There have always been measurables in marketing: retention, sales figures, customer feedback – but 2026 is seeing the beginning of a major shift in marketing. Brand awareness and loyalty are fast becoming the key drivers of growth, and brands which foster an emotional connection with their customers are likely to see the highest growth patterns.
A New Measurable
In part, this shift is taking place because brand loyalty is now far more measurable, thanks to advanced analytics tools, which can measure things like the return on marketing investment more easily, customer retention statistics and customer acquisition costs.
All of this means that it’s much easier to discover how well your brand is working.
Emotional Connection
While some companies in the past have tried – and arguably not succeeded with – a scattergun approach to marketing, with a range of fonts, ad types and themes, the marketing industry is witnessing considerably increased loyalty to brands which keep the same theming, semantics and feeling.
While this can be developed in-house, a brand strategy agency such as //www.reallyhelpfulmarketing.co.uk/specialist-services/brand-strategy-agency can be very beneficial in developing a strategy that really hits the mark.
There’s another argument for developing that emotional connection between target consumer and brand, too: it’s AI proof. With the advent of generational AI now able to create advert text, images, and even videos, a strategically thought-out, human touch style advertising campaign which gets right to the heart of its consumers’ hearts and minds is going to be worth its weight in gold.