Tim Riches.
In this series, industry leaders share their perspectives on the defining moments of 2025 and the forces shaping the year ahead. Here, Group Strategy Director and Principal at Principals, Tim Riches, writes his thoughts.
Be sure to check out Adnews' 50-plus page State of the Market report, Forecast 2026, for more outlooks.
If this piece is a Christmas gift, prepare for a six-pack of socks, not a new Nintendo Switch.
Sorry.
For my 2025 year in review, the issue that stood out for me over the last 12 months and remains top of mind looking forward to the short term and beyond, isn’t AI.
It isn’t having unique-to-market magic brand IP to deliver bankable business value.
It isn’t about the inspiration of breakout creativity.
It isn’t about how “authentic” branding got a guy elected in New York.
And it isn’t a lightning bolt insight into what it means to be a human as we circle the drain of the singularity.
Sorry to be the grinch, but I want to talk about getting work done. Business cases, mandates, governance and execution. And most of all momentum.
Because, in a dynamic and uncertain world, ‘project management’ counts.
Because in 2025, delivering a branding project can feel like building a sandcastle on the beach of a low-lying Pacific island.
Why so challenging?
Two reasons:
First, brand projects are not BAU marketing. They’re projects that are usually a form of business strategy execution designed to reset how the organisation shows up in the world across communications, CX and culture. Brand is not purely in the marketing functional domain; unlike making an ad that might attract lots of commentary, which is the core BAU of marketing.
In brand, you’re making strategic, language and design tools and rules that you need most of the business to actually use or follow - across people and culture, product, in-store and online. And marketing. It’s like an operating system for your identity, culture and value proposition.
So, you need to collaborate with lots of people and influence even more, in a world of fatigue, competing priorities and short attention spans.
Not saying this is a magic bullet, but something we’ve found very helpful is close working relationships between our strategy and writing teams – applying storytelling techniques to the project itself, connecting the brand naturally into the business conversation.
Secondly, in 2025 (and I’m guessing in 2026, it’ll be the same), projects that get bogged down get left behind. If your brand project gets seen as too hard, too slow, too expensive or, worst of all, too optional, then it’ll fail. And brand projects carry distinct bog-risk. Per point one.
With that in mind, I would reflect on the hallmarks of our most successful projects in 2025*:
- There’s a clear link between the project and business priorities – essentially, the project narrative and prototype brand narrative.
- The client team has had a clear mandate on what they’re delivering, by when, and how it will be used inside the business. The essential ingredients of expectation management!
- Well-defined project governance. With an engaged senior sponsor who makes themselves available to the project team.
- Agency and client have quality conversations about how to pivot the project to smooth the path – quality WIP meetings.
- There’s continuous reinforcement of key concepts like distinctiveness and consistency (with good visual exhibits) that the project team uses to build brand literacy.
- Executional clarity: implementation roadmaps – high-level, built around key milestones – are crucial.
- The agency is in the room in the right meetings to collaborate on the content with the client stakeholders. Building (hopefully) trust with stakeholders and helping make calls in the room to save time and money on rework.
And yes, insightful strategy and inspiring creative are necessary. But not sufficient.
More than ever, the work that really moves the dial is the work that branding agency and client do together to create the conditions for success. It’s about keeping momentum in the work. Actually getting good brand work done, delivered into the business’s ways of working. And making a difference in the real world.
*OK - this is more of a montage of successful characteristics. I wish our projects all looked like this!
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