even more so than more established brands.
Retail media gives brands of all sizes a trusted platform and a built-in, captive audience of current and future customers. For a growing CPG brand selling 10,000 units a year, the ability to nurture returning, valuable customers across multiple purchase windows while seamlessly reaching the next 50,000 potential buyers isn’t just convenient, but likely the most effective route forward.
Ed Sellier
Client Strategy Manager – Tesco Media and Insight Platform
2.
Tailor your tactics to the size of the prize
Balancing long-term ambition with short-term need is tough, particularly for G&E brands. Widespread fame may be the ultimate goal, but it’s one that needs to be supported with short-term success. Simply, brands need to make a profit—and that can lead them down a very specific path when it comes to their marketing. Unfortunately, focusing on purely short-term objectives can hamper their long-term objectives if the correct balance isn’t struck. With their finite budgets, it can be tempting for G&E brands to double down on reliable (and cost-effective) tactics like performance ads. In the long run, though, that kind of narrow focus can come back to haunt them. Since performance ads are mainly aimed at people at the point of purchase, they tend to limit brands to only reaching a small subset of potential customers at the bottom of the funnel. Tom Roach, a renowned communications strategist, refers to this phenomenon as the “performance plateau”. Brands end up experiencing rapid short-term growth, but then find their sales plateauing due to limited exposure.
For G&E brands to push past that plateau, they need to strike the right balance between upper and lower-funnel activity.
More specifically, they need to tailor their investments to the size of the opportunity. A brand that’s new to either retail media or the market as a whole, for example, should adopt a low-risk strategy and prioritise their existing loyal buyers (what’s known as a ‘sustain’ audience). As demand for their products grows, so too should their net. If you’re wondering how these principles can be applied to your own marketing strategy, then it can be helpful to think about opportunity as a sliding scale. Where you are on that scale then determines your approach. For example:
► In the early stages, you should prioritise high-intent customers using cost-effective, conversion-focused tactics like Sponsored Search and in-aisle placements.
► Once sales begin to plateau among these customers, you should look to recruit medium-intent customers; those who shop the category already, but not your brand.
► Eventually, you’d turn your attention to low purchase intent shoppers. They might be furthest away from your product currently, but they also represent the biggest opportunity.
A visualisation of that scale—and some of the tactics you can use at each stage can be seen here. The key here is finding your “sweet spot”; striking the right balance between those audiences you need to sustain your brand, and those that can help it grow.
Over its first three years, Pip&Nut achieved sales growth of 950%3, testament to what can be achieved when following this approach.
Despite a limited ad budget, Pip&Nut has pursued an effective ‘always-on’ strategy with Tesco—ensuring its products hold the top three spots on the search results page on Tesco.com (even when not on promo), and bidding on its own search terms. The latter has helped it raise the profile of new items via its most searched and best-known ones. The sales numbers speak for themselves here: Pip&Nut’s current strategy is delivering 433% ROAS, with more than 50% of customers converting to the brand.
By balancing top and bottom-of-funnel spend, growing and emerging brands can create sustainable, long-term growth funded by consistent short-term profit. Once these brands move away from purely using retail media for sporadic bursts of promotion-driving activity, that’s when they’ll unlock its true potential to support their long-term brand ambitions.
Hannah Kilburn
Strategic Planner – Tesco Media and Insight Platform
3.
Test, learn, and continuously optimise
Over the past few years, test and learn (T&L) has become a catch-all term, and not just in marketing either. T&L can also be something that—on the surface—might not sound all that appealing to G&E brands. When finances are tight, after all, experimenting with different tactics can feel like a quick way to waste money. The reality, though, is that these brands actually have the most to gain from T&L. Unlike the large, well-established players, G&E brands tend to have a relatively compact operational infrastructure. As a result, they also have the agility needed to pivot rapidly around the results of a T&L programme. Even if a brand only has the budget to activate in one channel, this shouldn’t stop them from exploring the test opportunities within it, from creative and formats through to audience segments. If brands continue to ask themselves: “what core question do I need to answer to move on to the next phase of our growth?” then they protect themselves from testing to no effect. Again, balance is key here. A smart T&L approach will combine safe bets with well-informed gambles. The former gives you the reliability of results you need to reinforce previous findings, while the latter gives you the fluidity required to stay ahead of changing customer behaviours.
Theory in practice
AMT are a great example of a small own-label brand leveraging channel testing capabilities to identify customer buying behaviours. Facing declining sales while the rest of the fruit category was in growth, AMT bought into a bespoke Meta campaign to A/B test colour vs flavour messaging of their new grape launch. And the learnings are striking - colour outperformed vs messaging across the board, driving stronger reach, engagement and sales by a significant margin. According to the opportunity scale, the results of this creative test will allow the brand to pinpoint their next source of growth and better understand what creative to use to further incentivise and loyalise their audience.
We all want optimal media investments, we all want to learn, but it’s often the ‘hard yards’ of testing that create the barrier. However, this is where G&E brands can gain commercial advantages: using their agility to learn more and learn faster will deliver quickfire results.
Jamie Howett
Client Strategy Manager – Tesco Media and Insight Platform
1 Tesco Media and Insight Platform. (2025) Shape What Britain Buys 2025. 17 January 2025.
2 dunnhumby Shopper Thoughts Survey 2024
3 Effective Design Awards. (2017) It’s The Nuts. Pip & Nut Award Entry.
Let's get growing.
G&E brands shouldn’t let a limited budget or resources limit their creativity and ambitions. By narrowing down their audience, understanding how to push past the performance plateau, and using a T&L approach to refine their activity, they’ll gain the insight and agility needed to find that sweet spot between maintaining and growing their audience. At Tesco Media and Insight Platform, we can help. Whether you want to know more about which shoppers to engage with next, how best to reach them, or want to improve the effectiveness of your channel strategy, we have everything you need to take your brand to the next level.
Become a retail media master.
There’s much more to retail media than we have room to include here. But if you want to sharpen up your skills, then the Tesco Retail Media Certification is for you. This free course gives you everything you need to hone your capabilities. Whether it’s an understanding of the trends driving retail media’s rise or actionable insights and in-depth guidance on Tesco Media and Insight Platform’s products and capabilities our dedicated training programme will help you get more out of the discipline. Better still, our modular approach means that you can complete your certification in your own time!
Power up your proficiency, register now and earn your badge.
