Every luxury brand needs a proactive approach to growth, whether that means adapting to shifting consumer attitudes, leveraging technology, or identifying new markets. One thing is certain: foresight and imagination are essential to staying ahead. 

Prophet’s Jörg Meurer has advised luxury brands for almost two decades. In this interview, we explore the concept of NEO Luxury and ask: What’s next? 

Prophet has been talking about the concept of NEO Luxury for more than five years. What does it mean? 

Brands at the premium end of the market are used to navigating major changes, most recently the rapid adoption of AI. They must constantly stay on the front foot when it comes to engaging with existing and future consumers, understanding their markets and turning innovation into profit.  

Until now, the luxury industry’s timeline can be categorized into three phases: First, classic luxury, which focused on exclusivity, ownership and craftsmanship, with tightly controlled distribution and elite audiences. Second, new luxury, which was a shift toward experiences, personalization and emotional connection, thus making luxury more accessible and lifestyle-oriented for consumers. Third, NEO luxury, a forward-thinking model for brands, integrating sustainability, technology, and purpose-driven values to redefine exclusivity and deliver ethical, experiential luxury.  

In 2019, we released a study examining the move toward NEO Luxury in collaboration with Dr. Julia Riedmeier, an international luxury brand strategist, renowned luxury expert, and the founder of Code \ Luxe. Fast forward to 2026: the big question for luxury and premium brands is what comes after NEO Luxury? 

How can brand leaders begin to anticipate what comes after NEO Luxury? 

It’s a bit more complex than simply asking ChatGPT. But, we did call upon AI to develop our initial predictions and remove some of the guesswork. 

Brands can find answers by combining structured foresight with creative hypothesis-building. So how does this work in practice? We created a custom GPT model to generate a couple of plausible scenarios for the future of luxury. We wanted each to be grounded in emerging signals but to also consider bold possibilities. These scenarios were not to be taken at face value; instead, we applied a curated, critical lens to evaluate their underlying assumptions, cultural implications, and potential business impact.  

This approach allows brand leaders to move beyond reactive thinking and into proactive innovation. By stress-testing these hypotheses and identifying accelerators, such as technology adoption, new collaboration models or shifts in consumer values, brands can chart a course toward the most promising directions, often before the market realizes they exist. 

What were the three potential futures for uxury imagined by the GPT model? 

Conscious Culture Luxury 

By 2028, luxury may be less about ownership and more about cultural and emotional intelligence. Status will come from understanding, not accumulating. Brands become “curators of meaning,” offering spaces for reflection and cultural exchange. Technology plays a quiet role, helping us slow down and connect rather than overwhelm. Think cultural travel, hybrid craft and psychological well-being shaping the experience. 

Neo Human Luxury 

With technology advancing at such speed, luxury may focus on the dignity of being human. Technology becomes a tool for empathy and well-being, not distraction. Expect bio-luxury (health tech and longevity) to be paired with radical transparency and “quiet AI” that understands rather than sells. Ownership fades as experiences and self-cultivation take center stage. Imagine studios dedicated to mental craftsmanship and mindfulness. 

Luxury Quantum 

Imagine a future where luxury isn’t confined to physical objects or digital screens but exists in a seamless blend of both. In this scenario, experiences become “phygital rituals,” combining real-world touchpoints with immersive virtual layers. NFTs evolve beyond collectibles into emotional artifacts, carrying meaning and memory, for example art pieces. The virtual world is enhanced by sensory technology, adding smell, sound, and touch for truly multisensory engagement. AI companions act as personal curators, shaping lifestyles and guiding choices. For brands, this means moving from selling products to designing entire alternative realities, spaces where identity, creativity and consciousness come together.  

Coming back to the present, what should premium brands be thinking about right now? 

Six years after we began to define NEO Luxury, the scenarios above are just the beginning of future thinking on this topic. The idea of “Luxury Quantum” may seem very futuristic, maybe even far-fetched, but we need to be open to a number of possible scenarios.  

In the near-term, luxury brands must balance heritage with innovation, embrace ethical transparency, and integrate technology thoughtfully. When creating experiences, they should prioritize cultural relevance, human well-being, and immersive engagement to stay competitive in today’s ever-changing market. 

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Seventy percent of CEOs report measuring marketing performance based on revenue growth. Yet for many organizations, marketing is still treated as a cost center, not trusted as a primary growth engine. 

The tension has never been more acute. Marketing leaders are navigating tighter budgets, longer sales cycles, fragmented customer journeys, and rising expectations for personalization all while proving impact with fewer resources. At the same time, GenAI is moving from experimentation to enterprise reality. But the tendency to see GenAI as a solution for reducing marketing costs misses the real opportunity to apply it in ways that credibly drive growth. 

What we’re seeing in the market is clear: GenAI is not just accelerating how marketing work gets done, it is changing who marketers are marketing to, how decisions get made, and how growth is earned and defended. The emergence of the “AI-powered consumer” in which machines increasingly surface options while humans make meaning, demands a different approach. 

For constrained teams, the opportunity isn’t to “do more marketing.” It’s to use GenAI as leverage: to reduce risk, sharpen focus, and connect marketing activity more directly to revenue outcomes. 

Based on our work helping organizations increase their AI-enabled marketing maturity, five use cases consistently separate teams that create growth credibility from those that simply create more output. 

1. Dynamic Audience Understanding: Maintaining Decision-Ready Audience Insight in a Constantly Shifting Market 

Traditional segmentation was designed for a slower world — annual refreshes, static personas, and assumptions that held long enough to matter. That model can break down in B2B environments with long buying cycles and in mid-market organizations where missed signals are expensive. 

GenAI enables a shift from static segmentation to living audience intelligence. By continuously analyzing behavioral, transactional, and engagement data, structured and unstructured, AI can surface early demand signals before they appear in CRM or pipeline reports. It allows teams to re-cluster audiences dynamically as motivations shift, markets evolve, or new use cases emerge. 

The real advantage here is not precision for its own sake. It’s being less wrong, earlier. 

For B2B marketers, this means understanding which accounts are warming before sales see it, which buyer assumptions are eroding, and where emerging needs are forming at the edges of the market. For mid-market teams with limited research budgets, GenAI acts as a translator, extracting insight from imperfect data rather than waiting for pristine inputs that never arrive.  

Increasingly, marketing teams are augmenting their first-party data and traditional research with cultural and behavioral intelligence platforms such as Quilt.AI and HiveScience.AI, which ingest millions of digital conversations across professional communities, industry forums, social platforms, and expert networks. These tools surface how buyers frame problems, evaluate trade-offs, and influence one another long before intent appears in CRM or marketing automation systems. Rather than relying only on survey responses or owned-channel behavior, marketers gain visibility into the narratives shaping demand inside peer groups, communities of practice, and category conversations. As influence, trust, and purchasing decisions increasingly form in these distributed B2B ecosystems, this layer of intelligence helps brands design strategies, campaigns, and creative that align with how buying groups actually think, talk, and decide — keeping marketing grounded in real market momentum, not internal assumptions.  

Some organizations are taking this further by simulating customer reactions to new product ideas, value propositions, or messaging using AI-powered behavioral modeling. Others deploy those digital twins of key personas to create a shared, evolving understanding of customers across marketing, sales, and products. 

In all cases, the outcome is the same: fewer wasted bets, sharper prioritization, and more confidence in where growth actually lives. 

2. Consistent Brand Experience: Turning Brand into a Force Multiplier 

Brand governance is often misunderstood as bureaucracy – layers of approval that slow teams down. Inconsistency is far more expensive. It creates friction in sales, dilutes the effectiveness of performance marketing, and forces constant rework across decentralized teams. 

GenAI allows marketing leaders to codify brand strategy into scalable systems designed for decentralized teams. These tools can monitor brand expression across channels before assets go live, evolve storytelling across the funnel, and enable sales teams and partners to deliver on-brand experiences without constant oversight. For mid-market and B2B organizations, this reframes brand investment as efficiency, not overhead. 

When brand guardrails are built directly into workflows, teams move faster, not slower. Content is clearer. Sales conversations are more coherent. Every dollar spent downstream works harder. Marketing teams are leveraging custom GPTs and enterprise tools such as Writer.ai and Jasper.ai to enable teams and partners to leverage the brand voice and tone and create content that is consistent across the funnel while also being customized for the target audience. 

Additionally, the need for consistency is becoming more urgent as the funnel itself collapses. The journey from discovery to decision is increasingly converged and mediated by AI models, from search overviews to conversational assistants. In many cases, customers now form impressions, shortlist options, and even make decisions without ever visiting a brand’s owned channels. 

As a result, brands are losing direct control over how they show up at the moments that matter most. AI-generated summaries, featured answers, and zero-click experiences increasingly define the brand narrative, often compressing complex positioning into a few lines of synthesized output. The impact is already visible: historic drops in direct and organic traffic, declining click-through rates when AI overviews appear, and growing difficulty explaining performance shifts to executive stakeholders using traditional metrics. 

In this environment, brand consistency can no longer be managed solely through owned experiences or channel-specific guidelines. It must extend into AI-mediated discovery itself.  

That shift requires moving beyond a traditional SEO mindset optimized around keywords, rankings, and clicks to an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) strategy designed for how AI systems interpret, select, and represent brands. As AI-mediated discovery accelerates and zero-click experiences reduce direct traffic, AEO becomes a critical growth lever, not just to protect brand consistency, but to mitigate lead erosion and revenue risk as traditional demand signals quietly disappear. 

The most effective leaders use GenAI not to control creativity, but to multiply it, enabling even the most bootstrapped teams to extract the most value from the brand across all of the moments that matter. 

3. Content at Scale: Orchestrating Insight and Creativity for Growth 

Content is where most GenAI adoption starts and where it often stalls. Producing more assets faster is easy. Producing the right content that actually moves buyers is harder. 

In an AI-saturated content environment, “more” is not a competitive advantage, difference is. When every team can generate competent copy on demand, the brand that wins is the one that creates distinctive, emotionally resonant work grounded in a sharper understanding of the buyer than competitors have. GenAI doesn’t reduce the importance of creativity; it increases the return on it. 

The real power of GenAI lies in connecting insight, strategy, and creation. By training models on customer personas, performance data, and channel context, teams can identify which topics, formats, and messages are most likely to drive value, then rapidly generate on-brand assets aligned to the funnel stage and buyer need. 

The biggest failure mode we see is not low adoption, it’s reliance on AI that produces AI-average work. GenAI is excellent at generating what is already common: category clichés, familiar narratives, and safe phrasing that passes a brand check but fails to earn attention or preference. That kind of efficiency can quietly stifle growth: it fills the funnel with content while draining the brand’s distinctiveness. 

Creativity is the counterweight. Distinctive creative work builds memory, creates meaning, and earns attention in compressed, AI-mediated journeys where buyers may encounter your brand through summaries, snippets, and secondhand interpretation. As discovery becomes more “zero-click,” the job of creative is not just to communicate, it is to stick. 

GenAI enables faster iteration, disciplined experimentation, and continuous optimization so teams can spend more time on the few ideas that will actually differentiate the brand. Content becomes a portfolio of bets, not a factory of outputs. 

Importantly, the highest-value creative inputs are still human: strategic judgment, cultural sensitivity, and the ability to introduce productive tension and say something specific enough that it excludes as well as includes. GenAI can help teams explore directions faster, but it cannot replace the brand’s point of view. The goal is not to automate creativity; it is to protect it from being flattened while scaling execution. 

When done well, creative capacity expands without diluting quality and marketing earns greater credibility by tying content directly to commercial outcomes. 

4. Always-On Insights: Ending the Quarterly Hindsight Problem 

Most marketing insights arrive too late to matter. Quarterly brand trackers, post-campaign analyses, and lagging performance reports explain what happened, but rarely when there was still time to act. 

GenAI changes this by enabling always-on intelligence systems that continuously monitor market signals, customer sentiment, competitive movement, and performance data across the funnel. Rather than waiting for formal research or reporting cycles, marketing leaders gain early visibility into shifts in perception, emerging objections, and changing expectations. While those shifts are still manageable. 

This matters deeply in B2B categories, where trust erosion often precedes pipeline decline and where sales friction shows up long before revenue does. AI-powered insight systems can model brand perception trajectories, forecast how marketing actions are likely to influence consideration or trust, and surface risks before they materialize in missed targets or stalled deals. 

But the most important shift is operational and commercial. Always-on insights make marketing performance easier to explain and defend. By unifying data across brand, demand, and sales systems, GenAI helps teams identify which KPIs connect marketing activity to revenue. It enables automated optimization loops, real-time budget reallocation, and scenario modeling that shows what is likely to happen next, not just what has already occurred. 

For leaders struggling with the cost-center perception, this is transformational. Instead of reporting past performance, marketing can recommend next actions and clearly articulate the trade-offs. Generative models allow teams to simulate future outcomes, test investment scenarios, and speak the language of finance: risk, return, and probability. Marketing evolves from an execution function into a decision partner in growth. 

The critical shift is to embed insights directly into decisions through content briefs, campaign prioritization, sales enablement, and spend allocation. For constrained teams, GenAI reduces learning costs and narrows the gap between signal and action. In an environment defined by uncertainty, speed and clarity of understanding become a durable competitive advantage. 

5. Future Back Planning: Designing Growth Around the Customer of the Future 

For many organizations, “whitespace” is still defined reactively: where competitors are weak today, where products don’t yet exist, or where demand appears underserved in current data. But in an environment shaped by GenAI, shifting buying behaviors, and accelerating category convergence, that approach is no longer sufficient. 

The most valuable whitespace opportunities sit ahead of demand, not behind it. They emerge at the intersection of how customers are evolving, how markets are fragmenting, and where competitors are structurally constrained by legacy assumptions. 

GenAI enables marketing and growth leaders to take a fundamentally different approach: identifying whitespace through a future-back view of the customer. 

Rather than asking only who our customers are today, teams can begin to answer deeper, forward-looking questions: who their customers are likely to become, what they will care about as AI reshapes work and decision-making, how their journeys will evolve, and how expectations around value, experience, and trust will shift over time. By decoding emerging market signals, early adopter behaviors, and disruptive forces, GenAI allows organizations to feed these inputs into predictive foresight models that simulate plausible futures. 

This capability is especially powerful in B2B categories, where buying decisions are increasingly shaped inside communities, peer networks, and ecosystems long before formal intent signals appear. GenAI can synthesize millions of conversations, behaviors, and signals to reveal not just unmet needs, but unarticulated tensions: where customers are struggling to reconcile old solutions with new realities, or where existing offerings no longer map cleanly to evolving jobs-to-be-done. 

From there, whitespace becomes clearer and more actionable. Teams can identify: 

• Gaps between customer expectations and current category norms 
• Opportunities competitors are unlikely to pursue because of their business models, capabilities, or positioning 
• Emerging needs created by AI adoption itself — new workflows, risks, and sources of value 

This is not an abstract strategy exercise. GenAI allows organizations to simulate future customers across different scenarios, stress-test ideas before they go to market, and engage in “research” with modeled future audiences to understand motivations, trade-offs, and barriers. The output is not just insight, but clarity on what new products, services, experiences, or business models are most likely to resonate. 

The final unlock is cross-functional. When whitespace is grounded in a shared view of the future customer, marketing can help translate insight into implications for growth strategy, offering design, experience innovation, and capability building. Instead of chasing incremental differentiation, organizations align around where to place their bets and why. 

In uncertain markets, growth doesn’t come from filling gaps competitors leave behind. It comes from seeing where customers are headed next and building into that space before it becomes obvious. 

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The biggest mistake luxury brands can make in 2026 is assuming AI only matters to younger customers. In reality, AI is reshaping consumer behavior across all generations, though its influence varies by age group. Brands must therefore keep pace with these shifts to stay relevant.  

Since 2018, we have been exploring the impact of AI on luxury brands as part of our bi-annual “Premium and Luxury Study.” Each wave surveys a representative sample of 1,000 German consumers, from Gen Z to Baby Boomers who regularly or occasionally purchase premium and luxury products.  

Our goal is to track how generational values and attitudes influence high-end buying behavior and purchasing decisions across age groups. Here are some of our findings from this year’s study. 

How Generations Like to Search

Search habits differ sharply across generations. Google is still firmly Baby Boomer territory, regarded as very important or important for 67% of respondents in this group, compared to only 41% of Gen Z. In contrast, 54% of Gen Z use social media for product searches, compared to only 29% of Baby Boomers.  

Millennials (40%) are the strongest users of retail platforms, such as Mytheresa and Net-a-Porter, for purchase decisions, compared to Gen Z (34%) and Gen X (38%). 

AI-Powered Convenience

The uptake of AI is making shopping much simpler, driven by the need for speed, simplicity, and ease of use. 78% of the total survey base actively uses AI regularly or daily, up from 73% in 2024. About 52% of all generations agree that AI will positively enrich their lives in the future. 

64% of Gen X and 61% of Baby Boomers say they actively follow developments and educate themselves on AI, compared to only 51% of Gen Z. One reason behind this response may be that Gen Z uses AI more intuitively. In contrast older generations feel the need to study to keep up with the changing trends. 

Convenience is a huge factor across all generations, with rapid AI adoption rates notably among older generations, being used to simplify forms and processes. Surprisingly, Baby Boomers (49.5%) value it more than Gen Z (44.5%). 

AI search driven by convenience plays a major role across all stages of the buying cycle, from inspiration to search and decision-making, and it is catching up with traditional tools. While consumers still rely on familiar channels such as brand websites (54%), Google search (55%) and social media (45%), we found a growing adoption of AI: 44% regularly use Google AI and 45% turn to platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Given that search engines have dominated for over 15 years, this narrow 10% gap highlights the remarkable pace at which AI is gaining ground. 

Building Trust With Buyers

Trust plays a major role in consumer behavior. When asked which channels were most important for inspiration, research and comparison, and purchasing decisions, Baby Boomers showed the highest trust in official brand websites, with more than 60% considering them important. In contrast, Gen Z is more skeptical of official channels, with less than 50%, and prefers decentralized information on social platforms. 

When it comes to letting an AI agent make a purchase decision, there’s a noticeable openness across all generations: Gen Z (41.5%) and Millennials (42%) are almost on the same level and even among Baby Boomers, roughly one in three (32%) expresses willingness.   

Likewise, 43% of respondents trust AI in decision-making, such as using AI agents. A slight increase from 41% in 2024. Whereas, younger generations show 42% approval compared to Baby Boomers (27%).  

Both points signal reluctance but a growing interest among senior audiences, which has knock-on effects for brands.  

Since 2024, trust and data privacy concerns in AI have fallen from 51% to 45% across age groups. When asked about concerns regarding AI ethics, Millennials are the least concerned  (31%), followed by Gen Z (42%), Gen X (42%) and Baby Boomers (45%). 

One important lesson: Brands must harness AI for personalized inspiration without compromising privacy. It is also important to address ethical and data concerns proactively, as trust remains a key lever in brand leadership. 

Future-Proofing Luxury

Our analysis shows the real risk isn’t overlooking AI; it’s assuming its impact is limited to select customer segments, especially younger consumers. The implication for premium brands is that they can’t afford to dismiss AI’s universal impact. Likewise, they need to mitigate generational blind spots, as viewing AI adoption through a single generation’s lens creates a constrained understanding of how others think and engage with technology. 

With the rapid rise of AI-based search, generative engine optimization (GEO) is becoming a key driver of traffic and brand visibility. This will impact how luxury brands show up on platforms, differentiate themselves and resonate with audiences across generations.  

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2025 was another year in which brands surprised, delighted, shocked and disappointed us. From major consumer brands dominating headlines to beloved institutions stumbling, the year once again reshaped the landscape of business and culture.  

Major tech players continued to dominate headlines. YouTube officially became the world’s largest streaming platform, surpassing Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and every major network combined. Walmart completed its transformation into a tech-first retailer with its NASDAQ debut. Meanwhile, a crowded AI category welcomed Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity and Amazon Q — yet none matched the persistent ubiquity of ChatGPT. MSNBC quietly reintroduced itself as MS NOW, Astronomer found unexpected fame via a Coldplay KissCam mishap and the world debated whether Tilly Norwood might become the first AI-generated movie star. If 2024 was about AI acceleration, 2025 was about AI integration into mainstream business. 

Legacy brands delivered some of the year’s strongest moments. Nike continued elevating women’s sports, Formula 1 solidified its status as the partnership platform every brand wanted to be part of, McDonald’s leaned into nostalgia to bring customers back, Coca-Cola returned to emotional storytelling with “Share a Coke,” while “old timers” Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie and Bed Bath and Beyond advanced their relevance reinvention efforts by courting Gen Z. Finally, streaming, again, saw historic gains as Stranger Things broke Netflix’s single day viewing record, Severance earned a historic wave of Emmy nominations for Apple and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives continued to help Hulu surge and search for more secrets! 

Challenger brands shaped culture just as powerfully. Poppi became one of the year’s breakout success stories with its two-billion-dollar sale to Pepsi. Quince leaned into radical transparency, Labubu sparked a Beanie Babies style collecting craze, Owala turned hydration into a movement, and Mike’s Hot Honey became the condiment of the year across grocery carts and fast casual menus. At the same time, Raising Cane’s and Buc-ee’s continued their near mythic expansions, the Savannah Bananas redefined sports entertainment and Bluey remained the ten-minute escape adults and children alike continued to cherish. 

2025 also marked a decisive shift toward health optimization and data-driven living, accelerating the rise of brands built around prevention and performance. Eli Lilly became the first trillion-dollar health company, powered by scientific credibility, deep patient insight and unprecedented demand for T2D and weight loss medications. On Running solidified its place as the lifestyle sport hybrid of the moment, Strava became the social network for movers and Oura entered the mainstream as consumers relied on sleep and recovery data to guide daily choices. With protein culture dominating grocery aisles and creatine entering mainstream longevity conversations, consumers were no longer just health conscious; they became health obsessed. 

Celebrity and creator influence remained a powerful force in shaping the brand narrative. Hailey Bieber’s billion-dollar sale of Rhode to e.l.f. dominated headlines, Sydney Sweeney brought “attention” and record sales to American Eagle. Levi’s extended its cultural resurgence through a high impact collaboration with Beyoncé. Amy Poehler became a top ten podcaster in under eight months; Pope Leo went global and Sabrina Carpenter and Bad Bunny owned both charts and culture. And in true 2025 fashion, a mashup of 4 Non Blondes and Nicki Minaj, sparked by Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, became the year’s most unlikely anthem. 

Looking ahead to 2026, the questions only grow more intriguing. Will HBO Max rebrand yet again if a Netflix/Paramount deal materializes? Is FIFA drifting into 2026 penalty territory amid early World Cup controversy? Will Prada and Versace manage to share power peacefully now that billions depend on it? Can Paige Bueckers out-dunk Caitlin Clark’s endorsement deals? Which Winter Olympic athletes will capture global attention? Do we actually care about another Avengers release? Why can’t we release Toy Story 5 tomorrow? And, the biggest mystery of all is whether or not Hinge’s positioning around “The Dating App Designed to be Deleted” will result in a swipe-left or a swipe-right? 

As always, time will reveal the answers. For now, we turn to the brands that defined 2025 — the headlining hits, the memorable misses, and the stories that shaped the year. With perspectives from Prophet colleagues around the world, and refraining from any commentary on current Prophet clients, here are our takes on the brands that rose to the top and those that fell flat. 

2025 Brand Winners 

DoorDash 

DoorDash reinforced its position as the dominant player in U.S. local commerce, expanding its footprint beyond food delivery into grocery, retail, convenience and alcohol. Growth in suburban and mid-sized markets remained a core competitive advantage, driving high order frequency and deep household penetration. DashPass continued to be one of the most powerful subscription products in the category, while the company’s merchant-focused model and operational tools made DoorDash a preferred partner for restaurants and retailers navigating an increasingly digital marketplace. 

Dr Pepper 

Dr Pepper solidified its status as one of 2025’s standout beverage brands, firmly holding the number two spot in the U.S. after surpassing Pepsi last year. Its loyal fan base and fast-growing Gen Z following fueled momentum, drawn to indulgent flavors and rising cultural relevance. When the “dirty soda” trend took off on TikTok, the brand moved quickly with its Creamy Coconut limited release, the most successful flavor launch in its history and a catalyst for nearly two million followers and over 12 million likes on the platform. Supported by continued heat from its Fansville campaign and an AI-driven Disney partnership that links beverage consumption to college football viewing for more precise targeting, Dr Pepper showed how a legacy brand can drive modern growth by pairing cultural agility with data-led innovation. 

Gap 

Gap regained meaningful cultural and commercial traction in 2025, driven by the viral “Better in Denim” campaign, which generated more than 8 billion impressions and reintroduced the brand to a younger audience. The company strengthened its positioning by accelerating influencer-led content, elevating its core assortment with higher-quality fabrics and modern fits and expanding its appeal to higher income shoppers. Supported by strategic partnerships and stronger digital execution, Gap demonstrated that a legacy retailer can regain relevance by aligning brand heritage with contemporary consumer behavior. 

Google 

Google emerged as one of 2025’s standout performers, regaining momentum in the AI race and boosting investor confidence. Alphabet’s stock climbed 77 percent in six months, becoming the third-most valuable U.S. company after launching Gemini 3, which, along with its Nano Banana model, outperformed rivals in early tests. Its pivot to AI-powered search paid off. Google Cloud revenue rose 32 percent and search grew 15 percent year over year. In a year defined by rapid innovation and fierce competition, Google didn’t just keep pace, it set a new bar. 

OpenAI 

OpenAI solidified its status as one of the defining technology companies of the decade, spearheading rapid global adoption of artificial intelligence through advances in models, multimodal intelligence and product applications. Tools such as ChatGPT and Sora became essential across sectors including education, healthcare, entertainment and enterprise, positioning OpenAI as both an innovation engine and a trusted partner. Its mix of technical leadership, robust safety research and accessible user experience helped the company anchor a major shift in how individuals and organizations work, communicate and create value. 

Skims 

Skims strengthened its position as one of 2025’s most influential apparel brands, evolving from shapewear disruptor to multibillion-dollar lifestyle powerhouse built on comfort, inclusivity and design innovation. With a valuation above $5 billion, global retail expansion and consistent sellouts, the brand sustained exceptional momentum, becoming the fastest-growing apparel label in America and generating millions in first-week menswear sales. 

Its NikeSkims collaboration underscored its reach, introducing women-first performance design and setting a new standard in activewear. As the official loungewear and underwear partner of Team USA, Skims continued to build credibility in sport. Guided by Kim Kardashian’s strategic leadership and cultural influence, the brand shifted from buzzy newcomer to long-term force in modern essentials. 

2025 Brand Losers 

Fast Fashion (Forever 21, H&M, Zara, Shein) 

Fast-fashion leaders struggled to maintain cultural relevance in 2025 as consumers, especially Gen Z, gravitated toward sustainable alternatives and circular models. Rental platforms such as Nuuly and Rent the Runway posted double-digit subscription growth, underscoring a shift toward quality, transparency and reduced environmental impact. Against this backdrop, fast-fashion’s rapid-turnover model increasingly appeared out of sync with evolving values. For brands long fueled by speed and trend replication, 2025 revealed the limits of a strategy misaligned with the priorities of the next generation of shoppers. 

Southwest Airlines 

Southwest faced significant blowback in 2025 as it moved away from hallmark customer-friendly policies to drive new revenue. The decision to introduce checked-bag fees and begin phasing out open seating signaled a decisive strategic shift but also triggered a decline in customer satisfaction scores following the announcement. While the airline argued the changes would help it compete more effectively on fares and court more business travelers, the moves threatened its long-standing position as the industry’s most approachable, traveler-first brand. The tension between financial opportunity and brand identity defined Southwest’s turbulent year. 

Target 

Target endured a difficult year in 2025 as shifting consumer priorities and lingering operational inconsistencies weighed on performance. The retailer posted its sixth consecutive quarter of declining foot traffic, signaling waning momentum in both discretionary categories and everyday essentials. Efforts to reinvigorate its style-forward identity were overshadowed by inventory misalignment, higher shrink levels and uneven in-store execution that eroded its once-stable appeal to middle-income households. With shoppers becoming more price sensitive and less inclined toward discretionary trips, Target found itself squeezed between elevated expectations for value and a brand positioning more closely tied to lifestyle than necessity. In a year defined by cautious spending, the retailer struggled to articulate a compelling reason for consumers to visit more often. 

Tesla and Elon Musk 

Tesla’s once-dominant position in the EV landscape weakened significantly in 2025 as consumer sentiment cooled and competition intensified. The company’s U.S. EV market share fell to 38 percent, its lowest level in nearly a decade, while global deliveries slipped 13 percent year over year. Product recalls, mounting battery concerns and the expiration of federal EV tax credits added pressure, but the most damaging factor may have been the growing disconnect between Elon Musk’s polarizing public image and the expectations of mainstream buyers. For a brand long fueled by mythmaking and momentum, 2025 marked a rare moment where narrative could not compensate for operational and market realities. 

Tylenol 

Tylenol confronted one of its toughest reputational tests in decades after allegations surfaced connecting its products to autism, thrusting the brand into a crisis that demanded clarity and rapid communication. Instead, the company delivered a fragmented and slow response that contrasted sharply with the decisive crisis management approach that made Tylenol an industry gold standard in the 1980s. Public sentiment declined noticeably across social channels, and the brand’s credibility took a measurable hit in consumer trust surveys. In an era of rapid information cycles, Tylenol’s hesitation proved as damaging as the accusation itself. 

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In times defined by disruption, from market volatility and AI to geopolitical flux, growth must be designed, not assumed. For this installment of Uncommon Growth Leaders, Chiaki Nishino spoke with Beth Wood, Chief Marketing Officer, and Brad Kaufman, Head of Digital Marketing and Marketing Operations at Principal Financial Group, about what it really takes to lead with purpose, clarity and resilience. 

Beth, let’s start at the top. When everything around you is changing, how do you ground leadership? What’s most important to you in those moments of uncertainty? 

Beth: It starts with clarity of strategy, purpose and values. You need a strategy that recognizes the forces outside your walls and gives people something stable to hold onto. Once you’ve got that, you repeat it, over and over. I often say, communicate, communicate, communicate. 

And you can’t drift from your core values. Those have to stay constant no matter how much the world changes. At Principal, we make our values visible, literally. They’re on walls, desktops and in conversations. We measure ourselves against them. If we’re not living up to them, we act. 

The other piece is followership. You want to build an organization full of people who would follow you anywhere, not because they have to, but because they want to. That’s how you build trust. 

Followership isn’t about hierarchy; it’s about belief. People follow leaders who are consistent, transparent, and authentic, leaders who show them the “why” behind the work, not just the “what.” When your team understands the purpose, when they see that you’ll make the hard calls and stand behind them, that’s when loyalty and engagement take root. 

I tell my leaders all the time: your goal is to earn discretionary effort; the effort people give because they believe in you, not because it’s written in their job description. When you’ve built that kind of followership, alignment becomes effortless, communication becomes more direct, and performance accelerates. It’s not about charisma or being liked, it’s about credibility and care. People will follow you through ambiguity if they trust your intent and your direction. 

Brad, how does that show up in your day-to-day leadership? 

Brad: Consistency is everything. The best leaders don’t just communicate clearly once they keep reinforcing the same message until it sticks. Words matter, and how you use them shapes trust. 

Consistency doesn’t mean being rigid; it means being reliable. When people know what to expect from you, even in uncertain times, they can move faster and make better decisions. It builds confidence. If you’re changing direction every week or framing the story differently every time you speak, people lose track of what matters most. 

I remind my team that clarity compounds. Every time you repeat the same vision with the same intent, you’re reinforcing the signal in a world full of noise. Consistency gives your people something to anchor to, and that’s when influence becomes sustainable. 

And when it comes to driving transformation, we always start with the problem. Teams love to jump into solutions, but I bring them back to the core question: what problem are we trying to solve? Once that’s clear, alignment and creativity happen naturally. 

The past few years have been incredibly disruptive. How do you balance short-term performance with long-term vision? 

Beth: You have to think with both sides of your brain. Short-term results matter, but if you only chase the urgent, you’ll never innovate. Our teams understand their role in both horizons: to solve today’s problems and to imagine tomorrow’s opportunities. 

I tell my teams constantly; you have permission to think big. But people need to hear a long-term idea 10 or 20 times before they start to believe it’s real. Repetition turns aspiration into culture. 

Brad: Exactly. I always say it takes a thousand one-on-ones. You can’t just say the vision once and assume people internalize it. I literally pull out our original project decks months later to remind everyone where we started. 

And psychological safety is huge. If people don’t understand something — or disagree — they have to feel safe to say so. That’s how you keep people aligned and engaged for the long haul. 

Beth, how do you make sure your teams stay customer-centered, especially in a large, complex organization? 

Beth: We keep our finger on the pulse. We run monthly “pulse” surveys, maintain multiple customer panels, and manage the long-standing research called the Well-Being Index that tracks optimism and financial health among small and midsize business owners. 

We also co-create with customers. We ask them directly: how would this work for you? They always bring perspectives we’d never think of on our own. That collaboration builds better solutions and a stronger brand. 

Brad: And for people who don’t directly engage with customers, we build the mindset into the culture. Everyone should think like a student of the business, curious about what the customer is doing, and how it impacts their role. That outside-in perspective needs to be automatic, not occasional. 

When budgets tighten, how do you still foster creativity and innovation? 

Brad: It’s about bending the curve. Every team is asked to do more, with more complexity, at higher quality, in less time. That equation doesn’t add up unless you change how the work gets done. 

“Bending the curve” means finding leverage, through process improvement, smarter workflows, and, increasingly, technology. You can’t outwork exponential complexity, but you can outthink it. That’s where automation, data and AI come in. 

Our job isn’t to work harder; it’s to work smarter. That means auditing what’s manual and finding opportunities to automate, investing in skill development so the basics become second nature, and then deploying new tools to multiply impact.  

Beth: Our CEO made a commitment to train all 20,000 employees on using AI to improve productivity and customer experience. And it’s working. People are realizing it’s not about replacing work; it’s about freeing up time for higher-value thinking. 

The key is embracing it. The tools are here, but you have to be willing to learn, experiment, and use them to do things differently. 

You’ve both talked about performance and development. How do you manage that “vital middle” of performers — those who aren’t low performers but haven’t yet hit their stride? 

Beth: With clarity and courage. The top performers manage themselves. The middle is where leadership happens. I have regular “Why do you stay?” conversations because I want to understand motivation. 

Once expectations and skills are clear, the question becomes: are you filling the role we need? Half the time, people rise to the occasion. The other half, we talk openly about fit. Direct, transparent conversations are how you build trust. 

Brad: There’s nothing more motivating than the truth. You don’t have to be harsh, just real. People appreciate it when they know exactly where they stand. 

Beth, you’ve been described as a sponsor of talent. How do you think about growing leaders? 

Beth: I hire people for the job I think they’ll grow into, not just the one they’re hired for. With Brad, for instance, he came to me after 20 years at Principal and said, “I want to do something different.” That’s gold to me. I just needed to open the door, provide coaching, and get out of his way. 

I ask one question constantly: how can I help? That’s it. If people need me, I’m there. If not, I move aside. 

I also host something called The Orange Room, a casual, no-agenda session every few weeks where anyone in my organization can ask anything. It builds transparency, trust, and connection. 

Leadership isn’t just about skills, it’s about mindset. How do you build resilience in your teams? 

Brad: For me, resilience starts with perspective. I encourage my team to step outside their own viewpoint, especially in moments of tension or frustration. When conflict happens, I’ll ask, “What’s the other person thinking right now?” or “What do they see that you might not?” 

It sounds simple, but that question resets everything. It slows the reaction, diffuses defensiveness, and shifts people from emotion to curiosity. When you practice that regularly, it becomes a leadership muscle. You stop seeing challenges as personal attacks and start seeing them as opportunities to understand context and improve outcomes. 

Resilience isn’t about being unshakable; it’s about being adaptable. It’s the ability to take feedback, reframe setbacks and move forward with perspective. And when leaders model that it cascades through the team, people start mirroring calm instead of chaos. 

Beth: I completely agree. A big part of resilience is choosing how you interpret what’s happening around you. You have to assume positive intent and that can be hard when you’re under pressure. But most people aren’t out to make your life difficult; they’re simply trying to solve their own set of problems. If you can start from that mindset, conversations become more productive and you stay in control of your own energy. 

Another dimension is discernment. I always remind my leaders that not every battle is worth fighting. Every hill isn’t a hill to die on. Part of resilience is knowing when to engage deeply and when to let something go. Leaders who can focus on what truly matters, who can separate the noise from the signal, move faster and inspire confidence in others. 

I also think resilience grows from community. People are more resilient when they feel seen and supported. When leaders create space for honesty, vulnerability and reflection when they normalize saying, “This week was hard” that’s when resilience becomes collective, not just individual. 

Brad: Yes, and it’s contagious. When you model composure and curiosity under pressure, it gives everyone permission to do the same. That’s how you create a culture that bends without breaking. 

Personally, how do you both stay inspired and balanced as leaders? 

Beth: Watching my daughter play hockey grounds me, its joy, pure and simple. I also read constantly, mostly business books and blogs like Seth Godin and Simon Sinek. I pull one or two takeaways from each and apply them. If they work, I keep them; if not, I move on. 

Brad: I’ve tried to make my job about what I love: technology, data, process. When you align your work with what energizes you, you don’t burn out. 

And I protect my time. Nights and weekends are sacred. I tell my team the same; rest isn’t a luxury, it’s a performance strategy. 

Before we wrap, anything we didn’t cover that feels essential to uncommon leadership? 

Brad: We don’t talk enough about leading humans. There’s no playbook for when someone’s parent is sick or their kid’s struggling. You can’t lead effectively if your relationship is purely transactional. 

Beth: Yes, and that care has to be real. People can tell when it’s performative. Be authentic, be vulnerable and let people see who you are. That’s how you build trust. 

And remember: every person on the team has a role. As John Wooden said, everyone must know their role and trust that others will perform theirs. When you have that trust, everything else flows. 

Chiaki: Beautifully said. Thank you both for sharing so openly. What stands out to me from this conversation is how practical and human great leadership really is. It’s not about having all the answers about building trust, showing care and helping people find clarity in complexity. The way you balance both purpose, performance and empathy is exactly the kind of leadership that fuels uncommon growth. 

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Chiaki Nishino, President of Prophet, sat down with Michelle Froah, a global marketing and innovation leader, to explore the leadership traits needed to drive impact in a world that’s anything but ordinary. In a conversation packed with insight and real-world examples, Michelle opens up about challenging legacy thinking, co-creating across silos, and why slowing down can sometimes help you move faster. 

In today’s high-pressure environment, there’s constant pressure to deliver growth. How do you push boundaries when it’s often easier or expected to do things the way they’ve always been done? 

Michelle Froah: One of the most powerful skills I lean on is co-creative problem solving. It’s not about having all the answers, it’s about bringing together brilliant people from across the business, especially those who’ve been working in silos and building solutions together. When teams feel ownership and safety to challenge norms, innovation happens. 

A great example is when I was working at CoverGirl. At the time, the “eyes” category — mascara, eyeshadow, eyeliner — was seen as a small piece of the business. But when we dug into the data, we found that eyes had higher velocity and margin than any other category. That insight reframed how we approached strategy and led to innovations like LashBlast, which ultimately elevated the entire brand. It was a team effort powered by data, creativity and cross-functional collaboration. 

That’s a perfect example of disruptive thinking. What leadership trait do you rely on to drive that kind of disruptive change? 

MF: Hands down: collaboration. It’s often called a “soft skill,” but in reality, it’s one of the most durable leadership capabilities. At ETS, we tackled a full transformation: business strategy, brand and innovation. But we couldn’t do it alone. ETS is a 75-year-old nonprofit with a deep research legacy, so we had to bring everyone along from researchers to business units, to functions including marketers. Only by co-creating together did we launch a new brand and strategy in under nine months.

People think rebranding is about logos and colors. It’s not. It’s about aligning everyone around a shared mission. When we unveiled the new brand, everyone walked out as a brand ambassador. That only happens when transformation is co-owned. 

Sounds like leading change requires both vision and execution. How do you balance the two? 

MF: You absolutely need both. When you set a bold vision, and then break it into tangible building blocks, you make big change feel possible and doable. Leaders need to set a future that feels bold, even a little scary, but also provide clear steps so teams see how to get there. 

I’ve seen this in practice at both Samsung and ETS. At Samsung, we rebuilt customer trust after the Note7 crisis by directly engaging our most loyal customers and partnering our marketing with customer service, something that hadn’t been done before. At ETS, we ensured that transformation wasn’t just a marketing initiative, but something embedded across business units, research and operations. 

In both cases, it was about setting a vision and then collaborating across silos to make it real. 

How do you stay inspired to lead through all this complexity and pressure? 

MF: Two things: First, I stay close to the work. I host working sessions, not just decision meetings. I want my teams to feel like we’re in it together not just presenting for my approval. It builds trust, encourages team development and gets better solutions faster.

Second, I look outside the walls of the organization. I stay active with groups like the ANA and The Marketing Society, sit on advisory boards and take the opportunity to mentor and be mentored.It keeps me curious, humble and open to ideas from completely different industries and perspectives.

Collaboration clearly plays a big role in your leadership style. How do you build a team culture that supports creativity and experimentation? 

Michelle: You’ve got to embed it in the culture. It starts with accountability and investment in talent. At P&G, where I spent 18 years, 50% of your performance rating was based on results and the other 50% on organizational capability — how you developed your teams and others across the organization. That instilled in me a responsibility to grow talent that delivers outcomes, not just deliver outcomes. 

So I always ensure that my teams have personal development objectives. Growth can mean deepening expertise or stepping into new, uncomfortable spaces to expand capabilities. Either way, it forces collaboration, mentoring and continuous learning.

What’s been one of your biggest leadership challenges to drive growth? 

MF: The biggest challenge is often inertia, the resistance to new ways of thinking. But if you can tap into people’s sense of purpose and show them the value they’re creating, you turn skeptics into lifelong partners. 

Transformation is hard and can invoke skepticism. At Samsung, during the Note 7 crisis, we had to rebuild trust. And we did this by engaging our most loyal customers and working hand-in-hand with the customer service team to create new experiences like white-glove service. It pushed us to innovate in ways we hadn’t before. 

At ETS, launching a new business unit and workforce solution was an investment that required significant buy in across the organization. But when you tap into people’s desire to make a difference, you gain an opportunity to build relationships that may turn into lifelong partnerships. 

Final question: What’s the anchor point of your leadership — something you rely on no matter where you’ve worked? 

MF: I’m naturally driven, fast-paced and not afraid of change or risk. One of my favorite poems is The Road Not Taken, because I’ve always chosen the less-traveled path.  

But I’ve learned that sometimes slowing down helps you go faster. When you give others time to catch up emotionally and strategically you get stronger buy-in, better ideas and faster momentum in the long run. 

So yes, I still love a good sprint. But I now know when to pause and bring people along. That’s how you turn a big idea into a movement. 

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In healthcare, few organizations have redefined the role of Brand Growth as boldly as Piedmont. Under CMO Douwe Bergsma’s leadership, marketing, communications, and patient experience have evolved from often undervalued functions into Brand Growth, a measurable business growth engine; accountable for driving demand, shaping brand health and improving patient experience. 

In this conversation with Scott Davis, Prophet’s Chief Growth Officer, Bergsma shares how he’s reframed Brand Growth at Piedmont around patient-centered, financial rigor, data-driven accountability, and the courage to simplify. Together, they explore how brand and demand disciplines combine to power sustainable growth in one of the nation’s most complex industries. 

Douwe, you’ve had quite a year. Piedmont’s performance has been exceptional. How would you describe where the organization stands today and how that influences your Brand Growth priorities? 

Douwe Bergsma: It’s been a record year across many dimensions. Ten years ago, Piedmont’s total revenue was around $1.5 billion. This year, we’re tracking toward $9 billion. We now serve ~4.5 million patients across ~50,000 employees and offer services close to about 85% of Georgia. Piedmont is among the best performing systems in the U.S when it comes to quality, safety, cost management and overall financial performance.  

For me, the real story is how Brand Growth is now directly accountable for a significant part of our total revenue. That’s based on our internal Brand Growth Mix Model (MMM), which quantifies the contribution to patient acquisition and office visits. That level of measurable impact is rare in healthcare. 

We measure success across three pillars: 

• Demand: How many office visits and appointments Brand Growth directly drives, and at what ROI? 
• Brand: Awareness and favorability, tracked through independent third-party research. 
• Experience: How well do patients adopt our digital tools and how satisfied they are.  

Those three lenses together represent the full brand journey – from the first awareness moment to a lifetime of patient loyalty. 

That’s an extraordinary shift, from Brand Growth as a service function to a growth engine. What sparked that transformation? 

DB: When I joined Piedmont,marketing and communications were respected but mostly undervalued, and patient experience was even a separate team. My goal was to reframe it into Brand Growth and become a strategic driver of growth, a quality and patient-centered revenue engine.

I came from the CPG world, where you live and die by metrics like household penetration and sales velocity. In healthcare, the equivalents are patient appointments and office visits. So, I started with that: proving that Brand Growth could measurably drive patient volume. 

Once we had data to show how communications, physician outreach, campaigns and digital investments translated into patient growth, the conversation with leadership shifted. Over time, Brand Growth was not only visible, but it was essential. 

I tell my team all the time: Marketing is math, with creativity to make the math work better. That mindset changed a lot.  

You’ve often said your mantra is “Think like a CFO, act like a CMO.” What does that mean in practice? 

DB: It means that marketers must understand and speak the language of the balance sheet. The fastest way to earn credibility in the C-suite is to tie your work directly to patient satisfaction and financial performance. 

When I came in, I brought data tables to almost every meeting, not creative storyboards. I walked the CEO, EVP and CFO through how Brand Growth metrics can translate into patient preference, conversion and financial outcomes. 

Over time, we built a full Brand Growth Mix Model to validate those linkages. It’s not just correlation, but also attribution and causation. We can now forecast how much incremental patients and revenue a certain campaign, media channel, or experience improvement will generate, approximately 

Once you can do that, Brand Growth earns a more permanent seat at the table not the “kids table,” as I like to say. 

That level of financial discipline feels rare, especially in healthcare marketing. What other changes made it possible? 

DB: A big one was patient-driven simplification. Like many large systems, we had accumulated too many vendors, tools, and disconnected digital experiences. There were multiple patient portals and apps, each with their own logins, designs, and data silos. 

We now aim to simplify almost everything down to one patient-preferred platform: Piedmont MyChart. It’s now the single digital front door for the majority of our patients. That decision was somewhat controversial; it meant consolidating walking away from several vendors. But simplification delivered an easier patient experience, clarity, consistency, and cost efficiency. 

The result is not only a better experience for patients, but a more streamlined, measurable, and scalable Brand Growth ecosystem. 

Once you had the demand engine humming, how did you elevate brand building within that mix? 

DB: Once we proved Brand Growth’s impact on office visits, the next step was to embrace its role in shaping brand awareness and preference.  

We were the #1 system operationally in Georgia but ranked only #2 in brand health. That gap was unacceptable. I used the science of marketing to help other executives understand that awareness drives patient consideration, and consideration drives choice. 

Once that clicked, support followed. Our brand building efforts grew exponentially within a few years. Today, our CEO is personally involved and presents Brand Growth results to our leadership and board. When the CEO takes pride in Brand Growth, you know it’s embedded in the enterprise strategy. 

That’s a powerful evolution and it mirrors what we see across industries: marketing leaders earning credibility through measurable results. How do you think about the intersection of brand and demand today? 

DB: They’re not separate disciplines; they’re symbiotic. Demand gives you patient choice, results and short-term value. Brand gives you the long-term ability to grow. 

The first phase of our transformation was all about driving demand: measurable, patient-centered transactional growth. But once we proved that engine, brand became the next multiplier. Brand health amplifies everything else: patient preference, physician partnerships, patient loyalty, even recruiting.  

We no longer debate “brand vs. demand.” We build both in concert, guided by a unified Brand Growth Flywheel that connects awareness to consideration to conversion. 

Scott Davis: That’s exactly what we call Brand & Demand at Prophet — the idea that sustainable growth happens when both sides of the Brand Growth equation reinforce each other. 

Let’s talk about experience, the final frontier of Brand Growth ownership. You’ve brought CX, marketing, and analytics under one roof. What prompted that integration? 

DB: The patient experience is the brand experience. You can’t separate them. 

We merged communications, community affairs, marketing, sales and patient experience into one organization with centralized insights and analytics. That was a major reorganization. It was a bit painful, but necessary. 

We rebuilt our organization and now we have a single, integrated view of the patient: from first awareness to appointment booking, to post-visit feedback. 

Brand Growth now is also accountable for digital tool adoption and patient satisfaction. It’s a closed loop. When patients have better digital and in-person experiences, loyalty and volume follow. 

Healthcare is facing capacity constraints and policy headwinds. How do those external dynamics shape your Brand Growth agenda? 

DB: Demand for healthcare in Georgia continues to grow, but access needs to increase as well.  

Our focus is on balancing patient demand growth with available capacity across our footprint. It’s about connecting patients to the right services, at the right place and time, managing expectations, and ensuring alignment with operations. 

We’re increasing access to quality care through capital investments in new and expanded facilities, hiring more physicians and staff and expanding virtual care, but Brand Growth also plays a crucial role in optimizing patient demand.  Relentless focus on quality and building a strong brand helps attract patients, but also physicians, nurses, and partners who want to work with the best. 

You’ve also been candid about cutting “vanity spend” and reinvesting for impact. What did that process look like? 

DB: We had a zero-based budgeting mentality – every program, vendor, and sponsorship had to justify its investments and show it was patient-preferred, driving value.  

I literally asked almost each partner to present their own value creation. Some could prove it instantly. Others, like certain sponsorships, technology partners or promotional programs, couldn’t. 

One example: we walked away from a high-profile sponsorship. It was a tough call; they were great partners, it had visibility but no measurable patient preference or impact. We reallocated that money to further upgrade our digital patient experience. 

That decision earned credibility with the other executives and freed resources for initiatives that drive true patient-centered and measurable growth. 

Many CMOs right now are under pressure to reorganize and to reimagine Brand Growth for greater agility and accountability. What guidance would you give them? 

DB: Transformation is never one-and-done. We’ve gone through multiple reorganizations to centralize analytics, insights, and patient experience l under unified leadership. Each time, it’s disruptive but clarity always follows. My advice? 

1. Start with what matters. Define the few patient-centered metrics that connect directly to overall business performance 
2. Invest in insights. The most underleveraged asset in most organizations is understanding the customer, or in our case, the patient, better than anyone else. 
3. Reinvest for growth. Don’t cut costs to just hit a number; reallocate investments toward what drives measurable patient-centered outcomes. 

Transformation is uncomfortable. We lost people along the way — some I wanted to keep. But we gained an organization built for the future: patient-focused, agile, data-fluent, and growth-oriented. 

When it comes to AI, what’s your perspective on its real potential within marketing? 

DB: AI is a promising tool, not a strategy. I expect that the real AI-driven value in healthcare will come from clinical and operational applications like diagnostics, imaging, ambient listening to aid in documentation, or operating room optimization, and less from marketing automation. 

Within Brand Growth, AI will absolutely streamline workforce effectiveness and efficiency and enable us to focus on upside opportunities that might currently be under-resourced.  

Our priority is still patient-focused life-saving or improving AI before marketing AI. We’ll automate where it makes sense, but not at the expense of authenticity, creativity or empathy. Brand Growth still needs a human heartbeat, especially in healthcare! 

Finally, as we look toward 2026, what’s top of mind for you as a CMO? 

Bergsma: Three things. 

First, sustaining growth responsibly, ensuring patient demand aligns with available capacity and that our efforts keep patient needs at the center of all we do. 

Second, continuing to integrate brand, demand, and experience into one team, one set of metrics, one North Star, driven by one Brand Growth Flywheel. 

And third, building future capabilities, remaining patient-centered, applying automation thoughtfully, elevating data literacy, empowering teams to think strategically and fostering a culture that embraces it all. 

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We often see companies consistently outperform because they share one defining trait: they operate with clarity. This allows them to turn insights into sharp strategies, distinctive experiences and to align their cultures behind a shared direction. 

Of all the factors that fuel business growth, clarity is one of the most critical—and sometimes the most overlooked. Without clarity, blind spots multiply, decisions falter and growth slows.  

When Prophet published Uncommon Growth for Uncommon Times, one message stood out: the winners don’t rely on slogans; they build purposeful systems that clearly connect strategy, people and performance.  

Clarity is about having the right lens to understand your key issues. Below are four examples of how we partnered with leadership teams to help them stop guessing and pursue a clear plan towards growth. 

Finding Clarity Through Customer Insights 

Clarity starts with understanding customers. Without meaningful insights, executives often struggle to prioritize effectively and pick the best growth trajectory.  

A leading consumer goods company was faced with a fragmented market and uncertainty about future growth. We delivered clarity by building a demand landscape that combined research, segmentation and cultural trends analysis. This pinpointed distinct growth territories and aligned leadership on where to play, and how to win. 

Similarly, a premium pet nutrition brand needed to scale without losing authenticity. By uncovering the motivations behind pet owner choices and mapping the most valuable demand spaces, we created a unified strategy that guided innovation, channel priorities and experience design. 

Through our work, their leadership team was able to understand the real story of what was happening in their markets and to develop clear, actionable insights that turned complexity into confidence. 

Making Innovation Clear—and Profitable 

For many leaders, the real challenge isn’t sparking innovation; it’s sustaining it and proving its value. Clarity means building a system where creativity consistently translates into measurable business success. 

A global industrial manufacturer wanted to move beyond incremental product development and create a durable source of differentiation. We helped design an innovation engine that identified unmet customer needs, defined a portfolio of growth bets and established a framework for testing and scaling ideas. 

By embedding innovation as a core capability, the organization was able to fund, build and launch new offers faster. 

Clarity in Brand Portfolios: Making Every Brand Work Harder 

When categories blur and portfolios expand, it can lead to a lack of awareness of which brands create real value and for whom. Without that knowledge, investments scatter and experiences fragment. 

We helped a hospitality group overcome brand overlap and inconsistent customer experiences by defining high-value guest segments, clarifying brand roles and creating a loyalty roadmap that guided investment and experience design across the portfolio. 

In another case, a global consumer company needed sharper focus for its growing portfolio. Our demand-space analysis defined each brand’s role and target, providing a roadmap that unified marketing, innovation and commercial teams. 

Clarity in Culture: Connecting Organizations 

Behind every successful transformation sits one constant: clarity on the behaviors and beliefs that unite people behind a common culture. 

 A fast-growing pharmaceutical services organization was expanding globally and needed to preserve its entrepreneurial energy while scaling effectively. Prophet worked with the leadership team to codify a culture framework that defined the values, behaviors and rituals connecting employees to the company’s purpose. 

Through co-creation and leadership activation, these behaviors were embedded into daily work—turning culture into a catalyst for performance and growth. 

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The Illusion of Speed and Simplicity 

We live in an age of AI hype: infinite value, instant transformation, and algorithms that solve all types of problems. But as Paul Hlivko warns in Harvard Business Review, those headlines often mask a much slower, more friction-filled reality: “AI will transform industries … but on enterprise time: longer, slower, and with far more friction than most expect.” According to the article, corporate leaders routinely make six core mistakes, including underestimating the time needed, overestimating adoption, and obsessing over the models instead of the real, sustainable systems.  

This aligns with what we see in practice: many AI transformation programs default to a standard consulting playbook — assess, reengineer, select technology, train, integrate, roll out. That is not wrong — but it’s insufficient. The promise of rapid returns often collides with legacy systems, cultural resistance, risk-averse governance, and organizational inertia. When execution lags, stakeholders grow impatient. Business cases underdeliver. Trust erodes. And the opportunity to capture exponential value slips away. 

The Two Risks That Leaders Rarely Face Head-on 

1. Underperformance: The Gap Between Expectation and Delivery 

Even with strong investment, many AI programs will land somewhere in the “incremental improvement” zone rather than delivering dramatic transformation. According to KMPG’s 2025 Global CEO Outlook, leaders are betting big on AI — but they’re acutely aware that culture, adoption, and trust are real constraints:  

• 71% of CEOs say AI is a top investment priority. 
• 69% plan to allocate 10–20% of budgets to AI.  
• Yet 63% of CEOs express concern about AI’s impact on culture.
• 33% see employee resistance to change as a serious barrier. 

To HBR’s point: the world believes in rapid adoption, but in reality, enterprise adoption is often slow, uneven, and delayed by legacy constraints.  

The result? Many organizations operate under a “speed illusion” thinking they’re moving fast, but really lagging in impact, adoption, and value captured. While CEOs are aware of the issues, they are not necessarily addressing them head on. 

2. Cultural Erosion: The Risk of Becoming Soulless 

Even when AI “works,” it can hollow out what makes organizations human.  

HBR refers to fact that “We are automating work without really understanding it.” Many tasks involve “connective labor”, the human act of seeing others and reflecting understanding; something no algorithm can replicate. When machines take over more of what people used to do, employees start questioning their role and relevance. What remains if your unique ideas, judgment, or moral instincts are replaced by algorithmic suggestions? 

Worse still, cutting out swathes of humans to be replaced by machines, like recent Amazon and UPS announcements to lay off 14,000 and 48,000 people respectively, spreads fear like wildfire. Remaining employees will be looking over their shoulder every day while they try to learn new processes/tools all while silently second guessing their own identity/worth/value as knowledge workers and experiencing survivor guilt over their departed peers. 

Organizations are inherently social and human. Unchecked, AI transformation can erode purpose, identity, and distinctiveness—leaving behind a high-efficiency shell that feels no different from any other. In the worst case, leaders may wake up in a faster, but hollow firm, bleeding any talent that remains. 

The Leadership Challenge: Balancing Technology with Humanity 

The paradox is stark: you need both speed and soul. You need technology execution and human-centered change. Too much reliance on process and systems, ignoring identity, narrative and belief, and you risk cultural collapse. Too much focus on people without execution rigor, and you risk underwhelming returns. 

The leaders who win in this era embrace a third path: integrative transformation, where machines and humans are co-designers of the future. 

What does that require? 

• A change narrative that connects AI to purpose, identity, and meaning — not just efficiency. 
• Leadership that can manage emotional truth, change fatigue, and scepticism, not just process rollout. 
• Investment in a culture of experimentation, trust, and iteration — so AI adapts with you, not against you. 

What it Looks Like in Practice 

• Start small, learn fast: Use early AI pilots to test the interplay of tech and culture before scaling. 
• Layer on change ignition: Don’t just train — it matters how you engage, narrate, and embed belief in your people. 
• Protect the “connective labor” parts: Recognize where human judgment, empathy, and identity still matter (and always will). 
• Design for endurance, not demos: Move beyond one-off AI initiatives to sustained systems, governance, and cultural habits. 

At Prophet, our core offer sits here: we amplify AI transformations by ensuring that it is not just delivered — but believed, felt and owned by the organization. This is human-centered change. We don’t just help change processes. We help you become the transformed organization. 

Read our report, Human-Centered AI: Culture as the Catalyst for AI-enabled Growth, for more recommendations to prepare your organization for AI transformation here  

There Has Never Been a More Important Time for Organizations to be Human 

AI transformation is no longer optional — it’s happening, whether you lead it or are swept up by it. But most will not achieve it in the way that they imagine it. The most likely scenario is that change will be executed slowly, overbudget, and without meaning. You have choices; deliver speed but lose your identity, protect your culture but lag behind in impact or integrate both — becoming faster, more distinct, more human. 

In a world racing toward automation, the greatest prize isn’t just efficiency — it’s being more human than ever. 

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Fred Ehle is no stranger to big brands, bold ideas and transformational growth. With leadership roles at McDonald’s, Redbox, Pulte and Rocket Mortgage, he has lived the tension between long-term brand building and short-term performance and has strong views on how marketing must evolve to truly drive enterprise value. 

In this candid conversation with Scott Davis, Chief Growth Officer at Prophet, Fred shares insights on the CMO’s changing role, aligning the C-suite around brand, the real impact of AI and how Rocket’s “Own the Dream” campaign came to life at the Super Bowl. 

Let’s start with your journey. What led you to Rocket Mortgage? 

Fred Ehle: I’ve had a great run across both agency and client-side roles. When the opportunity with Rocket Mortgage came up, it was a compelling moment. The company was already a major player in the category, but they were looking to evolve from a high-volume lead-gen machine to a modern, full-funnel marketing organization. 

Jonathan Mildenhall had recently joined as CMO, and he was setting out to build a marketing function that could drive both brand and business results. The chance to help shape that transformation — and to bring together brand, creative and growth under one roof — was too exciting to pass up. 

Many reports suggest that CMOs are losing influence — shrinking budgets, short tenures and fading confidence in the role. What’s your take? Is this cyclical or something deeper? 

FE: It’s something deeper. Marketing’s been losing ground in the C-suite for a while — and in some cases, we’ve done it to ourselves. As I often say, Marketing has a marketing problem.  

First, we’ve allowed the definition of marketing to get fuzzy. The function has blurred into areas like digital and IT, making it harder to define our value clearly. Then there’s our own jargon — terms like “growth marketer.” What does that even mean? Shouldn’t we all be growth marketers? 

Second, many CMOs don’t control all the levers of growth – pricing, product, distribution — and yet we’re still held accountable for outcomes we can’t fully drive. That disconnect erodes credibility. 

Third, there’s often a lack of alignment between business strategy and marketing KPIs. Too often, we’re measuring activity, not outcomes.  

And finally, some CMOs lean too heavily into communications without commercial sensibility. CEOs want profitable growth. If the CMO doesn’t understand how the business makes money, or doesn’t speak the language of finance, then the seat at the table becomes very fragile. 

So, what does good look like? What’s the silver lining? 

FE: It comes down to alignment. At Rocket, we had that rare moment where business strategy, brand strategy and marketing execution were completely in sync — from the CEO to the board to every team member. We had real clarity around who we were targeting, what our value proposition was and the resources to bring it to life. 

The “Own the Dream” platform we launched at the Super Bowl wasn’t just a campaign. It was the manifestation of that alignment. We built it from segmentation up: deep customer understanding, clear value prop and a singular creative idea that laddered all the way to business impact. 

And we proved it. Our brand health metrics tied directly to lead generation and revenue. When the brand score moved, leads followed — six months later.  

Brand marketing often struggles to win over CFOs. How do you make the case for investment to build trust? 

FE: Data and testing. We ran small-scale full-funnel experiments that demonstrated clear efficiency gains. At Rocket, nothing got funded unless it tied to measurable KPIs — brand health, leads, conversions, or share growth. 

By connecting brand health scores to downstream business results (like share gains six months later), we created a line of sight from brand to revenue. That kind of evidence earned CFO support and unlocked real investment. 

Let’s talk brand and demand marketing. That debate is louder than ever. How do you approach it? 

FE: It’s not either/or — it’s both/and. That sounds simple, but the execution is hard.  

The reality in our business is, up to 95% of your potential customers aren’t in-market at any given time. If you spend all your dollars chasing the 5% who are, you’re ignoring tomorrow’s demand. 

The key is balance. In some businesses, it’s 60/40 brand-to-performance; in others, 40/60. But leaning too far into performance just drives up customer acquisition costs as competitors bid on the same eyeballs. That was happening at Rocket before we pivoted to a more balanced approach. Full-funnel marketing ultimately proved more efficient, not less. When people recognize your brand and trust you, the funnel gets more efficient. But you have to prove that with data, especially to the CFO 

Let’s rewind to the Super Bowl campaign. “Own the Dream” was a big swing. What made it work? 

FE: We had a powerful emotional insight: 91% of people want to own a home, but 53% of first-time buyers cry during the process, and not tears of joy. 

That insight drove everything. Our creative agency brought us “Own the Dream,” and it clicked. It honored that tension—between aspiration and frustration — and gave us a rallying cry. 

The Super Bowl spot itself was powerful, but the in-stadium activation was the magic. Fans singing along to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” created this emotional, collective moment. It generated over a billion earned impressions. Social sentiment was 90% positive, cutting across demographics and political lines. And it felt like Rocket — authentic, optimistic, human. 

What role does AI play in all of this? 

FE: AI is an enabler, not a strategy. But it’s a powerful one. 

At Rocket, we used AI to remove friction from the mortgage process. We already allow customers to refinance without talking to a human if they choose. That’s real transformation. 

From a marketing lens, AI helped us get to insights faster, segment smarter and personalize at scale. But again, it’s not about the tool — it’s about what you do with it. 

But AI doesn’t replace critical thinking. AI can surface a trend. It can write the first draft. But it can’t feel what will resonate. That’s still the human job. 

Last question. What advice do you have for fellow CMOs trying to lead through this complexity? 

FE: Three things: 

1. Don’t abandon fundamentals. Segmentation, positioning, emotional resonance, they matter more than ever. 
2. Get close to your CFO. Tie brand health to business outcomes. Don’t just show marketing metrics — show impact. 
3. Be the Voice of the Customer. Bring the outside in. Share insight with your peers. Help the business make better bets. 

And one bonus: Run small tests. When you’re at odds with your CEO or CFO, don’t argue — test. Let the market decide.  

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Nearly every leader has AI at the top of their agenda, with resources deployed to understand how to utilize it for efficiency gains. We’ve all heard the promises: AI has the potential to deliver massive business efficiencies from automating administrative tasks to managing customer service channels, to drafting copy for SEO, ads and product pages. But beyond efficiencies, AI can deepen customer engagement, surface strategic insights and shorten the time it takes to bring new products to market.  

We call this speed to impact — a critical component of achieving uncommon growth. Growth that is sustained and outsized versus category peers. 

In a world where AI has the potential to impact everything, leaders face the choice of where to invest to maximize value creation. As the adage goes, “we can do anything, but we can’t do everything.” Successful AI strategies require a sharpened strategic focus, with investments deployed toward growth use-cases. 

Prophet’s Uncommon Growth research shows that companies achieving growth share three core traits: Customer Obsession, Pervasive Innovation and Strong Cultures. Investing behind these pillars is key to achieving business success. Deploying AI across the pillars, done right, has the potential to supercharge growth.  

We explored how AI is accelerating impact across these three pillars in 179 companies that achieved uncommon growth. 

Customer Obsession 

Companies achieving uncommon growth are relentlessly focused on understanding and engaging their customers — often outspending peers in sales and marketing. GenAI has introduced new channels of engagement, from influencing how consumers research products to driving deeper personalization and connection.  

In Prophet’s study, The Rise of the AI-Powered Consumer, 45% of consumers reported using Gen AI in the past six months to inform purchase decisions. Highly considered purchases, like technology, automotive and beauty, are seeing the most disruption. To remain competitive means optimizing your brand, marketing and media strategy for LLM awareness and sentiment.  

The Harvard Business Review’s “Forget What You Know About Search: Optimize Your Brand for LLMs” suggests marketers should: 

• Highlight expertise
• Speak to use cases and consumer needs
• Tailor content to the processing style of dominant LLMs for their target audience 

3. Retailers and marketplaces are taking this one step further, collapsing the “choose-use journey” within GPTs. Etsy recently announced a partnership with OpenAI, enabling in-chat purchases, with Walmart just following suit. More will undoubtfully follow. 

AI allows brands to get even closer to their customers, driving engagement and winning with personalization, leading to increased purchase likelihood and CLTV.  

Example: Crocs 

Crocs has long proven that personalization fuels growth. The success of Jibbitz, the individual charms for crocs, has lifted average order values, driven repeat purchases and built deeper brand affinity. With 75% of customers purchasing Jibbitz and $271M in 2024 sales (18% of total revenue). With the launch of the ABLO AI co-design tool, Crocs is doubling down on personalization, enabling customers to design their own Jibbitz through AI-prompts and image uploads. AI prompt indicators point to greater personalization and conversion, showing how AI can deepen brand affinity and accelerate growth at scale. 

“We have Jibbitz for everyone — from teachers to gamers to healthcare workers — and we are now giving our fans the option to design one-of-a-kind charms using ABLO’s AI technology, taking customization to the next level.”

Crocs Brand President Anne Mehlman, Fast Company

Example: L’Oreal 

L’Oréal has long positioned itself as a beauty tech pioneer. Through acquisitions like ModiFace, L‘Oreal offers virtual try-ons and diagnostics that reduce hesitation in digital shopping. Its new venture Noli uses over one million skin data points to generate hyper-personalized product recommendations. Internally, its CreAItech content lab produces up to 50,000 images and 500 videos per month, allowing marketers to rapidly adapt creative assets across markets and cultures without sacrificing brand essence. AI is enabling L’Oreal to expand personalization and inclusivity at scale by strengthening emotional connection while accelerating growth.  

In January 2024, L’Oréal was the first-ever beauty company to deliver the keynote speech at the world’s most important tech event – the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It was a highly visible stage to showcase our pioneering and leadership role in Beauty Tech and our next-generation innovations for more sustainable, personalized and inclusive beauty. These innovations included… Beauty Genius – a Gen AI-powered personal beauty assistant and HAPTA – the world’s first AI-powered makeup applicator for people with limited hand, wrist and arm mobility.

L’Oréal 2024 Annual Report

Pervasive Innovation 

Market leaders view innovation as an always-on, critical business muscle. They consistency over-invest in R&D, maintaining that discipline even in turbulent economic times. AI is accelerating the innovation process — from aggregating and synthesizing customer insights, identifying opportunities faster, to rapid concepting and prototyping and offering consumer validation through digital twins. With AI developing higher-quality innovation concepts, businesses can focus on critical routes to market activities, like securing the right distribution and getting through regulatory processes. 

Example: Moderna 

Legacy biopharma R&D is notoriously slow and capital intensive, but Moderna is proving that AI can reset the pace of innovation. Through its partnership with OpenAI, Moderna has deployed ChatGPT Enterprise across functions – from R&D to manufacturing — creating thousands of custom GPTs to trial handle trial data review, anomaly detection and documentation. These tools remove bottlenecks in data-heavy processes and allow scientists to focus on higher-order interpretation, resulting in a richer innovation pipeline. The result is compression of discovery-to-development cycles and Moderna plans to bring 15 new mRNA products to market in the next five years — from RSV vaccines to individualized cancer therapies. 

Culture as a Catalyst 

Culture is critical to achieving uncommon growth. Purpose-driven, intentionally designed cultures to enable enterprise-wide adoption of innovation, AI included. When AI adoption is fragmented across silos, momentum stalls. Prophet’s research, “Human-Centered AI: Culture as the Catalyst for AI-enabled Growth,” identified several imperatives for enterprise-scale AI adoption:

• A shared AI vision aligned company purpose, values and strategy 
• CEO and CHRO alignment on the AI vision 
• Clear expectations for AI fluency and the role of humans  
• Systems and training that enable AI adoption at scale  

Example: JPMorgan & Chase 

JPMorgan approaches AI adoption as both technological and cultural transformation. In under a year, it deployed its LLM Suite to more than 200,000 employees -embedding AI in daily workflows and building organizational fluency at scale. Tools like EEVEE and Smart Monitor (two of over 400 use cases at the firm) free teams from low-value manual work, redirecting energy toward higher-order problem-solving. The result is a workforce that sees AI not as a threat but as a partner: one that’s projected to fuel $1.5B in AI impact by 2030. JPMorgan’s bet is clear: AI will augment every role and drive growth — cultivating a culture where AI is trusted and widely used will compound in value, turning efficiency gains into a sustained competitive advantage. 

“We are setting very clear goals of success and KPIs for each one of these rollouts. We also have very good experimentation, so we can actually measure the incremental benefits by giving the tool to some agents and setting up test and control groups. We compare these results with clear metrics of success, and it helps us learn what’s working and what’s not working and what we need to do to drive adoption.”  

Katie Hainsey, Managing Director and Head of AI/ML and Data & Analytics for Digital, Marketing and Operations at JP Morgan

Example: Moderna 

Moderna recognized early that the barrier to AI adoption wasn’t just technology, but shared expectations of fluency. In 2021, it partnered with Carnegie Mellow to launch its AI Academy to drive AI fluency across the workforce, preparing employees long before generative AI went mainstream. That groundwork paid off when ChatGPT Enterprise rolled out in 2023: adoption was immediate, with nearly half of weekly active users creating their own GPTs and averaging over 100 interactions per week. By aligning purpose, values and training, Moderna turned potential resistance into active engagement, making AI a natural part of how work gets done.  

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