If you are running or investing in a consumer brand right now, you have probably been feeling a kind of pressure that no one in the room quite names — the pressure to keep growing, to compete with the brand that has more capital, to keep the lights on for another quarter. The way most companies respond to that pressure has, over time and almost invisibly, turned into a kind of trap.
The shape of the trap is straightforward enough once you can see it. When input costs rise or margins compress, operators take cost out of the product — cheaper inputs, smaller portions, reformulated recipes — and route the savings into the marketing auction, because that is where their competitors are and that is the only way to stay seen. Done once, this is a reasonable survival decision. Done year after year, it becomes the whole business model. The product gets a little worse, the marketing budget grows, and the consumer notices something they cannot quite name and slowly trusts the brand a little less — but by then the next campaign is already in flight.
The cleanest evidence I have seen of how far this can go landed in late 2025, when cocoa prices ran roughly 27% above the prior year and Nestlé and Pladis reformulated some of their UK products with cheaper fats — far enough that the recipes fell below the legal cocoa-content minimum, and the brands had to drop the word chocolate from the packaging. The reformulation was the response to a real cost shock; the label change was the part that became visible. The financial picture on the other side is just as severe — P&G alone spends about $9.6 billion a year on advertising, over eleven percent of its revenue, every year, on attention.
What I have come to realize is that none of this looks like a strategy when you are inside any one company. The product team is told to take cost out of the next quarter, the marketing team is told to win the next campaign cycle, and from inside the building those are two separate, ordinary conversations about ordinary problems. From far enough away — once you have seen it across enough companies — they are the same conversation, and they describe the same model.
The structural reason it does not heal on its own is that marketing, at the level the industry is doing it, behaves like an auction. The Ehrenberg-Bass team has been showing for decades that whoever spends above their share of the market grows, and whoever spends below it shrinks. Once you see that dynamic, you see why it ratchets — every additional bidder raises the floor, every channel that worked last year tends to stop working this year, and the spend has to keep climbing just to hold the same ground. Diminishing returns is the polite name. The plain version is that you are paying more, year after year, to be roughly where you already were.
There is a structure that doesn’t need the auction
So the way out, if there is one, is not to outbid the field. It is to be inside a structure that does not need the auction in the first place. The brand essay was circling that question from the brand side; what comes next is the same question from the system side.
The encouraging thing — and the thing that pulled me into this work in the first place — is that this kind of structure is not theoretical. It is already running at scale, in a few corners of the industry that do not usually get talked about together. Costco’s Kirkland Signature did about $56 billion in sales in 2023, which would make it, as a standalone company, larger than Kellogg’s or Hershey, and it does this with almost no traditional advertising. The same shape shows up at Aldi and Trader Joe’s, where almost everything on the shelf is the store’s own label, and at the deepest end at Apple, which controls every layer between the silicon and the unboxing experience.
What these companies share, despite running in completely different categories, is that they own the surface where their product actually meets the customer. The shelf, the store, the screen, the box. They do not have to bid for someone’s attention, because they are already standing where the attention is.
The cautionary tale of the last decade
The companies that tried to skip that step are the cautionary tale of the last decade. Allbirds, Casper, Brandless, Outdoor Voices — each of them owned the website and the packaging and the brand on the box, and rented everything underneath: the manufacturing, the warehouses, the ad space, the shipping. When ad costs rose, there was nothing in the business that could absorb the increase, and Allbirds went from a $4 billion valuation to a $39 million asset sale while Brandless simply closed.
Costco and Apple have what they have because they spent decades and an extraordinary amount of capital building it. That is not a runway most brands trying to make something genuinely better will ever have on their own. The founders who care most about the product almost never have ten years of runway to also build their own private retail empire.
A shared version of that infrastructure
This is the gap I think is worth doing something about, and the answer that holds up is a shared version of that infrastructure. A common layer of distribution, retail, fulfillment, and eventually repair, built once and made available to the brands whose only real job is making something genuinely good — so that the people who care most about the product do not also have to build their own private Costco to be allowed to compete.
What I keep coming back to, when I look at all of this together, is that the shape of the next generation of consumer brands will be defined less by who runs the slickest marketing and more by who is willing to do the much less glamorous work of building the system underneath. The product as the thing actually being made. The brand as the natural residue of a product that holds together. The marketing as something that happens when you are coherent, not something you do because you are not.
That is the work I am trying to do with Antara. The shape of it is still emerging. The conviction underneath is settled — the product comes first, and everything that has been treated as the lever should follow from a product that is actually worth making. The marketing auction is what you end up in when it does not.