Credit AI - Brand Is Having a Moment, But Is This a Comeback or a Correction?

The irony is striking, but only marketing leaders who’ve been around the block a few times may notice it. I’m one of them. 

The wave of technology innovation that transformed marketing in the early 2000s - the internet, Google search, and everything that came with it - contributed to making brand marketing and brand marketers feel “less than.” Not because brand marketing stopped working, but because we could now measure marketing’s impact in multiple ways, and that feeling of clarity was intoxicating. Soon, the mantra became “if you can’t measure it, don’t spend it.” And brand marketing went into hiding.

Here we are two decades later, and the latest technology to upend marketing, generative and agentic AI, is pulling brand marketing back to the forefront, at least conversationally.

But the challenge to measure and therefore defend investment in brand marketing is still with us. 

So, is brand really back, or are we in the midst of a marketing correction? 

Back story: I got “sorted” by the first wave

About fifteen years ago, I interviewed with a private equity investor for a marketing leadership role at a growth-stage company in edtech. A few minutes in, he asked me an appropriate question. 

"Do you consider yourself more of a traditional brand marketer, or a modern digital marketer?" (Italics for emphasis.) 

He wasn't necessarily curious. He was sorting me, and that’s okay. But at the time, I interpreted it as though I was being sorted into a pile marked "traditional and therefore not good.” At that point in my career, I was a successful marketer with expertise in product and brand marketing, having created innovative campaigns that drove revenue outcomes. But I was lacking a “modern” skillset that was simply more appealing, regardless of my track record. 

He went on to advise me to level up my skillset in digital marketing and stay in touch. (Which I did).

I’ve reflected on that conversation for years, because it was a powerful learning moment. It was also the starting point for how I’ve been framing my opinion regarding how brand and performance marketing should coexist, rather than replace one another. 

It’s also why the irony of the present moment for marketers is giving me a chuckle.

Ask yourself: How much spend on customer acquisition is worth it if the brand isn't strong, the value proposition isn't relevant and differentiated, and the product can’t live up to the hype? Worse yet, how much is wasted?

Marketers changed, or we lost relevance

With the rise of performance marketing, many of us marketers fell in love with dashboards, and our stakeholders did too. Speaking from personal experience, the data and the dashboards are, in fact, incredible. Who doesn’t love data? The ability to create an ad, push it into a channel, test it out, get measurable results instantaneously, and then follow that breadcrumb all the way to conversion has been exhilarating. (Not to mention the feedback loop that digital performance surfaces to influence product positioning and brand marketing. It’s a beautiful cycle and a little peek into my “coexist” point of view.)

For almost two decades, it’s been very difficult to sit in a board meeting and justify brand-related investment, even if we know it’s necessary, without a clean, measurable, dashboard-worthy throughline to revenue.

The reality is that many of us had to change our practical position regarding strategies and tactics that were commonly associated with top-of-funnel brand building, because it was incredibly difficult to translate brand investment to direct impact on revenue, and it still is. 

Today, nearly 63% of B2B marketers agree that brand is critical to long-term success, and that the biggest barrier to investing in it is proving the ROI. (eMarketer)

A 2026 CMO survey out of Duke's Fuqua School of Business found that approximately 71% of senior marketers say they're prioritizing short-term impact over long-run gains in response to organizational pressure. The survey names where that pressure comes from: CEOs, boards, and CFOs.

That's not strategy. That's a response to organizational pressure. And it’s a bummer.

The case for brand

In B2B, we have a justifiable case for brand investment purely based on the fact that a limited number of prospective buyers are in-market at any given time. Layer in the complexity of edtech with matrixed buying committees sometimes packed with active participants we don’t know, limited purchase windows, funding uncertainty, school board dynamics, and legislative factors, and you have an even more complicated go-to-market environment that requires even more of marketing. 

Depending on industry, data shows that only about 5% of B2B buyers are in the market at any given time. If we fund our go-to-market effort entirely against that tiny 5%, we’re going against every competitor in our category for the same tiny slice of demand, while doing nothing for the 95% who will decide later, if they remember us at all. 

And then, every year, we’re chasing another audience, and then another, and then another. This does nothing but drive up short-term cost of acquisition, with the winner being the company or product with the largest ad budget, not necessarily the best solution. 

Here’s another compelling data point that Gartner has been touting for years. Companies with strong brand strategy are 2X more likely to exceed their revenue and growth goals. 

Takeaway: Brand investment makes sense when go-to-market is complex because strong brands keep latent buyers in reach and bring active buyers to you when they're ready.

And AI is now revealing what many of us have known all along -  brand matters

As soon as we started learning more about how brands rank in AI platforms, my first thought was “brand is back!” I know I’m not alone in this because I’ve been hearing it from other marketers, leaders, and analysts.

There are many definitions of brand, but in this context, think of brand as what customers say about you when you’re not in the room. Metaphorically, these conversations are happening in online rooms that we’re not invited to, but AI is. 

Ahrefs (SEO platform technology) studied 75,000 brands in 2025 to figure out what drives whether a brand appears in Google's AI Overviews. 

The strongest predictor wasn't backlinks or domain authority or content volume (formerly seen as essential strategies that drive SEO dominance). It was branded web mentions, at roughly 3X the correlation of backlinks. The most automated discovery layer ever built is rewarding the least automatable thing in marketing, and also the most challenging thing to control: how often, and precisely how, the world talks about us.

Meanwhile, marketing campaign execution is quickly becoming commoditized. Content, omni-channel coverage, and personalization at scale are now available to any team with an LLM license and a budget. I’m not saying it’s easy to execute well, but we’re at a point where it’s feasible for any company to be everywhere, all at once, all the time. Which means executing marketing campaigns that run everywhere all the time (meeting customers where they’re at and whenever they’re looking) is no longer a ceiling. It's the floor.

Which brings us back to brand as the difference maker.

how I see it: brand and performance marketing working together to drive faster, predictable growth

So, is this a comeback, or just a correction?

We hear about market corrections as it relates to the economy, and I’ve been pondering this as a metaphor for what’s happening with brand and performance marketing. 

I've made the "brand is back" claim myself, and as I’ve said, I’m seeing it everywhere. But anyone who's watched a pendulum knows the first swings are the big ones. Then the arc gets shorter. Eventually it settles near the center, which is where it was trying to get the whole time.

So maybe this isn't brand's comeback at all. Maybe it's the correction that finally gets us to balance, with appropriate investment in brand and performance marketing, plus shared understanding with our cross-functional stakeholders regarding the value of brand investment and brand measurement.

Here’s how I see it, and how I’ve seen it for some time: We need both to produce great marketing. 

The most powerful recipes for predictable B2B growth will be comprised of long-lead brand investment that builds trust and leverages connection, community, and customer voice, augmented by timely, targeted, high-dosage performance marketing campaigns that capitalize on buying cycles when they happen.

Maybe this AI-driven attention back on brand isn’t ironic. Maybe it’s helping us get it right this time around, and we’re settling into that place of harmony where brand and performance marketing coexist, and we don’t have to hide our brand investment behind a barely used cost center. (IYKYK.)

AI transparency note: I used Claude and ChatGPT to source data to research my perspective, Claude Design for my image header, and Grammarly helped me avoid typos.