Agentic Commerce and Treatonomics Are Splitting the FMCG Market Into Two Economies — and Most Brands Are Stuck in the Middle

Agentic Commerce Is Rewriting the FMCG Brand Playbook Faster Than Most Teams Have Updated It

The practical implication of agentic commerce for FMCG brands is straightforward and consequential: if AI agents are executing purchases on behalf of consumers, the traditional brand marketing playbook — emotional advertising, in-store display, influencer content — is optimized for a human decision-maker that is no longer always in the loop. An AI agent making a grocery replenishment decision on behalf of a consumer does not respond to a television advertisement; it queries structured product data, compares attributes, checks price history, evaluates review sentiment at scale, and selects based on parameters the consumer set weeks or months earlier. Brands that are not machine-readable — whose product taxonomy, attribute metadata, and API integrations are not structured for AI agent querying — are effectively invisible in agentic commerce pathways regardless of how strong their human-facing marketing is. VML's research finding that 73 percent of consumers want brands to be more entertaining creates a paradox for FMCG marketing strategy: invest in entertainment to capture the humans who are still in the decision loop, while simultaneously investing in data infrastructure to capture the AI agents that are increasingly substituting for those humans in routine purchase decisions.

The geography of this shift matters for US and European FMCG players in different ways. US consumers are earlier adopters of AI shopping tools but have more fragmented retail environments — a brand optimised for Amazon's AI recommendation architecture is not automatically optimised for Walmart's or Target's, and each major retail platform's AI purchasing infrastructure has different data requirements and ranking factors. European FMCG markets are operating under the EU AI Act's new transparency and consumer protection requirements for AI-mediated purchasing, which impose disclosure obligations on retailers deploying AI purchasing tools and create compliance complexity for brands operating across multiple EU member states with different enforcement postures. The Shopper Perspectives research on European retail found that frictionless retail and convenience are becoming essential consumer expectations — which means European brands face the challenge of meeting AI-era convenience standards while operating within a stricter regulatory framework for AI-mediated commerce than their US counterparts face.

Treatonomics: The Premium-Value Split Is Structural, Not Cyclical

The treatonomics dynamic identified by VML — consumers prioritizing affordable indulgences even under financial pressure — is producing a two-speed FMCG market that challenges the value-brand strategies many companies adopted during the 2022-2023 inflation peak. The consumers who are most actively practicing treatonomics are the ones whose real incomes have been most compressed by the post-war inflation environment: workers whose wage growth has not kept pace with the cumulative price increase in essential categories are increasingly choosing to forego mid-tier FMCG purchases in favour of either private-label basics (where the value equation is unambiguous) or genuine premium indulgences (where the emotional payoff justifies the expenditure). The middle market — mainstream branded products at mid-range price points — is the segment experiencing the most pressure, as consumers optimise their spending between the rational cost-minimisation of essentials and the emotional reward of genuine treats. This bifurcation is visible in the earnings data from major FMCG players: Unilever, Procter and Gamble, and Nestlé have all reported stronger performance in both their prestige beauty and personal care lines and their private-label-equivalent value ranges than in their core mainstream branded categories.

For US and European FMCG executives, the strategic response to the treatonomics dynamic requires a portfolio review that most companies have not yet fully conducted: which products in the current portfolio are positioned in the squeezed middle, which can be repositioned upward as genuine premium indulgences, and which are competing for private-label comparison with cost disadvantages that brand investment cannot overcome? The limited-edition product drop strategy — creating artificial scarcity to generate the emotional premium associated with a genuine luxury purchase at accessible price points — is the most commercially successful treatonomics execution format, and it is being adopted by mainstream FMCG brands including Heinz, Oreo, and Walkers crisps in the UK with measurable sales uplift that justifies the operational complexity of managing constrained production runs and elevated marketing spend against a limited SKU window.

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