McKinsey’s State of Marketing Europe 2026 report adds some classic Big-Four quant to what I’m sure you’ve been hearing shouted triumphantly across your LinkedIn feed by marketers and brand practitioners alike: Brand is back!
After a decade dominated by performance marketing, companies are starting to move resources upstream again. My hunch is that rather than signaling a creative renaissance, marketers are just getting fatigued. Rising acquisition costs, weaker tracking, and more volatile markets are pushing organizations to reconsider the stabilizing role brand can play. They have to do something to get off that performance plateau, right?
However, there’s a fatal flaw at the heart of this renewed enthusiasm for brand. It’s a structural problem: 38% of companies surveyed don’t have a marketing leader in the C-suite.
The Crisis of Organizational Authority
The fact that more than a third of companies lack a C-suite marketing leader is not just an org-chart quirk. It reflects how many organizations still think about brand.
Many companies treat brand as a marketing tactic, a top-of-funnel activity designed to generate MQLs. But brand isn’t something marketing produces. It’s something the company expresses through everything it does.
This lack of authority creates a deeper organizational problem. Each department ends up interpreting strategy in its own way. The CEO may describe the vision one way. Sales adapts the story to close a quarterly deal. Product development moves according to its own roadmap and constraints. Marketing tries to turn all of those signals into something coherent for the market.
The result is not just inconsistent messaging. It’s strategic drift. Customers receive mixed signals about what the company actually stands for. That confusion makes it impossible for the brand to perform its most valuable function: building preference before the buying process begins.
Strong brands reduce that friction because the organization speaks with one voice. When leadership shares a clear view of what the company stands for and how it creates value, every function reinforces the same signal. Marketing becomes more effective, sales conversations move faster, and the company’s story becomes easier for customers to understand.
The Day One Reality vs. Full-Funnel Thinking
McKinsey also highlights the growing use of “full-funnel” campaigns that combine brand activity with performance marketing. The logic is reasonable, but it still misses an important reality: buyers decide who they trust before the buying process even begins. If you aren’t already on the buyer’s mental shortlist on Day One of their search, optimizing the funnel has limited impact.
Most marketing strategies are designed to capture in-market buyers. But less attention and resources are given to what brand is uniquely suited to do: shape the preferences and determine Day One list inclusion before buying begins. Brand, in this capacity, makes every part of the revenue process more efficient. Sales conversations begin with familiarity rather than explanation. Cycles shorten. Pricing becomes easier to defend.
In short, Brand has the potential to lower the cost of acquiring revenue. But that advantage cannot be created by a single campaign. It comes from long-term consistency in how the company shows up, communicates, and delivers value.
The Bottom Line: Fix the Structure First
McKinsey is right. Companies need to become more trusted, effective, and bold. But trust is not something a campaign creates. It is the result of consistency, at the enterprise level, over time.
If your organization is part of the 38% without marketing representation in the executive team, or if you’re investing in brand but not giving it the authority to influence organizational decisions, you should rethink the entire structure behind how your company goes to market.
A useful place to start is by asking a simple question: does your brand shape how the company operates, or only how the company communicates? If brand is confined to messaging and campaigns, it cannot influence the decisions that ultimately determine how the market experiences your company.
Building a brand that drives growth starts with organizational clarity. Leadership must align on what the company stands for, the problem it exists to solve, and the role it intends to play in its category. From there, that clarity must show up in how the company builds products, how it sells, how it prioritizes investment, and how it consistently shows up in the market.
This is the difference between brand as a marketing activity and brand as a revenue efficiency multiplier.
If this is hitting home, let’s talk about how to make your brand work harder.