Social Commerce Strategies Help Challenger Brands Grow

A new product can take off on social before most shoppers know the brand exists. A founder posts from the factory, and a creator shows how the product works. People start asking where they can buy it, search activity picks up, and a retail buyer notices. Within weeks, a small brand can be in the spotlight.

That speed changes the job for challenger brands. Social can help you build awareness and learn what people want and what makes them ready to buy.

GWI's brand discovery research across 54 markets puts search engines, television ads, word of mouth, and social ads as top brand discovery sources. For challenger brands, social can introduce your product and help shoppers decide whether it's worth a closer look.

Use Social as an Early Read on Demand

Useful social signals often show up before the sale. People repeat a product benefit in comments. Searches climb around a new phrase. A founder's simple explanation beats a polished ad. A demo gets shared a lot because it answers a question people had.

Behave is a good example. Modern Retail reported the low-sugar gummy brand was under serious cash pressure when its founders leaned into TikTok Shop. Its Super Sour Skulls launch sold out in three days, and the company said the attention helped support a Target launch across nearly 2,000 stores. The brand also read thousands of customer comments and used that feedback to refine packaging and marketing.

Social can reveal demand, language, and objections early enough to shape the next decision, which might be a creative brief, a product page, a retail pitch, or a media test.

Make the Product Easy to Understand

Some challenger brands have to teach the market before they can sell products. If the category is new, unfamiliar, or easy to misunderstand, a pack shot won't do enough on its own. Social gives brands room to explain the product in plain language, over and over, through different people and formats.

Poppi built much of its early momentum that way. Prebiotic soda wasn't a familiar idea for a mass audience, so the brand used social to explain the category in everyday terms and show how this drink fits into people's routines. When PepsiCo described its agreement to acquire Poppi, it pointed to the brand's role in a fast-growing functional soda space shaped by changing consumer preferences.

Medicube offers a similar lesson in beauty. Vogue Business reported the Seoul-based skincare and beauty-tech brand used TikTok to demonstrate products such as Zero Pore Pads and Age-R devices, leaning into visible results and peer explanation. The brand also built a large TikTok Shop affiliate network and expanded into Ulta stores in the U.S. For products that need explanation, social can shorten the learning curve.

Give People a Reason to Join In

Social works even better when the audience has a role. e.l.f. Cosmetics proved the scale of that idea with #eyeslipsface, a TikTok challenge built around an original song. The company said the campaign generated more than one billion views and more than 400,000 user-created videos.

Participation changes how the creative is developed. A brand doesn't have to produce every asset itself. It just needs an easily understood idea flexible enough for people to make their own, and useful enough to pass along.

For challenger brands, user-generated content (UGC) can serve them even better than polished ads. A repeatable social idea produces many versions of the same concept, and each one shows what people find useful, funny, surprising, or worth sharing. And those reactions can inform the next round of content and paid activation.

Plan for the Purchase Path People Take

Social commerce is growing, but the transaction doesn't always happen where discovery starts. A forecast from eMarketer expects U.S. social commerce sales to pass $100 billion, with TikTok and Instagram both playing major roles for social buyers. TikTok Shop has also seen rapid U.S. sales growth, according to NielsenIQ data cited in an eMarketer analysis.

But social commerce growth can take many paths. Someone may discover a product on TikTok, compare it on a retailer site, and buy it in store. Another person may see an Instagram Reel, search the brand later, and purchase through Amazon. The platform starts the journey, but brands still have to capture the sale wherever the shopper acts.

That's why social needs to connect with search, retailer media, product pages, promotions, and store execution. Goodway Group's Connected Commerce approach treats those pieces as one system, with commerce, connection, and consulting working toward business outcomes. Social can create the signal, but the rest of the system has to be ready for it.

Answer the Questions Holding Shoppers Back

Shoppers want validation before they buy, and social conversation can provide it: Reviews, comments, demonstrations, and side-by-side comparisons can answer questions an awareness ad simply can’t. They also show whether the product proposition makes sense outside the brand's own language.

Any insights gained should be reflected in the media plan. Goodway Group's media activation work connects paid social, search, programmatic, and commerce media so teams can respond across channels. Turn audience feedback into a decision and then test whether that decision improves the business result.

Prove What Social Changed

Social platforms can report views, clicks, purchases, and attributed revenue with impressive precision inside their own walls. Yet challenger brands still need to know what happened outside them.

A campaign may lift retail sales without producing a trackable social checkout. It may increase branded search before shoppers buy somewhere else. Or it may drive trials that fade quickly or bring in new customers who come back. Those are different business outcomes, and they need a broader measurement view.

Goodway Group's Connected Commerce measurement emphasizes incremental revenue, new-to-brand growth, store traffic, transactions, and more, with channel metrics serving as evidence rather than the final answer. The question is simple: did the social investment create enough new demand to justify the next dollar?

Turn Attention Into a Growth System

Challenger brands have an advantage with social because the feedback loop can move fast. A product earns attention, the brand sees what people respond to, and the next decision can follow while interest is still building.

But you shouldn’t treat social as a stand-alone content engine. Use it to introduce your product, learn from real consumer response, create participation, connect discovery to commerce, and measure the sales effect. Behave shows how TikTok Shop attention can support a retail story. Poppi shows how social can make a new category easier to understand. Medicube shows how demonstration and social commerce can help a brand move into mainstream retail.

Connected Commerce is how those signals become more useful across your business. When media activation, data, commerce, creative, audience strategy, and measurement work together, brands can see where demand is forming and make a smarter call on what to do next.

Social can get people interested, but the growth comes from knowing what to do with that interest once you capture it. Reach out to us to learn how to best connect social signals, commerce media, and measurement so your brand can turn interest into sales you can see.

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