In December 2024, Omnicom merged with IPG, eliminating approximately 4,000 jobs. Among those displaced were hundreds of brand strategists who had spent their entire careers honing the art of positioning, differentiation, and cultural resonance.
They didn’t lose their jobs because they weren’t talented or dedicated. They lost them because the infrastructure they relied on—the promise-making apparatus of the advertising age—collapsed from obsolescence.
This wasn’t a cyclical downturn. It was structural. And understanding why requires an understanding of how brands have fundamentally changed the way they create value for their owners and the customers they serve.
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The Shift Everyone Saw Coming (But Was Still Surprised By)
For more than a century, the brand-building playbook was remarkably consistent: Make a promise. Tell it beautifully. Repeat until it sticks.
Sneaker companies promised athletic identity. Banks promised security and partnership. Consumer brands competed on who could craft the most compelling story about what their product meant, not what it could actually do for you beyond its basic function.
This made sense given the constraints of the era. A sneaker company couldn’t actually make you a better athlete—but it could make you feel like one. A bank couldn’t simplify the genuine complexity of personal finance—but it could promise you’d feel confident and secure.
So an entire industry architecture evolved around this model: Agencies optimized persuasion. Research measured perception. Media delivered reach. Success meant winning the battle for attention and preference through superior creative execution and bigger media budgets.
Here’s what changed: That playbook just became obsolete. Not outdated—obsolete. Like a Rolodex or a fax machine or the idea that you can build a brand without actually being useful to people.
And the implications are more profound than most CMOs have fully absorbed. Which is understandable—it’s hard to notice the ground shifting when you’re standing on it.
Three Technology Shifts That Ended the Promise Era
Three technological capabilities emerged that fundamentally eliminated the constraints that made promise-based branding necessary:
First, brands can now deliver contextual utility at scale.
Connectivity, sensors, and AI enable brands to understand individual contexts in real-time and orchestrate genuinely personalized responses. Nike doesn’t just promise athletic identity anymore—it delivers adaptive training programs, biomechanical feedback, and performance optimization through Training Club. Capital One doesn’t promise financial confidence—it delivers real-time spending insights, instant fraud alerts, and automated savings tools. The promise has become operationalizable in ways that were simply impossible a decade ago.
Second, consumer expectations shifted irreversibly.
People now expect brands to be useful, not just meaningful. A 2024 Edelman study found that 67% of consumers define brand trust primarily through “helping me solve problems” rather than “sharing my values”—a complete inversion from 2015 when values alignment dominated. Cultural resonance still matters, but it’s become table stakes rather than differentiation. Amazon’s cultural salience is near zero, yet it maintains dominant positions because it relentlessly delivers operational value: speed, convenience, reliability, and price.
Third, promise-making now creates vulnerability in transparent markets.
Social media, review platforms, and instant information access have made gaps between promise and delivery instantly visible and permanently documented. Brands that overpromise face immediate, public accountability. There’s a reason “We’ve heard your feedback” became the most panic-inducing phrase in corporate communications.
The old model—craft aspirational messaging, deliver adequate product—now generates backlash rather than loyalty. Trust gets built through consistent delivery of value, not repetition of claims.
Why The Old Model Creates New Strategic Risks
The promise-focused approach isn’t just less effective—it actively creates three forms of new strategic risks:
Capital misallocation. Marketing budgets optimized for awareness and persuasion are generating diminishing returns. A 2023 McKinsey analysis of 200 CPG brands found that incremental media spend beyond baseline thresholds produced 0.3x ROI, while investment in what they called “experiential utilities” – apps, services, and personalization engines – generated 3.2x returns. Every dollar spent on louder promises is effectively subsidizing competitors who are building better delivery systems.
Talent misalignment. The most sophisticated strategic and technical talent now gravitates toward brands that are building operational capabilities – product teams, experience designers, and data scientists—not communications roles. Agencies report 40% declines in applications from top-tier creative talent since 2019, while product-led brands like Stripe and Notion face talent surpluses. The promise model simply can’t attract the capabilities required for modern competition.
Commodification risk. When multiple brands make similar promises without differentiated delivery, entire categories collapse into price competition.
Consider banking: Every major institution promises ‘financial partnership’ and ‘personalized service.’ Yet 89% of consumers report experiencing no meaningful difference whatsoever. If you’ve ever tried to distinguish between Chase’s promise and Bank of America’s promise and Wells Fargo’s promise, you know exactly what I mean. They all sound like they were written by the same AI prompt: ‘Sound trustworthy but not boring, aspirational but not arrogant, personal but not creepy.
Point being, the promise layer has become completely indistinguishable, forcing bank brand competition toward rate arbitrage. Meanwhile, brands with superior delivery systems, such as Chime’s instant notifications and Revolut’s multi-currency infrastructure, capture disproportionate growth despite minimal brand investment.
Playing Three Games Simultaneously
Here’s what I’ve learned watching brands win and lose over the past several years: They’re no longer just trying to play one simple game where the rules are known to everyone. They’re playing three different games simultaneously.
There’s the game everyone knows: Products. Better ingredients, faster processors, longer battery life, and superior formulations. This is the traditional realm of functional performance where CPG and consumer tech have always competed: simple product features, tangible benefits, and superiority claims.
Then there’s the game brand strategists have obsessed over for the past 20 years: Ideas. Cultural conversations about what the “good life” looks and feels like. Not just brand positioning, but participation in broader societal dialogue about meaning, identity, and values. This is where brands try to build emotional affinity, ethical identity, and cultural capital.
But there’s a third game that’s fast becoming the deciding factor: Services. And I need to be specific about what I mean here, because I’m not talking about customer service. I am not referring to call centers, return policies, or post-purchase support functions. Those remain operationally important, but they’re cost centers focused on maintaining satisfaction.
What I am talking about is capability delivery: Technologies, platforms, and orchestrated experiences that give customers new abilities or dramatically expand what they can accomplish with products.
Sephora’s Skincredible AI skin analysis isn’t customer service fixing a problem; it’s giving customers the tools they need to choose the best products for their skin type. Nike Training Club doesn’t address product quality issues that arise after purchase; it helps its customers become better athletes. Capital One’s real-time spending insights don’t supply FAQs. They help build financial acumen.
These services don’t merely satisfy their customers’ aspirations. They provide them with new abilities. And capability delivery generates a behavioral dependency that messaging simply can’t replicate.
Once you’ve integrated Spotify’s algorithms into your daily routines, you don’t switch to a competitor offering better brand promises. You’ve offloaded the cognitive work of music curation to a system that knows your preferences better than you can articulate them yourself. That’s a moat built through delivered utility, not communicated meaning.
The critical insight: The competitive hierarchy among these three games has completely inverted. And understanding how requires seeing the mechanism at work.
How Culture Drives the Need for Services
The traditional model assumed a linear progression: Products → Ideas → Communications. Build a better mousetrap, craft compelling meaning around it, and then broadcast that meaning at scale.
The modern reality operates completely differently: Culture → Products → Services → Cultural Permission.
Please allow me to show you how this works:
Step 1: Culture elevates aspirations.
Societal movements are perpetually redefining what “good living” means. Over the past decade, we’ve seen dramatic aspiration inflation across multiple dimensions:
- Health redefined from lifespan to healthspan – vitality and capability, not just longevity
- Consumption shifting from ownership to access – experiences valued over possessions
- Success evolving from wealth accumulation to time sovereignty – control over attention and energy
- Sustainability moving from abstract concern to operational expectation – circular models, not just recycled packaging claims
- Personalization elevated from nice-to-have to baseline assumption – mass customization as category hygiene
Step 2: Elevated aspirations raise the performance bar across products.
These cultural shifts don’t just change what people want. They change what they expect brands to do. When culture elevates healthspan as a new well-being aspiration, food brands face pressure for clean ingredients, supplement brands need clinical validation, and fitness brands must deliver personalized optimization. The product performance threshold rises across entire categories.
But here’s the critical dynamic: Product improvements alone no longer create sustainable advantage. Technology diffusion and manufacturing democratization mean functional parity arrives faster than ever. Plant-based proteins, carbon-neutral production and AI-powered personalization—these innovations spread across competitors within 18-24 months. Product superiority becomes temporary, not structural.
Step 3: Services become the actual differentiation layer.
Elevated cultural aspirations create expectations not just for better products, but for personalized, connected, joyful experiences of those products. This is where services (and experiences) enter as the new competitive battleground.
Consider the beauty sector: Cultural conversations about inclusive beauty standards raised product expectations such as broader shade ranges, clean formulations, and dermatologist-tested ingredients. Every major brand can now meet these thresholds. Product parity is nearly complete.
But Sephora dominates because it competes in the service layer: AI skin analysis, virtual try-on technology, personalized routine recommendations, community tutorials, and beauty advisor access. These services deliver the “personalized, connected, joyful” experiences that elevated beauty aspirations demand.
And here’s what matters most: Service delivery earns permission to shape cultural conversation. Sephora can credibly participate in defining beauty standards because it operationally delivers inclusive, personalized beauty experiences. Competitors still making promises about inclusive beauty without service infrastructure sound hollow—the gap between claim and capability is instantly visible to consumers.
Step 4: The compounding loop that changes everything.
Brands that build service layers don’t just differentiate. They trigger a self-reinforcing cycle:
Culture elevates aspirations → Raises product and experience expectations → Brands that deliver service layer differentiate → Service delivery generates cultural credibility → Cultural credibility earns permission to shape the next cultural iteration → Strengthened cultural position attracts more users → More users generate behavioral data → Data improves service delivery → Improved services strengthen cultural authority → Culture elevates aspirations further.
Brands stuck in the Products + Ideas model can’t enter this loop. They’re making cultural promises without experiential proof. Meanwhile, brands building service infrastructure compound their advantage with each cycle; cultural position strengthens operational capability, which strengthens cultural position.
Why Meaning Still Matters—But Can’t Stand Alone
This framework resolves what seems like a paradox: Cultural salience remains absolutely essential, but it’s now downstream from service delivery, not upstream from product marketing.
Ideas are still the prize. Brands that shape cultural conversations about aspiration achieve disproportionate mindshare, loyalty, and pricing power. Nike’s cultural influence on athletic identity, Patagonia’s environmental leadership, and Apple’s creative empowerment positioning. These idea-level assets generate billions in equity value.
But services have become a powerful weapon for winning in the marketplace of ideas. You can’t credibly shape cultural aspiration through messaging when competitors are delivering capability.
Let me be clear: This doesn’t mean promises have no role. Brand awareness and initial consideration still require cultural presence. Consumers need to know a brand exists before they can experience its service layer. But awareness without delivered utility now creates vulnerability, not competitive advantage. A compelling brand promise gets you into the consideration set. But a compelling service determines whether you’ll win the decision and build the kind of behavioral loyalty that compounds over time.
Three mechanisms explain why this shift happened:
1. Service as Cultural Credential: The New Authenticity Standard
The brand services layer doesn’t replace cultural meaning. It validates it. Brands attempting to lead cultural conversations through messaging alone face immediate authenticity scrutiny in transparent markets where gaps between claims and capabilities are instantly visible. Consumers and critics ask, “What operational evidence gives you permission to speak on this topic?”
The service layer provides the answer through demonstrated commitment, not stated values.
Consider Patagonia. They earn permission to shape environmental conversations because their service infrastructure proves they’ve operationalized sustainability, not just marketed it. Their Worn Wear platform offers repair services and a used gear marketplace. Their supply chain transparency tools make factory data and material sourcing publicly available. Their environmental activism funding, the 1% for the Planet commitment, gets operationalized through actual donations you can track.
This provides concrete evidence that environmental stewardship is structural to their business model, not performative in their advertising. When Patagonia’s leadership advocates for public lands protection or criticizes fast fashion, the service layer grants credibility. They’re not making promises about values. They’re demonstrating values through operational commitment that costs them margin, constrains their growth, and creates a competitive disadvantage in pure product comparisons. That sacrifice is what earns cultural authority.
Now contrast this with the authenticity gap that undermines promise-based cultural positioning:
Dove spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars on “Real Beauty” campaigns celebrating body diversity and challenging unrealistic beauty standards. Yet they delivered retail experiences and product formulations identical to competitors who made no such cultural claims. When you asked “what operational evidence supports your beauty inclusion message?” the answer was effectively “our advertising says so.” “The service layer provided no proof.
The result: cultural skepticism, campaign fatigue, and minimal impact on actual beauty culture conversations despite massive investment.
Meanwhile, Fenty Beauty achieved instant cultural authority in beauty inclusion with a fraction of Dove’s marketing budget. Why? Rihanna established a service infrastructure that implemented inclusivity by offering 40 foundation shades at launch, compared to the industry standard of 6-12, utilizing undertone-matching technology that catered to the full spectrum, ensuring diverse model representation across all customer touchpoints, not just in advertising, and developing products that prioritized historically underserved skin tones.
The service layer granted permission to lead beauty culture conversations that Dove, despite decades of promise-based positioning and vastly larger budgets, couldn’t credibly join.
This pattern is pretty consistent: Cultural salience remains the prize, but service delivery is the credential that earns entry to the competition. You can’t claim environmental leadership without circular service models. You can’t champion inclusion without operationalized accessibility. You can’t promise empowerment without capability-conferring tools.
The service layer is how brands prove their cultural positioning is authentic rather than opportunistic. And in transparent markets, that proof is a prerequisite for cultural authority.
This is why the three-marketplace model places Ideas downstream from Services in the modern competitive hierarchy. Brands don’t build service capabilities to support their cultural positioning. They earn cultural positioning by building service capabilities. The causality reversed.
2. Experience as Proof: Making Abstract Aspirations Tangible
Abstract aspirations become concrete through delivered experiences. “Healthspan” as a cultural aspiration remains vague until Peloton delivers personalized training that makes you measurably stronger, or until Levels provides continuous glucose monitoring that reveals how specific foods impact your energy throughout the day.
The service translates aspiration into felt reality. And felt reality is infinitely more persuasive today than aspirational storytelling.
3. Behavioral Integration: Creating Mental Availability Through Utility
When brands deliver utility in specific contexts, they achieve what The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls mental availability at Category Entry Points—the purchase moments that actually matter.
Tesla famously doesn’t advertise, yet it dominates EV consideration. Why? Because they deliver measurable value, the Supercharger network, over-the-air updates, and autopilot capability are in the exact moments relevant to EV purchase decisions. The service delivery is the marketing, creating situational presence that pure messaging can’t replicate.
The Pattern of Competitive Displacement
The three-marketplace framework reveals why incumbents with superior product heritage and decades of cultural equity are losing to service-first challengers. Again, allow me to show you the pattern I’ve seen everywhere in my work and research:
Traditional Banking vs. Chime/Revolut
Incumbents compete on Products (marginally better rates) plus Ideas (trust and partnership messaging). Challengers compete on services: instant notifications, fee elimination, multi-currency infrastructure, and automated savings. Despite zero brand equity, service-first challengers capture disproportionate growth because they deliver the “personalized, connected, joyful” financial experience that elevated money-management aspirations demand.
Traditional Retail vs. Amazon
Department stores maintained superior product curation and cultural positioning; lifestyle aspiration and promises of personal service. Amazon built service infrastructure: 1-click ordering, Prime shipping, personalized recommendations, and Alexa integration. Amazon’s cultural salience is minimal, yet it dominates because service delivery creates behavioral lock-in that messaging can’t overcome.
Traditional Beauty vs. Sephora
Legacy brands owned a stronger product heritage. L’Oréal formulations and Estée Lauder brand prestige and cultural equity were built through decades of advertising investment. Sephora invested in the service layer: virtual try-on, skin analysis, its Beauty Insider community, and personalized routines. Now Sephora shapes beauty culture conversations despite having weaker product IP. Service delivery earned cultural permission that heritage brands assumed was permanent.
Traditional Eyewear vs. Warby Parker
This same pattern extends beyond tech giants to mid-market challengers in commodity categories. Everyone knows this story by now. Warby Parker entered a mature eyewear market dominated by Luxottica’s brands (Ray-Ban, Oakley, and LensCrafters), which had superior product heritage, widespread retail presence, and a design legacy spanning 50+ years.
Warby couldn’t win on lens technology. Prescription optics are scientifically standardized. They couldn’t win on frame design alone because fashion cycles move too fast for sustainable differentiation there.
They won by competing in the service layer: Home Try-On, which ships five frames free for customer testing; Virtual Try-On technology using AR-based fit visualization; prescription renewal reminders; streamlined insurance integration; and Vision for All, which is its social impact program delivering donated glasses. These services delivered the “personalized, convenient, socially conscious” eyewear experience that elevated consumer aspirations demanded. Aspirations that Luxottica’s promise-based marketing through celebrity endorsements and fashion advertising couldn’t satisfy operationally.
The result: Warby Parker achieved $500M+ revenue and market-leading satisfaction scores despite competing against brands with 50+ years of cultural equity and 100x their marketing budget. Service delivery earned cultural permission. Warby Parker now shapes conversations about accessible, responsible, stylish eyewear that incumbent brands can’t easily defend against. Their product was comparable. Their experience layer created an asymmetric advantage.
The pattern holds across categories, even B2B: Service infrastructure beats cultural promise when aspirations have elevated beyond what products alone can deliver.
How Service Delivery Creates Compounding Advantage
Brands that architect service delivery systems rather than communication strategies build three forms of advantage that compound over time:
1. How Services Create Dozens of Moments Where Your Brand Matters
Here’s something that becomes clear when you study what’s actually working: When you deliver utility through services, you’re not just strengthening the moments where people already think about your brand. You’re multiplying the number of moments where your brand comes to mind in the first place.
Traditional brands compete for mental real estate at a handful of purchase occasions. Nike shows up when someone thinks, “I need running shoes.” Gatorade comes to mind at “I’m thirsty after my workout.” These are discrete, infrequent moments, maybe once or twice a year, where brand awareness determines which product ends up in the shopping cart.
But watch what happens when Nike builds Training Club. Suddenly, Nike becomes mentally available at entirely different moments: “I’m starting my morning workout.” “I need motivation to actually exercise today.” “I want to track whether I’m making progress.” “I’m planning my fitness routine for the week.” “I’m recovering from an injury and need modified exercises.” “I’m training for my first 10K.”
Each of these situations creates a new trigger point where Nike comes to mind—not because someone saw an ad recently, but because Nike’s service delivers utility in that specific context. They’ve gone from owning 2-3 purchase moments to being present across 15-20 behavioral moments in someone’s life.
Promise-based competitors are still fighting for the same old purchase occasions with louder messaging and bigger media budgets. Meanwhile, service-delivering brands have quietly embedded themselves into dozens of daily situations through integrated utility.
The compounding advantage works like this: When someone finally forms purchase intent – when they actually need new running shoes – the brand that’s been useful across twenty different moments wins consideration automatically. Not because their last ad was more memorable, but because they’ve built mental availability through delivered value across multiple contexts in that person’s life.
And here’s what makes this a real moat: These aren’t just awareness touchpoints and memory structures. They’re habit formation moments.
Changing someone’s opinion about a brand is relatively straightforward. A competitor’s advertising campaign can shift preference in a few months. But changing someone’s embedded daily routines? That’s extraordinarily difficult.
Once Tesla’s Supercharger network becomes part of how you plan road trips, once Peloton’s 6am class becomes non-negotiable in your morning routine, and once Spotify’s Discover Weekly feels like it knows you better than you know yourself, switching to a competitor means disrupting established behavioral patterns. That friction protects market position far more effectively than emotional brand attachment alone.
As I’ve already said, Tesla doesn’t run ads, yet they dominate electric vehicle consideration. Why? Because they deliver measurable value at every moment that matters for EV ownership: route planning through Supercharger network locations, managing charging anxiety through fast infrastructure, receiving software updates over-the-air, optimizing performance through autopilot capability, and protecting resale value through battery warranty programs.
The service delivery is the marketing. They’ve created situational presence that pure messaging can’t replicate—and competitors can’t disrupt by outspending them on Super Bowl spots.
The contrast is stark: Traditional brands spend millions fighting for 2-3 moments of consideration. Service-first brands invest their capital in building capabilities that create 15-20 moments of integration. One approach buys temporary awareness. The other builds behavioral dependency.
That’s not a better marketing strategy. That’s a different category of competitive advantage entirely.
2. Learning That Compounds: Why Brand Services Improve 10-20x Faster
Promise-based brands study consumers. Service-based brands learn from them. This distinction creates a structural advantage in speed-to-market fit that compounds over time.
Traditional brands optimize through episodic research cycles: Conduct focus groups to understand preferences. Analyze survey data to identify unmet needs. Test campaign concepts to predict resonance. Measure post-launch performance to assess effectiveness. Adjust messaging for the next iteration.
This cycle takes 6-12 months minimum, often longer for complex categories. By the time a brand has learned whether a message resonates and has deployed adjusted creative, market conditions have shifted, cultural moments have passed, and competitors have moved.
Branded services and experiences are optimized through continuous behavioral feedback: Every interaction that delivers value generates data about actual usage patterns, contextual preferences, and revealed priorities, not stated intentions. Algorithms process this data in real time, not quarterly. Improvements deploy daily or hourly, not annually.
Spotify doesn’t survey users about music preferences every six months. It processes 500+ million listening sessions per day and continuously adjusts recommendations. Netflix doesn’t run focus groups about content preferences. It analyzes billions of viewing decisions and uses those signals to inform content production and personalization engines.
This compression of learning cycles means service-delivering brands achieve product-market fit 10-20x faster than research-dependent competitors. A service feature that isn’t creating engagement can be identified within days and modified within weeks. A messaging campaign that isn’t driving awareness requires months to measure and quarters to adjust. The velocity difference is structural, not tactical.
More importantly, the learning compounds exponentially through a self-reinforcing cycle: Better service attracts more users → More users generate more behavioral data → More data enables algorithmic improvement → Improved algorithms deliver better service → Better service attracts more users.
Each cycle strengthens the next, creating what people in tech call data network effects.
Promise-based brands can’t enter this compounding loop because they’re optimizing communications about value, not capabilities that deliver it. You can’t A/B test your way to delivered utility. You can’t survey your way to behavioral integration. You can’t focus-group your way to capability conferral.
Optimization happens through usage, which requires operational infrastructure that messaging-focused organizations don’t build and that agency partners can’t provide.
Sephora’s beauty advisor recommendations improve with every skin analysis completed, every product review submitted, and every purchase made. The system learns which advice generates satisfaction and which creates returns. This learning is specific, behavioral, and continuous, creating service quality that manual consultation or static product knowledge can’t match.
Competitors can copy Sephora’s service concept. But they can’t copy the years of behavioral learning embedded in the algorithms. The data moat is as defensible as the experiential moat.
3. Cultural Authority Through Demonstrated Values
Brands that operationalize cultural aspirations through service delivery achieve authentic cultural presence without performative messaging.
IKEA is an excellent case in point. The company’s commitment to sustainability is important to the culture because it’s built into the way they do business. For example, their Furniture Buyback program pays customers for used items, their refurbishment workshops fix and resell returned items, and their spare parts marketplace extends the life of products. These aren’t marketing claims—they’re measurable service systems customers can use. When brands demonstrate values through capability delivery, they earn cultural authority. When they merely state values through communications, they invite skepticism.
The Strategic Imperative—And the Infrastructure Problem
The shift from promise to delivery represents a categorical transformation in how brands create competitive advantage through customer value creation.
The three-marketplace model reveals the mechanism:
Culture elevates aspirations → Products must meet raised bars but quickly commoditize → Services differentiate by delivering elevated experiences → Service delivery earns cultural permission → Cultural authority compounds operational advantage.
Technology eliminated the excuse for gaps between aspiration and reality. Consumers recalibrated expectations accordingly.
But here’s the strategic tension most brand leaders haven’t fully confronted yet:
When brands shift from making cheap promises to expensive experience innovation, the cost of guessing wrong increases dramatically.
A failed advertising campaign costs media dollars and creative agency fees—painful, but contained. The brand survives. You regroup, test new messaging, and try again next quarter. Campaign failure is recoverable.
A failed service platform costs engineering years, operational integration complexity, and customer trust.
When you’ve asked customers to change behavior, integrate your service into their routines, share personal data, and invest time learning your interface, and then you deprecate that service, deliver broken experiences, or pivot strategy, leaving them stranded, you don’t just lose the financial investment. You lose permission.
And unlike a cheesy Super Bowl ad that everyone forgets by February, a broken service or a poor experience is the kind of betrayal that still gets mentioned in a Reddit thread five years later. ‘Remember when Brand X launched that thing and it just… stopped working? Yep, never trusting them again.
Brands that waste people’s time or betray their trust through incompetent execution don’t often get a second chance from their customers. Service failures create lasting brand damage that messaging can’t easily repair.
This asymmetry creates a new imperative: Brand strategy can no longer afford to run on creative intuition, historical precedent, and post-launch measurement.
The decision-making infrastructure that served the promise era is fundamentally inadequate for the capability era.
A Clear Gap in Our Brand-Building Infrastructure
The tools that most CMOs currently rely on, such as focus groups, brand tracking studies, campaign pre-testing, message recall metrics, and annual strategy planning cycles, were engineered for a world where:
- Decisions were reversible (pull the underperforming campaign, cut new creative, adjust media mix, try again next month)
- Costs were contained (production budgets and media spend, not multi-year platform development and operational integration)
- Failure was survivable (nobody remembers your poorly performing Q3 campaign three years later; brand equity recovers through subsequent efforts)
- Optimization happened post-launch (test, measure, learn, adjust—the classic marketing cycle assumes you can afford to be wrong initially)
This infrastructure can’t support the new capability era, where
- Decisions require operational commitment (you can’t A/B test a service platform after launching to millions of customers; the engineering, training, and integration investments are sunk before you know if it works)
- Costs compound over time (engineering resources, ongoing maintenance, customer support infrastructure, data storage and processing, continuous feature development)
- Failure creates lasting damage (broken service experiences become permanent brand associations; deprecating a service customers depend on destroys trust that takes years to rebuild)
- Optimization must happen pre-launch (when the cost of failure is existential, you need confidence before commitment, not learning through expensive mistakes)
The New Capabilities We Need For Experience Innovation
CMOs investing in experience innovation need analytical infrastructure that can:
→ Simulate how cultural communities will respond before launching service platforms: Will this capability feel valuable or intrusive to target segments? Does it align with their elevated aspirations or violate their expectations for brand behavior? Which cultural communities will embrace it versus reject it?
→ Model which service touchpoints create sustainable habits versus one-time engagement: How many different life contexts must the service serve to achieve meaningful mental availability? What’s the threshold for behavioral lock-in that creates real switching costs?
→ Predict how quickly usage data will improve service quality: What volume of users is required to generate meaningful learning? At what point do the data advantages create defensible competitive moats versus remaining replicable by well-funded competitors?
→ Test whether proposed experiences actually deliver the elevated, personalized, joyful experiences that current cultural aspirations demand: Or will they feel transactional, generic, and friction-filled, failing to meet the raised performance bar that culture has established?
→ Assess operational feasibility and integration complexity: What organizational capabilities, technology infrastructure, and partnership ecosystems are required to deliver this service reliably at scale? Where are the execution risks that could turn a theoretically strong service into a practically broken experience?
Current brand management tools still operate on unreasonably long timescales and fuzzy data types, such as stated preferences from surveys, recall metrics from tracking studies, and claimed behaviors from focus groups. All of these are fundamentally mismatched to service platform decisions.
When you’re committing engineering years and operational integration to a capability that customers will depend on daily, you can’t afford to “test and learn” after launch. The cost of learning through failure is too high. Customer patience for broken experiences is too low. The competitive window for establishing behavioral advantages closes too quickly.
The gap between what brand strategy now requires and what current analytical infrastructure provides has never been wider.
Closing that gap – building decision-making tools adequate to the risks, speed, and complexity of experience innovation – is perhaps the most urgent infrastructure challenge facing marketing organizations today.
The strategists who master this new discipline won’t just help brands avoid expensive mistakes. They’ll help brands simulate, test, and optimize service strategies in low-risk environments before committing capital to high-risk deployment. They’ll compress the learning cycle from years to weeks. They’ll turn experience innovation from a leap of faith into a calculated investment with predictable returns.
That capability doesn’t exist at scale yet. Which means the professionals who build it will define the next era of brand strategy practice.
The Human Cost—And the Professional Opportunity
Remember the hundreds of strategists who lost their jobs in December? This is what this shift means for them—and frankly anyone navigating the future of brand building today. This isn’t just theoretical. It’s deeply personal for thousands of talented people right now.
The market for traditional brand strategy work is contracting. Not cyclically, but structurally. When brands realize that incremental media spend produces 0.3x ROI while experience infrastructure generates 3.2x returns, they don’t just shift budgets—they shift what kind of expertise they actually need.
The demand signal moves from “help us craft better messages” to “help us architect better value delivery.”
This creates profound professional displacement. Strategists trained in cultural semiotics, brand positioning frameworks, and campaign development find their core skills misaligned with what clients now require. The anxiety in the strategy community is real and entirely justified. Careers that seemed secure—trajectories pointing toward Chief Strategy Officer roles, agency leadership, and independent consulting—suddenly feel precarious.
But I want to be clear about something: This displacement isn’t the death of brand strategy. It’s the genesis of something more valuable.
The shift from promise to delivery doesn’t eliminate the need for strategic thinking; it elevates it. The questions become harder, the stakes become higher, and the impact becomes more measurable:
Old question: How do we position our brand to resonate culturally?
New question: What service capabilities must we build to earn permission to shape cultural conversations?
Old question: What message will differentiate us from competitors?
New question: What delivered experiences will create behavioral advantages that messaging can’t overcome?
Old question: How do we communicate our values authentically?
New question: What operational systems will demonstrate our values through capability delivery?
These new questions aren’t easy to answer. They require strategic rigor plus an understanding of technology enablement, operational feasibility, data architecture, and service design. They demand strategists who can operate at the intersection of culture, capability, and customer value—not just at the intersection of culture, creativity, and communications.
I firmly believe this is the future of brand strategy work: helping companies build value-delivery systems that earn cultural authority rather than crafting communications that try to cheat it.
The opportunity space is vast:
- Service strategy: Defining which capabilities brands must build to deliver on elevated cultural aspirations
- Salience engineering: Architecting how brands achieve cultural, situational, and experiential presence simultaneously
- Experience orchestration: Designing how service touchpoints create behavioral integration and mental availability
- Value delivery roadmaps: Sequencing which capabilities to build, test, and scale based on cultural trajectory analysis
- Infrastructure consulting: Helping CMOs adopt decision-making tools adequate for the risks and speed of experience innovation
These aren’t incremental evolutions of existing roles. They’re new disciplines that don’t yet have established career paths, educational pipelines, or professional associations.
Which means: The strategists who master this transition will define the next era of our profession.
For many strategy professionals, the recent layoffs feel like a hopeless ending. And for too many careers, they will be. But for strategists willing to evolve from promise architects to value delivery shapers, this moment represents the most significant professional opportunity of our era.
The old guard is collapsing. The new infrastructure doesn’t exist yet. And yet, the brands that will dominate the next decade desperately need strategic guidance on how to make this transition without destroying operational efficiency or customer trust in the process.
The uncertainty you’re feeling isn’t the absence of a future. It’s the absence of a defined future.
Someone will define it. The question is whether displaced strategists will lead that redefinition effort or wait for engineers to do it for them. And trust me—you don’t want engineers defining what ‘cultural salience’ means.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Adrian Barrow,
At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable at pivotal moments of change. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth, and Brand Education
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