The 2026 Growth Playbook: 4 Experts on the Levers That Actually Move the Needle Now

The shopper you’re trying to reach today sees 1,200 ads in a day. Ten years ago, that number was 600.

Their attention span on a Meta post? 1.7 seconds before they scroll.

And ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are quietly rewriting the way they discover new brands in the first place.

If your 2026 growth plan is “spend more on Meta and hope,” prepare for a brutal year.

eCommerce growth is no longer about getting one tactic right. It’s a full-funnel, full-organisation game. Brand and performance. Strategy and discounting. Psychology and platforms. The brands winning in 2026 are pulling multiple levers at once, not chasing the latest shiny hack.

Over the course of four episodes, Chloe Thomas sat down with four experts who are already pulling those levers, hard. What they shared adds up to a complete masterclass on how to grow an eCommerce brand in the noisy, AI-curious, attention-starved year ahead.

Let’s get into it.

First, Get Your Creative to Cut Through

Most brands aren’t failing because they’re spending too little. They’re failing because their ads look like everyone else’s.

That’s where Amy Budd, Client Services Director at Launch, started us off in Episode 299. She calls it the attention recession. Ad exposure has doubled. Brands are spending more to be remembered less.

Her three-pillar fix is recognisable, relevant, and rewarding.

Recognisable. Strip the logo from your ad. Could a customer still tell it was you? That’s the blur test. Distinctive brand assets, your typography, colour palette, and even sonic cues, are what make recall possible. Too many brands accidentally uplift the category rather than stand out within it.

Relevant. Stop describing your product. Describe how the customer uses it. Amy’s team practices review mining: pulling the language customers use in reviews and social posts, then feeding it back into ad creative. One client sells dresses. The detail that drove their performance? Pockets. It was right there in the reviews.

Reward. Brands combining distinctive assets with positive emotion are 7 times more likely to see incremental revenue. Joy works. Heartstrings work. Corporate ad-speak does not.

For the “but how do we measure brand?” objection: brand investment shows up in brand search volume, direct traffic, and organic traffic. There’s a 6 to 8 week afterglow after you turn the spend off. Amy’s recommendation: minimum 10% of media spend on testing.

Your move: Pull up your last 10 ads. Run the blur test. Mine your reviews and rewrite one ad around the language customers actually use.

Stop Discounting Like It’s an Afterthought

Discounts are the most powerful and most dangerous lever a retailer has. And almost nobody is using them strategically.

That was the message from Dan Bond, VP of Marketing at RevLifter, in Episode 301. Most retailers don’t have a discount strategy. They have a habit. Quarterly sales because everyone does quarterly sales. 20% off because the shop down the street had 20% off.

Dan’s starting question is simple: What’s your position on discounting? Yeti has run two discounts in roughly 13 years. Some brands live and die by it. Most have never made a conscious decision either way. Strategy first, tactics second.

Once you have a position, the work becomes about who, what, when, and which products. Hero products, the small subset driving most of your sales, should rarely be discounted. The slower-moving long tail is where promotions earn their keep.

Three of his sharpest tips:

For brands trying to wean themselves off discounts, going cold turkey usually tanks performance. Gradually reduce who sees a discount and in what context. Margin recovers 2% to 3% at a time, compounding.

For brands looking to grow AOV, the classic stretch-and-save mechanic gets sharper when you actually look at where customers drop off. Maybe your real threshold is £150, not £100. Dan worked with a kayak brand. Nobody buys two kayaks. But oars, gloves, and life jackets? That’s a real cross-sell.

For brands optimising conversion, exit campaigns (browse, basket, checkout) deserve different treatment. The right offer for someone browsing is rarely the right offer for someone already at checkout.

The metric trap to avoid: looking only at conversion rate or AOV in isolation. Margin and LTV are where the truth lives. Customers who use a 10% signup code and then immediately unsubscribe aren’t customers. They’re a leak.

Your move: Write your position on discounting in one sentence. Stop discounting your hero products. Pick one exit point and run a clean test.

Use Psychology, or Watch AI Race You to the Bottom

Colin Hodge, author of Outrageous Startup Growth and someone who has scaled startups to over 100 million users, joined us in Episode 302 to talk about decision engineering. The premise: the environment your customer encounters determines their outcomes. Psychology isn’t fluffy. It’s the most measurable lever you have.

Colin’s prework starts with you, not the customer. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Ship something. See how people react. Iterate.

Then comes empathy. Real empathy, not personas stuck in a deck. Colin runs “psyched personas” that go a level deeper into customer mood, context, and the moment they hit your site. Maybe they just got paid. Maybe they’re tired and rushed. The same offer lands completely differently depending on which.

The levers he pulled out:

The contrast effect. If all your categories look the same, the brand that genuinely contrasts wins. Duolingo’s Duo the owl is the perfect example: annoying but cute, and impossible to forget.

Pricing context. Pricing is a context game. A high-priced option next to a compromise option next to a budget option will outperform any single price shown alone.

The fresh start effect. Spotify built an entire growth engine on this. Discover Weekly drops every Monday because Mondays are temporal landmarks. Humans are more open to trying new things at the start of a week, month, or season. The reported lift in re-engagement was 20%. Pick your fresh start moments and build campaigns around them.

Magic moments. Emotional peaks and troughs in the customer journey. The moment after they find a great price. The moment something goes wrong. Those are when an opt-in, referral, or review request will land harder than any neutral moment.

Colin’s warning: AI without psychology is a race to the bottom. Brute-forcing creative through generative tools without understanding why people respond will produce a wave of indistinguishable ads. Brands that combine AI speed with psychological depth will eat the brands that don’t.Your move: Pick one lever to test in the next 30 days. A fresh start campaign on your next temporal landmark. A price anchor next to your hero product. Or one journey moment rebuilt around the emotional state your customer is actually in.

Reddit Is the New SEO (And You’re Already a Bit Late)

Roughly 20% of all citations from large language models come from Reddit. It is the single most cited platform feeding ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and the rest.

That’s the number Danny Kirk, founder of ReddiReach, dropped in Episode 303. Reddit’s data is open and can be scraped. Most other social platforms aren’t. So the LLMs were trained on it. Now, OpenAI and Google deals are locking in Reddit as the AI’s favourite source of human conversation.

Danny’s take: this feels like SEO 20 years ago. The brands that start the Reddit snowball today are the ones AI will recommend for the next decade.

But Reddit is community-first. The downvote button is a market mechanism. Salesy, link-stuffing behaviour gets buried fast. The playbook is fundamentally different from traditional SEO.

Two strategic paths:

Branded. Set up an account in your brand’s name. Be the brand’s fairy godmother: friendly, transparent, helpful. Answer questions, don’t pitch. Best for established brands, customers are already talking about.

Non-branded. A real human at your company posts under their own pseudonymous account. Share factually accurate information. Mention your brand in fair comparisons (“I’ve used Brand A, B, and C, here’s what I found”). No fabricated reviews. Reddit’s culture punishes anyone who fakes it.

Three things to internalise:

Comments are where the work happens, not posts. Roughly 1 post for every 50 comments.

Don’t add links. Counterintuitive but true. Links increase the chance that a comment gets deleted. LLMs and humans can find your brand from a mention of your name alone.

Pick 3 to 5 core subreddits and engage in others for fun. Build karma. Look human. Reddit is about to crack down hard on bots and AI-generated content because its entire business model now depends on selling human data to LLMs.

Payoff timeline: 3 to 6 months for directional results. Track via Peekaboo or Profound for AI search visibility, plus a post-purchase survey asking how customers heard about you.

Your move: Create a personal Reddit account today. Lurk for two weeks. Find the 3 to 5 subreddits where your customers actually hang out. Then start commenting helpfully. No links. No pitching.

The Masterclass in One Page

Stack the four perspectives together, and a 2026 growth plan emerges:

1. Make your creative cut through. Recognisable, relevant, rewarding.
2. Discount with strategy, not habit. Define your position. Protect your hero products. Track margin and LTV, not just conversion. 
3. Layer in psychology. Decision engineering, contrast, anchors, and fresh-start moments. AI without psychology is a race to the bottom. 
4. Build a Reddit presence early. Pick 3 to 5 subreddits. Comment helpfully. No links. No bots. 

These four levers reward depth over speed. They assume the noise is going up, not down. And they all require you to think about your customer as a human in a moment, not a number on a dashboard.

The brands that pull two or three of these in 2026 will outperform the brands chasing whatever tactic is trending on LinkedIn. The brands that pull all four will own their categories.

This article is part of the Keep Optimising Growth series. Listen to all four episodes:

• Episode 299: Amy Budd on the 3 Pillars of Creative to Beat the Attention Recession
• Episode 301: Dan Bond on Discount Strategies for Growth
• Episode 302: Colin Hodge on Consumer Psychology
• Episode 303: Danny Kirk on Reddit for AI Search Growth

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