In your opinion, what will be the biggest challenge to building an impactful brand strategy in 2025?

One of the biggest challenges will be to balance market positioning with emotive positioning to drive differentiation and meaningful, loyal relationships with audiences. Brands that lose sight of the human element may struggle to build authentic, lasting connections.

Here are 3 examples of “go-to” brand exercises that we have found effective among ourselves and clients:

Brand Asset Audit: Start with a centralized review of all templates, presentations, and collateral. Identify outdated or inconsistent elements that undermine your brand story. Streamline and ensure these assets reflect your core message and visual identity.

Leverage Technology for Brand Governance and Control: Use tools or platforms that automate brand compliance across content creation workflows. Ensure it’s easier to stay on brand than go off-brand and that all brand-approved content and templates can be found where the employees work and can be governed centrally by the brand team. This guarantees that every asset and document —internal or external — aligns with your story and standards, saving time and avoiding costly rework and reputational risk.

Appoint and Empower Internal Brand Ambassadors: Educate and inspire employees to tell the brand story consistently. Equip them with clear brand guidelines and tools like pre-approved templates to ensure every document or communication reinforces the right message. Appointing and educating 1 or 2 persons in each department that can function as an extension of the brand team is very efficient – gifting them “brand ambassador”-swag as an extra thanks will help with engagement.

Balancing an authentic voice with AI's impact is crucial. In publishing, we're cautious about AI-written manuscripts. Internally, we must balance AI use with personal human touch. Consumers are aware of AI-driven content, so maintaining a human voice and authenticity is key.

It's shocking how rare uniformity in value propositions is across company departments. People often think it's a sales and marketing issue, but it's more fundamental, like product versus sales. Organizations must be in lockstep from product development to sales. We often see sales selling products that don't exist, which can bring businesses down. It's a prevalent problem, especially in technology.

One of the most important aspects of building an impactful brand is understanding and acknowledging your target markets and best buyers to create authenticity in your brand messaging. AI has complicated things, as many see it as a simple copy-and-paste tool. However, relying on AI-driven content that doesn't grasp the nuances of your target markets can quickly kill your authenticity. Creating a more impactful brand in the coming year requires balancing technology use with genuine engagement.