Hello, and welcome back to Inc.'s 1 Smart Business Story. Consumers are getting harder to fool. Allison Ellsworth, who turned the beverage brand Poppi into a $1.95 billion brand, says the viral playbook that made her famous is already dead. So what actually works in 2026? Ellsworth says it has nothing to do with celebrities or big budgets. In a new report, the Poppi founder, along with Kim Chappel, chief brand officer at Bobbie, reveal the seven rules rewriting modern marketing (including why a dad at a Chili's with 900 followers outperformed every paid campaign they ran).

In this article you’ll learn:

BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER

Allison Ellsworth built Poppi into a $1.95 billion soda brand by persuading legions of young women to buy her drinks, but after eight years of marketing her colorful cans, the co-founder has noticed a shift in shoppers’ mindset. 

“Consumers are smarter. They’re so sick of being sold to,” Ellsworth tells Inc. “Especially when it comes to influencers and creators and celebrities.”

The growth playbooks that worked two years ago no longer do. Consumers can sniff out the paid ads and endorsements on their social media feeds. Changes in algorithms have made going viral on a massive scale much harder, if not impossible. “My first viral video has 250 million views,” says Ellsworth. “That is absolutely not going to happen anymore.”

That means founders need to think differently about how their brands can break through. To help give entrepreneurs the tools to do that, Ellsworth teamed up with Kim Chappell, the chief brand officer of Bobbie, an infant formula brand also known for its creative marketing. The executives released a new report called “The State of Brand 2026: The Ultimate Guide to Attaining Cultural Relevance and Winning Consumers,” which was co-authored with Bruno Solari, founder and CEO of SolComms, and Kylee Kaetzel, vice president of consumer at the New York City-based public relations agency. 

Here are the new marketing rules that Ellsworth and Chappell think brands should follow in 2026, including why they think this will be the year of the “no-name creator.”

Brands need to embrace a marketing strategy that is more reactive than planned. That means paying attention to the latest pop culture trends and viral memes.

“Brands need to move fast at the speed of culture, and that has never been more important,” says Chappell. “Brands that start planning their next ad campaign eight months out, at that point, I really feel like you’re crossing your fingers and wishing on a prayer for relevancy.”

At Poppi, Ellsworth called this their 80/20 rule. “Eighty percent of everything was planned, and 20 percent was just what is culturally relevant,” she says.

Unplanned opportunities will inevitably come up, and companies need extra cash set aside to be able to take advantage when those moments do happen. Think of it as an emergency culture fund. 

For Bobbie, that happened when the formula company received a cold email from Cardi B’s team last fall. The Grammy-winning rapper was a customer herself and wanted to work with the brand. Within two weeks, Bobbie’s 18-person brand marketing team launched a campaign featuring Cardi B as their new chief confidence officer. The ads, which went live one month after Cardi B had been found not guilty of assault in a trial that had taken over social media, included the artist cheekily telling other moms they were “not guilty” for feeding their babies formula. 

Poppi also fielded similar last-minute celebrity requests. Chappell Roan wanted Poppi at her birthday party this weekend. The Kardashians wanted Poppi at their infamous annual Christmas party. That’s when you pull out the “black ops budget,” says Ellsworth

When your brand does land a celebrity moment like this, don’t fall into the trap of thinking your marketing team needs to “squeeze it for as long as possible” and make the moment evergreen, says Chappell, even if that feels like the “responsible thing to do with your marketing dollars.” 

Content shelf lives are shorter. Consumers are feeling burnt out and tuning out the things they see too much on repeat. 

“Something that five years ago could have lasted you seven to eight months,” says Chappell, “now it’s more like four to five, just because people are so voracious in their consumption of social content.”

Consumers want to see quality content, and that means investing in videographers, editors, copywriters, and creatives, says Ellsworth. “Highly produced content was a big no-no three years ago. Now we’re starting to see it come back,” she adds. 

This will be the year of the “no-name no-follower creator,” Chappell predicts. Normal people on social media “can carry and lift a brand,” she adds. That means founders need to build their own band of nano- and micro-creators without blue check marks or endorsement deals by finding people organically using your product on social media. Bobbie found one such dad, who posted a video of him feeding his baby at a Chili’s while his daughter sang a Bobbie jingle. He had fewer than 1,000 followers, but the video quickly became one of the brand’s best-performing pieces of organic content, racking up thousands of saves and hundreds of comments. 

When you do choose to work with creators, don’t give them a strict script or a long checklist of points to hit. Poppi learned that the hard way when it launched a campaign about “bringing soda back” in 2023. The effort flopped, says Ellsworth.

Now, the brand gives creators three points to hit about the soda’s ingredients in their posts and lets them fill in the rest of the blanks. “We allow those creators to be themselves,” says Ellsworth. 

One of their biggest takeaways for brands this year: Know what you stand for—or don’t—and stick to that message. Craft campaigns that will appeal to the majority of your customers, knowing that some people will always find fault with them. That’s OK. Provoking controversy is not a problem. Caving to small pockets of criticism is.

Set aside those fears about upsetting people, and be comfortable saying bold things that align with your brand, says Chappell. 

“There’s no shortage of haters in this world, keyboard warriors, online trolls,” she says. “If you’re building a bold, disruptive brand, you have to be OK with not pleasing everybody. … Put your neck out for something.”