The principles that govern impactful brand marketing have not changed. Buyers still choose with feeling and rationalise the decision afterwards, and the brands that grow are the ones that are in mind long before customers are ready to buy.
What has changed is how those principles are applied to move the needle and deliver successful campaigns. AI now sits inside the creative process, media has splintered into countless feeds across a myriad of channels, culture moves quicker than planning was ever built to track and the line between brand and performance has largely dissolved.
The old brand marketer skillset focused on total control. 6-12 month processes to get to a single ad. Linear campaign thinking. Ruthless adherence to static brand guidelines. Multiple rounds of creative testing and approvals to de-risk investment. Ad buys that ensured the whole thing was too-big-to-fail. We present the case that this control-oriented model cannot hold in a media environment that is characterised by overwhelming complexity.
Fragmentation means there is no longer a single point of origin for how a brand is experienced, and no single cultural lingua franca for marketers to work from. Brands are increasingly built bottom-up, mediated through third parties: creators, brand partnerships, community activations, AI search. Content demands are expanding out to infinity.
