Is your brand built for durability—or just quarterly earnings?

CMOs are under more pressure than ever to deliver immediate results, stretch every dollar, and justify every campaign with measurable ROI. But here’s the paradox: The more you cling to short-term performance in turbulent times, the more you erode the very thing that can help you weather the storm—your brand.

After all, Airbnb didn’t become a global hospitality disruptor through short-term clicks. It grew by investing in brand storytelling that resonates.

In a world where every click is measurable and every competitor is optimising for the same bottom-funnel conversions, brand is the one thing that can’t be copied, commoditised, or outbid. 

Brand is the reason people choose you when everything else looks the same. It’s the force that turns transactions into loyalty, awareness into advocacy, and companies into cultural icons.

Despite this fact, brand remains one of the most neglected assets in modern-day marketing. 

CMOs know it: 77% feel pressure to hyper-focus on short-term performance, so few shift course. We’re squeezing the bottom of the funnel dry, chasing sales that might have happened anyway, while neglecting the upper funnel efforts that make brands unforgettable.

Too often, brand work is seen as fluffy and disconnected from business outcomes. But ask yourself:

• How does your brand shape social conversation?
• What is brand preference doing to your conversion costs?
• Are your brand investments increasing customer lifetime value?
• How much of your in-store lift is attributable to upper-funnel efforts?
• How does brand health influence behaviour from awareness to advocacy?

These aren’t abstract questions—they’re boardroom questions. And they’re being ignored.

We are living in an era of content surplus. AI has put the content treadmill into overdrive, lowering the barrier to creation while increasing the volume, velocity, and volatility of what’s out there. In this noisy landscape, disposable brands will be forgotten faster than they were created.

But durable brands don’t just survive the noise, they rise above it. They don’t compete solely within categories or aim to simply win market share—they define new markets. And instead of reflecting culture, they shape it. 

What sets them apart is a deep understanding of the conflict they resolve. Not a fight with competitors, but a deeper tension between two seemingly incompatible forces. The resolution of this conflict becomes their reason to exist, a brand idea that shapes everything they do.

Durable brands are built through every touchpoint, product decision, experience, and policy. 

Take eBay. It used to be a place for simple transactions, where you’d hunt for a deal for something secondhand. Functional, but forgettable. 

But by investing in brand-building moments like their Love Island campaign, eBay has repositioned itself as a marketplace built around passion, not just product. It’s reorganised the experience and messaging around “Things.People.Love,” elevating everything from pre-loved fashion to car parts. Every campaign, every click, and every piece of creative is personalised at scale, designed to connect every customer to the things they love. In doing so, they’ve moved from being a utility to becoming a brand with soul—one that stands out in a sea of sameness and drives durable, long-term preference.

The best brands use their central idea to inform product strategy, organisational design, customer experience, and yes, even media investment. When you build from a core brand idea—one born from conflict and expressed consistently—you become easy to understand, difficult to ignore, and impossible to replicate.

So here’s the challenge for today’s CMO: In a climate of economic headwinds and market volatility, be the steward of something bigger than quarterly KPIs. Champion a brand that transcends the turbulence of trends and the pressure of short-term performance. Because while everything else gets faster, cheaper, and more automated, brand remains the one advantage no one can copy.

And in times like these, that makes it not just durable—but indispensable.