Why Emotional Brand-Building Is The Most Underrated Commercial Lever Right Now

The sameness problem in brand marketing is now coming from two directions at once. AI has lowered the barrier to creative production, making it faster and cheaper for new entrants to show up with seemingly polished branding. At the same time, the visual codes that challenger brands pioneered within category, like pastel colours in the premium coffee industry, or quirky illustrations in craft beer, have been so widely adopted they've become their own kind of uniform. Brands that once broke the status quo are now watching multiple competitors show up wearing the same look. The result is a market where everything looks considered, and nothing stands out.

Natasha Berthiaume has spent the last 15 years in brand and marketing roles across B2B, D2C, and B2C companies. Now a Brand and Marketing Consultant at Beyond the Norm, and until recently Brand Director at Corndel, she previously led brand at international print and design company MOO and the pet food subscription brand Tails.com. During her time at MOO, she helped grow the company's US business, making it MOO's most profitable market. At Tails.com, she led brand strategy and campaigns during the company's European expansion and move into grocery. Her argument, consistently borne out across sectors, is that brand is a commercial engine, and the companies investing in multichannel brand building and leading with emotional storytelling are the ones that will win.

Purpose can't be copied

Multichannel presence and emotional storytelling matter, but they only create lasting advantage when they're rooted in something deeper.

Execution can be replicated overnight. A visual identity can be copied, a channel strategy borrowed, a campaign format cloned. What cannot be copied is why a brand exists and what it genuinely stands for. "Purpose is the foundation that determines whether a campaign resonates or disappears, whether a community event feels authentic or opportunistic, whether a premium price point is trusted or questioned," says Berthiaume.

When visual identity and production quality can no longer be relied on to set a brand apart, how a brand makes people feel becomes the most important strategic question a leader can ask. And increasingly, that question is being answered not just through digital channels, but through how brands show up in the real world.

When everything looks the same, feeling becomes the differentiator

"The brands that broke the status quo on visual identity are now watching competitors copy their playbook. At the same time, AI is lowering the barrier to entry for creative production. So the question becomes: where do you differentiate next? I think community events and experiential marketing are going to have a significant resurgence," she explains. "So many people are done with the online world and feeling disconnected. That need to connect in real life is becoming more urgent."

Berthiaume points to screen-free networking concepts emerging across Europe, where attendees put their phones away to meet strangers, play games, and reconnect without screens, as evidence that the desire for offline experiences is growing and that consumers are willing to seek them out and pay for them. Real-world experiences are harder to replicate at scale, but only when they are grounded in something authentic. A pop-up or community that genuinely expresses what a brand stands for lands differently than one that is simply occupying space. That coherence between purpose and presence is what competitors cannot reverse-engineer.

This matters because competition itself has changed shape. Brands are no longer only fighting their direct category rivals. They are competing against everything vying for a person's time and monthly spending.

"Ultimately, that's what we're competing for," she says. "I notice it in myself. When I was younger, I had far fewer distractions. Now it's Netflix, Spotify, an app pinging me to sell something, social media, WhatsApp. Every brand faces the same challenge: earning people's time, the scarcest currency any brand competes for. Your competitors aren't just the brands in your market or category. You're competing for attention and spend overall, especially in subscriptions, where people look at their bank statements, realize they have 10 different services, and start cutting back. The competition has shifted."

Every consumer brand is now competing for a slot on someone's monthly statement. The brands that survive the next subscription cull will be the ones a customer cannot imagine their week without. That standard is only met by brands that have made themselves an integral part of people's lives, and very few of them get there on product features alone.

Sell the feeling, not the feature

Knowing what a brand stands for emotionally is what makes every touchpoint meaningful rather than merely visible. Without that clarity, a pop-up is just an event and a campaign is just noise. With it, every interaction becomes a chance to reinforce what a brand makes people feel. That is especially true in commoditized categories, where the product alone will never be the hook.

Purpose-driven companies often enjoy a built-in narrative advantage, but Berthiaume has a clear move for leaders in categories where that advantage does not come naturally: sell the feeling. "In home cover, you're selling peace of mind and reassurance. Some brands in this space lean into themes that create a sense of safety. A warm home, a happy family. Others take a more provocative approach, calling out the unfairness in the market, which drives an emotional response through a sense of activism."

The case for emotional positioning is ultimately a financial one. At Hometree, Berthiaume deliberately premiumized the company's core home cover business to compete more credibly with legacy incumbents like HomeServe and British Gas, while maintaining a coherent narrative and promise across its home cover, finance and green energy propositions: helping people look after their homes and transition to low-carbon living. The emotional clarity of that promise is what made the premium positioning credible, not just the product features behind it.

Why speed alone does not win anymore

What was a competitive advantage 12-18 months ago is now a baseline expectation. Every competitor has access to the same tools, the same speed, and therefore the ability to produce a similar output. The result is not just more content, but more sameness, which makes emotional differentiation more valuable, not less.

"AI has removed a lot of the operational complexity, so now everyone can ship faster. But there's a whole question about quality and how you manage it alongside efficiency. I think that's making a lot of business owners realize that they need to invest in brand and storytelling because otherwise, it becomes very surface-level. Suddenly, you've got 15 or 20 competitors that weren't there yesterday. If you're competing functionally in the same space, how do you create that value? How do you give people reasons to choose you? That's exactly why brand becomes the core differentiator," she says.

The pressure to demonstrate that trust is measurable has intensified as AI-generated content floods every channel, chipping away at the trust signals brands have spent years building. That pressure is finally pushing the brand conversation into the boardroom, a place it has belonged for years.

Measuring what brand actually drives

The commercial case for emotional brand-building only lands if brand leaders can demonstrate its impact in terms the boardroom understands. Brand channels are now held to the same commercial accountability as performance marketing, and rightly so. The job of the CMO or Chief Brand Officer is to build the attribution model and the narrative that demonstrates to the CEO and board that investing in brand pays off.

Berthiaume treats brand as a measurable, wraparound function that extends well beyond marketing. "Brand marketers and creatives need to connect with the commercial challenge and make it central to their roles," she says. "Brand impacts everything. Your product proposition, your marketing, your service, your values, how you behave when things go wrong. Those moments aren't footnotes to your results. They drive them."

Measuring brand success means looking past a single conversion rate. "Start with the metrics that signal brand pull: organic traffic, on-site engagement, conversion funnel rates. Then connect those to the harder commercial indicators: CAC-to-LTV, repeat purchase, and retention. Brand is directly accountable for those numbers. It shapes how customers move through lifecycle journeys and how compellingly you can upsell and cross-sell. When you build that full picture, the boardroom case for brand becomes clear."

The brands that will outlast their competitors are not the ones that move the fastest or spend the most. They're the ones that give people a reason to stay and a reason to believe.