Why Reports of Its Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
As 2025 drew to a close, a familiar fatalistic narrative took hold across business and marketing commentary. It became a year of obituaries.
Marketing was declared dead, reduced to dashboards and attribution models.
Advertising was pronounced obsolete, flattened by platforms and performance logic.
Holding companies were written off as bloated and irrelevant.
Creativity was dismissed as automatable.
And branding, inevitably, was said to be finished at last.
Maybe the holding companies and their storied brands have had their day (RIP Leo Burnett, FCB, DDB, Y&R, JWT, Wunderman, and Mullen Lowe). What died with them was not branding, but the belief that efficiency and optimization could replace the role brands play as drivers of choice and preference in competitive markets.
Far from disappearing, brand building is moving back to the top of the business agenda.
The Market is Reversing Course
A recent McKinsey study of senior marketing leaders across major European markets makes the shift explicit: brand building has reemerged as the dominant priority heading into 2026, outranking performance-led optimization and emerging technologies.
That finding matters because it runs counter to the prevailing logic of the past decade. For years, marketing leadership was told that precision would replace judgment. If the funnel could be tuned, the attribution model refined, and the technology stack perfected, growth would follow.
For a time, that model delivered results. Eventually, performance efficiency declined, media costs became volatile, channels became saturated, and AI-driven content flooded the market with superficially competent but interchangeable language.
Organizations gradually realized they had optimized the machinery while neglecting the underlying meaning that made it effective.
McKinsey’s research affirms this shift. Branding is no longer treated as legacy craft or an aesthetic overlay. It is seen as a stabilizing force for resilience and long-term growth in environments defined by choice overload and accelerated imitation.
Organizations with clear brand strategies materially outperform peers over the long term, while those that focused narrowly on tactical optimization saw early gains followed by erosion. Brands grounded in meaning endured.
Branding Moves in Cycles
Branding does not evolve in a straight line. It moves in cycles triggered by structural change.
Each cycle begins with a new tool promising efficiency and scale.
Each cycle ends with convergence, saturation, and rising decision cost.
And each time, branding reasserts itself as the mechanism that makes competition navigable again.
We have seen this pattern repeatedly. Mass media. Digital. Performance marketing. Platforms. Now AI.
AI accelerates output, but it does not resolve meaning. It generates options; it does not decide what matters. As McKinsey’s research reveals – while experimentation with generative AI is widespread, few organizations report sustained impact or maturity.
Brand Strategy as a System Discipline
The branding that reemerges in 2026 will not resemble the branding many organizations abandoned.
McKinsey rightly foresees brand strategy as a system discipline encompassing meaning, positioning, emotional differentiation, cultural relevance, and trust. Not a campaign. Not a logo. A system.
Branding in the next cycle will be less about expression and more about clarity and coherence. Less about volume and more about growth momentum under pressure. Less about activation and more about alignment across product choices, pricing decisions, sales behavior, and leadership actions.
This is why a majority of European CMOs plan to increase investment in brand heading into 2026. Not because branding has become fashionable again, but because it is doing work nothing else can replace.
BrandingBusiness is a global B2B branding agency dedicated to building powerfully effective B2B brands that lead with clarity and perform with purpose. For more than 30 years, we have helped forward-looking clients to navigate change, enter new markets, unify cultures, and drive sustainable momentum toward their growth plans.