Yes! It’s Time to Talk About Modern Growth Pathways
For the past two decades, branding has lived in a noisy house. Every room hosted a different argument:
- One group insisted relevance was everything.
- Another swore by distinctiveness.
- A third demanded differentiation at all costs.
Entire careers were built defending one side of this triangle, as if brands had the luxury of choosing only one. But they don’t.
Strong brands are not ideological. They are functional systems.
Remove relevance and the brand becomes hollow. Remove distinctiveness and it disappears. Remove differentiation and it becomes replaceable.
Growth does not come from choosing between these forces, but from orchestrating all three in the real world.
Yet that real world has changed more than most brand frameworks are willing to admit.
The Quiet Mistake Leaders Keep Making
Most marketing debates today are fighting the wrong war. Many of the models that dominate boardroom conversations were built for stable environments: clear categories, predictable demand, habitual buyers.
In those conditions, growth comes from being easy to buy, easy to recognise and broadly available. That logic works beautifully, when the world stays still.
However, many markets no longer do so… Categories blur, new use cases appear, behaviour shifts faster than annual plans, and technology reshapes how people discover, compare and decide. Under such conditions, maximising reach does not drive growth; it merely refines yesterday’s strategy.
This is the most expensive mistake leaders make today: applying equilibrium thinking to environments defined by change.
The result is familiar. Marketing becomes more efficient. Dashboards look healthier. Yet growth becomes harder to find.
From Attention to Intention
For twenty years, the digital economy ran on attention:
- Marketing chased impressions
- Sales chased conversion
- Finance analysed outcomes after the fact
Brand equity sat somewhere in the middle, important, discussed often, priced rarely. The system never fully added up because it was never designed to.
Today, a structural shift is underway. We are moving from an attention economy to an intent economy. The difference is profound.
In the attention economy, intent had to be guessed, from keywords, clicks, browsing paths and retargeting. It was inferred indirectly and often inaccurately.
In the intent economy, intent is expressed directly in natural language, in context, in real time… And this starting point changes everything.
When a system begins with an intention, interactions cease to be isolated impressions; they accumulate, and memory is formed. Preferences, limitations, and progress are transmitted. Decision-making becomes an unfolding episode, rather than a linear funnel.
In this world, persuasion gives way to assistance. The role of the brand shifts from storyteller to problem-solver.
Why This Finally Links Brand to Profit
This is not a philosophical shift. It is an economic one where results are discussed, not income.
When intent is observable, interactions are measurable and outcomes are explicit, brand investment stops being abstract.
Improving the quality of interactions directly improves decision confidence, repeat behaviour, willingness to pay and, ultimately, economic profit.
For the first time in a long time, marketing can speak the language of the CEO and the CFO without translation:
- Capital goes in
- Interactions improve
- Trust builds
- Pricing power follows
- Economic profit emerges
- Capital is reinvested
One loop. One system.
This is why many familiar artefacts quietly lose relevance. Websites are bypassed. Carefully mapped customer journeys are skipped. Brand books sit untouched on shelves.
Brands do not matter less in this world. They matter more, but differently.
And Why Planning Keeps Failing Too
Traditional planning assumes consumers live in segments, portfolios and budget lines. They don’t.
People live in episodes: routines, moments, constraints and intentions that repeat over time.
The brain learns value through experience –did this work last time?– and then arbitrates choice quickly when the moment returns.
Strong brands reduce friction between learning and choice. They collapse complexity into trust. When that happens, the decision feels obvious, not because it is simple, but because it is safe.
This is why allocating capital by demand episodes rather than organisational silos changes behaviour inside companies. Alignment improves. Trade-offs become clearer. Learning accelerates. Optionality remains open.
Planning stops trying to predict the future and starts learning its way into it.
When Strategy Becomes Structure and Meaning Becomes Non-Negotiable
Once brands stop competing for attention and start competing for intention, two questions arise, almost at random -because several more came to my mind later-, which seem to go from being secondary elements of a strategy to becoming part of its central pillar, one conceptual and the other sectoral:
- Conceptually, the scope of decisions regarding brand systems, architectural
- Sectoral about meaning in the luxury industry – an industry that is always under pressure in terms of brands –
Both are often treated as specialised topics, one delegated to brand teams, the other to luxury experts. In reality, they emerge naturally from the same shift that is reshaping growth itself.
When intent becomes the organising principle of value creation, brands are no longer judged by what they claim, but by how effectively they help people decide and progress. That places new demands on the structure of brands: how they are organised, named, related and navigated in moments of choice. Architecture stops being an internal convenience and becomes an external performance system.
At the same time, this shift exposes categories where meaning is not an overlay but the product itself. Luxury is the clearest example. In an intent-driven world, people do not ask luxury brands to be useful or accessible. They ask them to preserve desire, distinction and symbolic value. When intent is explicit, dilution becomes visible instantly and irreversibly.
Brand architecture and luxury therefore surface as strategic fault lines, not theoretical discussions. One addresses how complexity is transformed into clarity when decisions matter. The other tests whether meaning can survive when markets accelerate and access expands.
Both force the same leadership question:
Does our brand system still reflect how people choose and why they desire in this new world of intent?
What follows is not a technical exploration, but a strategic one. Because once attention no longer guarantees growth, structure and meaning stop being secondary considerations. They become the mechanisms through which growth either compounds or quietly erodes.
Not All Architectures Survive the Same World
One of the most practical implications for leadership is that:
There is no single “correct” brand architecture; instead, those that emerge are those that are suited to the level of uncertainty faced by their category.
This is where brand architecture stops being a naming or design question and becomes a growth decision.
At its core, architecture exists to do one thing: turn organisational complexity into customer clarity. It helps people decide -quickly and confidently- when choice matters.
In stable markets, classic brand architectures work well. Consistency reduces cognitive load. Clear hierarchies reinforce trust. Meaning changes slowly, and architecture acts as an anchor.
But when markets become fluid, architectures built around products, functions or legacy hierarchies start working against growth. They force customers to navigate internal logic that no longer reflects how demand actually forms.
People do not live in portfolios. They live in episodes.
Architectures organised around demand episodes -moments, routines, contexts-reducing friction between intent and action. They allow learning to compound. They make the “right” choice feel obvious, not because it is simple, but because it is safe.
In environments of extreme uncertainty, even this is not enough. Architecture must operate at system level: interfaces, data loops, incentives and governance reinforcing one another. In such worlds, architecture is not how brands are arranged. It is how value is produced.
The critical leadership question is not aesthetic. It is strategic:
What architecture does our category demand today, and what architecture will the future force us to build?
Most organisations fail not because they choose badly, but because they never ask this question honestly.
The real risk is not choosing the wrong architecture. It is failing to evolve architecture as uncertainty increases.
When meaning reshapes markets
This shift also explains why smaller players sometimes reshape entire markets.
They do not begin by meeting existing demand, they begin by challenging the dominant way value is defined. They introduce new meanings, new language and new standards of judgement. Over time, intermediaries, early believers and cultural signals reinforce the new frame.
What looks like “branding” from the outside is often a deeper act of market construction.
The same logic explains why attempts to dilute luxury almost always fail. Luxury is not expensive because of materials; it is expensive because of scarcity, symbolism and identity. Dilution is a category error.
Luxury is not a pricing strategy; it’s a meaning system… It’s not a reflection of cost; its price is narrative
People do not buy luxury primarily for utility. They buy it for what ownership signals about identity, status and belonging. Scarcity is not a marketing trick; it is the mechanism that sustains desire. This is why attempts to democratise luxury so often destroy value.
Lowering price does not simply expand demand. It changes its nature. Existing customers feel betrayed as exclusivity erodes. New customers remain sceptical because accessibility contradicts the promise of luxury. The brand drifts into a no-man’s land, neither aspirational nor mass.
It builds a story about rarity, discipline, patience and arrival. When that story breaks, trust breaks.
This is also why the most successful luxury groups protect their core brands relentlessly. They grow by adding new brands at different price points, not by stretching existing ones.
Make it widely accessible and it stops being luxury altogether. Desire evaporates while value collapses.
Back to brand architecture, in this specific case, it preserves meaning. Separation protects desire. Growth in luxury comes from going higher, not broader.
The Leadership Takeaway
Read as a whole, the message is simple and demanding.
Growth today does not come from shouting louder, measuring harder or optimising faster. It comes from understanding what people are trying to achieve in their lives and building brands that operate as coherent systems to help them do so, relevantly, recognisably and with real value.
This is not a marketing tweak, it’s a rewrite of the growth system, and it is a leadership responsibility.
Dear Erich! Thank you very much for your thoughts, insights and knowledge shared on these topics, which, as a trigger, have helped me convey these ideas.
Image
- Cottonbro Studio, Pexels
