The State of Branding in 2026

Branding as a discipline in 2026 looks both more important and more contested than it has in twenty years. The same forces that compressed UX practice — AI in the production layer, generative tools eating commodity work, brutal economic pressure on marketing budgets — are reshaping branding too. The brands winning right now share patterns that would have looked unfashionable in 2022; the brands losing are still using the playbook that won the last cycle.

This report distills what we've observed across Makreate's brand engagements over the last 18 months (US, UK, UAE, India), combined with industry data from Brand Finance's 2025 Global 500 report, Kantar's BrandZ rankings, Marketing Week's brand investment surveys, public reporting on AI's impact on creative work, and other cited sources.

Framing: Makreate does brand work for growth-stage and SME businesses (Series A through to established mid-market). We don't have a strong vantage on Fortune-500 mega-brand work and we're not commenting on that segment here.

1. Brand investment has rebounded — selectively

Brand-marketing budgets across SaaS and consumer brands declined in 2022-2023 as performance marketing absorbed share. By mid-2025 the trend had reversed — Marketing Week's annual budget survey and Gartner CMO Spend reports both show brand investment recovering meaningfully, driven by recognition that performance-only spend was hitting diminishing returns and that CAC-driven funnels can't be sustained without trust-building upstream.

The brands recovering brand investment fastest are the ones who have a clear thesis about what brand is meant to do for the business — typically lower CAC, improved retention, premium pricing power. The brands still hesitating are the ones who can't articulate what brand spend produces, which usually means they don't have a measurement framework or didn't have one in 2022 either.

What we're not seeing: a return to pre-2020 brand-spend levels. The new normal is brand as a smaller-but-disciplined component of the marketing mix — typically 25-40% of marketing budget for growth-stage businesses, with performance taking the rest.

2. Identity design has gotten quieter and more confident

The identity design trends of 2020-2022 — loud gradients, expressive typography, motion-heavy systems — have moderated. The 2026 identity work that's winning is quieter, more typographically-disciplined, more architectural. Think the recent identity work for Linear, Vercel, Notion, Stripe's evolved system — restrained, confident, structurally clean.

The driver isn't aesthetic preference; it's practical. AI-generated visual content has flooded the design space with loud-and-busy work, and brand identities that compete on visual noise are getting drowned out. The brands that stand out are doing so through restraint, not amplification. The contrast itself is the signal.

Custom typography is back. Most of the strongest 2025-2026 identity releases include a custom or extensively-modified typeface — not because it's trendy but because off-the-shelf type has become commoditised. A brand using the same typeface as 50,000 other brands isn't using brand assets; it's using design defaults.

3. Brand voice is doing more work than brand visuals

If 2020-2022 was the era of visual identity dominance, 2026 is the era of verbal identity. The brands winning recognition right now are doing so through distinctive voice, not just distinctive marks. Liquid Death, Oatly, Cards Against Humanity, Mailchimp (in its prime), Death & Co — these brands win because their writing sounds like nobody else's writing.

The shift is structural. AI has commoditised middle-tier copywriting; the same generative tools that produce mediocre visuals also produce mediocre copy. Brands that sound like AI wrote them — most of them, in 2026 — are forgettable in a way they weren't 24 months ago. Brands with genuine voice are louder than they've ever been by contrast.

Voice is also harder to fake than visuals. A logo can be redesigned in a weekend; a brand voice takes months of explicit work — documenting principles, vocabulary, patterns, training writers, auditing for drift. That difficulty is now compounding into a competitive moat for brands that did the work.

4. The brand-as-product idea has matured

The 'brand is everything' framing that took hold in the late 2010s — that brand isn't the logo, it's the product experience, the customer service, the packaging, the receipts, the founder's tweets — has matured into actionable practice. The brands winning in 2026 treat brand as a discipline that crosses every customer touchpoint, owned by the brand team but practiced by every customer-facing function.

What this looks like operationally: brand guidelines that aren't just a PDF but a living component library, embedded brand reviewers in product and content workflows, structured cross-functional rituals to keep brand expression consistent across surfaces. The brands that ship this end up with much more coherent customer experiences than brands that treat brand as a marketing-team-only concern.

The pushback we hear: 'isn't this just good cross-functional discipline?' Yes — and the brands that don't have it have inconsistent customer experiences. The label matters less than the practice.

5. AI in the brand-design workflow

AI tools are widely adopted in brand work but used differently than in product UX. Most senior brand designers we work with use AI for: rapid concept exploration (producing 50-100 directional sketches in an afternoon), production work on derivative assets (social templates, document variants, asset resizing), copy variants and brand-voice drafting, and brand audit synthesis (analysing existing brand expression at scale).

What AI isn't doing in serious brand work: the final identity decision, the strategic positioning, the voice principles. Senior brand designers are using AI to expand exploration, not to substitute for judgment. The work has gotten faster; the decisions have stayed human.

The brands that have tried to fully AI-generate their identity are mostly producing forgettable work — and customers, especially in design-conscious categories, can usually tell. The hybrid model (human direction, AI execution, human refinement) is producing the best output across our 2025 engagements.

6. What good brand teams are doing differently in 2026

A few habits show up consistently in the brand teams winning right now. First, they invest in voice work, not just visual identity — and they treat voice as a tool the whole company uses, not just the marketing team. Second, they use AI as production leverage but keep judgment work human. Third, they treat brand expression as cross-functional, with rituals and reviewers across product, content, support and sales. Fourth, they measure brand — not perfectly, but consistently — through some combination of brand-search lift, unaided recall, NPS-adjacent surveys, and category-share-of-search.

What's not working: spending the brand budget exclusively on visual identity refreshes; treating brand as a marketing-team activity instead of a company-wide one; using AI to generate the foundational brand work; under-investing in voice because visuals feel more concrete.

7. What's coming for brand in 2027

Two trends look near-certain over the next 12-24 months. First, distinctive voice will continue compounding as a competitive moat — the brands that develop genuine voice now will be meaningfully harder to compete with in 2027 than they are today. Second, custom typography will continue normalising — within 24 months, off-the-shelf Google Fonts use will look as dated in serious brand work as Comic Sans does today.

What probably won't happen: AI replacing senior brand designers. The discipline keeps becoming more strategic — moving from execution craft to positioning, voice, and cross-functional orchestration — and senior practitioners have always done that work. The role is changing; the demand for the role isn't.

What might happen: AI-native brand expression as a new category of design work. Brands that exist primarily inside AI conversations, AI assistants, and chatbot interfaces have different design constraints than brands optimised for visual surfaces. The early experiments are happening now; we'd expect mature practice patterns to emerge by mid-2027.