How you can thrive in 2025…by betting on thinking big

In 2025, the fastest growing brands will better balance short-term sales growth and long-term brand building. At first glance, this might seem like a counter-intuitive prediction. Yet it is an increasingly important focus for brands as we approach 2025 confronted with a range of headwinds and uncertainties – what will be the effect of Trump tariffs on the global economy? Is inflation back in its box? Will low growth forecasts turn out to be overly pessimistic, or overly optimistic?

Against this backdrop, the normal expectation would be brands hunkering down and focusing on efficiencies in the short term. But here’s why I think that’s not what’s going to happen: artificial intelligence; human intelligence and a combination of both.

Specifically, smart marketers and business leaders will increasingly turn to AI to assist with optimisation and automation. This will free up human intelligence, creativity and plain old hours in the day. These freed-up resources will be redeployed, away from harvesting demand, to creating demand. This shift won’t be at the expense of the short term, but a complement to it. An and, not an or. It will be powered by the increasing sophistication of AI and smart marketers’ growing ability to deploy it.

Every year, Interbrand calculates the value of the world’s 100 most valuable brands. This year, their aggregate value stood at a mighty $3.4 trillion, equivalent to the world’s fifth-biggest economy. While a striking stat, this year’s report contained a possibly even more stand-out number. This year we estimated that an over-emphasis on short-term performance marketing cost the world’s 100 most valuable brands $200bn in revenue in 2024 alone. We are not talking down the value created by performance marketing, but rather making a point about emphasis and balance.

As AI increasingly assists at the bottom of the funnel, the brand-building questions leaders will turn to fall under three categories:

Brand strength – how can our brand better compete with immediate competitors?

Role of brand – how can we enhance margins, loyalty and cross-sell by making brand a bigger factor in customer decision-making?

Arena thinking – how can we make our brand relevant beyond our immediate category?

Let’s take these ideas in turn.

Marketing leaders will become increasingly systematic and long-term about evaluating where their brand is strong and where it’s weak. At Interbrand, we evaluate brand strength based on 10 factors. Let’s think illustratively about just one of them – coherence.

Coherence is all about a brand showing up consistently wherever it shows up. Brands with low coherence confuse customers and miss out on efficiencies, and often we find it’s the fastest-growing brands where coherence is weakest. Few brands are growing faster than ChatGPT. Yet, breathtaking as it is in English, ChatGPT doesn’t show up consistently across geographies because the quality of its answers varies so much by language. Coherence may not be the limiting factor for other fast-growing brands. The bigger point is that business leaders will increasingly have time to ask deeper questions about their brand’s strengths and weaknesses.

Brand strength is all about how well a brand competes against its category. The role of brand, by contrast, is all about how well a brand “competes” against other customer-decision-making factors such as price, proximity or product features. Apple is a great case study here. Apple Stores are a move downstream into retail. Multi-device ownership increases the value of the Apple ecosystem effect.  And focusing on privacy elevates a previously latent demand driver. All these moves have increased the role of the Apple brand in customer decision-making. But brands don’t have to be Apple. Cloud accounting platform Xero has increased the role of brand by building a community of users around its core product.

Finally, arena thinking. Brands that excel at this translate customer trust into revenue streams in wholly new categories. Rather than looking for customers for their competencies, they build competencies around their customers. Uber (pictured) has excelled at arena thinking in recent years.

Moving into Uber Eats addressed a need that a taxi company would never answer. Likewise, Uber Trains takes them into a new space within the mobility arena. The rumoured takeover of Expedia would extend the relevance of their brand further still, answering the human need to explore and experience new places.

The case for thinking expansively rests on data, as well as logic and precedent. Over the 25 years we’ve been running our analysis, the 100 Most Valuable Global Brands have outperformed the S&P 500 and MSCI Index. And brands which excel in multiple arenas have outperformed the outperformers. Similarly, this year we showed that every one-point increase in brand strength and role of brand correlates with a 2.3% share price increase. Thinking big about brand pays.

Economic and political uncertainty abound. But business leaders have better tools than ever to ensure their brands thrive over the long as well as the short term. We believe more and more leaders will also have the temperament.

Sam Ashken is senior strategy director at Interbrand