Year 2025 is coming to a full stop in just a few days. An old year has passed and a new one dawns soon. Time to take a ‘comma pause’ and think of what 2026 might have in store in terms of marketing and branding. And why marketing and branding alone? Simply because marketing touches all our lives all the time.
In this view of the world, there are just two types of people. One are those who market to others, and the other are those marketed to. The truth: none of us can do without brands of one kind or the other. Every step you take, and every breath you take, a brand touches you. We are brand-polluted folk.
Let me ask questions then. Many of them.
Is branding going to be back?
The year almost past saw the near-decimation of brandcraft in more ways than one. It remained one totally devoted to technology. ‘MarTech’ or marketing technology became a phrase on its own. Technology-led companies had the old world of brand-thinkers in a twirl. Technology led and brands had to follow meekly.
Most of those who believed in the prowess of MarTech, with its ability to crunch numbers—both at the macro and micro level—and deliver results, seem to be doing a big rethink now as the year ends. Brand delivery on the basis of data and numbers have taken companies and their promoters onto a different track altogether. Phrases such as hyper-personalisation, customer data platform, growth-hacking, and actionable analytics have become popular with the new proponents of new industries.
The startup founder has precious little time for branding. At best, branding is seen as a service. Very few think of the brand as the product itself. In the bargain, brand thinking took a back seat and the ecstasy-play with numbers became the new passion.
Is branding going to be back in the boardroom once again as a cutting- and bleeding-edge differentiator in a world that is progressively getting flat in terms of the differentiated offering? I do believe it will.
Brand managers and brand-thinkers will be in demand again. Startups of every kind will realise the ability of a brand that helps their offering stand apart from the rest. As technology brands took the route of being transactional in 2025, the year ahead promises to bring back relationships. Not yours and mine, which soured last year, but the relationships that define the umbilical connect between the brand and you as an individual user. A relationship status that shuns the transactional and moves more towards that end of the brand spectrum where companies invest in what moves people.
The recent fracas that IndiGo Airlines went through in December—where users did a quick flip from being ostensibly loyal brand-users to being very ardent, unforgiving and vitriolic critics in five days flat—is a clear case in point of the transactional brand being a weak thing to be.
For the customer then, this is good news. Brands are going to, once again, get a little more real than they have become. They will respect humans. Many will set up real call-centres once again with real people answering your real calls. The automated bots, that do little with limited interface today, are going to be relegated to a less important corner of competence. Till a self-aware and autonomous form of artificial intelligence arrives, of course. And that shall be a fun moment to wait for.
The good news then: 2026 will see responsible companies of both the heritage and new-age kind re-embrace the art, science, and philosophy of branding. ‘Long-termism’ is going to be back. Startup ‘now-termism’ is going to have a few takers. Branding is going to be back with a whimper, if not a bang.
Will small be beautiful again?
The bigger you are as a brand, the more vulnerable you will be in 2026. Big companies are already experiencing the ‘ration-shop effect’—many of their old and popular brands are displaying in the markets. That very popular brand of shampoo with that exciting piece of advertising looks so ordinary and boring, as compared to that absolutely new, niche brand that comes in a bottle that is all glass and looks all-medicinal. The advertising is boring and matter-of-fact. But small, somehow, seems to be beautiful again. Expect this movement to cascade.
The big companies will worry and struggle a lot with their big brands in 2026. Many will buy into new niche brand offerings within the same category to keep their revenues and image intact. Expect big companies to break up their bigness into small little pieces of operation and brand excellence. Goliath brands will worry as the David brands take centre-stage of attention with both the Alpha and Beta generations ahead. The very process of selling will change as well. The new mantra: sell to them the way they want to buy rather than the way you want to sell.
Is brand communication going to change altogether?
The 2026 ethos in brand communication is more likely to be a bottom-up piece rather than the traditional top-down heritage. Consumers must talk about your brand. Not you. This is going to impact the big brand endorser of yore. The big film star and big cricketer gives way to the smaller influencer. You can buy 2000 small influencers on social media for the cost of that one tall and lanky film star with a baritone. What’s more is that your credibility scores will go up as the smaller influencer is closer to Earth, on which the real consumer lives.
As I close this piece, look around in 2026 for the agile brand. The brand that seems more living than any others you have seen in the past. Expect this brand to be ahead of the curve of consumer thinking. A brand that is wired to perform at the speed at which society moves, jives, does the Bachata and changes.
Expect real-time reading of consumers to be a science on its own, expect intuitive branding to be an art form. Expect more authenticity than you have ever seen before in a brand relationship. Expect the brand to be more amoebic in the future than the paramecium it had become in 2025. And finally, wait for sentient branding as sentient AI takes baby-steps—all hopefully in 2026.
Harish Bijoor | Brand guru & founder of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc
(Views are personal)
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)
