Brand betrayal: Trading emotion for engagement and paying the price

We were warned in 2015. We ignored it. Now we're paying for it.

Just re-read this brilliant 2015 FT piece about advertising's great digital delusion, and bloody hell, it reads like prophecy.

Ten years ago, whilst everyone was genuflecting before the altar of "engagement metrics" and "precise targeting", Byron Sharp was quietly publishing research showing that brands grow through light buyers, not loyal fans. That your actual customers are mostly people who buy from you once every 18 months and from your competitor the rest of the time.

The industry's response? "Lovely theory, Byron. Now excuse us whilst we spend millions building a TikTok presence for fabric softener."

Here's what makes me want to weep:

Pepsi ditched the Super Bowl in 2010 for a "digital engagement project". Got millions of likes. Lost 5% market share. That's not a rounding error—that's a catastrophe with emoji reactions.

Meanwhile, John Lewis created TV ads that made grown adults cry about penguins and sold so much merchandise they had to apologise for the queues.

The article nailed it: we invented the perfect system for reaching millions of people who aren't thinking about your product—it's called telly—then abandoned it because CFOs couldn't measure the ROI of making someone feel something.

We traded "mental availability" (being remembered at the point of purchase) for "engagement" (three bot accounts and your mum liked your post).

The really depressing bit? Ten years later, we're still doing it. Still confusing performance marketing with brand building. Still measuring everything except what matters. Still letting data scientists tell us that emotion is "inefficient".

You know what's inefficient? Spending a fortune targeting your existing customers whilst your competitors colonise the memories of everyone else.

The fame of a brand takes years to build but becomes, as Buffett understood, "a gusher of cash cascading down the generations." But we'd rather have the dopamine hit of Tuesday's click-through rates.

Perhaps the real lesson: In any industry threatened by technological disruption, the gravest danger isn't being too slow to adopt the new thing—it's forgetting what made you valuable in the first place.

Or as I'd put it: we were so busy becoming data scientists, we forgot how to be interesting.

(Gustaf Wick is a global brand strategist, advertising & digital marketing expert and ASEAN Business Director of Mahlab with 10+ years across EAME & APAC, specialising in B2B marketing, strategic consulting, and building high-performing teams.)