Digital Isn’t a Channel, It’s Infrastructure.

Digital is not just another place to run campaigns. It has quietly become the operating system underneath how consumers discover, decide, pay for and receive products. Treating it as a “channel” keeps it stuck in the marketing budget. Treating it as infrastructure puts it in the core business model.

Below is a deep dive on why that shift in mindset is no longer optional.

1. The world is already wired for digital by default

Digital is now embedded in everyday life – not as a separate space, but as background infrastructure.

Globally, retail ecommerce is expected to reach about 6.86 trillion USD in 2025, growing faster than physical stores and continuing at roughly 7–8 percent CAGR to 2027.
Ecommerce is projected to account for 20.5 percent of all retail sales in 2025, up from 19.9 percent in 2024.

In India, the “digital foundation” is even more striking:

India had about 751.5 million internet users at the start of 2024, with internet penetration at 52.4 percent of the population and ~462 million social media users.
As of March 2024, India had 954 million internet subscribers, of which 398 million were rural, and roughly 95 percent of villages had 3G or 4G coverage.

On top of that, digital payments have become a national utility:

UPI transactions grew from 92 crore in FY 2017–18 to 13,116 crore in FY 2023–24, a compound annual growth rate of about 129 percent.
In just the first five months of FY 2024–25, UPI volume reached 7,062 crore transactions.
By October 2025, monthly UPI volume was over 20.7 billion transactions across more than 680 banks.

This is not “a digital channel” in the old sense. This is infrastructure that underpins how people live, transact and interact with brands.

2. Digital now influences the majority of retail, even when the sale is offline

Even when a consumer buys in a physical store, digital often shapes the journey:

One omnichannel study finds that 60 percent of all retail sales are influenced by digital channels, even if the final purchase happens in store.
Shoppers “no longer see a difference between online and offline,” with 77 percent searching on their phones in store and **69 percent comparing prices while standing in the aisle.

Omnichannel customers also behave differently:

Research shows omnichannel customers tend to spend more and repeat their shopping journeys with the same retailer compared to single-channel shoppers.

From the consumer’s point of view, there is no “digital channel” and “offline channel”. There is just “my experience with this brand”. The digital layer is the connective tissue that makes that experience coherent.

That is what infrastructure looks like.

3. Consumers expect integrated digital experiences – and most companies are not ready

Customer expectations today are built around integrated journeys:

About 90 percent of consumers say they want seamless interactions across all channels, but only 29 percent of businesses actually provide that.
Companies that deliver strong omnichannel experiences see up to 15 percent more revenue and 35 percent more customer loyalty.
In service contexts, omnichannel support can lift customer satisfaction scores to about 67 percent, versus 28 percent for fragmented multichannel setups.

In other words, the value is not in “having a digital channel”, but in having digital infrastructure that connects everything: identity, orders, inventory, loyalty, service, payments.

When digital is treated as a standalone channel, you get:

Different prices online and offline
Promotions that do not match across platforms
Call centers that have no idea what a customer just did in an app
Stores that cannot see online order histories

When digital is treated as infrastructure, you get:

One view of the customer across touchpoints
One understanding of inventory across the network
One set of rules for pricing and promotions
One data backbone feeding analytics and decisions

The difference shows up directly in revenue, loyalty and cost.

4. For consumer goods, digital infrastructure is now a financial performance lever

In CPG and consumer goods, digital transformation is no longer soft or experimental. It is tied to hard P&L outcomes.

Recent analyses suggest:

A digital transformation in CPG can lift revenue by 6–10 percent and EBITDA by 3–5 percentage points, driven by smarter supply chains, personalization and automation.
One large personal care and home company with about 10 billion USD in revenue has an estimated 1–1.8 billion USD value at stake from digital and AI, equivalent to 9–16 percentage points of EBITDA margin.
A beverage company that undertook a comprehensive digital and AI transformation reported an 18 percent EBITDA uplift over two years.

These numbers are not coming from “running ads on digital”. They come from:

End-to-end demand sensing and forecasting
Dynamic pricing and promotion optimization
Route to market optimization
Trade spend effectiveness
Mix and assortment decisions at a granular level

All of those require digital infrastructure: data pipelines, integrated systems, analytics platforms and decision engines, not just a social media team.

5. What it means to treat digital as infrastructure, not a channel

If digital is infrastructure, not a channel, several strategic shifts follow.

a) Architecture before campaigns

Most companies still start with questions like:

“What should be our digital media mix this year?”
“Should we spend more on marketplace ads or influencers?”

Those are channel questions. Infrastructure questions look more like:

“What is our canonical source of truth for customer, product and inventory data?”
“Can we see a unified journey from first exposure to repeat purchase?”
“Can our systems support real time pricing, availability and personalization?”

Without this foundation, channel decisions sit on top of fragmentation. The result is duplicated effort, inconsistent experiences and low ROI.

b) Operating model, not just marketing plan

Treating digital as infrastructure means CPG and consumer brands must redesign how teams work:

Sales, marketing, trade marketing, e-commerce, IT and supply chain all work from the same data, not separate spreadsheets.
KPIs move from “impressions and GRPs” to “customer lifetime value, incremental margin, net revenue per outlet, fulfilment cost per order”.
Decisions about assortment, promotions and distribution are driven by live data and algorithmic recommendations, not annual planning slides that age quickly.

This is exactly what underpins the EBITDA uplifts mentioned above.

c) From project to platform

Many digital initiatives are run as projects:

A mobile app revamp
A new D2C website
A CRM implementation

Infrastructure thinking pushes you toward platforms:

One identity and access layer for all consumer touchpoints
One unified product and pricing service feeding every channel
One order management core that orchestrates fulfilment regardless of where the order originates

Once you have platforms, every new feature or campaign plugs into the same backbone. That is where speed and scale come from.

6. Why this matters especially in markets like India

In India the stakes are even higher because digital is leapfrogging older models.

With more than 751 million internet users and fast-growing rural connectivity, digital reach no longer maps neatly to metro vs non-metro lines.
UPI’s growth, with monthly volumes above 20 billion transactions, shows that digital payments are now a baseline expectation, not a premium feature.

For consumer goods brands this means:

A kirana customer might discover products on social platforms, pay via UPI, and expect consistent pricing across marketplace, D2C site and local store.
Retailers expect digital support on planograms, promotions and performance analytics, not just a salesman visit.
Even in small towns, consumers use price comparison on their phones, which puts pressure on any inconsistency between offline and online.

In such a context, treating digital as a marginal channel is strategically dangerous. It underestimates how deeply it shapes expectations and behavior.

7. Practical implications: how to “infrastructure-shift” your digital thinking

For a consumer-goods or CPG business, shifting from channel thinking to infrastructure thinking implies at least five moves:

Define a single digital backbone Decide what will be your source of truth for customer data, product data, inventory and pricing. Commit to integrating everything into that backbone over time.
Make digital part of core capex and opex, not only the marketing budget If digital is infrastructure, it sits alongside factories, warehouses and ERP in investment priority, not as an experimental media line.
Tie digital metrics directly to P&L outcomes Build the ROI narrative around revenue growth, margin, cost to serve and working capital, not just impressions or clicks.
Redesign roles and governance Create cross-functional teams that own journeys or value streams end to end, for example “awareness to repeat purchase” or “new product launch to national scale”.
Sequence access and experience before promotion Use digital to ensure availability, reliability and convenience first. Only then lean on advertising to amplify demand.

Conclusion: Digital is the new backbone of growth

Calling digital “a channel” made sense when it was primarily a media outlet.

Today:

It shapes most buying journeys, even in offline-heavy categories.
It has become the default way people pay, particularly in markets like India.
It is directly linked to measurable revenue and EBITDA gains in consumer goods and CPG.

That is what infrastructure looks like.

The brands that will win the next decade will not be the ones that simply “spend more on digital”. They will be the ones that build on digital, treating it as the infrastructure that connects consumers, products, payments, data and operations into one coherent system.

Digital is not a channel you buy. It is the backbone you build on.

References: Sellerscommerce Emarketer Datareportal PIB #1 PIB #2 Sranalytics MCKinsey