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Socially Powerful surveys 300+ enterprise FMCG marketers in the UK and US, and finds the giants know exactly what they’re losing — and are mostly not changing.

LONDON, July 23, 2026 — Ask a marketer at a billion-dollar consumer goods company whether smaller rivals move faster than they do, and seven in ten will tell you yes. Ask whether creators read culture better than their own internal teams, and 81% will agree.

Then ask whether any of that requires them to change how they operate, and 62% say no.

That contradiction sits at the center of Best Before: Your Next Campaign, a new report from social-first agency Socially Powerful, based on a survey of more than 300 enterprise FMCG marketers across the UK and US. The research measured how enterprise brands plan against how consumer demand is actually generated. It found a widening gap between the two — and, for founders and challenger brands, a quantified picture of where the incumbent is slow.

The numbers behind the gap

The report’s most striking figure is also its smallest. Just 1% of enterprise campaign ideas originate from testing and learning in public. By contrast, 41% come out of annual or quarterly planning cycles, and only 11% begin with a cultural or social insight.

For anyone building a brand without a planning department, that is worth sitting with. The thing challengers do reflexively — put something out, watch what happens, adjust — is close to structurally absent inside the organisations they compete against. It is not that large brands lack talent or budget. It is that an approval architecture built for television-era marketing does not bend easily to a culture that ships daily.

Other findings from the survey:

• 86% of enterprise FMCG marketers say brand loyalty is weaker now than it was five years ago
• More than a third say social platforms and creators are where most product discovery in their category now happens — ahead of both TV and search
• 43% cite internal risk aversion as the main reason bold, culturally led work is hard to deliver consistently
• 40% still say brand history has the biggest influence on a first-time purchase

Read together, the last two are the interesting pair. Heritage still opens the door. It just no longer keeps it open, and the mechanism most likely to refresh it is the one the organisation is most nervous about approving.

Renting attention versus owning it

The report’s central argument is that influence, as most enterprises currently buy it, resets. A campaign runs, attention spikes, the brand feels present again — and then the activity stops, consumer memory cools, and the next campaign inherits nothing. The brand pays for the same first impression twice.

“Creators not only participate in culture, they drive it,” said Paolo Narag, Global Brand Director at Mars, quoted in the report. “The brands that will win in the future are those that embed themselves in the creator economy and treat creators as co-creators, not channels.”

Don Cheney, Senior Brand Manager at The Absolut Company, framed the same shift as a question of perspective: “Instead of thinking how the creator fits into the brand world, the question needs to become, how can the brand fit in the creator’s world?”

A maturity model, and where most brands land on it

Alongside the survey data, Socially Powerful has published its Influencer & Advocacy Maturity Modelâ„¢, which assesses organisations across five dimensions: architecture, creator selection, integration, speed and frequency, and measurement and learning.

Level 1 describes influence bought as a launch spike with no creator memory. Level 5 — what the agency calls the Cultural Engine — describes creators sitting inside the brand’s decision-making as a standing advisory function, informing product and positioning before a plan is locked rather than promoting one after it is.

Most enterprise influence, the report finds, currently sits at Level 3: always-on ecosystems and tiered creator portfolios, with social integrated into planning, but measurement still catching up and speed still gated by case-by-case approvals.

That midpoint is the opportunity window. Level 3 is competent. It is not fast.

What it means for smaller brands

The report is written for enterprise marketers, but its findings describe a competitive landscape that favours operators who can act on a signal the same week they see it. Speed alone is not the advantage — the report argues the real metric is speed-to-proof, the ability to test something publicly, learn from the response, and build on it before the next planning cycle.

That capability costs a challenger brand almost nothing. It costs an enterprise a restructure.

Best Before: Your Next Campaign is available from Socially Powerful