Back to Brand: Why the Return Matters More Than Ever

It’s encouraging to see McKinsey’s State of Marketing Europe 2026 report confirm something many of us have felt building quietly over the last few years: branding is once again the number one priority for European CMOs, across both B2B and B2C.

In a world dominated by AI, performance dashboards, optimisation loops and relentless quarterly pressure, that feels both significant and overdue.

Not because brand ever stopped mattering. Brands remain the most valuable assets a business owns.

But because, for a long period of time, brand has been treated as secondary to short-term activation, something to return to “once the numbers are fixed”, rather than the foundation that enables sustainable growth in the first place.

The Evidence Was Always There

This shift back towards brand isn’t a leap of faith, the evidence has been clear for years.

More than a decade ago, Les Binet and Peter Field demonstrated that long-term investment in brand building delivers roughly twice the profit of short-term activation alone. Their work also showed that the strongest commercial outcomes come when organisations deliberately combine both, balancing long-term brand building with short-term performance activity.

And yet, despite this, many organisations drifted towards an over-reliance on immediate results. Brand became harder to justify in boardrooms focused on dashboards, attribution models and next quarter’s numbers.

What’s interesting now is why brand is rising back to the top of the agenda.

Why Brand Becomes Critical in Uncertain Times

In volatile markets, brand plays a very different role. It stops being a “nice to have” and becomes an anchor.

• Brand provides stability for the people we serve when markets, categories and confidence are fragile.
• It reinforces trusted value at moments when customers and partners are more cautious.
• It protects margin when pricing pressure intensifies and differentiation matters more than ever.
• And it unites people internally, giving teams something to believe in, rally around and act with courage behind.

Seen through this lens, the return to brand isn’t nostalgic. It’s practical.

Two Beliefs That Have Shaped My Working Life

This moment reinforces two beliefs I’ve held throughout my career.

1. Brands are the most important assets of a business.
   The value of a company is largely driven by the strength of its brands and its reputation. But brands don’t build themselves. They require clarity, commitment and sustained investment over time.
2. People are the most important resource in building brands.
   Brands are built every day by the people inside the organisation and by those who represent the brand to customers, shoppers and the people we serve.

That comes down to some very human fundamentals:

• How clearly people understand and believe in the brand’s purpose
• How aligned teams are across the organisation, not just within marketing
• How consistently the brand shows up across every touchpoint, experience and interaction

This is where many brand strategies fall down. Too much time is spent perfecting the words, the visuals and the frameworks and not enough time working with the people expected to bring them to life.

From Marketing Output to Organisational Focus

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s this:
You need to spend at least as much time working with your people and teams as you do designing the strategy and execution of your brands.

Because when people are aligned, empowered and accountable, brand stops being a marketing output and becomes something far more powerful an organisational focus and a collective mission.

That’s when brand moves beyond campaigns and comms, and starts shaping behaviour, decisions and culture.

More Than a Marketing Reset

So yes, branding is “back” at the top of the agenda.

But this time, the opportunity is bigger than marketing alone. Done well, brand can bring organisations together combining ownership, purpose and resilience to drive growth, even amid uncertainty and change.

Because when people grow, brands grow.
And when brands grow, businesses grow.

How is this “return to brand” is showing up inside your organisation and what is it changing?

Steve