Red Door Interactive joined top brands like Coca-Cola, GM, and United Airlines at Ad Age's Business of Brands conferenceto take a hard look at what’s shaping modern marketing. Today’s consumers expect seamless experiences, authentic connections, and deeper purpose—and they’re no longer forgiving when brands fall short. Exceeding these expectations requires more than good intentions. It demands strategy, innovation, and resilience to maintain momentum.
Here’s are 6 ways we see the conference insights translating to a competitive advantage for your brand.
1. Human-Centric Marketing: Leveraging Empathy & Connections
While empathy in branding isn’t new, the conference emphasized a deeper, strategic integration of human-centric approaches. Storytelling today needs to go beyond relevance; it must create an emotional impact that resonates long after the moment. You can do this by using audience insights to craft narratives that reflect what someone wants to hear and how they aspire to be seen.
Key Takeaway
Investing in emotional insights means going beyond basic demographic data and digging into the psychology driving customers’ choices. It’s about understanding the trust, excitement, and even frustration consumers feel throughout their journey with a brand. Brands that understand these emotional drivers create connections customers won’t easily leave behind. The conference provided a great reminder that, at the end of the day, we’re not talking to ‘consumers’, we’re talking to people.
2. Data & Emotion: Redefining How We Measure Success
Ad Age challenged marketers to think beyond traditional key performance indicators (KPIs), suggesting that brand health is also a measure of how consumers feel. Ferrara, for example, leverages emotional data to assess long-term impact. Brands that assess metrics like emotional engagement and brand sentiment alongside KPIs get a fuller view of success and a strategic advantage.
Key Takeaway
Emotional metrics offer valuable insights that enrich traditional analytics. Integrating measurements like Emotional Value Index, Net Promoter Score, and more, can elevate your reporting and deepen your understanding of your consumers.
- Emotional Value Index (EVI) - captures consumer emotional attachment to a brand by evaluating positive emotions like joy, trust, or excitement.
- Net Promotor Score (NPS) - reflects the strength of emotional attachment by asking consumers how likely they are to recommend a brand. (Source: HBR)
3. Purpose-Driven Branding: Authenticity is the Only Way
Consumers today recognize when a brand’s purpose is authentic—but even more so when it’s not. The conference made it clear that purpose can’t just be a line of text on the website; it needs to be part of the business model. Cotopaxi – a growing outdoor gear brand — integrates sustainability at an operational level, showcasing the competitive edge that comes from genuine, purpose-driven practices.
Key Takeaway
The hard work comes when maintaining that purpose over time, especially when the mix of shareholders, employees, and customers begins to pull you in competing directions. If a brand’s purpose matters to the founders, they also need a plan for sustainable business beyond the moment when growth plateaus.
4. Seamless User Experience: Exceeding Multi-Channel Expectations
Brands like Vuori and Cotopaxi drove home the new standard for omnichannel consistency. The goal is not just to create frictionless experiences but to ensure consistency between digital and in-store interactions. This approach requires brands to actively map the customer journey and identify moments where incongruencies could occur, removing them before the customer even notices.
Key Takeaway
In 2024 and beyond, brands that anticipate, rather than react to, cross-channel misalignment will be the ones building lasting loyalty. Seamless integration across all touchpoints isn’t just a marketing best practice but a fundamental business strategy.
5. AI & Creativity: Bold Innovation with a Human Touch
AI’s role in marketing has evolved. Coca-Cola and GM showed us that AI is no longer just optimizing campaigns—it’s enabling creative risk. AI tools can now help identify patterns in consumer behavior that spark creative concepts. Using actual audience data, brands can utilize AI to push creative boundaries without losing the nuanced, human elements that resonate.
Key Takeaway
AI-driven insights are shifting creative strategy and evolving our ability to understand which creative elements resonate with consumers. The fact remains that we must use AI as a supplement, not a substitute. By defining core brand values and personalizing outputs through AI ideation, your tools will enhance human connection rather than dilute it and allow you to take risks that resonate.
6. The Hybrid Agency Model: Agility through Collaboration
With brands building in-house capabilities, agencies aren’t fading—they’re adapting. The hybrid model, where brands blend in-house speed with agency specialization, allows brands like GM to react faster with data-driven approaches. This model gives brands control and access to specialized resources without sacrificing agility.
Key Takeaway
Here are three ways to think about this. First, agencies bring a creative range that internal teams often overlook based on their brand familiarity. Secondly, the division of labor is vital: in-house teams can focus on brand continuity, while agencies will drive impact with high-stakes projects and targeted campaigns. Finally, regarding data, agencies offer advanced analytics and research that empowers in-house teams to dig deeper into campaign performance and make each insight count.
Innovation, Emotion & Authenticity
This Year’s Ad Age Business of Brands Conference made it clear: success in 2025 will require balancing bold innovation with emotional intelligence and genuine authenticity. Need a hand with striking that balance? Red Door is here to help your brand lead with purpose, adapt with agility, and build deeper consumer people connections to stay ahead in today’s fast-moving marketing world.