Brands Mean Business

Brands matter now more than ever.

You don’t have to say it, I know what you’re thinking: the CEO of a brand agency arguing for brands? How surprising.

But this isn’t for me. This is for every CMO looking to secure their seat at the table and fighting to keep brand investment alive.

This is for every CEO and CFO balancing the pull of GenAI and the flood of new tools that promise optimization, automation, personalization, and agentic transformation.

And yes, dare I say it, this is for my competitors, who I know are on their own crusade to prove that brand still matters.

Because brands are quietly under attack, through budget cuts, short-termism, and the belief that anything truly valuable can be automated. We’re confusing lead generation with brand creation and, even more dangerously, forgetting how important a brand is to business growth.

WHY BRANDS MATTER

In the process, we’re forgetting what brands actually do and why they still matter. Because when everything is automated, brand is what remains human. When products and services are copied, a brand is what creates desire, and an unfair advantage. And when disruption is constant and competition global, only strong brands will endure.

I may lead a creative company but I’m also a CEO with a growth mandate, investing in our own brand. And I believe, now more than ever, that brand is a strategic asset and one too many businesses underinvest in at their peril.

So, let’s confront four counterarguments, the real ones I hear every day in rooms where growth is on the line.

1. Performance marketing delivers sales. Brand is just a cost center.

Performance marketing works. It gets clicks, drives conversions, and shows up beautifully on a dashboard. But, if performance is the engine, brand is the fuel that drives it, as the prior CEO of Nike found out a little too late, after a focus on performance and efficiency over brand led to stalled growth and declining sales.

Performance doesn’t create preference or build loyalty. Without brand, performance marketing becomes a tax you pay repeatedly to stay in the game. Brand, by contrast, is a multiplier. It builds memory, emotional affinity, and cultural relevance—the very elements that make performance more efficient over time. Strong brands can command higher prices, attract better talent, and weather competitive pressure. It’s why Mastercard keeps innovating on its “Priceless” brand platform. How Xbox has become more than a console, it’s become a community. And it’s why L’Oréal Paris’s “Because I’m Worth It” still drives double-digit growth.

Brands like these are powerful business engines delivering three times the brand value and nearly four times the year-on-year growth of their competitors, according to a McCann analysis of 15 brands across 12 countries and 6,000 consumers. They create the conditions for performance marketing to perform better.

2. Brand can’t be measured.

This is the argument I hear most often, and it is the one that stings the most, because there is some truth in it. We have failed to connect the emotional power of brand with the hard metrics that matter to long- and short-term business success. We have defaulted to soft metrics like awareness and recall, when what clients and boards are asking for is clear and fair: Show me how my investment in brand creates growth. Show me how it moves people and moves markets.

That is a leadership challenge for everyone responsible for a brand. And I include McCann in that.

But the belief that brand cannot be measured is simply wrong. Strong brands command higher prices, drive loyalty, and outperform competitors, with up to two times market cap and four times employee engagement, based on McCann’s analyses of more than 130 brands across multiple markets and categories. Brand is structural and, when measured with the right intent, it becomes the most powerful signal of long-term business health.

Again, this is about completing the picture, not replacing performance metrics. Because brand powers performance.

3. Everything can be copied, so what’s the point of brand?

Dupes may seem like a threat to a brand, but they’re not. It’s actually a sign of how culturally powerful brands have become. People buy the dupe because they know the original. They’re not rejecting the brand or buying a brandless product, they’re acknowledging the brand by seeking out something that looks awfully close to it. Strong brands know how to stay in the story. When knockoff “Lafufu” versions of Pop Mart’s Labubu toy went viral, the brand didn’t retreat. It trademarked the parody name and turned it into a moment.

In a world where everything can be copied, the only asset that can’t is the emotional signal people choose to align with. That’s your brand.

4. Discovery is data-driven now. Brand doesn’t matter if you’re not in the feed.

There is no question that discovery looks different now. People are not searching the way they used to and content is now served by an algorithm. What shows up is no longer just about keywords or intent but about LLMs and algorithms predicting relevance, proximity, and engagement. For consumers, especially Gen Z, the feed is culture and connection, not just content. And if you’re not appearing there, you risk being invisible.

But that is exactly why brand matters more than ever. While data may determine what gets delivered, it is brand that determines what gets noticed. Algorithms reward attention signals like clicks, shares, comments, and saves. Brands that understand human truths (yes, humans) can generate those signals for a business. It is what makes people stop scrolling, pay attention, and feel something. Without it, content becomes wallpaper, optimized but forgettable wallpaper.

According to McCann’s own Truth Central research, 64% of people worry they will discover fewer new things if companies only show them what the algorithm thinks they want. That is an open invitation for brands with a point of view and the courage to break the pattern.

So yes, I’m the CEO of a brand company making the case for brand. Because in a world of endless change, a brand is what gets you emotional advantage and moves the people and markets that matter most to your business.

Daryl Lee is global CEO of McCann Worldgroup.