Is the art of building iconic brands changing?

Is brand building losing relevance? This is one debate seeming to follow marketers everywhere: conference stages, LinkedIn feeds, podcasts and boardrooms alike. 

Performance marketing has indeed taken over, creators have perhaps replaced celebrities, and algorithms for sure decide what people see. AI is churning out content at scale and consumers, they say, “have the attention span of a goldfish”. So does nobody have the patience to build an iconic brand anymore? Well, that doesn't quite seem to be true.

Perhaps the more important question is how has brand building changed? For many industry leaders, the fundamentals remain surprisingly intact. 

Reworking the old philosophy

Ashwin P, Managing Partner - Creative, TBWA\Lintas, frames the contradiction through a series of questions rather than answers.

“How come, in this day and age of startups and D2C brands, the benchmarks are still Apple, Nike, Asian Paints, Fevicol? How come, in this day and age, the products we use and the brands we desire are not the same? (Use Noise, want Apple). How come, in this day and age, brand loyalty is considered uncool, and one is always on the lookout for the next trending brand? How come, in this day and age, are CMOs of brands that did consistent work for decades, sick and tired of the voice that made their brand what it is today? How come, in this day and age, are agencies finding themselves redesigning logos and brand books for brands that have remained unchanged for decades?" 

His conclusion is equally direct.

"The answer is unequivocal. This is a phase. Those brands that burn their fingers but manage to survive through it will return to the basics, and survive another 100 years. The new brands that think they're too cool to invest in long term brands and instead chase engagement and virality, well, they're not planning to be around for even the next 10 years, they're just working towards valuation and sale."

That distinction between chasing engagement and building enduring memory emerges repeatedly across conversations with marketers.

As for Asparsh Sinha, Managing Partner at OPEN Strategy & Design, the biggest disruption isn't technology. It's the mindset. "The fundamentals of human psychology haven't changed; what's changed is our impatience. Brands today have become too reactive. We've turned branding into a high-frequency trading floor, that's optimised for the click rather than conviction. There is no denying that there is a homogenization at play where every brand uses the same trendy palettes, the same cheeky SMS marketing, and the same UGC-style ads just to game the Instagram algorithm. They are hyper-optimised for the digital ecosystem, but completely unremarkable to the human mind."

It's a powerful observation. Digital platforms have dramatically improved marketers' ability to measure every click, view and conversion. But the very metrics that make campaigns more accountable can also make them more short-term. When every dashboard refreshes in real time, patience becomes harder to justify.

For Sinha, the platforms marketers obsess over already offer the clearest blueprint for building enduring brands. "Who is actually driving massive engagement and cultural weight today? It's the creators, the Zakir Khans of the Instagram world. They win because they show up with a distinct, unapologetic point of view and stay relentlessly true to themselves. But instead of taking a leaf out of their book, brands refuse to do the hard work of building their own memory and meaning. They just leverage these creators as rented faces to extract short-term attention."

Winning consumer love

If digital marketing has taught brands to move faster, it has also encouraged constant reinvention. New campaigns replace old ones within weeks. Visual identities evolve frequently. Messaging shifts to suit every platform. But consumers rarely build emotional memory at that pace.

Nisha Khatri, CMO, Libas, believes the definition of an iconic brand has certainly evolved, but not the purpose of brand building itself. She explained that a few decades ago, brands entered popular culture through repetition, simplicity and concentrated media consumption. Television commercials weren't simply advertisements; they became shared entertainment.

Today's environment looks radically different. "Attention is fragmented across social media, creators, OTT, marketplaces, WhatsApp, offline retail and performance-led touchpoints. A brand can no longer depend only on repeated exposure; it has to stay relevant across multiple formats and moments."

Yet relevance should not be mistaken for abandoning long-term thinking. "That does not mean modern brands are less iconic. It means today's audience defines 'iconic' differently. Earlier, it may have been a jingle everyone remembered. Today, it could be a brand that becomes part of someone's feed, identity, community, conversation or lifestyle."

Banking on trust

If marketers have become obsessed with speed, several believe trust still grows slowly. Akash Agrawalla, Co-founder of ZOFF Foods, argues that digital acceleration hasn't replaced the foundations of brand building.

"While today's digital ecosystem enables faster engagement and more precise performance measurement, it cannot replace the need to build long-term brand equity. The fundamentals of building an iconic brand have not changed."

He sees celebrity partnerships and digital creators as amplifiers rather than substitutes. "These partnerships help strengthen awareness and recall, but enduring brands are ultimately built by consistently delivering on their promise. Performance can create momentum, but trust creates legacy." That distinction between momentum and legacy runs through much of today's branding debate.

Stories that outlive campaigns

Abhimanyu Singh, Chief Strategy Officer at Kulfi Collective, believes brands have become impatient with storytelling itself.

"Two things are missing. One: narrative discipline, the willingness to hold onto a story long enough for it to compound. Two: the incentive structures around brands. When investors, finance teams, and leadership are chasing quarterly growth, the space to build stories that take time to land keeps shrinking."

He argued that consumers don't simply remember logos or campaigns. They remember stories.

"A brand is a character (no, not a friend or a bestie) in the consumer's world. But not every character earns a place in that world."

Kulfi Collective describes these enduring expressions as "cultural objects" like ideas, products or stories that people want to own, quote, imitate, debate and pass along.

"Get the narrative and the participation right, and the effect compounds. Every cultural object makes the next one travel further because people are already carrying the story forward. That's the real case for brand building. Not the tools. Not the platforms. It's the discipline to understand that stories take time to take hold, but once they do, they travel much farther than the next 16:9-optimised, three-second hook ever will."

Clarity before content

If patience is disappearing, clarity may be disappearing with it. Hemal Majithia, Founder and CEO of OktoBuzz, believes companies often invest heavily in marketing before defining what they actually stand for. "Most companies today are investing in marketing without first doing the harder work of branding."

He drew a clear distinction. "Branding creates clarity and direction. Marketing creates speed, reach and transactions. But speed without direction only helps a brand get lost faster."

In an age of endless content production, he believes the competitive advantage is surprisingly simple. "The brands that grow faster are not always the ones with the largest budgets or the loudest marketing. They are the ones with The Clarity Advantage: clarity of audience, perception, promise and direction. Time does not create iconic brands. Clarity, sustained over time, does."