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Whether you are growing a wholesale channel, building a direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand, or doing both at the same time, there is one thing that sits at the heart of every food and drink marketing strategy in 2026: how your audiences find you.
And that has fundamentally changed.
The platforms, the behaviours, the sequence of touchpoints that lead someone from first awareness to purchase decision: none of it looks the way it did three years ago. For food and drink marketers, understanding this shift is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation on which every other strategic decision about budget, channel, and content needs to be built.
The Old Model and Why it No Longer Holds
For years, the dominant mental model for marketing in food and drink looked something like this. You invested in awareness through above-the-line activity or paid social. You supported that with a website optimised for search. Buyers or consumers found you, engaged with your content, and eventually converted. The journey was broadly linear, and the channels were broadly separate.
That model made sense when audiences behaved in predictable, sequential ways. It no longer does.
Today, a wholesale buyer researching a new supplier does not follow a clean path from awareness to consideration to decision. They see a mention in a LinkedIn post, ask ChatGPT a follow-up question, watch a short video on Instagram, search on Google to validate what they have found, read two or three articles, and then finally arrive at your website. Sometimes in that order. Often not.
A consumer discovering a new food or drink brand follows an equally fragmented path. They encounter a product on TikTok, scroll past it twice before it registers, search for reviews, find it on a retailer site, abandon the page, and eventually convert after seeing a targeted ad three days later.
The journey is non-linear, cross-platform, and driven by intent signals that shift at every stage. If your marketing strategy is still built around a linear funnel, it is not built around how your audiences actually behave.
Four Modes of Behaviour Have Replaced the Funnel
The most useful framework for understanding how modern buyers and consumers navigate discovery and purchase is not a funnel at all. It is a set of four distinct behavioural modes that people move between, often within a single session, and certainly across a single decision journey.
- Search: the active pursuit of answers, validation, and options. This happens on Google, on AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, on YouTube, and increasingly on retailer platforms and social search.
- Scroll: passive consumption of content across social platforms. This is where brand awareness is built, where preferences begin to form, and where the seed of a purchase decision is often first planted, for both trade buyers and consumers.
- Shop: active purchase behaviour across e-commerce platforms, retailer sites, and direct brand channels. This is where the decision converts, and where search and scroll activity either pays off or fails to close.
- Stream: the consumption of long-form content including podcasts, video, and webinars. This is where deeper trust is built and where both B2B buyers and consumers spend increasing amounts of their attention, particularly in the research phase of a significant decision.
For food and drink brands, the strategic question is not which of these modes matters most. All four matter. The question is whether your marketing strategy is built to reach your audiences across all four, in the right way, with the right content, at the right moment.
Why Brand Investment is the Foundation of All Of It
Here is where many food and drink businesses underestimate the connection between their channel strategy and their brand strategy. Whether you are selling into wholesale accounts or selling direct to consumers, brand is what makes every channel work harder.
A trade buyer who already recognises your brand converts faster, negotiates less aggressively, and is more likely to give your product prime positioning. A consumer who has encountered your brand across scroll and stream is more likely to click your search result, more likely to choose your product on a retailer shelf, and more likely to become a repeat buyer.
Brand awareness does not sit above the funnel anymore. It is woven through every mode of behaviour. The food and drink businesses that are growing most consistently in 2026 are those that have stopped treating brand investment and performance marketing as separate budget lines, and started treating them as parts of the same system.
Organic search engine optimisation (SEO) sits at the centre of that system. It is the channel where brand authority is tested and proven. When a buyer searches for a category, you operate in and your brand does not appear, that is not a search problem. It is a brand problem. When a consumer searches for a product like yours and finds a competitor instead, that is lost revenue that your brand investment failed to protect.
What This Means for Your Marketing Strategy
The food and drink marketers who are getting the best return from their budgets in 2026 are those who have done three things. They have mapped how their specific audiences, whether trade buyers, consumers, or both, actually move across search, scroll, shop and stream. They have aligned their content and channel strategy to show up at each of those moments. And they have invested in organic search as the connective tissue that ties all of it together.
This is exactly the kind of strategic advisory work we do at POLARIS. We work with food and drink businesses to understand how their audiences behave, identify where their current strategy has gaps, and build organic search campaigns that drive both brand performance and commercial results.
If you want to understand how your current marketing strategy maps against the way your audiences are actually behaving, our strategy playbook sets out the framework we use with every client we work with. It is a practical guide to navigating the shift from the old linear model to the four-mode reality of 2026.
