The End of Incrementalism: Why Consumer Brands Must Stop Selling and Start Serving
You build awareness, dominate retail, then iterate products. That's been the standard way to brand and sell to consumers - for decades.
But times have changed. How do you respond?
We posed the question to Ry Luikens , who works with the world's largest brands.
The time to start is now. Enjoy.
By Elke Boogert, Mach49 Managing Editor
The End of Incrementalism: Why Consumer Brands Must Stop Selling and Start Serving
By Ry Luikens , Co-Founder, Consumer Brand Ventures at Mach49
The business landscape is littered with cautionary tales from large consumer brands that optimize what exists, instead of finding out what’s emerging. Here are three principles for staying on the offense and creating new value with your brand.
In boardrooms across the world, executives celebrate victories that will soon become irrelevant. A 3% uptick in household penetration. A modest gain in shelf space. A small decrease in customer acquisition cost.
This is the seductive lie of incrementalism: the belief that small, continuous improvements will somehow compound into lasting competitive advantage. My take? Incrementalism won't just fail to save brands. It's actively killing them. Here is how I know.
For decades, the following approach defined success: You build awareness, dominate retail, iterate products, rinse and repeat. The machine was predictable, and the quarterly returns reliable.
How Good Companies Die Slowly
The true danger of incrementalism isn't just diminishing returns. It's strategic blindness. While you're optimizing what exists, you're missing what's emerging. The business landscape is littered with cautionary tales. Kodak didn't fail because they couldn't make better film - they failed because they couldn't imagine a world where memories existed without it. Blockbuster didn't collapse because their late fees were too high - they collapsed because they couldn't envision entertainment without physical distribution. Toys "R" Us didn't disappear because their stores weren't efficient - they went bust because they couldn't see beyond the big-box model. In the meantime, play itself was redefined.
They were all the inevitable result of corporate cultures that prioritized optimization over reinvention.
Meanwhile, brands that have escaped the incrementalism trap have achieved exponential growth by fundamentally reimagining their role in consumers' lives. Like Netflix, who transformed from a DVD rental service to a global entertainment studio. Or LEGO, which evolved from plastic bricks to a transmedia empire. Even Adobe, which pivoted from selling boxed software to building a creative cloud. What these transformations share isn't better products. They showcase a fundamentally new understanding of who they serve and how they serve them. In other words:?
“Meaningful growth doesn't come from better understanding your current customers—it comes from identifying and serving the communities that will shape tomorrow's markets.” Shane Ginsberg, Chief Brand Officer, Mach49
This shift - from inside-out to outside-in strategy - is what we call the Culture-to-Commerce Imperative. It demands that brands stop thinking like product companies and start thinking like community platforms.
If you run a brand that targets consumers, what can you do? How can you turn this ship around?
We've identified three principles that separate tomorrow's category creators from today's category defenders.?
1. Communities > Demographics
Traditional segmentation is dead. Age, income, geography - these markers have become increasingly irrelevant in a world where passion, purpose, and shared values create stronger bonds than demographic similarities.
Red Bull understood this early- investing over $2 billion annually into content and events that serve communities united by a pursuit of boundary-pushing experiences—from extreme sports to music to gaming. Their content studio creates documentaries and feature films that never mention their product. This isn't a marketing strategy. It's a fundamentally different business model built around serving communities rather than selling to consumers.
The right question is: 'What communities could we authentically serve?
2. Relevance > Reach
In an attention economy, the scarcest resource isn't media impressions - it's meaningful engagement. Brands that matter deeply to specific communities can create value in ways that brands with mere visibility cannot.
Patagonia exemplifies this principle. Their famous "Don't Buy This Jacket" campaign didn't reduce sales - it increased them by deepening relevance with their core communities. Their decision to restructure as a company owned by a climate-focused trust wasn't just purpose-washing - it was aligning their entire business model with the values of the communities they serve.
The most important metric is no longer "How many people know us?" but "How much do we matter to the people who matter most?"
3. Service > Selling
And the most powerful question a brand can ask isn't "What else can we sell?" but "How can we be of greater service?"
When Fender realized that 90% of new guitar players quit within a year, they didn’t respond with incremental product tweaks. Instead, they built Fender Play: a digital learning platform built to guide aspiring musicians. This service-first approach didn’t just reduce abandonment - it transformed Fender's relationship with an entire generation of players, turning a product into a platform and transactions into lifelong relationships.
The new KPI isn’t 'Share of wallet' - it’s 'Share of life,' measuring how essential your brand is to the communities it serves.
Oh Ry, you’ll say. I know exactly how my Board will respond when I tell them this.
I get it.
When we first present these ideas to leadership teams, the reaction is predictable. Polite skepticism tinged with defensiveness.
"This sounds like brand building, not growth strategy."
Or,
"We need to sell more products, not build a movement."
Or,
"Our shareholders want results this quarter, not relevance next year."
But then something transformative happens?
As we map the communities that will shape their category's future - not through traditional market research, but through socio-graphic analysis that reveals the cultural currents driving behavior change - leaders start seeing the opportunities their conventional thinking had missed.
One of our luxury fashion clients transformed their sustainability narrative from obligation to aspiration - shifting from "saving the planet" to "celebrating the future." This subtle but powerful reframing didn't just improve brand perception. It created a platform for product innovation that traditional sustainability initiatives couldn't have supported.
And a global spirits brand discovered that by focusing less on product attributes and more on creating inclusive nightlife experiences, they could not only accelerate growth in core markets but identify venture-scale opportunities that traditional innovation processes had missed entirely.
This is the power of the Culture-to-Commerce approach: it doesn't just drive incremental growth. It reveals entirely new vectors of value.
The Future Belongs to Brands That Serve
In a marketplace where community influence has replaced corporate messaging as the primary driver of consumer choice, the brands that will thrive aren't those with the biggest budgets or the most efficient operations - they're those that serve communities with purpose and authenticity.
The future belongs to brands that can answer one simple question:
This isn't just a strategic pivot. It's an existential choice. And for those consumer brands willing to make it, the rewards extend far beyond quarterly results. They include the most valuable currency in business today: lasting relevance in a world of constant change.
The death of incrementalism isn’t a distant threat. It’s already claiming victims. And the brands that survive won’t be the ones that sell best - they’ll be the ones that serve most authentically.
Will your brand survive the death of incrementalism?
RY LUIKENS is co-founder of the Consumer Brand Ventures group at Mach49, where he helps brands identify growth opportunities at the intersection of culture, technology, and community. With experience spanning venture building, creative strategy, and cultural foresight - as well as a background in photojournalism covering cultural transformation in developing markets - Ry specializes in transforming established brand equity into venture-scale growth opportunities.