How Direct-to-Consumer Brands Can Continue to Grow

Key Takeaways

Focus on Trust and Awareness: Direct-to-consumer brands must prioritize building trust and awareness through strategic PR. Earned media, particularly product reviews in reputable outlets, can create lasting impressions and enhance brand credibility more effectively than transient social media or cookie-based advertising.
Leverage Thought Leadership: Developing a robust thought leadership program is essential for brands seeking visibility. By engaging executives in discussions on relevant topics, brands can enhance their authority and credibility, which is increasingly important for gaining consumer trust, especially among younger audiences.
Embrace Digital PR Strategies: Brands should adapt to the evolving digital landscape by focusing on high-quality content and product reviews that align with search engine algorithms. Collaborating with online news outlets can amplify brand visibility and establish trust, making it crucial to integrate digital PR efforts into overall marketing strategies.

We live in a world where ideas, products, and signals come at us so quickly that consumers can’t process everything. Direct-to-consumer brands can still grow—but only with a strategic focus on trust and awareness. With over 5,000 ads per day hitting the average person, subtlety isn’t an option.

The average person now spends 473 minutes per day engaging with media. Add in a post-ChatGPT environment, shrinking newsrooms (down 25% since 2008), and intensified competition for ad dollars, and it’s clear: DTC PR must evolve with the media landscape. Earned media and digital PR matter more than ever.

There are two ways to approach CPG PR:

Holistic approach of communications, digital visibility, thought leadership, and product PR where metrics match key business objectives

Laser-focused approach, which could be consumer product PR or thought leadership, depending on the brand strategy with more PR-focused KPIs.

In an ideal world, all brands embrace a holistic point of view with a complete bespoke PR program. But, by choosing a strategic consumer PR lever, challenger consumer brands can be precise and thoughtful about their earned media.

This is about the laser-focused approach, and consumer brand PR firms must expand their definition of PR to stay useful to DTC, CPG, and consumer product brands.

The Argument for Laser-Focused Media Relations

It’s a harsh world for direct-to-consumer brands to continue growing. For challenger consumer product, DTC and CPG brands – those past startup mode but not a household name – there are an overwhelming number of media options. From Instagram influencers to a dizzying array of advertising choices, the challenger brand has more choices than money. Therefore, it needs to act strategically to do two things at once to scale: build awareness and trust.

That’s one reason PR is the signature choice for consumer product PR: Trust and Awareness.

Trust is the longest game but the most crucial communication goal of any brand. But trust takes a long time to build. Unlike Instagram Influencers (whose influence is waning) and paid advertisements, and the 68% of consumers who think cookie-based advertising is creepy (Marigold 2023), earned media addresses the #1 PR challenge for upstart brands: trusted reach. Whether your target audience is GenZ or a target broader, consumers must trust your brand before you edge in on the market share of competitors or create a new product category altogether, trusted reach is where the smart money goes.

So how do you build trust and awareness when your branding budget is limited? The fact is that branding is expensive, and brands with hyper-growth ambitions need a more direct form of branding. Indeed, product reviews play a vital role in both trust and awareness, and there’s one way to super charge product trust: product reviews in trusted media outlets. Media coverage has several advantages over other brand awareness options, including stickiness. Unlike a fleeting social media post or a questionably targeted ad, product coverage, especially reviews on online media sites, is extremely sticky, lasting in search results for years.

Owning Content and Messaging with Thought Leadership

Executive visibility has never been more important. A well-developed owned content program isn’t a blog program; it’s a program that embraces all the thought leadership opportunities available to hypergrowth brands today. From blog posts and contributions to emerging topics to the multitude of contributor opportunities to executives willing to share insights with the broader public, thought leadership is ripe with opportunities for challenger brands. This is especially true for younger audiences who distrust established and entrenched brands more than they do startup consumer brands.

A modern owned-content program goes far beyond blog posts. It includes:

Contributor articles
Executive commentary
Insights on emerging topics
Participation in expert platforms

Younger audiences increasingly trust emerging brands more than legacy brands. Thought leadership gives challenger brands a path to credibility.

Even when audiences don’t directly read contribution sites, they:

strengthen SEO through authoritative links,
present executives as open and engaged, and
build long-term trust.

According to Edelman, business remains more trusted than government or NGOs, but CEO trust is still fragile. Visibility deepens customer relationships, a key factor Harvard Business Review highlights as essential for consumer-brand success.

Businesses also earned a 20-point increase in perceived ethics from 2022–2023. That makes thought leadership a huge opportunity especially when connected to purpose-driven messaging or leadership values aligned with what 63% of consumers care about: brands that reflect their beliefs.

Embrace Digital PR Completely with Product Reviews

Digital-first PR teams stay focused on future-proof solutions, not shortcuts. Google actively adjusts against “work-around” tactics, so brands should align with the system instead of trying to manipulate it.

Influencer trust continues to decline, and many early Instagram-heavy strategies failed due to poor execution. Meanwhile, Gen Z doesn’t trust social media but they use social platforms to find news. And they trust:

Cable/network news (49%)
Online-only news sites (52%)

These outlets constantly need fresh content—and product reviews drive both traffic and revenue (via affiliate programs). For PR, this is a win-win.

A smart digital PR strategy blends:

hero product reviews
gift-guide inclusion
search-aligned earned content

This is one of the most efficient ways to stretch consumer-product PR budgets.

How Digital PR and Earned Media Work Together

Working alongside journalists to support their objectives is and always will be the objective of media relations. Today’s savvy media relations teams understand how to help digitally savvy online news outlets so that their content surfaces on Google (and AI-driven search like Chat GPT). It goes beyond keywords into the deep algorithm that is Google’s search engine. Direct-to-consumer brands can continue to grow by leveraging Google’s search and trust algorithm for themselves, even within their consumer product PR campaigns. And that search engine is leaning heavily into authority and trust. There are millions of ways to signal that your brand is trustworthy, but one of the most attainable is aligning with Google’s most trusted sources, and that’s where consumer product PR can make the biggest impact.

Upstart consumer brands can become hypergrowth consumer brands by investing in very defined strategic PR initiatives. Connect with us today to learn more about our laser-focused PR programs for ambitious brands.