The traditional path from TV commercial to store shelf has evolved dramatically. Today's shopping journey might start with watching product tutorials on a phone during the morning commute, move to scanning reviews on a laptop during lunch break, and end with a final purchase decision while standing in a store aisle—where smart displays, tablet-equipped associates, and augmented reality experiences add new layers to the brick-and-mortar experience.
For consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, this transformation presents a critical challenge: How do you measure success and optimize campaigns when a single purchase might be influenced by dozens of touchpoints across every stage of the funnel? Consumers are often engaging with multiple content formats simultaneously—watching an influencer's product review while reading customer comments, or checking prices online while viewing in-store displays.
To understand how this complex landscape translates into actual shopping behavior, Amazon Ads and GWI surveyed 2,850 U.S. consumers between August and September 2025 across CPG categories. The findings reveal distinct patterns that marketers can leverage to optimize their full-funnel strategies.
The research reveals an evolving story in how consumers approach different categories. While the traditional divide remains—household maintenance categories tend toward planned, routine purchases, and beauty and personal care see higher impulse buying—today's shoppers are bringing new sophistication to both. A planned purchase of laundry detergent might now involve extensive research and emotional considerations about trust and reliability, while a beauty purchase could combine spontaneous discovery with careful price-value analysis. Understanding these nuanced patterns is key to effectively engaging shoppers at every stage of the funnel.
Home care
(58% routine, 40% necessity)
Oral care
(49% routine, 48% necessity)
Over-the-counter medication
(36% routine, 57% necessity)
Predictable patterns
When it comes to household essentials and daily care, consumers shop with purpose. The data shows this methodical approach across multiple categories:1
Impulse and inspiration
Other categories show more variation in purchase drivers. Skincare bridges the gap between routine and impulse, with 37% of purchases driven by routine but also showing 19% impulse purchases. Baby care follows similar hybrid patterns, with both planned and spontaneous elements. The most emotionally driven categories are fragrance, where 39% of consumers seek self-indulgence and 26% are driven by impulse, and makeup, which combines impulse purchases (27%) with practical necessity (46%).1
These purchase patterns offer a framework for messaging strategy, but shouldn't limit brand-building opportunities. Whether a category tends toward planned or spontaneous purchases, successful brands find ways to build both functional trust and emotional connections with their audiences.
61% of fragrance shoppers
While purchase decisions happen quickly—with over 92% of consumers making their choice within a week—the path to that decision is shaped by multiple brand touchpoints over time. The data shows this clearly across CPG categories, with significant percentages of shoppers recalling advertising before purchase:1
59% of baby care shoppers
50% of skincare shoppers
48% of makeup shoppers
42% of personal hygiene shoppers
46% of home care shoppers
The complexity of today's shopping journey creates multiple opportunities to engage consumers at every stage of the funnel. Amazon Ads offers a unique advantage: The ability to combine premium entertainment environments with sophisticated audience reach and measurement capabilities, helping brands create seamless experiences that drive both immediate sales and long-term equity.
Here's how CPG brands can leverage Amazon Ads to engage shoppers across their journey:
With over 300 million monthly ad-supported viewers in the U.S.,5 the Amazon DSP enables brands to reach audiences both across Amazon properties and throughout the open internet. This extensive reach helps brands maintain presence wherever their consumers are engaging.
Reach audiences at scale
Prime Video, with its array of award-winning originals and live sports coverage, offers a foundation of premium, brand-safe entertainment complemented by its growing network of third-party supply. With exciting new partnerships across streaming platforms like Netflix, Roku, and Spotify, brands can create meaningful connections during peak engagement moments. Plus, interactive ad formats like pause ads help collapse the funnel, turning entertainment moments into shopping opportunities.
Connect through premium entertainment
By combining trillions of durable signals with AI-powered optimization, Amazon Ads helps brands understand and act on consumer behavior patterns. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) enables brands to measure and optimize their full-funnel strategy, from awareness building to conversion both on Amazon and beyond.
Optimize with intelligence
From that first moment of discovery to the final purchase decision, today's CPG shopping journey is more complex—and more opportunity-rich—than ever before. Amazon Ads helps brands transform this complexity into advantage, providing the tools to create seamless experiences that resonate whether a consumer is making a planned purchase or acting on inspiration. By understanding and adapting to evolving shopping patterns while harnessing the power of entertainment, brands can build connections that drive both immediate action and lasting growth.
Amazon Ads offers full-funnel advertising solutions to help businesses of all sizes achieve their marketing goals at scale. Amazon Ads connects advertisers to highly relevant audiences through first-party insights; extensive reach across premium content like Prime Video, Twitch, and third-party publishers; the ability to connect and directly measure campaign tactics across awareness, consideration, and conversion; and generative AI to deliver appropriate creative at each step. Amazon Ads helps advertisers reach an average monthly ad-supported audience of more than 300 million in the U.S. across Amazon's owned and operated properties and third-party publishers.
This immersive experience was produced for Amazon Ads by EMARKETER Studio, an in-house creative studio within research company EMARKETER. EMARKETER is the leading provider of research, data, and insights for marketing, advertising, and commerce professionals. Our data-driven forecasts and rigorous analysis empower revenue-driving teams to make strategic decisions with confidence. Through expert context from our analysts, carefully vetted data sources, and a proprietary research methodology, EMARKETER delivers forecasts, reports, and benchmarks that help companies anticipate tomorrow’s market trends today. EMARKETER is a division of Axel Springer S.E.
Design
Miri Kramer - Creative Director, Content Studio, EMARKETER
Christy Shih - Senior Digital Designer, Content Studio, EMARKETER
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
These distinct shopping patterns—from routine essentials to impulse purchases—highlight an opportunity for brands to connect with consumers in different ways. One powerful constant emerges across all categories: the influence of entertainment in shaping purchase decisions. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of consumers worldwide appreciate advertising that entertains them, and 63% agree that advertising has the power to shape and create culture, according to the Amazon Ads “From Ads to Zeitgeist” report. This represents a significant opportunity for CPG brands, particularly as consumers spend over 90 minutes daily streaming TV.2
The influence of entertainment and media is especially pronounced among younger audiences. Across beauty and personal care categories, consumers aged 18-34 are three to four times more likely to cite entertainment and media as purchase drivers compared with those 45-59. This includes influences from streaming content to celebrities and creators, highlighting the growing importance of entertainment-driven marketing strategies.
Digital video is projected to capture nearly 60% of total TV and video ad spend by 2025, doubling its share in just five years.3 The effectiveness is clear: 71% of viewers prefer ads that mirror the content they are watching.4 Importantly, this influence extends beyond impulse-driven categories, suggesting all brands can benefit from entertainment-driven strategies that create meaningful connections with their audiences.
These consumers encountered brands across traditional TV, streaming content, social media, and in-store displays. Notably, even when consumers have a specific brand in mind, they remain open to alternatives. Baby care (16%), fragrance (14%), and moisturization (13%)1 show the highest rates of shoppers switching brands at the point of purchase, highlighting the ongoing opportunity to influence decisions throughout the entire shopping journey.
Picture this: A consumer spots an intriguing skincare product while binge-watching their favorite show, sees it again in their social media feed, hears its benefits discussed on their morning podcast, and finally encounters it while browsing online.
This isn't just a story about discovery—it's the new reality of how consumers move through the full marketing funnel, from awareness to purchase.
Hair care
(42% routine, 45% necessity)
Personal hygiene
(50% routine, 43% necessity)
Beauty
SOURCES
1. GWI x Amazon Ads, "CPG Path to Purchase Summary," Q2 2025
2. Amazon Ads From Ads to Zeitgeist, U.S., March 2024
3. IAB Advertiser Perceptions: Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy Report, 2025
4. GWI Core, U.S., N=32 Q1 2024
5. Amazon Internal, 12/30/2024- 1/28/2025
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