State of Branding - April 2026
Of all the shouting I’ve been seeing on LinkedIn in this past year or so, there’s three aspects that not only have exploded but are actually merging/melding and even colliding:
1. Marketing wanting to own and do Branding
2. Marketers as well as Creatives who are ‘discovering’ that Brand is not a Logo & Color
3. Branding (and Marketing) in the age of AI
Let me examine each of them.
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1. Marketing want to own and do Branding.
Mr/s Marketing: you’re just too powerful a profession, and it’s the governing perspective on the client side as well. You win.
But let me note that …
- some of you say that Branding is an enabling tool in the Marketing arsenal: Marketing Strategy dictates what ‘Brand’ needs to be. (But wait: as you, and rightly so, change Marketing Strategy based on the needs of the Business, does that mean that every time you change Marketing Strategy the Brand changes direction?)
while
- some of you say that Brand is an Operating System, and by definition an OS commands everything: so … Brand comes first and dictates an overall marketing strategy within which you apply marketing tactics as needed.
Which is which? Make up your mind please – you cannot have it both ways.
Either way, you want and are going to own Branding (especially now in the age of AI). On behalf of anyone who claims to be a ‘brand consultant’ (like me), I’m waving a white flag. You win, indeed.
Few more notes, just because.
For those of you old enough, what’s poetic here is that for many years the Advertising Industry tried very hard to own Branding, but always failed because their short-termism just couldn’t cope with the long-termism that’s at the core of Brand. But Marketing is indeed a strategic discipline (then implemented via marketing tactics) and so it is an easier alignment with Branding, the paying clients are all business and marketing people, plus MBAs is a global thing whereas ‘Branding’ education is non-existent. Again, you win.
So now, Marketing, go ahead and use Brand as your strategies’ implementation activity or as an OS – whichever you decide it to be. Either way though, so far the majority of the Branding I see coming off ‘Marketing’ is of the shallow-tagline-as-foundation-plus-shiny-comms-objects variety – which is tasked to do the lion’s share of the convincing, with performance marketing* as the ultimate judge.
*I hear many marketing experts saying that Performance Marketing is not ‘it’ and it’s not right, and that real Branding is what’s needed. And so Marketing needs to start doing real Branding; if so, Marketing, where and when have you learned how to do it and for how long have you been doing (see also 2. below)?
And allow me just an example, of many. A marketer with a really impressive marketing resume’ just published a Brand Performance Platform for AI stating that customers must see Brand Clarity, Brand Strength, and Brand Reputation, and offering subsets of it as Substance, Signal, and Representation. Dear MarketerWithAnImpressiveResume: your platform is not bad, kudos, but ... there is NOTHING new in it, just different words and/or synonyms for what existed since forever in Real Branding. Welcome to the Light.
Overall, Mr/s Marketing, please get better at it - learning from the few of you who in fact do Real Branding work, or even from people with my background.
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2. Marketers as well as Creatives who are ‘discovering’ that Brand is not a Logo & Color
Let me just say … bless their hearts.
While that is of course true, it was never the case – at least since 1995 when my generation turned Corporate Identity (which was indeed, by and large, Logo & Color) into Corporate Branding. This type of professionals would be well served by reading this Chapter of my industry narrative https://tinyurl.com/Greencarder19in1995
And so there’s a lot of shouting about “This is NOT That or The Other” and lots of disingenuous copy&paste and plagiarizing (and quite a bit from people whose daily job and background has absolutely nothing to do with Marketing or Branding), but zero self-awareness of not really knowing how to do it – while some just (re)inventing things as they think them up. Naïve lack of self-awareness, or professional arrogance at its most shameless.
But now that these type of Marketers and Creatives have arrived to that realization, and have to do ‘Branding’ … how do they know what’s needed, which are the parts, how those parts are done, where and how did they learn all that?
Starting with the Core Idea - which cannot be just a shallow slogan-ish phrase or just a cool wordsmithing of the business realities or, worse, something that resides in the overlapping area of three circles. And if one is found and then needs to be the root of an OS, do you know what it needs to command everything and can you map it all out? Do you know Brand Architecture to take it to market or you just do PortfolioManagement-with-logos plus House of Brand vs Branded House (while some recognize that the very vast majority of companies are somewhere in the middle and they just call them ‘Hybrids’ and leave it at that - great, thanks) and within it do you address products, solutions, programs, services, methodologies, technologies, 3rd-party relationships, marketing constructs, ingredients strategies, etc. – branded AND unbranded? And I can ask the same for Brand Culture, Command and Control Tools, internal implementation, training, and education – and more, before getting to the granularities of the Identity System per se and its implementation and ongoing refinements. You say you ‘do real Branding’ now? Show me you’ve done all of the above – and for multiple clients, ‘cause it’s never the same. Those are all things that take years of experiences in different industries and in different situations, and having had multiple clients and time is the only way to really learn it all.
And finally, if you are in the Brand-as-OS camp, you surely realize how complex is getting an idea be the root for EVERYthing a company does and say and operates as; you can list all the things that Brand will influence, but can you actually articulate Brand to do all those different things? A ‘regular’ Marketer would not have a clue - but a few of you do. And then is the question of appreciating the nuances of Brand in order to actually do the work (which a leftbrain will have a hard time with). I myself do have an articulated approach, but then I can deliver only about 60% of those things and have to rely on other experts (which I guide) to plan & do the rest.
Finally, fair is fair, at the end of the road Marketers actually do good Brand Management and I envy those skills, and famous universities and Mark Ritson have great courses for it (but no, none of them are about the actual doings of Brand Development – other than Positioning ‘Statements’ and Portfolio Management).
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3. Branding (and Marketing) in the age of AI
AI is an unquestionable new reality - and one with huge implications. It’s the most legitimate brand-related topic to be discussed and resolved.
Overall, ‘Brand’ must be readily discoverable and accurately readable by the non-human agent, otherwise everything else suffers or just doesn’t happen. This is in and of itself a new ‘science’ to be mastered. And that creates a revolution in what’s next – fully in Marketing, but not so much in Branding:
- in Marketing, the way I see it (but I’m no expert here) the revolution is mostly in the path that Brand travels to adoption and ultimate loyalty, including market visibility, active consideration, customer acquisition and management, and investment allocations.
- in Branding, I don’t see much of a difference than before: a Brand must be appreciated and valued beyond the confines of its factual business prowess, and such desired intangible traits need to be defined and expressed so that they can be seen by a machine (in addition to the facts, as said before) to pave the way for the proposition to then enter the brand-to-human stage proper. All this is not different at all than pre-AI, as much as many pundits shout otherwise: either it’s a self-serving perspective (which I can respect), or they just don’t know how Branding works and always worked.
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In closing, I say that I do Branding and am a Brand Consultant.
And if I do Branding seriously, based on all of the above I have to recognize when my own ‘branding’ offer may not be as easily and accurately understood as it used to be. I’m working on a solution and I’ll post my re-positioning paper soon.
See you then.
Q
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