2026 The Year of The Brand

By Fraser Thomson – Head of MarketingStrategic Growth Marketer

reading the McKinsey’s State of Marketing 2026 report (link below) this week, it’s fascinating how the pendulum has finally swung back. After a decade of chasing dashboards, marketers are rediscovering something oddly radical: brand actually matters again.

Not as a “nice to have,” not as a fluffy line item… but as the engine of long-term growth, pricing power, and resilience.

And it’s great timing, having just re-read the brilliant Financial Times. article from 2015 (link in comments and thanks to Gustaf Wick for the reminder). It warned almost prophetically about the industry’s “great digital delusion.”

Back then, everyone was drinking the “precise targeting” Kool-aid, while Byron Sharp was quietly reminding us that brands grow through light buyers, not superfans. Through mental availability, not micro-optimised click-throughs.

Of course, the industry largely ignored him.

Fast forward to today, and McKinsey is saying what many have felt but few have had the courage to admit:

– We over-rotated.
– We fragmented.
= We optimiszed ourselves into irrelevance.

Brand is back, not in a nostalgic way, but in a strategic way. Because volatility rewards brands people actually remember. Because loyalty is mostly a myth.
And because emotion, reach and distinctiveness remain the most efficient levers for long-term growth, even in a hyper-digital world.

If 2015 was the wake-up call, maybe 2026 is the year we finally listen. Exciting times ahead……