How to Escape the Race to the Bottom:
Building scalable, competitive advantage using modern digital experiences
- Article
- 5 MIN READ
- Aug 7, 2025
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Dennis ClausStrategy Consultant
In a world where increased cost-of-living is front of mind for consumers, low-involvement and commodity products are facing a common challenge: they’ve become trapped in a race to the bottom, where price cuts and promotional discounts dominate.
This is especially true in the world of basic groceries, where economic uncertainty is rising. 85% of global consumers are concerned about increasing grocery costs. As a result, brand loyalty is falling by the wayside — with the knock-on effect being that digital experiences are becoming purely transactional, and brands are caught in a price and promo war that simply isn’t sustainable.
Instead, executives should look at their digital ecosystem — websites, apps, integrations, commerce platforms, content management, and overarching tech stack — and ask themselves: is this designed and built to accelerate our business goals? Will this help me outpace our competitors, and win over more customers in more efficient ways?
Put simply, the constant race to beat prices or promotions is unsustainable. It drains time, resources — and most importantly, limits a brand’s ability to develop long-term, meaningful connections with consumers. Thankfully, modern digital experiences offer a way to escape this race. When they are built as a holistic operating system across strategy, experience, and technology, they offer opportunities for brands to get ahead at scale:
Meaningful personalisation (based on insights, not just data points)
Experience as a distinctive brand asset (not just generic websites)
Faster speed-to-market (not the grind of getting new promos, offers, and content live).
Drive insights and personalisation
For brands in the grocery sector, a generic ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will always fall short. Catering to multiple dietary preferences and restrictions — whether lifestyle-based (vegan, keto, pescatarian), or medical (allergies, intolerances) — requires more nuance. Messaging, product recommendations, and content type should all be considerate of the individual.
Brands can leverage modern technology, designed to capture and activate data, to navigate this minefield. Rather than simply collecting data points en masse, new AI tools can harvest actionable insights — something which Apply Digital helped Kraft Heinz unlock through Ai.Oli, an AI chatbot.
Ai.Oli turned generic recipes that would traditionally only capture basic flavour interest data points, into an interactive experience. The chatbot was supported by an AI segmentation model, which extracted 140 consumer attributes — double the number that was historically available — at an accuracy rate of 90%.
Cultivate distinctive brand assets
Digital stagnation has become commonplace across the food and beverage sector. Each website follows a cookie-cutter template, making differentiation almost impossible. SEO-led content is preferred to creative storytelling; any original messaging has been replaced by price, health claims, and sustainability.
Many brands have forgotten that your digital experience should be a distinctive brand asset in its own right. The sea of sameness is confirmation of this sad truth. What’s more, this is a problem that extends beyond category lines. As of 2023, only 15% of brand assets were considered “truly distinctive”.
Digital experiences shouldn’t just share information; they should build a brand. Brands can make this a reality by pairing a modern content management system (CMS) with a strong strategic insight, such as identifying what increases customer relevance. Subsequently, a powerful design system can harness these learnings to achieve visual differentiation.
Take Oatly. Its insight was that customers embrace rule rebellion — they’re actively searching for experiences that “break the norm.” The oat milk brand capitalised on this knowledge by delivering content in a branded way, via its ‘Look Book,’ a horizontal scrolling feature that allows users to explore a hub of recipes, both traditional and unconventional. Oatly balances functionality with distinctiveness, which is the catalyst for cutting through the noise.
Cultivate distinctive brand assets
Efficiency will always be front-of-mind for brands. Whether launching seasonal products, limited-time promotions, or reactive marketing campaigns — agility is the catalyst for success. However, this speed must be balanced with cost efficiency.
A modern digital ecosystem can help brands successfully toe this line. By introducing automation into the mix, and replacing legacy systems with sophisticated tools, brands can reduce time-to-market for campaigns and product launches — without having to sacrifice quality.
Case in point: Parkland, one of North America’s leading fuel and retail brands, identified it wasn’t converting physical traffic into digital engagement. The leading cause for this disconnection — a fragmented tech stack.
To resolve this, Apply Digital implemented a three-step plan. A strategic-led enhancement of Journie (the brand’s loyalty program), coupled with aligning the brand’s marketing automation with the customer data platform (CDP), and enhancing its CMS’ capabilities, resulted in Parkland’s campaign lead time falling by 61%, with campaign development costs also dropping by 68%.
In other words — the perfect example of how brands can achieve the desired results faster, and at lower cost, with the right technical set-up.
Unlocking scalable growth
Brands shouldn’t be aspiring to win the price and promotion race; the goal should be to break the transactional cycle, and build competitive advantage through compelling digital experiences. While promotions and SEO can help drive short-term wins, these don’t move the needle on a macro scale. It is the brands that adopt a more holistic approach — one that straddles strategy, experience, and technology — that will build emotional engagement, and sustainable growth.
Do you want a digital ecosystem designed to accelerate your business goals, outpace competitors, and win over more customers in more efficient ways? Get in touch at emeamarketing@applydigital.com, and start your journey towards a more modern, personalised, and on-brand digital experience.
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