Disrupt or decline? Why brand relevance matters more than ever in the digital age

Reflections from CIM Yorkshire's Brand Relevance in the Age of Digital Disruption event, part of Leeds Digital Festival 2026.

Earlier this month, I spent a really interesting afternoon at CIM Yorkshire's annual event, held at Hippo in Leeds as part of Leeds Digital Festival 2026. The discussion brought together brand leaders from M&S, Craghoppers and Yorkshire County Cricket Club to explore the challenges of building and maintaining brand relevance in an increasingly disrupted and digitally driven world.

It was a great opportunity to hear different perspectives on something that sits at the heart of what I do at Think Collectiv: understanding how brands create meaningful connections with customers, build preference and ultimately influence choice.

We have more customer data, more channels and more opportunities to personalise communications than ever before, yet I wonder whether all this technology and our relentless focus on optimisation are necessarily making our brands stronger. Are we becoming so focused on measuring individual interactions and short-term performance that we're losing sight of the bigger picture, and what actually makes people care about a brand in the first place?

There were some really interesting themes that came out of the discussion, many of which reinforced my own thinking around brand strategy and the importance of building what I call brand bias.

Brand relevance is determined by the customer, not the business

One of the points that particularly resonated with me was the idea that brand relevance isn't something a business can simply decide it has. It's determined by customers, through their experiences, perceptions and the value they believe a brand brings to their lives.

Whether we're talking about B2B or B2C, the fundamentals are much the same. We need to understand why customers would choose us, what space we occupy in their minds and whether we're consistently delivering against the promises we make. It's easy to become preoccupied with what we want to tell people about our brands, rather than considering what they actually think, feel and remember about us.

The panel also touched on the idea that brands are competing not just for customers' money, but for their time and attention. This is increasingly important when we consider how many brands, messages and experiences we're exposed to every day. Creating more opportunities for customers to engage with a brand is valuable, but only if those interactions are meaningful and add something to the relationship.

For me, this is where brand relevance and brand preference become closely connected. It's not enough for people to know who you are. You need to create strong, positive associations that give them a reason to think of you, feel something about you and ultimately choose you.

Are we optimising the life out of our brands?

This was perhaps one of the most thought-provoking areas of the discussion, particularly given how much of modern marketing is now driven by data, technology and performance measurement.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big believer in using data to inform decisions and understand what's working. But I do think there's a danger that we become so focused on what we can measure that we overlook some of the more important things that are harder to quantify.

We can track customer behaviour in extraordinary detail, but that doesn't necessarily mean we understand customers any better. Knowing what someone clicked on, purchased or engaged with is useful, but it doesn't always tell us why they made that decision, what they value or what associations they're building with our brand.

This is why I believe good customer insight remains so important. It's about looking beyond the numbers to understand the motivations, attitudes and behaviours that influence choice, then using that understanding to shape a brand proposition that is both meaningful and distinctive.

The opportunity isn't simply to use data to reach people more efficiently, but to use insight to make our brands more relevant and valuable to them. There's a subtle but important difference, and one that can easily get lost when short-term performance becomes the dominant measure of success.

Knowing when to evolve and when to transform

Another interesting theme was the challenge of knowing when a brand needs to change, whether that's a relatively small evolution or a more fundamental shift in positioning and direction.

Claire Grimshaw from Craghoppers spoke about the importance of understanding cultural moments and how brands need to respond to changing customer expectations to remain emotionally relevant. I thought this was particularly interesting because it raises the question of how brands balance the need to evolve with the importance of consistency.

After all, much of the value of a brand comes from the associations it has built over time. Change too much, too often, and you risk losing what makes you recognisable and distinctive. But remain too rigid and there's an equally real risk of becoming less relevant as the world moves on around you.

I think this is where having a really clear brand strategy makes all the difference. When you understand what your brand stands for, the value it offers and the associations you want to build, you have a much stronger foundation from which to evolve. It gives you the confidence to respond to new opportunities, experiment with different approaches and even challenge established brand guidelines without losing the central thread that holds everything together.

Brand consistency shouldn't mean standing still. It should mean having a clear enough sense of who you are to know what can change and what needs to remain constant.

Bringing the brand to life through experiences

I particularly enjoyed the discussion around experiential marketing and the role of brand in creating communities and shared experiences.

Craghoppers talked about its membership activities and events, bringing people together through shared interests and passions. What I liked about this was the idea of the brand facilitating something meaningful rather than simply communicating a message. It's a great example of how brand values can move beyond words on a page and become something customers actively experience.

Yorkshire County Cricket Club raised a different but equally interesting challenge around maintaining a consistent brand while appealing to multiple audiences, each with different needs, motivations and expectations. It reinforced the importance of having a strong strategic framework that can guide communications and experiences across different customer groups without fragmenting the overall brand.

Both examples brought the discussion back to something I feel strongly about: brand isn't just what we say through our marketing. It's what people experience through every interaction they have with a business.

Whether that's customer service, CRM, partnerships, events, the product itself or the way colleagues represent the organisation, every interaction has the potential to reinforce or undermine the associations we're trying to create.

There was also an interesting point about the exchange of value between brands and customers. If we're asking people to give us their time, attention, money or loyalty, what are we giving them in return? It's a useful question to keep coming back to, particularly when we're developing marketing activity that may deliver engagement without necessarily adding much meaningful value.

The role of partnerships in building relevance

The discussion around M&S and the role of brand partnerships was another interesting example of how established brands can continue to evolve and create new reasons for customers to engage.

Partnerships can be incredibly powerful when they connect a brand with new audiences, cultural moments or associations that are relevant to its positioning. They can help shift perceptions, introduce new dimensions to a brand and create experiences that might be difficult to achieve independently.

But, as with any brand activity, I think the important question is whether the partnership is actually strengthening the brand in the way we want it to.

It's relatively easy to create attention through an unexpected collaboration, but attention alone doesn't necessarily build long-term brand value. The real opportunity is in using partnerships to reinforce or develop the associations that make a brand more relevant, distinctive and desirable.

Bringing it back to Brand Bias

Listening to the discussion, I kept coming back to the thinking behind my Brand Bias Framework at Think Collectiv.

The principle is relatively simple. Strong brands create an advantage by building positive associations in people's minds that influence how they think, feel and ultimately behave towards them. They create a preference, sometimes conscious and sometimes less so, that makes people more likely to notice, remember and choose one brand over another.

For me, this starts with meaningful customer insight and a clear understanding of the business challenge. From there, it's about developing a distinctive positioning and proposition that gives people a reason to connect with the brand, then ensuring that promise is brought to life consistently through marketing, communications, products, people and experiences.

It's something I refer to as brand power that creates bias, using insight to build memorability.

What particularly struck me about the panel discussion was how closely these ideas connected with the need to align brand and business strategy. There was a really interesting point about looking beyond immediate commercial objectives and considering where a business wants to be in five or even ten years.

I think that's a challenge more businesses should be asking themselves. If we know where we want the business to go, what role does the brand need to play in getting us there? What do we need customers to think and feel about us in the future, and what associations do we need to start building today?

It's why I believe brand strategy needs to be connected to the wider commercial direction of a business rather than treated as a separate marketing exercise. A strong brand should help shape decisions, guide investment and provide a consistent thread through the customer experience.

And importantly, it needs to be more than a strategy document. It has to translate into action, with the right processes, structures and people in place to deliver it.

Digital disruption changes the opportunities, but not the fundamentals

My biggest takeaway from the afternoon was that, despite the pace of digital change and the extraordinary opportunities technology now gives us, the fundamentals of building a strong brand haven't really changed.

We still need to understand our customers, offer something they genuinely value, create distinctive and memorable associations and consistently deliver on our promises.

What has changed is the number of ways we can do this, the speed at which customer expectations evolve and the increasing pressure on brands to demonstrate commercial value.

I don't think the answer is to resist change or become less focused on performance. Far from it. The opportunity is to use technology, data and new channels more intelligently, while keeping sight of the longer-term role brand plays in creating preference and driving growth.

Perhaps the real challenge for businesses isn't simply how to keep up with digital disruption, but how to make sure their brands continue to mean something in a world where customers have more choice, more information and more demands on their attention than ever before.

Because ultimately, the brands that thrive will be those that know what makes them valuable, understand when they need to evolve and continue to give people meaningful reasons to choose them.

And that, for me, is what building brand bias is all about.

A big thank you to CIM Yorkshire for organising such an interesting event as part of Leeds Digital Festival 2026, to Marisa Kimos Brown for chairing the discussion and to Lawrence Christensen (M&S), Claire Grimshaw (Craghoppers), Daniel Mattson (Yorkshire County Cricket Club) and Jessica Rhodes for sharing their perspectives. Thanks also to MET Mentoring, powered by MET Marketing, for sponsoring the event.

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