Branding Has Changed More in 10 Years Than in the Previous 50

The evolution of branding is not a smooth arc of progress. It is a series of forced adaptations, each one triggered by a shift in how people communicate, consume, and decide what to trust. What began as a system for marking ownership and guaranteeing product consistency has become one of the most commercially consequential disciplines in business. And the pace of that change has compressed dramatically.

Understanding where branding has been matters because it tells you what the discipline is actually for, stripped of the mythology that tends to accumulate around it. The fundamentals have not changed as much as people claim. The context has changed enormously.

Where Did Modern Branding Actually Begin?

The word brand comes from the Old Norse word for burning. Livestock were branded to establish ownership. Products were marked to identify their maker. The functional purpose was traceability and accountability. If a barrel of whisky or a bolt of cloth carried a mark, you knew who made it and could return to them or avoid them accordingly.

That accountability function is still at the core of what branding does, even if nobody talks about it that way. A brand is a promise with a name attached. The name makes the promise attributable. Without attribution, there is no reputation, and without reputation, there is no brand equity worth having.

The industrial revolution scaled this up. Mass production meant products needed to be distinguished from competitors making functionally similar goods. Pears Soap, Quaker Oats, Coca-Cola: these were early examples of brands being used not just to identify origin, but to create preference. The communication tools were limited, print and outdoor mostly, but the strategic intent was the same as it is now. Build recognition. Create preference. Sustain it.

If you want to go deeper on how brand positioning fits into a broader strategic framework, the Brand Positioning and Archetypes hub covers the full territory, from competitive mapping to tone of voice and value proposition development.

What Did the Broadcast Era Add to Branding?

Television changed branding more than any other single medium. It gave brands access to emotion at scale. You could not make someone feel something through a print ad the way you could through a sixty-second film with music, character, and narrative. The agencies that built their reputations in the 1950s through 1980s, the ones that became legendary, were largely riding the power of that medium.

The broadcast era also created a particular type of brand thinking that is still influential and sometimes still useful, but also frequently misapplied. It was a top-down model. Brands spoke. Consumers listened. The feedback loop was slow: sales data, tracking studies, annual brand health surveys. If your positioning was wrong, you might not find out for eighteen months.

The discipline of brand management as it was taught in business schools from the 1960s onwards was built on this model. Brand managers at Procter and Gamble, Unilever, and their equivalents were essentially product custodians managing a portfolio of promises, making sure the communication stayed consistent and the product delivered on what the advertising claimed. It worked because the channels were controllable and the competition was manageable.

That controllability is exactly what the digital era removed.

How Did Digital Change the Rules of Brand Building?

When I was running iProspect’s European hub in the mid-2000s, we were watching the shift happen in real time. Search was becoming the primary entry point for commercial intent. Social platforms were beginning to give consumers a voice that brands could not control or ignore. The idea that a brand could manage its narrative through paid media alone was starting to look fragile.

What digital did was collapse the distance between brand promise and brand reality. If your product was poor, people said so publicly and permanently. If your customer service was inconsistent, the evidence accumulated in reviews that outranked your own website. The broadcast model assumed a controlled information environment. Digital removed that assumption entirely.

This created a structural shift in what branding had to do. It was no longer sufficient to communicate a position. You had to live it operationally. The brands that thrived in the digital era were the ones where the product, the service, the culture, and the communication all pointed in the same direction. The ones that struggled were the ones that tried to maintain a brand image that their actual customer experience did not support.

Wistia’s analysis of why existing brand building strategies are failing captures part of this tension well: the playbooks that worked in the broadcast era are being applied to a media environment they were not designed for, and the results are predictably weak.

Digital also fragmented attention in ways that made brand consistency harder to maintain. When a brand had three or four media channels to manage, consistency was achievable. When it had thirty, including channels it did not own and could not fully control, maintaining a coherent identity required a different kind of discipline. Not more rules, but clearer principles.

Did Digital Democratise Branding or Just Make It Harder?

The optimistic version of the digital branding story is that it levelled the playing field. Small brands could now reach audiences that previously required television budgets. A founder with a clear point of view and a social media account could build a following that a legacy brand would struggle to replicate. And that is true, to a point.

But the levelling has limits. What digital removed was the barrier to reach. It did not remove the barrier to trust. Building a brand that people believe in and return to still requires consistency over time, a clear and defensible position, and a product or service that delivers on the promise. Those things take time and discipline regardless of the channel.

What I observed across the thirty or so industries I have worked in is that digital lowered the cost of launching a brand while simultaneously raising the cost of sustaining one. The noise level increased. The number of brands competing for attention in almost every category multiplied. The result was not a more level playing field, it was a more crowded one, and in crowded markets, weak positioning becomes a liability faster than it used to.

MarketingProfs research on brand loyalty showed that consumer loyalty was already weakening under economic pressure, and digital amplified that trend by making switching easier and comparison more frictionless. The brands that retained loyalty were the ones with genuine differentiation, not just strong awareness.

What Role Did Purpose Play in the Evolution of Branding?

Brand purpose became the dominant conversation in marketing for most of the 2010s, and it is worth being honest about what happened. Some of it was genuine and commercially sensible. Some of it was theatre.

The genuine version: brands that had a clear reason for existing beyond profit, that could articulate what they stood for and against, tended to attract more loyal customers and better talent. Patagonia is the obvious example. The Body Shop before it lost its way. These were not brands that bolted purpose onto a positioning statement. Purpose was embedded in how they operated.

The theatre version: large corporations that had never particularly stood for anything decided that purpose was a communication strategy rather than an operational commitment. They ran campaigns about values they did not demonstrably hold. Consumers, particularly younger ones, became increasingly good at identifying the gap between what brands said and what they did. The backlash when that gap was exposed was often more damaging than saying nothing would have been.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and one of the things that became clear in that process is that the work which genuinely moved business outcomes was almost never the work that was loudest about its values. The most effective campaigns tended to be the ones where the brand had a clear, specific, and credible position, and the communication expressed that position without trying to claim moral authority it had not earned.

BCG’s work on the intersection of brand strategy and HR made an important point about this: purpose-driven positioning only holds if it is reflected in how a company hires, operates, and makes decisions. When it is not, the brand becomes a liability rather than an asset.

How Has Brand Measurement Evolved?

One of the more underappreciated shifts in branding over the last two decades is in how it gets measured, and how the availability of data has changed what gets prioritised.

The broadcast era measured brand health through tracking studies: awareness, consideration, preference, intent to purchase. These were quarterly or annual snapshots. They were slow, expensive, and imprecise, but they forced a kind of long-term thinking. You could not optimise a brand health tracker in real time, so you had to commit to a direction and hold it.

Digital gave marketers access to daily, hourly, sometimes minute-by-minute data on how their brand was performing across search, social, and paid channels. That is genuinely useful. But it also created a bias toward short-term, measurable activity at the expense of longer-term brand building. When you can see the click-through rate on a performance campaign in real time and you cannot see the effect of a brand campaign for six months, the performance campaign wins the budget argument even when it should not.

Semrush’s guide to measuring brand awareness illustrates how the proxy metrics available to digital marketers, branded search volume, direct traffic, share of voice, can give a reasonable approximation of brand health without requiring a full tracking study. But they are proxies, not the thing itself, and treating them as equivalent leads to bad decisions.

The tension between brand and performance measurement is one of the defining debates in modern marketing. It is not a new debate. The argument about whether advertising builds long-term equity or drives short-term response has been running for decades. What is new is the degree to which performance measurement has crowded out brand thinking in organisations that have access to both.

Wistia’s argument against over-indexing on brand awareness is a useful counterweight here. Awareness without relevance or differentiation does not convert. Measuring awareness in isolation tells you very little about whether your brand is actually working commercially.

What Does the Current Era Demand from Brand Strategy?

When I was growing a team from twenty people to nearly a hundred and moving an agency from the bottom of a global network ranking to the top five by revenue, the brand work that mattered most was not the external positioning. It was the internal one. What did we stand for as an agency? What kind of work did we do and not do? What did we promise clients that we could actually deliver?

Getting that internal clarity right was what made the external positioning credible. We positioned ourselves as a European hub with genuine multicultural capability, twenty nationalities working together on pan-European briefs. That was not a marketing claim. It was an operational reality that we had built deliberately. The brand followed the business, not the other way around.

That sequence matters. The most common mistake I see in brand strategy work is trying to define the brand before the business model is clear. What do you do better than anyone else? Who specifically is it for? What does it cost them to switch to you, and what makes it worth their while? Those are business questions, and the answers to them are the foundation of a brand position that holds up under pressure.

BCG’s analysis of the world’s strongest brands found that the brands with the most durable equity were not necessarily the ones with the biggest advertising budgets. They were the ones with the clearest positions and the most consistent execution over time. That finding has held up. Consistency compounds.

The current era adds two demands that previous eras did not require in the same way. The first is speed: brands need to be able to respond to cultural moments, competitive moves, and market shifts without losing their core identity. That requires a brand architecture that is clear enough to provide guardrails without being so rigid that it prevents adaptation. The second is coherence across channels that a brand does not fully control, including influencer content, user-generated content, and employee advocacy. HubSpot’s research on brand voice consistency shows how much revenue and trust is lost when the same brand sounds and feels different across touchpoints. The fix is not more rules. It is clearer principles that people can apply without checking a style guide.

What Has Not Changed in 100 Years of Branding?

For all the genuine disruption in how brands are built and maintained, the core logic has not changed. People choose brands they trust. They trust brands that are consistent. They stay loyal to brands that keep their promises and leave brands that do not. That was true in 1924 and it is true now.

What has changed is the speed at which trust is built and lost, the number of competitors in almost every category, and the degree to which brand reality and brand communication are visible and comparable. The fundamentals are the same. The environment in which they operate is more demanding.

The brands that will be durable over the next decade are not the ones that are fastest to adopt new channels or most aggressively purpose-led. They are the ones with the clearest sense of what they are for, who they serve, and what they will not compromise on. That clarity is harder to build than a campaign and harder to copy than a product feature. It is also the only form of competitive advantage in branding that genuinely compounds over time.

The full strategic toolkit for building that kind of clarity, from positioning frameworks to archetype mapping and competitive differentiation, is covered in the Brand Positioning and Archetypes section of The Marketing Juice. It is where theory connects to the decisions you actually have to make.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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