Three things are happening in brand strategy at once this year, and they are pulling in different directions. Software is starting to read your brand before people do. Some of the biggest names in the world have just been publicly punished for changing too fast. And the money that built brand equity for a decade is quietly draining into channels that are easier to justify on a spreadsheet.
None of this is happening in one country or one category. It's global, and it's happening to founders and leadership teams whether they're paying attention to it or not. Here's what's actually going on, sorted into what's emerging, what's in trouble, and what's winning.
Emerging: your buyer might be software
I wrote here a few weeks ago about the agentic era, and the pace hasn't slowed. Consumers are increasingly letting AI agents research, compare and shortlist on their behalf, and those agents don't shop the way people do. Nobody prompts an agent with "running shoes." They ask which trainers suit marathon training with flat feet, and the agent has to understand your business well enough to answer.
That's forcing a quiet rewrite of what a brand even needs to say. Product pages need to answer questions, not list features. Positioning needs to be explicit enough that a machine can parse it, not just implicit enough that a person can infer it. Trust is becoming the deciding factor, because shoppers will only let an agent act for them if they believe the outcome is reliable.
In trouble: rebrands are getting punished for confidence they haven't earned
Jaguar's rebrand became the case study everyone in the industry is now quoting, and not for good reasons. Sentiment swung from roughly a quarter positive to under one in ten. Cracker Barrel lost enough of its regulars over a redesign that traffic measurably dropped. Sports franchises have had fans openly mocking new crests within hours of release.
The pattern underneath all of it is the same. A brand with decades of earned recognition changed too much, too fast, without bringing its audience with it. The change wasn't wrong because it was bold. It was wrong because nobody outside the boardroom had been let in on the reasoning first.
A rebrand that isn't explained doesn't read as progress. It reads as abandonment.
In trouble: brand budget is quietly bleeding into performance
Around seven in ten marketers say they're prioritising performance marketing over brand building this year, chasing the comfort of a number that's easy to defend in a budget meeting. CMO confidence in long-term brand investment has dropped too. Fewer than seven in ten now say their own CEO and CFO believe brand building pays off, down from four in five just two years ago.
That's happening despite the evidence pointing the other way. The IPA's long-running research from Binet and Field attributes somewhere between sixty and eighty per cent of long-term sales growth to brand investment, not performance activity. Performance marketing is easier to measure. It was never proven to be more valuable, just easier to defend on a Tuesday.
In trouble: purpose is going quiet, and the silence is loud
Plenty of brands are pulling back from visible Pride sponsorships this year, worried about backlash from one side or the other. Some are shifting to hyper-local, lower-profile support instead. That caution is understandable, but it isn't free. The businesses getting hurt aren't the ones who took a clear position and kept it, or the ones who never claimed one at all. It's the ones who loudly stood for something two years ago and have gone quiet now that it's inconvenient. Consistency was always the price of credibility. It's just more visible when you drop it.
Winning: the brands that already knew who they were
Underneath all three of those pressures sits the same winning move: decide who you are and stay decided. Emotionally engaged customers are measurably more valuable, spending significantly more with brands they feel connected to, and that connection is built by consistency, not by chasing whatever's trending this quarter. The businesses weathering the AI shift, the rebrand backlash and the budget squeeze best are, unsurprisingly, the ones who'd already done the hard work of deciding what they stand for before any of these pressures arrived.
That's not a coincidence. A brand built on a real decision doesn't need to reinvent itself every time the landscape shifts. It just needs to keep saying the same true thing, clearly, in whatever format the moment demands.
The through-line
Whichever of these forces is closest to your business right now, they all lead back to the same leadership work. Not a new logo, not a bigger ad spend, not a statement drafted to survive a news cycle. The decisions about who you're for, what you stand for, and whether you'll hold that position when it's inconvenient. Everything else on this list is just what happens when those decisions were never properly made in the first place.