# Bath & Body Works and 248 brands pivot from owned channels back to paid media for 2025 holiday *Glossy Research shows owned-channel fatigue as brands reallocate budgets to external advertising after years of direct-customer emphasis.* By **Jenny Huang Goodman MPA MSc MHSA, Principal** — The Stash Edge, Hako Shikin LLC. Published 2026-10-27. Canonical: https://www.pops4.com/stash/articles/bath-body-works-glossy-research-sample-2026-10-27t03-6 Subject: Bath & Body Works + Glossy Research sample Tags: paid media, owned channels, holiday marketing, customer acquisition, bath and body works, retention --- According to a Glossy Research report on 2025 holiday marketing strategies, brands are pulling budget from owned channels—email, SMS, loyalty programs—and redirecting it toward paid media. Among **248 brands surveyed**, the share planning to prioritize owned channels for the holiday season dropped measurably from prior years, signaling a strategic retreat from the direct-to-consumer playbook that dominated pandemic-era retail. The mechanics are straightforward: brands built robust email lists and SMS programs between 2020 and 2023, often treating them as zero-cost acquisition engines. But list fatigue set in. Open rates declined. Conversion per send dropped. The incremental revenue from another promotional email became harder to justify against the deliverability cost and subscriber churn. At the same time, paid media platforms—Meta, Google, TikTok—improved targeting and attribution, making external channels competitive again on a cost-per-acquisition basis. Brands that once celebrated independence from ad platforms now see them as necessary scale levers. Bath & Body Works exemplifies the shift. The fragrance and body-care retailer relies heavily on holiday gifting, a period that can represent a disproportionate share of annual revenue for mass-market personal-care brands. Like many in the category, the company built a substantial owned-channel apparatus during the direct-to-consumer surge. But with increased competition in the mass market and a turnaround still in progress, the brand is supplementing owned touchpoints with paid campaigns. The company recently enlisted Zooey Deschanel for a holiday push, a signal that it is betting on broad awareness plays rather than list-nurture alone. Why it worked: owned channels excel at retention and low-friction conversion among existing customers, but they do not build the top of the funnel. Paid media does. When category competition intensifies—new entrants in body care, fragrance brands moving into mass retail, Amazon's private-label push—a brand cannot afford to rely solely on its existing customer file. It needs new names. Paid media, particularly video and social platforms, delivers reach and consideration at scale. The trade-off is cost, but for a seasonal business like holiday gifting, the payback window is short enough to justify the spend. The steal for a small physical-product brand: reallocate **15 to 20 percent** of your Q4 email and SMS budget to paid social. Run a simple awareness campaign on Meta or TikTok targeting lookalike audiences based on your existing customer list. Use static images or **15-second video** showing the product in a gifting context—unboxing, wrapping, or display on a counter. Set the objective to traffic, not conversions, and send clicks to a collection or gift-guide landing page, not the homepage. Budget **$500 to $1,000** for a four-week test. Track new-visitor sessions and first-time buyers separately from your email cohort. If cost per new customer is within **two times** your email CAC, continue the campaign through December. If it exceeds that threshold, pull back and redirect spend to retargeting existing visitors. The goal is not to abandon owned channels but to stop relying on them as the sole growth engine when the calendar demands new names. The broader pattern: owned channels are retention infrastructure, not acquisition infrastructure. When a brand's growth stalls, the instinct is to mail the list harder. The better move is to spend strategically on external reach, measure new-customer acquisition cleanly, and use owned channels to convert and retain the incremental volume. The brands winning 2025 holiday will do both, not one at the expense of the other. ## The takeaway Owned channels retain customers but do not build the funnel; paid media fills the gap when category competition demands new names. --- ## Publisher **Hako Shikin LLC** — Virginia Beach, Virginia. Founded 1997. ASI 217876 · DUNS 18-204-6339. Principal and author: **Jenny Huang Goodman MPA MSc MHSA**. - Author: https://www.huanggoodman.com/about - LLM context: https://www.pops4.com/stash/llms.txt - MCP endpoint, for AI agents: https://mcp.pops4.com/mcp - Client dashboard: https://dashboard.pops4.com/ - Catalogue: 70,000+ products, 200+ brands