This week, the marketing world is buzzing about McKinsey’s latest revelation: brand building matters. McKinsey has said “Brand Is Back”. CMOs are forwarding the report to their boards with the quiet relief of someone whose alibi just checked out. The consultants have spoken. We can finally stop pretending that tracking influencer click-through rates constitutes a growth strategy.

But it’s worth sitting with the strangeness of this moment. Corporations are paying consultancy fees to be told something they knew a decade ago. How did we get here?

Sometime around 2015, a seductive bargain emerged in corporate marketing departments. Trade the ambiguous for the quantifiable.

I have sympathy for why this happened.

Brand equity is genuinely difficult to measure. It accumulates like sediment, layer by invisible layer, in the murky territory of consumer psychology. Preference formation. Trust. The feeling that makes someone reach for your product without consciously knowing why.

Try explaining that in a quarterly finance call. Try defending a budget for something you can’t put in a spreadsheet. It’s uncomfortable. You’re asking a room full of people who built their careers on certainty to take something on faith.

Performance marketing offered relief from that discomfort. If Influencer X generates Y clicks at Z cost, you have a formula. Formulas feel like science. Science feels like certainty. And certainty, in a boardroom full of anxious executives, is oxygen.

What followed was a kind of measurement myopia. There’s an old joke about a man searching for his keys under a streetlight. A passerby stops to help. After ten minutes of fruitless searching, the passerby asks, “Are you sure you dropped them here?” The man shakes his head. “No, I dropped them in the alley. But the light is better here.”

This is what happened to marketing. The alley where brand equity actually lives is dark and difficult to navigate. Performance metrics offered a well-lit patch of pavement. So that’s where everyone looked. Quarter after quarter, year after year, searching with increasing sophistication for something that was never there to begin with.

Consider what the attribution models were actually measuring.

Say your performance campaign shows 10,000 clicks leading to 500 conversions at $20 per acquisition. Clean numbers. Defensible in any boardroom.

But those 500 conversions didn’t happen in a vacuum. Some percentage of those people already knew your brand. Already trusted it. Already had it lodged somewhere in their memory from years of accumulated exposure. The performance campaign didn’t create demand. It captured demand that brand investment had quietly built.

Attribution models can’t separate these two things. They credit the last touch. The final click before purchase gets 100% of the attribution.

Imagine you’re in the movie The Italian Job. Months of planning. Stolen blueprints. Safe-cracking expertise. An inside man. Carefully timed explosions. Mini Coopers weaving through Los Angeles drainage tunnels. And at the end, when the gold bars hit the van, the getaway driver turns to the crew and says, “You’re welcome.”

That’s last-touch attribution. The driver was there when the value transferred, so the driver gets credit for the heist. The months of planning, the expertise, the risk, the tunnels? Doesn’t show up in the model. As far as the data is concerned, the guy who drove the van cracked the safe.

The math looked precise. But precision isn’t accuracy. You can measure the wrong thing to six decimal places.

There is this Einstein quote that is relevant to this scenario:

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

When “social first” becomes your organizing principle, you’ve confused the delivery mechanism with the message.

Think of a jazz musician deciding that the venue matters more than the composition. Optimizing obsessively for the room’s acoustics while forgetting to write anything worth playing. The sound is crisp. The seats are full. But there’s nothing on stage worth hearing.

Brands started asking “How do we go viral on TikTok?” before asking “Who are we and why should anyone care?”

The sequence matters.

Get it backwards and you become a content factory chasing algorithmic favor. Adopting every trending audio. Mimicking every format. Shapeshifting so rapidly that your audience couldn’t pick you out of a lineup.

I’ve watched brands with eighty years of equity start behaving like twenty-three-year-old influencers desperate for engagement. There’s a clinical term for this kind of identity instability. In marketing, we called it “being agile” and gave it awards.

Brand equity and performance marketing operate on fundamentally different mathematical curves.

Performance marketing is largely linear with diminishing returns. Spend $100,000 this month, get X conversions. Spend $200,000, get something less than 2X. Stop spending entirely, and the conversions stop too. There’s no residue. No accumulation. You’re renting attention.

Brand equity compounds. Year one, you’re planting seeds that won’t visibly sprout. Year three, preference begins to form. Year seven, you’ve built something that generates returns even when you’re not actively spending. You own a slot in the consumer’s mind. That’s an asset, not an expense.

The problem is that compounding is backloaded. The early years look like waste if you’re measuring quarterly. A CFO staring at year one brand spending sees cost without visible return. A CFO staring at year one performance spending sees a clean ratio of dollars in, conversions out.

One is building equity. The other is liquidating it. But on a quarterly spreadsheet, they look opposite to what they actually are.

The performance marketing formula is easy to populate. You know your spend. You can track your clicks. You can count your conversions. Plug and play.

Brand equity is harder. Much harder. How do you measure starting brand equity? What units is it even in? How do you calculate a growth rate when brand “investment” includes everything from Super Bowl ads to how your customer service reps answer the phone?

There are proxies. Brand tracking studies measure awareness, consideration, preference. You can survey consumers on willingness to pay a premium. You can track organic search volume, direct traffic, earned media mentions. Econometric models attempt to isolate brand contribution from the overall marketing mix.

But none of it is as clean as “spent X, got Y clicks, converted Z customers.”

And that’s precisely the point. Performance marketing wins in boardrooms not because it’s more accurate, but because it’s more legible. The inputs are obvious. The outputs are obvious. The story tells itself.

Brand equity requires faith in fuzzy inputs yielding fuzzy outputs over fuzzy timeframes. Try putting that in a quarterly deck.

Brand compounding takes time. More time than most CMO tenures, which average somewhere between 3 and 4 years. More time than most CEO tenures. Quarterly earnings calls happen every 90 days. Activist investors have even shorter horizons.

If you’re a CMO who knows you’ll be in the seat for three years, the rational play might actually be performance marketing. You’ll get legible results. You’ll hit your numbers. You’ll collect your bonus. And the brand equity erosion you’re causing? That becomes visible after you’ve left. Someone else takes the L.

Now imagine you’re an agency walking into this CMO’s office. You’re preaching brand building. Quoting Byron Sharp on mental availability. Citing Binet and Field’s research on the 60/40 split between brand and activation. Waving around marketing science like it’s scripture.

The CMO is listening to you like you’ve arrived from a different time dimension.

She has a quarter. You’re talking in 5 to 7 to 10 year timeframes. She’s 40 years old with a board meeting next month. You’re essentially telling her that if she follows your advice, the payoff arrives right around the time she’s navigating a midlife crisis. Or she’s 32 and ambitious, and you’re asking her to plant trees whose shade she’ll never sit in. At least not at this company.

Think of it this way. You’re at a corporate party. Your boss and everyone in the C-suite is dancing. Terribly, as they often do. Trying all the cool moves like they nailed them. And you? You happen to know how to actually dance. Michael Jackson meets a ballerina meets a breakdancer. Are you going to walk over and coach the C-suite on their footwork? They just want to get jiggy with it. They’re having fun. They think they look good.

That’s what it sounds like when you say “brand” during a performance marketing meeting. Or quote research. Or present proof of why the right way is some way that involves a completely different dance. You’re not enlightening anyone. You’re interrupting the party.

The incentive structure is working exactly as designed. The system rewards short-term legibility and punishes long-term ambiguity. Rational actors respond accordingly.

And then, somewhere down the line, when the brand has hollowed out enough that even the quarterly numbers start suffering, a consulting deck arrives. McKinsey or Bain or whoever stands in front of the board and says, with great authority, that the company needs to reinvest in brand. The new CMO gets permission to pivot. The old CMO’s choices get quietly filed under “previous strategy.” Everyone saves face. The consultants get paid.

Truth delivered in the middle of someone’s performance is sabotage.

Company abandons fundamental practice A in pursuit of shiny tactic B. Years pass. Tactic B fails to deliver sustainable results. Company now needs external validation to return to Practice A, because admitting they were wrong requires political cover.

Enter the consultancy.

The McKinsey report isn’t really selling insight. Rather, it is selling air cover. CMOs who knew better but couldn’t say so without data-backed armor now have their shield. In the performance marketing era, “we need to build brand love” sounded soft. Unserious. When McKinsey reframes it as “strategic resilience,” suddenly it’s acceptable boardroom vocabulary.

The Reversion Premium isn’t just the cost of rebuilding the brand. It’s the cost of the entire cycle. The years of erosion, the consulting fees, the organizational churn, the face-saving narratives. All of it could have been avoided by maintaining the compounding chain in the first place.

But maintaining the chain requires someone willing to defend fuzzy numbers in a system that rewards crisp ones. That’s a hard ask.

The Hierarchy Restored?

What’s actually changing is a restoration of logical hierarchy that should never have been inverted. But is it?

Brand strategy sits at the top. It answers the foundational questions. What do we stand for? What associations do we want to own in the consumer’s mind? What’s our distinctive point of view?

Everything else exists in service of that strategy. Social media. Influencer partnerships. Content marketing. Performance campaigns. Distribution channels and tactical executions. Necessary. Sometimes powerful. But fundamentally subordinate.

The “influencer industrial complex” isn’t dying. It’s being demoted to its appropriate position: a channel, not a theology.

The consultants have spoken. The pendulum is swinging. Brand is back.

But back to what, exactly?

The same organizations that spent a decade strip-mining brand equity for quarterly metrics are now being told to rebuild it. By the same people who never understood what it was in the first place. The muscle memory is gone. The practitioners who knew how to do this work have retired, pivoted, or been laid off in one of several “efficiency” rounds.

What’s left is a generation of marketers trained on click attribution, influencer CPMs, and content calendars. They’ve been told brand matters again, but the comprehension isn’t there. The craft isn’t there. The patience certainly isn’t there.

Watch for the signs. Brand campaigns that look like extended product ads. “Emotional storytelling” that’s just lifestyle footage with a logo at the end. Purpose statements written by committee, focus-grouped into meaninglessness. Brand building as aesthetic exercise, divorced from actual positioning, actual distinction, actual meaning.

The word is back. The discipline may not be.

The irony of corporations paying premium rates to rediscover obvious truths never stops being instructive. It reveals something important about how institutions actually function: not through accumulated wisdom, but through cycles of forgetting and expensive remembering. The strategist’s job, increasingly, is to simply maintain continuity while everyone else oscillates.

Nazrawi Ghebreselasie is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kana TV, Ethiopia's leading television network known for bringing global entertainment and original local productions to millions of viewers. A mathematician and entrepreneur, Nazrawi also leads STRATIX, a strategy and creative consulting agency working at the intersection of media, technology, an culture across Africa. His work focuses on audiencebehavior, media innovation, and building data-driven creative ecosystems.