How brands can grow share in 2026

Build memory structures faster to combat the attention deficit

So, to grow market share you need to grow sales from new or current customers. For most purchases, the battle begins long before a customer hands over their hard-earned money for your goods or services. If share is mostly won in people’s heads before it’s won at shelf, then your job is to make your brand easier to notice, recognise, and remember. That means two things working together: emotionally engaging creative (so it gets encoded in their brains) and distinctive brand assets used relentlessly (so it gets attributed to you) – read more about great examples of these in our latest Sports Marketing Playbook.

Attention will continue to be fragmented in 2026 with the continued explosion of AI mediocrity flooding channels with a sea of cheap creative. Making your message standout and be remembered has never been harder and you need to be using everything at your disposal to make sure your brand is remembered – we wrote about a few ways of doing this on a budget last year which still hold true.

Plan content, social, and CRM for both long and short-term growth

In the last decade, channel strategies have been creeping towards the performance end of the funnel with many marketers chasing immediate ROI to prove progress. While hugely important, any successful channel mix needs a balance of long-term and short-term marketing focus to be optimal. What’s changing now is how brands should use channels – particularly content, social and CRM to grow share.

In social strategy in 2026, content creators aren’t only there to shift discount codes; they’re increasingly powerful at building the brand while still contributing to sales. New IPA analysis of a cross-industry Influencer Database (220 campaigns, £133m spend) found influencer marketing’s short-term ROI index is comparable to the all-channel average, while long-term effects are exceptionally strong (including a standout long-term multiplier).

Meanwhile, CRM which has always been known to be strong in driving action in your warm customer base – but, more recently, there has been growing evidence that it can also be used to build long term brand affinity and is best used to both grow long and term KPIs to give the more ROI and ultimately help win share.

This chart from System1 and The Effies in 2025 shows how touchpoints can be most effective and building future demand or converting current demand:

Defend margin with brand-led pricing power

When chasing growth and looking to steal a sale from a competitor, giving away margin through promotion can lead a brand into a race to the bottom. Share won on promo is share you “rent”; share won on perceived value is share you can bank.

The results of the recent IPA Grand Prix-winning paper from McCain show that, by the end of a 10-year campaign, McCain’s investment in brand building had created an effect on the brand’s pricing roughly five times bigger than the effect on its sales volumes. This reminds us that investment in your brand and brand building isn’t just about selling volume to gain share, but also pricing power. Strengthening or maintaining position during periods of cost inflation or buying time to recover from disruptive innovation by a competitor. If you want to defend a premium price point, you must lead with brand-led investment.

Fight on your own terms

What’s crucial is that whatever tactics you employ to win share is something that fits your brand and your position in the market. What works for new, smaller brands can be disastrous when copied by bigger players.

If you’re a big brand, don’t get tempted into “guerrilla” behaviour; hyper-local, short-term, performance-heavy tactics; just because challengers look like they’re growing faster. In doing so, leaders trade away their real advantage: scale, fame-building media, and the kind of broad brand-building that sustains penetration and pricing power.

Meanwhile, smaller brands should lean into disruptive, asymmetric tactics (creators, disruptive social, DTC, earned attention) because it’s affordable and can convert early pockets of demand, especially up to a point, before you need to invest further in brand to maintain growth.

The market share implication is big brands win share by behaving like big brands (broad reach + consistency + fame), and small brands win share by behaving like small brands (sharp provocation + speed + disruption), then graduating their mix as they scale. This will become more important in 2026 because the tools of disruption are cheaper and more abundant (AI-assisted content, creators, performance media, retail media), so it’s easier than ever for big brands to get dragged into a thousand tactical skirmishes and easier than ever for small brands to create attention spikes; the brands that grow share will be the ones that resist imitation and choose the battlefield that suits their size and strengths.

Be consistent and repetitive

For marketers, the temptation to bring something new to their business and C-suite can be overwhelming. But, it’s important to remember that consistency is more powerful with customers than constant reinvention. A recognisable platform and repeatable brand codes and distinctive brand assets reduce the cost of creating demand, and make every new execution work harder driving penetration and, over time, share. IPA research on creative consistency (using IPA Databank evidence) shows the most consistent brands generate materially more very large business effects, including market share gain. The key is working with creative partners who can turn your positioning into consistent, attention-grabbing brand activation.

Refresh your positioning, not just the logo

If market share growth is the goal, sometimes communications isn’t the answer at all; it’s what the brand stands for and delivers (product, pricing architecture, positioning, purpose and value proposition). A smart brand refresh is really a relevant way of upgrading your appeal: tightening who you’re for, what need you solve, and why you’re worth choosing; then aligning the whole offer so it’s easier to buy and harder to swap. Brands that grow are ones that make themselves easier to choose and offer real value to a customer – brands simplify choice, products widen it.

As we work our way through a post-inflationary economy and ‘value reset’, brands that don’t sharpen their story and value proposition can get trapped in promo-and-price wars. Add in new entrants taking disproportionate incremental growth (even from tiny share bases), and the case for revisiting positioning toward a more defensible, lucrative space becomes even more important in 2026 than ever before.

Thanks for making it this far, here’s a quick recap on how you can grow share in 2026:

• Build memory structures faster to combat the attention deficit
• Plan content, social and CRM for both long, and short-term growth
• Defend margin with brand-led pricing power
• Fight on your own terms
• Be consistent and repetitive
• Refresh your positioning, not just the logo

So, growing share in 2026 doesn’t have to mean breaking the budget or throwing out 2025’s strategy, it’s just about setting your brand up in the best way to optimise, race your strengths and stand out from your competition.

Looking to grow share in 2026? We help brands build distinctive positioning and turn it into brand-led campaigns that drive long-term growth. Get in touch with our Head of Strategy, Nick, or contact saintnicks here – let’s start collaborating.