Anyone old enough to remember drinking martinis from an office liquor cabinet on Monday mornings will tell you the Golden Age of brand advertising ended long ago. Back then, production and distribution barriers limited competition across most consumer categories, while scarce media placements across TV, radio and print allowed a small number of well-capitalized brands to dominate share of voice.
In that environment, broad familiarity, trust and cultural presence ruled, translating naturally into enduring brand loyalty.
The advent of the internet and social media destroyed that paradigm. Ecommerce dissolved the barriers to launching, marketing and distributing new brands and products. Armed with near-infinite choice and frictionless discovery, consumers became less anchored in their purchasing behavior. Brand ties weakened.
Marketing changed even more dramatically. As digital platforms matured in the 2000s and 2010s, performance marketing rose to prominence. Advertisers – and their CFOS – embraced the promise (or illusion) of precise attribution, believing short-term sales could be directly tied to specific advertising expenditures. Budget priorities were dramatically reshaped. According to Gartner, the average CMO allocates more than twice as much to performance marketing as they do to brand marketing.
But there’s a retro era upon us now.
Two macro trends foretell a rebalancing of marketing investments from performance to brand in the coming years.
Younger generations are leading a broader resurgence in brand loyalty
According to CivicScience, after more than a decade of consistent decline, the percentage of US consumers who self-identify as “very brand loyal” began to climb in 2021, rising steadily ever since. This newfound loyalty is distinctly “emotional” in nature, as consumers forge connections with brands to fill voids left by pandemic-era social isolation and institutional distrust.
Even as economic headwinds drive rampant deal-seeking, consumers carefully trade down in some categories to preserve spending in others – and with brands – where their loyalties lie. Importantly, this trend is being driven by younger consumers, historically the age group believed to be most promiscuous in their buying behaviors. The potential customer lifetime value at stake among these young, brand-loyal shoppers is massive.
This should give CFOs pause: A dollar spent earning a 25-year-old’s emotional loyalty today may pay off for decades in ways that no last-click attribution model will ever capture.
AI agents change the shopping journey
CivicScience data tells us that over 40% of US adults have already used AI for at least one shopping excursion. These numbers will only rise as more advanced agentic technology gains prominence. As a result, consumers will become increasingly disintermediated from big swaths of the shopping journey, including most of the stops along the way where a “performance” ad might be seen or clicked.
In this future, brand will matter more than ever. Brand preferences and loyalties will drive the prompts consumers feed to their agents and provide the filter through which they evaluate options or recommendations.
When an agent does the browsing, performance advertising loses its audience and the real competition shifts upstream to the familiarity and trust that brands built long before anyone typed a prompt, much as it did when share of voice ruled.
The brand marketing comeback
While the zeros and ones of programmatic advertising are here to stay, the next few years should see a rebalancing of investments in storytelling, bold activations and partnerships and all the creative elements of brand marketing that move and inspire people.
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