Have We Forgotten How to Build Brands?

Reading time: 5-6 minutes

There was a moment during Cannes Lions this year that caught my attention, and surprisingly, it wasn't a campaign.

It wasn't an AI demo. It wasn't a celebrity keynote. It wasn't even one of the award winners.

It was a conversation.

Over the course of the festival, a number of speakers kept returning to the same idea: we've become exceptionally good at making things look beautiful, but we're in danger of forgetting what makes brands meaningful in the first place. It was a subtle shift in tone, but one that felt impossible to ignore.

A few weeks later, Vogue Business echoed the same sentiment in an article exploring the future of branding in the age of AI. Their argument was refreshingly simple: as generative AI makes beautiful content increasingly easy to produce, beauty itself stops being the thing that differentiates a brand. Instead, meaning becomes the scarce resource.

I haven't stopped thinking about that since.

For years, our industry has celebrated polish. We obsessed over visual identity systems, colour palettes, animation styles and the perfect social feed. Those things still matter, of course. Design has always been one of the quickest ways to communicate trust. But somewhere along the way, we started mistaking beautiful execution for strong branding. It's something we've explored before when discussing why clarity beats aesthetic

They're not the same thing.

You can build an immaculate visual identity and still struggle to answer the simplest question a customer might ask: Why should I remember you?

That's the challenge many brands are facing today.

Ironically, AI hasn't created this problem. It's simply exposed it.

When everyone has access to the same image generators, copywriting tools and design assistants, producing something attractive is no longer a competitive advantage. Good design is becoming accessible in the same way professional photography did when smartphones arrived. The baseline has risen for everyone.

The brands that stand out won't necessarily be the ones creating the most content, but actually they'll be the ones creating the strongest memories. Again – think connection. Think human.

Think about the brands that have stayed with you for years. Chances are it isn't because they had the trendiest Instagram grid or the cleverest campaign headline. It's because they made you feel something consistently over time. Maybe it was the way they spoke, or an experience they created. Maybe it was simply the confidence of knowing exactly who they were.

That's what branding has always been.Not decoration.

Memory.

It's interesting that many of the brands held up as examples today aren't trying to reinvent themselves every six months. Luxury houses like Hermès and Louis Vuitton continue to draw strength from decades of accumulated stories, craftsmanship and cultural relevance rather than chasing every new visual trend. As Vogue Business pointed out, heritage has become an advantage because it represents something AI can't manufacture overnight: lived experience, emotional memory and trust.

Of course, not every business has a 150-year archive to draw from.

Most of us are building brands in real time.

But perhaps that's exactly the point.

Every interaction your business has today becomes part of tomorrow's heritage. Every project delivered well, each thoughtful email, conversation, and every decision to remain consistent when changing direction might have been easier.

Brand equity isn't built during a rebrand.

It's built in the hundreds of small moments that follow.

That feels particularly relevant in a world obsessed with speed. Marketing teams are under pressure to produce more content than ever before. Algorithms reward frequency. Trends appear and disappear within days, and of course, there’s a temptation to believe that relevance comes from constantly changing your message.

In reality, relevance often comes from repeating the right message for long enough that people begin to associate it with you.

Consistency has quietly become a competitive advantage.

Perhaps that's why another announcement from Cannes this year felt so significant. For the first time, the festival introduced the Creative Brand Lion, an award that doesn't recognise a single campaign but rather the systems, culture and long-term commitment that make great creative work possible year after year. It's a subtle but important shift. Instead of celebrating one brilliant idea, it's celebrating the environment that allows brilliant ideas to happen consistently.

That feels like a much healthier conversation for our industry, because brands should be judged by whether people still remember them after the campaign ends.

The temptation today is to ask, "What should we post next?"

A better question might be, "What do we want people to remember about us five years from now?"

The answers to those two questions are rarely the same.

So...

Maybe the future of branding isn't about creating more, but rather about creating things that last.

Because in a world where almost anyone can generate beautiful content in seconds, the brands we'll remember won't be the ones that looked the best.

They'll be the ones that stood for something long enough that we couldn't forget the