Relearning the Fundamentals: Marketing’s 2026 Reset

Well, it’s marketing planning season again. You can always tell by the smell of pumpkin-spiced Excel spreadsheets wafting through the air.

I’m helping several clients with their 2026 plans. Almost every conversation has resurfaced a familiar theme: a return to fundamentals.

I’m the one helping with the planning, so it might be more accurate to say I’m surfacing a familiar theme. 

But there is a growing sense that marketers are craving something more grounded after years of chasing shiny tools, rapid experimentation, and the endless expansion of martech.

The pendulum seems to be swinging back from “move fast and optimize” toward something more reflective and more human.

So, I was heartened by Marc Pritchard’s keynote at this year’s ANA Masters of Marketing Conference. The longtime chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble (arguably one of the most respected marketers on the planet) stood on stage and declared that the future of marketing lies in its past.

His five timeless fundamentals are as relevant now as ever:

• Know your consumer
• Know your brand
• Fall in love with advertising
• Build memory
• Nurture creativity

But as I read that list, I found myself wondering what happens when those fundamentals meet the marketer’s current reality?

How do young marketing teams translate “know your consumer” when consumers are also creators? How can we “fall in love with advertising” when most people actively try to avoid it? And how do we “build memory” when attention resets every 24 hours?

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The fundamentals are still true, but the context has changed. Maybe it’s time not just to go back to fundamentals, but to relearn them, reframed for this era of complexity, participation, and constant motion.

Instead of more tactics to plug into your 2026 plans, think of what follows as a mindset reset — a way to weave timeless fundamentals back into the fabric of modern marketing. Less a checklist, more a philosophy.

1. Knowing the customer means understanding the relationship

Entire martech stacks have been built around the promise of knowing your customer: who’s clicking, who’s buying, who’s bouncing, and when. But somewhere along the way, “knowing” started to mean counting. 

Some teams built sophisticated dashboards, attribution models, and A/B tests that can predict behavior down to the second. Yet, they’ve grown no closer to understanding why people care about the brands they choose.

The original intent of “knowing the consumer” was never about click-through rates, funnel velocity, or ideal customer conversion models. It was about empathy — understanding the emotional and social context of people’s lives (their hopes, their frustrations, and their aspirations).

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That’s where the reinterpretation begins for 2026: Instead of thinking about knowing consumer behavior better, invest in understanding your relationship with them.

Relationships are mutual. They evolve. They require patience. And most importantly, they’re not defined by transactions. 

You don’t measure a friendship by the number of texts exchanged. You measure it by the depth of connection. The same goes for brands.

I wrote about this shift to relationships in my latest book, Valuable Friction. Brands spent years trying to remove every bit of friction from the customer journey. But friction is where meaning lives, because it allows things to slow down enough that brands can listen, observe, and engage sincerely.

Of course, slowing down requires organizational patience, something most brands have lost. The patience to let ideas cook. To observe before optimizing. To resist the instinct to stir before the rice is ready.

2. Knowing your brand becomes knowing your brand’s stories

“The fruits are in the roots.” That line from Marc Pritchard’s talk stuck with me. His point was that brands should reconnect with their own histories to understand where they came from, what they’ve stood for, and how that foundation can still inspire creativity and consistency.

Related:To Build Affinity, Learn To Dance With Your Audience

Most brands could benefit from revisiting their archives — not for nostalgia’s sake, but to re-remember what made them distinct in the first place. 

I’ve watched brands that are barely a decade old drift into sameness, victims of an institutional forgetting that dulls the sharp, disruptive purpose that once gave them life.

But I think the modern challenge goes even a step further. Knowing your brand isn’t enough. Marketers and content teams need to know the brand’s stories (i.e., what your brand believes about the world).

Shifting from internal self-reflection on value propositions to external development of a consistent worldview is critical. Because brands don’t exist in isolation, they exist inside a cultural context and conversations. People don’t just want to know what you sell; they want to understand what you stand for.

That’s where the story becomes a content strategy.

When people talk about “brand purpose,” the conversation often drifts toward lofty mission statements or cause marketing. But at its best, a brand’s story isn’t a line in a manifesto; it’s a belief system that informs everything from how you innovate to how you show up.

Knowing your brand’s story means understanding the mythos that connects your product to the culture it serves — whether you sell fast fashion, enterprise software, rain gutters, or industrial generators. That’s what transforms features into beliefs and helps audiences see themselves in the brand, not just as customers of it.

And when AI can replicate almost any creative output, that story — that worldview — is one of the last sources of real differentiation.

The fruits may be in the roots, but the roots are only alive if the story keeps growing.

3. Fall in love with the art of advertising

Pritchard’s suggestion for marketers to “fall back in love with advertising” feels almost romantic. He’s right — somewhere along the way, the industry lost its affection for its craft.

Marketers became data scientists, growth hackers, and optimization experts. We turned creativity into an algorithmic exercise, something to be A/B tested and iterated until it was sufficiently “performant.” In the process, we forgot that the entire point of advertising was never to perform — it was to move.

I’ve always loved this Howard Gossage quote: “People don't read advertising. They read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad.” 

Advertising used to be a trusted source of interesting things. The best campaigns didn’t tell us what to buy — they made us feel something. They entertained, provoked, and made us laugh, cry, or hum along. They became part of the culture.

But as performance marketing rose, that artistry began to feel almost indulgent — as if caring about beauty, craft, or emotion made you naïve. The pendulum swung hard toward efficiency and optimized the soul right out of the work.

The irony is that even the most data-obsessed platforms are rediscovering the power of creativity. Multiple research studies now show that creative quality drives the lion’s share of performance outcomes in digital campaigns. 

The machine is finally proving what great marketers always knew: Emotion works.

When I think about “falling back in love with advertising,” I don’t hear a call to nostalgia for the format. I hear an invitation to return to the art of it — to create things people want to engage with.

That doesn’t mean abandoning data or rejecting performance metrics. It means remembering that the craft of storytelling — the artistry of how we connect — is still the most powerful differentiator.

Because while algorithms may deliver impressions, only creativity leaves an impression that lasts.

4. Building memory becomes building muscle memory

In talking about how advertising builds memory, Pritchard said that repetition is how ideas “wear in, not wear out.” I agree: Great brands are built on consistency, not constant reinvention.

In practice, especially with all the channels marketers manage today, that kind of consistency requires more than disciplined media planning; it demands organizational muscle memory.

Memory is what audiences keep. Muscle memory means creating a story so great that you’re willing to let it run over time.

The companies that endure commit to their core story, rehearse it over time, and let it compound. That’s how memory becomes identity inside and outside the organization.

Yet in this era defined by rapid change, quarterly pivots, and marketing leaders cycling through every 18 months, many organizations have lost that muscle memory. They forget the language, tone, or even the creative instincts that once made them distinct. Every new campaign becomes a “reset,” when it should really be a “reminder.”

Building that internal endurance is a new challenge for brand leadership today, even more so than building consumer memory. It takes courage to stay consistent when everything around you is moving faster than ever.

5. Nurture creativity becomes co-creating with your communities

Great marketing has always come from great partnerships. The best work emerges when brands, agencies, and creative teams trust each other enough to take risks.

Today, those relationships can’t stop at the edges of the organization. Creativity is now participatory. Consumers, creators, and even critics are all part of how a brand takes shape in the world.

That means the most enduring creative relationships today are the ones that extend outward — where brands co-create with the communities they serve. 

You see this in the creator economy, where partnerships are less about “influencing” and more about collaboration. You see it when fans remix a brand’s work, or when products get redesigned in response to real-time cultural feedback.

The old model of advertising to people is being replaced by building with people. It’s a subtle shift, but a profound one.

Brand leadership today is less about controlling the message and more about curating a conversation. It’s about creating enough trust and clarity that others can carry the brand’s story forward, in their own way.

That’s what “enduring creative relationships” look like now: not static partnerships, but living, breathing communities of participation.

The fundamentals relearned

I can feel the industry trying to exhale as organizations look to 2026. It’s not a sigh of relief, something more like an acknowledgment. “OK, this is the air we have to breathe right now.”

AI will continue to reshape our work in 2026. Cultural and political divisions will continue to change how people see brands. Economic pressure will almost assuredly force short-term decisions in organizations that know they need long-term vision. 

Yeah, it’s going to be a lot.

And yet, in the middle of all that noise, something encouraging is happening. We’re returning to fundamentals not as a nostalgic retreat, but as a way of finding stability in motion.

Knowing your consumer. Knowing your brand. Falling in love with the art. Nurturing creativity.

These are old ideas. But they’re also anchors, steadying us in a shifting world. They’re reminders that marketing’s real job has never been about algorithms or optimization; it’s always been about connection. 

But connection requires a new language today — one grounded in the fundamentals, yet fluent in the world we live in now.

And that’s why I love the marketing practice so much. At its best, it’s about helping people turn toward something they can believe in now, when everything feels uncertain.

So yes, the fundamentals remain. They give us a way to breathe, build, and belong in a world that’s constantly rewriting the rules. And that’s something steady to hold onto while everything else is in motion. 

It’s your story. Tell it well.