Brand is back
McKinsey’s new State of Marketing Europe 2026 report highlights what should be on every marketer’s agenda now.
European marketing is returning to the fundamentals - a strong brand, trust, budget discipline, and measurable effectiveness - while also needing to integrate generative AI and agentic AI into real marketing workflows faster.
European marketing is returning to the fundamentals - a strong brand, trust, budget discipline, and measurable effectiveness - while also needing to integrate generative AI and agentic AI into real marketing workflows faster.
Be a brand people trust
Branding is once again the number-one priority for European CMOs. Amid economic uncertainty, channel overload, and rapid AI development, a strong brand is one of the main assets for resilience and long-term growth.
- Brands are moving from one-way advertising to interactive dialogue: community, UGC, behind-the-scenes content, immersive experiences.
- 71% of CMOs use multipurpose full-funnel activations combining brand storytelling with sales impact - up around 30 percentage points vs previous years.
- Even in B2B, companies increasingly use B2C-style approaches: storytelling, emotion, creativity, community.
- Brands are moving from one-way advertising to interactive dialogue: community, UGC, behind-the-scenes content, immersive experiences.
- 71% of CMOs use multipurpose full-funnel activations combining brand storytelling with sales impact - up around 30 percentage points vs previous years.
- Even in B2B, companies increasingly use B2C-style approaches: storytelling, emotion, creativity, community.
Marketing effectiveness
72% of CMOs expect marketing spend as a share of net sales to increase in 2025 (the average budget is 8.7% of revenue), but pressure from CEOs and CFOs is growing. Marketing must prove its contribution to profit, revenue, and market share.
- Budget management is priority #2, marketing ROI is #6.
- Only 3% of companies can explain more than 50% of their marketing budget through MROI measurement. Main barriers: data quality and analytical capabilities.
- Best practice: combine MMM (marketing mix modeling is a statistical method for measuring each channel's contribution to sales), incrementality testing, and attribution. Only around half of CMOs report regular collaboration with the CFO.
- Budget management is priority #2, marketing ROI is #6.
- Only 3% of companies can explain more than 50% of their marketing budget through MROI measurement. Main barriers: data quality and analytical capabilities.
- Best practice: combine MMM (marketing mix modeling is a statistical method for measuring each channel's contribution to sales), incrementality testing, and attribution. Only around half of CMOs report regular collaboration with the CFO.
AI is underestimated
Gen AI and agents rank only 17th out of 20 in importance - McKinsey sees this as a serious underestimation. Gen AI leaders place it in their top five; laggards keep it near the bottom.
- Only 6% of companies have high gen AI maturity.
- Leaders already achieve an average of 22% efficiency gains and expect around 28% over the next two years. 89% of laggards have seen almost no impact.
- Leaders are moving beyond internal use cases into customer-facing ones: personalized content at scale, product discovery, creative efficiency.
The next phase is agentic AI: autonomous agents that plan and execute tasks. And SEO is evolving into GEO - more than 50% of AI-search users already rely on AI answers when choosing and buying. AI should not remain a collection of pilots; it must be embedded into end-to-end workflows.
- Only 6% of companies have high gen AI maturity.
- Leaders already achieve an average of 22% efficiency gains and expect around 28% over the next two years. 89% of laggards have seen almost no impact.
- Leaders are moving beyond internal use cases into customer-facing ones: personalized content at scale, product discovery, creative efficiency.
The next phase is agentic AI: autonomous agents that plan and execute tasks. And SEO is evolving into GEO - more than 50% of AI-search users already rely on AI answers when choosing and buying. AI should not remain a collection of pilots; it must be embedded into end-to-end workflows.
Cases from the report
- Schneider Electric shows that a B2B brand also needs to be emotional, recognizable, and creative. The company focuses on brand presence, relevance in key segments, and visibility of its product portfolio.
- Lindt & Sprüngli continues to invest in the brand despite rising raw-material costs. Their logic is clear: a premium brand should not protect margins by cutting brand investment. The focus is on long-term brand equity, consumer trust, and smart media planning.
- BMG uses gen AI through MAGE, its marketing asset generation engine, to create marketing videos and social assets for its music catalogue. Asset production costs have been reduced by around 98%, while keeping human oversight and respecting the creative identity of artists.
Conclusion
Winners in 2026 will do three things at once - build an authentic brand, systematically prove marketing effectiveness, and move gen AI from pilots into a scalable operating model. Otherwise, European brands risk losing both short-term efficiency and long-term competitiveness.
Our take
The industry is doubling down on MROI measurement just as a growing share of brand influence is moving into a space with no click, no referrer and no clean signal to attribute.
AI is becoming a discovery and decision layer, not just another marketing channel or tool. Brands will need to learn how to be visible, trusted and accurately represented inside AI answers, like they once had to learn SEO, social media and performance marketing.
Measurement will need to expand: classic MMM, attribution and incrementality for what is trackable, plus a new "AI visibility" layer - monitoring whether the brand appears in AI answers, how it is represented and how stable that presence is across engines and repeated queries.
Consistency here is underrated: an answer that mentions your brand today and not tomorrow is a very different asset from a stable one.
AI is becoming a discovery and decision layer, not just another marketing channel or tool. Brands will need to learn how to be visible, trusted and accurately represented inside AI answers, like they once had to learn SEO, social media and performance marketing.
Measurement will need to expand: classic MMM, attribution and incrementality for what is trackable, plus a new "AI visibility" layer - monitoring whether the brand appears in AI answers, how it is represented and how stable that presence is across engines and repeated queries.
Consistency here is underrated: an answer that mentions your brand today and not tomorrow is a very different asset from a stable one.
Report link: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/past-forward-the-modern-rethinking-of-marketings-core