Consumers continue spending money on experiences even as they have grown careful about everything else. Between 2023 and 2025, consumer spending on experiences grew 2.6%, more than three times the rate of spending on ordinary goods.¹ Packaged goods companies have responded by pushing their products past the shelf and into experiences, through pop-ups, partnerships and a presence inside the cultural moments their consumers already care about.
This summer, Procter & Gamble (P&G) opened the Downy Fine Fragrance House, an immersive pop-up in South Carolina and Ohio, where shoppers stepped through a guided scent journey and experienced the brand’s fragrances firsthand. A fabric softener is about as ordinary as a product gets, but its constant presence in everyday life is exactly why P&G turned it into something consumers could experience rather than simply use.
Consumer spending and marketing investment have diverged
While cost pressure has changed where experience spending lands, it has not reduced it. Some consumers moved toward premium travel while others concentrated on streaming, gaming and at-home entertainment, formats that are in direct competition for the same hours and discretionary money.
Marketing budgets have been flat since 2022 and sit roughly 18% below their level four years earlier, with paid media now the single largest and only growing category, funded substantially by reductions in agency spend.² Within that smaller budget, allocation has shifted toward digital channels and customer acquisition while loyalty and retention have declined. The categories being trimmed are the ones with the longest payback periods. An experience has one of the longest.
Extension into experience is mostly borrowed
Building an experience outright is expensive, and few packaged goods companies have appetite for permanent physical assets on the balance sheet. The practical route has been partnership. Hershey licensed its confectionery brands to a developer of location-based attractions rather than construct venues itself. Trolli, owned by Ferrara, committed to a multi-year arrangement with a video game publisher and an immersive presence at a fan convention, placing the brand inside a calendar it did not have to build.
Each of those arrangements changes the accountable executive’s role. Negotiating terms with a game publisher, an attraction developer or a sports property requires a discipline unlike commissioning a campaign. Brand control becomes shared. Commitments run in years rather than quarters. Partners arrive carrying commercial interests that only partly overlap with those of the manufacturer.
The seat is being assembled rather than filled
Responsibility for building these experiences and the partnerships that carry them has now settled in the CPG organizations. The pressure typically falls on four seats in particular: Chief Brand Officer, Chief Experience Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Communications Officer.
The commercial seat has already widened to absorb the work. The Chief Marketing Officer role has expanded steadily into growth, commerce and brand, and an experience program lands inside a portfolio that already holds revenue management and innovation, competing for attention against initiatives with faster and cleaner measurement. The Chief Communications Officer has become more central as well, because an experience generates very little paid inventory. It generates coverage, creator content and conversation, which means most of the audience meets the program through secondhand viewership. Responsibility for earned media therefore sits with more of the audience than the program budget reaches directly.
Below the C-Suite, the vice president tier is where new titles are being written. Titles combining brand with experience, partnership or culture appear at large CPG companies, often reporting into marketing while holding budget and partner relationships of their own. When Unilever built a network of branded creator spaces around this summer’s World Cup, the executive who led it carried the title Vice President of Integrated Brand Experience, and a colleague running the surrounding media operations held the title Chief Media & Marketing Capability Officer, neither of which roles existed in the sector a decade ago.
Defining the role
Most of these executive searches falter before the first candidate call, because the specification is written without deciding what the experience is meant to accomplish. Awareness, trial and pricing power are separate objectives, and each favors a different kind of leader.
Those three objectives behave differently in practice.
- Awareness: An executive from media or creator operations fits an awareness program, where success is counted in impressions and content volume and the space exists for cameras.
- Trial: Trial belongs to someone who has held a customer relationship, since units and repeat rate depend on planning against the retailer’s promotional calendar.
- Pricing Power: Pricing power asks for a brand steward, because elasticity moves across several quarters and only a format returning in recognizable form builds the following that supports a premium.
Most briefs request all three at once, which yields a shortlist of partial candidate fits.
Finding the right leaderCandidates who do this work well share qualities a resume does not display. They can state, before money is committed, which measurable outcome the experience is expected to deliver. They have negotiated with a partner whose brand was larger than their own and absorbed the compromise that followed. They have carried a line of spending through a budget cycle in which finance asked what it returned, and they had an answer. The strongest backgrounds combine packaged goods experience with time in sponsorship, licensing or entertainment partnerships, where shared control and multi-year commitments are ordinary, and they sit under inconsistent titles that make the right candidate hard to find from a job description alone. Experience programs are temporary by design, but the roles created to run them are not. Most of the companies writing those roles are defining them for the first time. |
SOURCES
(1) McKinsey & Company, State of the Consumer 2026 | (2) Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey
