By Jodie Gillary, head of brand activation at Kantar UK & Ireland
Over the past three decades, marketers have worked to keep up with increasingly fast-changing consumer behaviour. We’ve seen the rise of reviews and forums discussing products and services, the boom of social media and influencers lending brands authenticity, and growing personalisation and data-driven targeting.
Now AI has sparked a fundamental upending of how consumers interact with brands – and who, or what, marketers need to engage to deliver sales.
According to our data, a quarter of UK consumers ask AI for product recommendations, with one in three saying they’d now buy directly through ChatGPT and other generative AI tools rather than click through to retailer websites.
Yet we know the power of brand is growing. The strongest brands in the Kantar BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands have grown by 22% in value over the past 12 months, reaching a total $13.1 trillion. These businesses continue to outperform the market, including in tough economic times.
Against heating competition and low consumer confidence, what does it take to make a brand stand out and grow in today’s AI world?
Understanding the new rules of the game
As marketers we know that so many of consumers’ decisions are emotional and instinctive, and brand building has therefore traditionally centred on creating feeling and memory.
But Claude doesn’t have feelings. ChatGPT doesn’t recommend a product because it brings back good memories.
LLM suggestions are driven by functionality – by how well a brand, product or service meets a need, sometimes a very specific one. Ask for a “quiet, cordless vacuum under £200 that’s good for pet hair and for storing in a small flat”, and the model is effectively filtering what it can find in specifications, reviews and comparisons to identify the best match.
We all know it’s not quite that straightforward though. Even the perfect specification fit isn’t guaranteed to be suggested in an AI search result, because LLMs are also influenced by ‘talkability’ – the volume and credibility of people’s discussions surrounding the brand across reviews, Reddit threads, social posts. And that’s bigger and broader than an SEO challenge.
What gets people talking?
Marketers’ focus has long been on building a brand’s sense of difference and standing out from the competition – and rightly so, as we know that brands which are seen as more different can justify higher prices and protect margins.
But people don’t post online about brands just because they’re different. They write about products or services that have met a particular need – whether that’s a practical or an emotional one. Brands that really matter to consumers, that make them feel something and that stand out in a meaningful way are therefore much more likely to be reinforced by AI search and build salience.
The importance of meaning is nothing new. Kantar data has found that over the past seven years, the businesses which have strengthened their meaningful connections with consumers have grown their brand value by an average 129%, compared with just 80% growth for those with lower perceptions of meaning.
But AI search is bringing this into sharper focus.
Automotive is a category where this trend has been particularly visible. Tesla long held the top spot in the electric vehicle market, with a strong sense of difference against the competition. In 2025, it grew its brand value by an impressive 30%, reaching $112 billion.
But the new kid on the block, BYD, is nipping at its heels. Through an initial focus on hybrid vehicles to meet customers where they’re at, on innovative tech at affordable price points and on mass distribution via a network of established showrooms, the Chinese brand has built its relevance among consumers fast. It grew its brand value by a whopping 41% last year and is now the fifth most valuable car brand in the world.
Getting under the bonnet of AI search
To tread the line between engaging humans and the robots, marketers need to get to grips with the nuances of AI search engines and which models their audiences are using. It’s about understanding what feeds different algorithms, who is using them and how.
In a world where we can’t ‘keyword’ our way to the top of the list, marketers then need to ensure they’re using these signals to inform strategies which create the meaning and social currency to get people posting about the brand on the right platforms.
Economic uncertainty looks set to be the norm for the foreseeable future. The businesses that manage to grow over the coming years will be those that can build brands that people love and that models can confidently recommend.
