Brand trends for 2025 – a snapshot

Firstly let’s talk about brand and brand value

Interbrand’s exhaustive report is the annual go-to deep dive into brand value. No surprise that the cumulative value of the top global brands has significantly increased, with Apple, Coke and Microsoft leading the way.

But brand building isn’t just for the behemoths — it should be on the agenda for every business in 2025, after Interbrand revealed that an emphasis on short-term operational efficiencies saw $200 billion in lost revenue opportunities in the past year. This is something that we’ve talked about before — short-term tactics are effective for increasing immediate eyeballs, but consistent brand building delivers compound value.

Interbrand suggests that in 2025 successful brands will compete beyond traditional industry categories by focusing on customer needs rather than product lines. The report reveals that this approach has driven exceptional growth for companies like Apple, Amazon, and Disney, who have expanded their brands across multiple arenas while staying true to their core identity.

The key insight – that tomorrow’s most valuable brands will be those that evolve from asking “what do we sell?” to “what do we help our customers achieve” – is in line with our Business to People approach. Putting customer needs and benefits at the forefront is one of the core principles of Nalla’s B2P branding.

Communicating trust, everywhere – marketing’s challenge

Anyone in comms will be acutely aware that marketing is becoming simultaneously more fragmented and more focused.

The way we all consume content has fractured across a number of channels and brands are finding themselves stretching into radical, sometimes uncomfortable, new spaces. Coupled with this is a sharp focus on authenticity and trust; perhaps most obviously highlighted in the recent TikTok ban/ TikTok’s back! event.

It’s not just new channels that are set to cause concerns over trust — AI adoption, sustainability commitments, creator partnerships — it’s an ever-growing, complex communications ecosystem that marketers need to navigate. A brand’s success depends on authentically connecting with fragmented audiences across multiple channels while balancing innovation with human values.

The core challenge for brands is how to maintain coherence while navigating this evolving landscape and heightened consumer expectations. Rigid inflexible brands are looking more and more out of step.

Personalised experiences, but at what cost?

Reflecting some of the core themes faced by marketing, the key UX trend for 2025 can be best summarised as “transparent personalisation”.

Dig a little deeper into what this means and we can see that users seemingly want contradictory things; they’re demanding highly personalised experiences, whilst wanting clear control over their data. The vast majority of users now see the value of their data, so transparency about its use is crucial; add AI into this conversation and the water becomes perhaps a little murkier.

Once again, trust is key; the vast majority of users are looking for assurances about data security. Successful UX is increasingly about striking the perfect balance between sophisticated, intuitive experiences that are based on user behaviour and maintaining clear data practices that build confidence and trust.

The brands that will excel will be those whose UX delivers experience and assurance. Customer journeys are becoming non-linear but need to be seamless across channel.

In summary…

Your brand must appear trusted and transparent; be consistent and coherent; meet your audience where they are looking; and understand exactly what they want to achieve. More compelling reasons why your brand needs to adopt a Business to People approach.

Insights shared from Kantar’s Marketing Trends, Interbrand’s Best Global Brands Report, Redfox’s Trends in User Journeys and other publicly available trend forecasts.