Brands, Welcome to the Versus Era

How brands can navigate new challenges around maintaining their visibility, relevance and value to consumers

Photo by Aditya Wardhana on Unsplash

It’s never been a more difficult time to be a brand – and it doesn’t look to be getting any easier. 

Brands should be a beacon for familiarity and, at their best, trust. A mental shortcut for convenience, expectation, consistency, and more. As of late, this vaunted position and the tools of the trade to achieve or reinforce it, are under siege. 

The confluence of years of platform evolution, macroeconomic issues, and explosion of content (both real and artificial) has created a brutal environment for reaching consumers in a meaningful way. Even brands with the strongest creative, media, data and communications strategies are feeling pressurized by this new unforgiving landscape. The bar for recall, let alone impact, has never been higher. 

We are shifting from a period of constant navigation – where change was expected, but paths to capture value were still presented as available and clear to utilize – into a more oppressive time I’m dubbing the versus era. Brands are fighting to be seen in an endless stream of content, fighting for relevance amongst an evolving competitive landscape, and fighting to be valued in the midst of challenging economic times. 

Vs. Visibility: 

Where the prevailing logic for brands remains ‘best content wins’, things have changed. In the context of being more engaging than a competitor, that adage is likely still true, but in today’s landscape, brands are competing with literally everything: constant breaking news, the proliferation of AI slop content, growth in AI search behavior, group chats with private social sharing, and many other dynamics.

Underscoring the competitiveness of this digital environment, recent research from Karen Nelson-Field PhD has shown that the vast majority of digital ads today (~85%) receive less than 2.5 seconds of attention. Capturing attention in this environment can feel like hoping for a miracle. 

Vs. Relevance:

It’s not just algorithms and attention spans brands have to contend with, but rapid cultural and business disruptions. To look only at two of the biggest current breakthroughs, GLP-1s and Generative AI, entire industries are being remade in real time. Consumer expectations and needs are accelerating and shifting making it tough for brands to maintain relevance with key audiences. Most of us are probably a ways away from truly grasping the downstream knock-on effects.

Meanwhile in media, the creator economy is now drawing larger scale than mainstream entertainment properties. For better or worse, many brands are shifting their operations to accommodate and adopt this. Look no further than reports of Unilever spending up to 50% of some brand marketing budgets on ‘influencer-first’ social strategy, effectively outsourcing their mouthpieces to more consumer connected influencers. As ever, brands need to be relevant in culture. That may mean pivoting more than creative campaigns. 

Vs. Value:

Lastly, brands are up against very tough times for consumers. The data has been showing we are once again in the midst of a K-Shaped Economy, leaving the majority of people feeling less than confident in their spending. With this as a backdrop, it is harder than ever to justify premium pricing (often built through brand) and money needs to be spent thoughtfully. We know consumers are often lighter buyers and more promiscuous than we’d like to believe when it comes to brand loyalty, but when budget becomes the primary filter, one can imagine choice and preference are even more heavily squeezed in the equation. What’s left is an undoubted need for the actual product and brand experience to deliver tangible value to its consumers.   

Ok, enough bad news – sorry about all that. 

What can brands do to compete in the vs. era?

The state of affairs is a lot to digest and merits hard resetting of traditional mindsets. I’ll admit it – I don’t have the magic solution to all this turmoil, but I believe there are some clear signals that give brands near-term guidance. 

• Define and Display Authenticity. In an era where people are, in Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri’s words,  "defaulting to skepticism" authenticity is at a premium. This will look different for different brands, but erring toward imperfect, personality-forward, and trust-first communications is one way to fend off consumer tune-out. 

• Normalize Creative Risk-Tasking. In an environment dictated by quarterly results, short-termism has taken hold in marketing organizations. Now more than ever brands need to be investing to build their value offering up to consumers in the long-term. One of the surest ways to do this is with stand-out creative. Standing out means not conforming to ‘best practices’ that contribute to homogenous looking categories. If they don’t take some risk, there may not be any customers for them to market to when the future arrives. 

• Commit to Brand-First Thinking for Both People and Machines. Finally, as we continue barreling down the road toward AI-mediated interactions, building brand memorability and recall should have a newfound urgency. If consumers aren’t typing you into their search, you may never show up. Being able to put your brand front and center in creative, communications, earned media, and across the web can help mitigate this fate. 

Marketers can start reacting to these shifts by adding tactics to their plans designed to address the new battlegrounds of attention, cultural attunement and value positioning. This will require asking what authenticity looks like for their brand and being more thoughtful about media and social content planning. Investing in bigger creative swings to break through and initiatives that build brand salience in a saturated and increasingly AI-mediated environment should now start becoming business imperatives. 

Happy planning, brands. In the meantime: elbows out.