CPG Brands Have a Consumer Problem—and Social Media Is Telling Them Exactly What It Is

Want to know what consumers really think about CPG brands? Forget the 40-page brand-health PowerPoint for a minute and spend a few hours reading Reddit threads, TikTok comments, product reviews and consumer conversations. What emerges isn’t necessarily scientific sentiment analysis, but it may be more revealing: consumers talking to one another when they don’t think a brand manager is listening. And what they’re saying should make some CPG executives uncomfortable. Consumers still care about brands. They’ve simply become much more demanding about what a brand has to earn.

The biggest theme is value—but not value in the way most CPG companies define it. Consumers aren’t simply looking for the cheapest product. They’re constantly calculating whether the difference between the branded product and the cheaper alternative is worth paying for. Look at conversations around Costco’s Kirkland Signature. Consumers routinely compare Kirkland products with national brands product by product rather than assuming the national brand must be superior. One Costco discussion in January 2026 generated nearly 2,000 upvotes around precisely this issue: if Kirkland offers similar quality for less money, why buy the branded alternative?

Consumers don’t blindly worship private label either. In that same conversation, some shoppers said they preferred the branded Harmless Harvest coconut water because they thought it tasted better. Elsewhere, consumers complained that Kirkland coffee, detergent, toilet paper and other products didn’t perform as well as branded competitors. That’s an important lesson. Brand equity still matters when consumers can actually experience it. “We’re the leading brand” isn’t a consumer benefit. Better taste, better cleaning, better absorbency or better performance is.

Then there’s shrinkflation, where the emotional response goes well beyond price. Consumers increasingly interpret smaller packages at similar prices as a trust issue. In a 2026 Reddit discussion about shrinkflation, commenters repeatedly described the practice as deceptive or lacking transparency, particularly when brands celebrate “20% more” but remain conspicuously quiet when package contents decline.

That’s a dangerous shift for CPG companies because consumers can forgive a price increase more easily than they forgive feeling manipulated. A package quietly shrinking from 16 ounces to 14 ounces may produce a beautiful spreadsheet showing protected margins. The consumer sees something else: “You hoped I wouldn’t notice.” Social media makes sure they do notice—and tells thousands of other shoppers.

Another unmistakable theme is that the product experience is overpowering the marketing message. Consider Poppi and Olipop. These are brands built for the social-media age: colorful cans, health-oriented positioning, influencer visibility and products that practically beg to be photographed. Yet scroll through consumer discussions and the conversation quickly moves from branding to taste, texture, ingredients, fiber and price. One recent Olipop discussion praised the attractive packaging while criticizing an unexpectedly viscous mouthfeel. Other discussions are brutally divided: some consumers love Poppi while others describe its taste as artificial or vinegar-like; Olipop gets enthusiastic advocates while other consumers complain about aftertaste or texture. That’s exactly how modern brand equity works. Marketing gets you into the cart once. Product experience determines whether you stay there.

Another fascinating lesson hides in these conversations: consumers increasingly trust other consumers to translate marketing claims for them. Someone asks, “Is this worth $3 a can?” and suddenly dozens of strangers are discussing fiber content, ingredients, flavors, stomach reactions, refrigeration and whether the product actually tastes like the soda it is supposed to replace. This is the part of the purchase funnel many CPG organizations still underestimate. Consumers no longer move neatly from awareness to consideration to purchase. They discover a product on TikTok, search it on Google, read Reddit, check Amazon reviews, watch another video, stand in Target looking at the package, and perhaps ask an AI assistant whether the ingredients justify the price. The consumer’s consideration set is being built—and destroyed—in public.

That’s also why authenticity has become such an overused marketing word but such an important consumer expectation. Dove provides an interesting example. Rather than pretending uncontrolled consumer commentary doesn’t exist, a Reddit campaign placed 50 unfiltered comments about a haircare product at the center of the campaign. Reddit and WPP describe the strategy as letting real customer experiences do the talking, rather than polishing everything into conventional advertising language. That’s much closer to how consumers communicate. Nobody tells a friend, “This innovative formulation delivers an elevated hydration experience.” They say, “This stuff actually works,” “It smells weird,” “It’s too expensive,” or “I’ve bought it three times.” CPG marketing departments may spend six months perfecting a claim that consumers translate into six words.

And then there are brands such as Liquid Death, which demonstrate that consumers don’t necessarily want brands to behave like corporations at all. Liquid Death turned one of the world’s most commoditized products—water—into entertainment by packaging it like beer and adopting the deliberately absurd “Murder Your Thirst” identity. Social-media discussions of the company routinely focus as much on the audacity of the branding as the water itself. The lesson isn’t that every laundry detergent needs skulls on the package. It’s that distinctiveness matters enormously in categories where functional differentiation is increasingly difficult for consumers to see. Being recognizable can be an asset. Being safe, generic, and focus-grouped into oblivion can be a liability.

But perhaps the most important thing social media reveals is that consumers aren’t particularly loyal to corporations; they’re loyal to outcomes. A shopper may love Tide detergent, buy Kirkland trash bags, insist on Bounty paper towels, drink Olipop, switch toothpaste because another brand is on sale and abandon a snack brand the moment the package gets smaller. Even within Kirkland discussions, consumers happily praise one product and criticize another. That’s rational behavior. CPG companies, however, sometimes still operate as though decades of advertising have created a protective moat around their brands. For many categories, that moat is getting shallower.

This should change how CPG brand managers measure performance. Awareness, reach, impressions and purchase intent still matter, but management should also be asking: What percentage of unsolicited consumer conversations recommend us? What product defect or complaint keeps appearing? What competing brand are consumers comparing us with? What words do consumers use to describe our product? Where does price become “too expensive”? What feature are people actually willing to pay more for? And, most importantly, what are consumers telling each other about us when we’re not in the room? Those questions can reveal threats months before they become obvious in syndicated sales data.

There is a larger warning here. Social media has destroyed one of the great historical advantages of big CPG companies: information asymmetry. Thirty years ago, if a cereal box quietly became smaller, a detergent formulation changed or a snack didn’t taste quite as good, consumers experienced those things largely individually. Today one shopper posts it, another confirms it, someone uploads the old package, somebody calculates the price per ounce and thousands of consumers can see the evidence before the brand’s communications team has finished deciding whether to respond.

That’s why the most valuable social-media research may not be counting positive versus negative mentions. It’s identifying the gap between what the brand believes it is selling and what consumers believe they are buying. The marketing department may believe it’s selling heritage. The consumer may be buying convenience. The brand manager may believe it’s selling superior quality. The consumer may think the private-label version is identical. The company may call a package change “price-pack architecture.” The consumer calls it shrinkflation.

CPG executives shouldn’t fear those conversations. They should be obsessed with them. Somewhere right now, consumers are discussing your product’s price, packaging, taste, ingredients, quality and competitors without anyone from your company moderating the conversation. They’re effectively conducting one enormous, continuous, brutally candid focus group for free.

The smartest CPG companies won’t ask consumers to talk more positively about their brands. They’ll listen closely enough to give consumers something more positive to talk about.