If I had to explain how I think about building anything in CPG or ecommerce in one line, it's this:
Product → Brand → Marketing → Advertising.
That's the ladder. Most brands work it backwards, pouring budget into campaigns and media before the product has earned the right to be amplified. That inversion is why CAC creeps up, LTV flattens, and Amazon reviews start reading like a customer support inbox.
You can absolutely hack growth for a while by starting at the bottom. You can't build something durable that way.
A weak product silently sabotages your reviews, repeat, margins, and word of mouth. A fuzzy brand makes even a great product forgettable and price-sensitive. Sloppy marketing takes a good product and a good brand and still manages to confuse the customer. Advertising just pours money on whatever reality already exists.
No matter how talented your creative team is, they cannot save a bad product. Great marketing and great advertising on a solid-but-not-special product will eventually tap out too. And yet… most of CPG works this ladder backwards. Big campaign, new tagline, heavy media, "brand refresh," influencer program. Then maybe someone whispers in the back of the room, "Are we sure this thing is actually better than what's already out there?"
On digital and Amazon it's the same movie:
"Let's scale spend."
"Let's brief the Amazon agency."
"Let's spin up creators and TikTok."
All before we've earned the right to pour gas on it.
The Sequence That Compounds
Why the Order Matters
When you build in the correct order:
Product creates real, felt value in someone's actual life.
Brand gives that value a memory and a meaning.
Marketing makes it stupidly clear who it's for and when to use it.
Advertising accelerates everything that's already working.
When you build in the wrong order, advertising amplifies your flaws, marketing "clarity" highlights the fact the product isn't special, and brand spend ends up benefiting whoever has the better product next to you on the shelf, or the SERP.
You don't notice this in a one-week campaign report. You do notice it over 12–24 months when your CAC creeps up, your LTV flattens, and your Amazon reviews start reading like a customer support inbox.
Let me ground this in a few examples.
Grüns: The Vitamin as a Snack
Grüns is my favorite example of "product-first" thinking in a category that's absolutely suffocating in hype.
On paper, "super greens" is the most over-marketed space on earth. Powders, pills, tinctures, sachets. Everyone is yelling about gut health, energy, longevity.
Grüns did something deceptively simple: they built a gummy that consolidates a huge stack of ingredients (fruits, veggies, superfoods, mushrooms, prebiotics, adaptogens, fiber) into one daily format that actually covers big nutritional gaps. They put it into individual snack packs of gummy bears. You grab one packet, eat it, done. No scoops, no shaker bottles, no pill organizer.
That snack-pack decision is not just cute branding. It's product. It taps directly into a familiar behavior: tear open a small bag of gummy bears. Who hasn't done that since they were a kid?
The ingredients are strong. The flavor is actually enjoyable. But the utility is what makes it lethal: easy to remember (one pack a day), easy to travel with, easy to comply with (you don't dread taking it).
That's why they can sit on massive review volume and high ratings; people actually stick with it and feel the benefit.
Only after that product reality exists does the rest of the ladder start to matter. Brand: approachable, not "biohacker cult," feels inclusive and modern. Marketing: simple, visual comparisons vs. powders and vitamins, clear language about filling gaps. Advertising: influencer mentions, paid channels, retail. All of that just carries a truth the product already earned.
Reverse that order and Grüns is just another pretty wellness brand shouting into the void.
DUDE Wipes: Humor Works Because Product Does
Everyone knows DUDE Wipes for the jokes.
The Super Bowl spots, football tie-ins, "toilet paper is outdated tech," sports partnerships. They've leaned hard into irreverence and it works.
But the foundation is boring and very operational: the wipes are genuinely better than dry TP for a huge chunk of people (larger size, softer feel, aloe and vitamin E), the format lineup is tight (home packs, travel packs, 3-packs and 6-packs, multipacks on Amazon that map neatly to real usage), and review volume and ratings are massive on Amazon, with strong signal on comfort and cleanliness.
That's all product, and pack architecture, doing its job.
Then: Brand gives permission to talk about something nobody wants to talk about. That's the "DUDE" voice. Marketing runs a consistent creative platform across TV, OOH, Amazon, retail displays, and social. Advertising can justify big bets (Super Bowl, sports) because they're not driving people to a novelty item. They're driving them to a habit.
And when DUDE steps into categories where the product isn't as differentiated, the brand halo doesn't carry as far. The ladder shows up again: when the product advantage is weaker, the whole system feels a little less inevitable.
Dr. Squatch: The Fantasy Only Works If the Bar Hits
Dr. Squatch is another case where people fall in love with the top of the ladder (the ads and the brand) and forget what's sitting at the bottom.
Everyone talks about the funny, high-production ads, the "natural soap for guys" positioning, the packaging, the names, the Squatch universe.
But the product is doing real work: more natural formulations with fewer harsh ingredients than most drugstore bars and body washes, distinctive scents that actually smell good in a shower (not just in the copy), and a product architecture built around bundles and variety packs: multi-packs of soap, mini deodorant bundles so you can test scents, 2-packs and 3-packs that separate trial from loyalty.
That's classic product-first thinking. Make the bar and the experience meaningfully better. Make it easy to try several versions. Make it easy to lock in once you know what you like.
The brand fantasy works because when someone actually uses the soap, it feels aligned with what they were promised. If the bar was mid, the whole thing would feel like a YouTube parody that escaped the ad account. Unilever's $1.5 billion acquisition validated exactly that: the product earned the valuation, not the ads.
Ramp: The Non-CPG North Star
Outside of physical goods, Ramp is my north star for how this ladder should look in software.
Ramp didn't start by screaming about "AI finance revolution" and then backfilling the product. They started by quietly building something that made finance, accounting, and expense tracking less painful for operators: corporate card, expense management, bill pay, and accounting automation in one system, with real workflows that make closing the books faster, catching policy violations easier, and controlling spend smoother.
That's raw product value.
Then they layered on brand (modern, slightly contrarian, grounded in "save money, save time" for finance teams), marketing (case studies, benchmarks, and content that speak in operator language, not just founder hype), and advertising (only once the unit economics and word of mouth were clearly working).
The result: they've ripped through valuation milestones and are now sitting around a $33B valuation. That doesn't happen because the logo is clean. It happens because the product is a monster and everything else is built on top of that reality.
Why CPG Works It Backwards
So Why Does CPG Keep Working Backwards?
Given how obvious this looks in hindsight, why do so many brands invert the ladder?
A few patterns show up again and again:
Org charts are built around media, not outcomes. Brand and media teams hold the power, so budgets and energy flow toward campaigns, not formulations, pack architecture, or real-world utility.
Time horizons are misaligned. You can brief an agency in 30 days. Reformulating a hero SKU or overhauling the pack lineup can take 12–24 months. Bonuses are paid on 6–12 month windows, so people chase the knobs they can turn fast.
Attribution is biased toward the visible. It's easy to attribute a sales bump to "the new creative" or "the Meta campaign." It's harder to attribute it to "we quietly made the product better, improved the Amazon pack strategy, and let the compounding do its thing."
The product feels scary to touch. Ads feel reversible. Product changes don't. So everyone piles into the reversible layer and treats the foundational layer as sacred, even when it's mediocre.
The problem is: the market doesn't care about any of that.
On Amazon, product quality shows up in reviews, returns, and page-level metrics. Brand strength shows up in branded search and click-through. Marketing clarity shows up in whether someone can understand the product in three seconds on a PDP. Advertising just accelerates whatever truth is already there.
If you start at the bottom of the ladder and work up, Amazon exposes you quickly. If you build from the top down, it exposes you brutally.
How to Use the Ladder
How to Actually Use This Ladder
If you're running a CPG or eCom business, especially one leaning on Amazon, here's how I'd gut-check your roadmap:
Product: Is this meaningfully better than the top three alternatives for a specific use case? Do people feel a real difference after using it? Would they be annoyed if you took it away?
Brand: Does the way you look and sound make that difference obvious and memorable? Could someone describe you in one sentence that doesn't work for your competitors?
Marketing: In seven images and a few lines of copy, is it insanely clear who this is for, why it's better, and when to use it? Could a distracted shopper on Amazon or Target "get it" in one scroll?
Advertising: Are you scaling spend on proven heroes with strong retention and reviews, or using ads as a life support machine for weak products?
If the honest answer is that you're spending more time on ads and campaigns than on product and pack architecture, don't be surprised when the ladder feels wobbly.
Product → Brand → Marketing → Advertising.
Get that sequence right, and the examples above stop looking like anomalies and start looking like a playbook.
At Neato, this is how we think about the brands we operate. As a 2P retail operator, we purchase inventory, become the seller of record, and run every channel as our own business, which means the ladder isn't theoretical for us. When our capital is on the line, we feel every rung. And we won't pour ad spend on something the product hasn't earned yet.
What Is the Growth Ladder for CPG Brands?
The CPG growth ladder is the sequence Product → Brand → Marketing → Advertising, built in that exact order. Product creates real value. Brand gives that value a memory. Marketing makes it clear who it's for. Advertising accelerates what's already working. Most brands invert this sequence by leading with ad spend and campaign energy before the product has earned the right to be amplified. The brands that compound (Grüns, DUDE Wipes, Dr. Squatch, Ramp) all built from the top of the ladder down. The ones that plateau built from the bottom up and wondered why the math stopped working.
