The problem is not the product. It is the experience around it. And for premium brands, that distinction has never mattered more.
Something has shifted in how consumers relate to the brands they buy from. Not dramatically, not overnight, but in the quiet, compounding way that structural changes tend to move. And by the time most brands notice it in their numbers, the gap between where they are and where they need to be has already grown wider than a single campaign can close.
The EY State of Consumer Products Report 2025 gives this shift a precise frame. According to the EY State of Consumer Products Report 2025, revenue growth across the 322 largest consumer products companies dropped from 12.2% in 2022 to just 0.4% in 2024. The same report found that 83% of consumers want better quality from brands, while 42% now believe product improvements are simply cost-cutting exercises. Consumer trust is not being lost at the point of product. It is being lost at every touchpoint where a brand either proves, or fails to prove, that it is worth the price on the label.
For premium brands, that is an urgent problem. Because premium is not a product category. It is a belief system. And belief is built or broken in the moments between discovery and purchase; moments that, for most consumers today, happen entirely on a mobile screen.
1. The Brand Experience Is Now the Brand
There was a time when brand equity lived primarily in advertising. In the campaign, the ambassador, the story told at scale through paid media. The product experience came later, after the sale.
That sequence has inverted.
Today, the digital experience is where brand equity is tested in real time, visit by visit, scroll by scroll, page load by page load. A consumer who arrives at a premium brand's website carrying genuine intent - who has discovered the brand through social, through word of mouth, through an AI-generated answer to a question they were already asking - will make a trust decision within seconds. Not about the product. About the brand.
A slow page communicates something. A search bar that returns nothing communicates something. A checkout process with six steps and no visible returns policy communicates something. None of those things say premium. And in a market where the consumer has never had more alternatives and less patience, those signals are enough to end the relationship before it begins.
In one recent mobile audit for a globally recognised premium lifestyle brand, we found 17.5 million product page views and two million add-to-carts. That represented an 88% drop-off at one of the most critical moments in the purchase journey.
Not a traffic problem. Not a brand awareness problem. A trust gap; built across a dozen small failures that, taken individually, seemed minor, and taken together, were catastrophic.
2. What Consumers Are Actually Looking For
The consumer who shops premium today is not the same consumer who shopped premium a decade ago. They are younger, more research-driven and significantly more sceptical. They have grown up with digital experiences that are fast, personalised and frictionless. They do not accept a substandard digital experience as the price of buying a premium product. They interpret it as evidence that the brand does not value them enough to get it right.
The EY research is precise on this point. Consumers in this segment expect sharper value, clearer differentiation and a sense that the brand actually sees them as an individual rather than a transaction. In the era of personalised marketing, they want to feel seen, heard and appreciated.
What does that look like in practice?
It looks like a product page that loads in under two seconds. A search experience that anticipates what they are looking for. A product detail page that gives them the confidence to buy, with sizing guidance, trust signals and visual depth - rather than simply the option to. A loyalty programme that offers something genuinely different from the guest experience, not just a points balance. A site that tells the brand story with the same conviction the brand applies to its product design.
These are not complex demands. They are the minimum conditions for a premium brand to be taken seriously by a premium consumer.
3. The AI Dimension Most Brands Are Missing
There is a layer to this conversation that most brand teams are not yet treating with the urgency it deserves.
AI search is reshaping discovery. When a consumer asks an AI tool which running shoe is best for long-distance road running, or which lifestyle brand is worth the premium, the answer they receive is drawn from the brand's structured content, its editorial authority and the quality of its digital signals. The brand with the richest, most credible, most structured digital presence wins that recommendation. The brand with thin content and technical debt does not.
The premium lifestyle brand we audited had 82% positive AI sentiment - the highest in its category. It held the number one share of voice in AI-generated answers about its space. And yet AI was driving only around 1% of purchase intent.
The authority was real. The site was not built to convert it.
That is the hidden cost of the digital gap for premium brands right now. It is not only the direct revenue lost to slow pages and broken journeys. It is the compounding loss of brand authority in a discovery landscape that is restructuring itself around digital signals the brand is not yet sending clearly enough.
1. Two Paths Available to Premium Brands
EY frames the strategic choice available to consumer brands right now in terms that resonate far beyond the FMCG sector they were primarily studying.
The first path is what they call Defensive Scale. Protecting what exists through promotional activity, discounting, operational efficiency. It is the path of least resistance and, as the data makes increasingly clear, the path toward a diminishing position in a market that has moved on.
The second path is Disruptive Optimism. The deliberate choice to act as though the brand still has something extraordinary to offer, and to build the experiences that prove it. Not louder. Not bigger. More intentional.
Every premium brand sits somewhere on that spectrum. The ones choosing Disruptive Optimism are not necessarily spending more. They are spending with more clarity about what the consumer actually needs from them and building backwards from that clarity to every digital decision they make.
The brands choosing Defensive Scale are running promotional campaigns to drive traffic to experiences that are not compelling enough to convert it. The economics of that strategy only become harder to defend.
2. What the Gap Is Actually Costing
The gap between a good digital experience and a premium one is not abstract. It is quantifiable - and for most premium brands, it is significantly larger than their teams have been asked to confront.
Every second of unnecessary page load time costs approximately 7% in conversion. Retail sits at the bottom of every mobile opt-in benchmark, with the lowest performing apps seeing iOS opt-in floors of just 18.1%. This is being driven almost entirely by generic promotional messaging that offers no personalisation and no reason to engage. According to Airship’s 2026 benchmark analysis, which examined more than 681 billion push notifications, brands using zero-party data, meaning preferences customers explicitly share, saw an 82% lift in direct open rates compared with brands relying on inferred data.
The consumer who has told a brand what they want, and receives a communication precisely calibrated to that preference, is not the same commercial proposition as the consumer who receives a generic sale notification. One is the beginning of a relationship. The other is noise that will eventually push them to a competitor who listened.
For premium brands, the cost of that gap accumulates across every visit, every abandoned cart, every loyalty programme that gave no compelling reason to join, every AI answer that cited a competitor because their digital foundation was built to be cited and yours was not.
3. The Audit as a Strategic Starting Point
The brands that close this gap do not start with a rebrand or a platform migration. They start with an honest diagnosis.
A structured digital audit: one that maps technical performance, user journey, content quality, SEO and AI readiness, and conversion architecture together rather than in isolation, gives brand and marketing leadership the clarity to make decisions that actually compound. Not a list of things to fix. A clear-eyed account of what the brand's digital experience is communicating right now, and a sequenced roadmap for making it say something worth hearing.
The premium brands that will lead their categories in the next three years are not the ones with the largest media budgets or the most ambitious campaign calendars. They are the ones who understood, clearly and early, that the digital experience is where brand belief is built in 2026. And who had the conviction to build accordingly.
The gap between good and premium digital is a strategic choice. For most brands, the first step is not another campaign. It is a clear audit of where the digital experience is weakening trust, slowing conversion, or failing to translate brand authority into commercial intent.
Sources:
EY State of Consumer Products Report: Reclaiming Relevance, 2025
Airship Mobile App Push Notification Benchmarks for 2026
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