AI and the Future of Brand Marketing

Brand marketing was, until very recently, the marketing discipline most under threat. A decade of performance-media dominance had convinced an entire generation of UK CMOs that brand was either a luxury good or a legacy obligation, to be funded only after performance budgets were satisfied. The Binet-and-Field 60/40 ratio became something everyone cited and almost no one practised. That period is ending — abruptly — and the reason is AI.

The argument is structurally simple and commercially significant: if AI commoditises execution, then the only durable competitive advantage left is what AI cannot replicate. That set is small, and brand sits squarely inside it. Identity, trust, distinctive point of view, emotional resonance with customers — none of these are produced by AI tools, and none of them depreciate quickly when they are built well. UK CMOs are noticing, and reallocating.

The state of play in 2026

• Pure performance. Brands operating with little or no brand investment, all spend in performance channels. Increasingly squeezed as performance returns plateau and challenger brands with stronger brand investment overtake them. This was the dominant model for UK challenger D2C brands through 2018–2024 and is now visibly struggling.
• Performance with brand top-up. Most modernised UK brands are here in 2026 — predominantly performance investment with intentional, measured brand investment alongside. The honest situation is that most are still under-investing in brand relative to what their own data would justify.
• Brand-led with performance discipline. A growing minority of UK brands are operating closer to the 60/40 ratio, with brand as the primary lens and performance as the conversion engine. This group is gaining share in most categories where it operates.

What's actually changing

1. Performance returns are plateauing. The marginal return on additional performance media spend has been declining for most UK brands for several years. AI-driven platform optimisation has accelerated the convergence — when everyone uses Performance Max equally well, performance differentiation collapses.
2. Brand returns are accelerating. AI-mediated discovery rewards strong brands. Strong brands cut through AI-generated content saturation. Strong brands command price premium more easily. Strong brands earn citation more easily. The compounding has become measurable.
3. The brand work itself is changing. AI enables massively higher creative variation against the same core identity, allowing brands to be more present across surfaces without losing consistency. Done well, brand becomes more ubiquitous, not more diluted.
4. Internal capability has atrophied. A decade of performance focus means many UK marketing teams genuinely lack the skills to do brand work at the level the moment now requires. The teams that win this phase are rebuilding the capability — through senior hires, structured external partnership, or deliberate internal development.

Live UK signals

• UK challenger D2C brands that built brand alongside performance over the last three years are commanding meaningful price premium versus equivalent-product competitors operating purely on performance.
• OOH, sponsorship, and high-quality video advertising spend in the UK are all up year-on-year — the first sustained growth in those categories in over a decade.
• LLM unprompted brand recall is emerging as a real internal metric for sophisticated UK brands. The gap between brands that are 'known' by major LLMs and brands that are not is becoming commercially decisive on category-defining queries.
• Distinctive brand assets (Byron Sharp / Ehrenberg-Bass framework) are being formally audited and invested in by a growing share of UK brands, after a long period of de-prioritisation.

What this means for UK CMOs

1. Reallocate budget honestly. Most UK marketing budgets are still skewed too far toward performance. If you have not moved meaningful spend toward brand in the last 18 months, you are likely under-investing.
2. Invest in distinctive assets. Brand identity work compounds for years when done well. The cost of producing it is now a fraction of historical levels thanks to AI; the value of having it is at a multi-decade high.
3. Audit your AI presence as a brand metric. What major LLMs say about your brand is a measurable, addressable, and increasingly important brand surface. Most UK brands are not yet tracking it.
4. Rebuild internal brand capability. If your team was hired and trained in the performance era, you may need to add senior brand judgement deliberately. It does not appear by accident.

For the broader strategic context, see AI vs Human Creativity in Marketing and Who Owns the Customer in an AI World?.