Fragmentation is the biggest threat to your brand - So don’t feed it.

The marketing industry loves a specialism. Social. Search. PR. Retail media. Influencers. Commerce. Each with its own owners and optimisation logic. But outside our bubble, those boundaries do not exist. People move from streaming to scrolling to searching to shopping, often inside the same decision.

This means that while the media ecosystem might be fragmented from a practitioner’s perspective, people’s real world experience of media is the opposite. More seamless and joined up than ever. In the real world, fragmentation isn’t a thing. The only risk is fragmentation in the way brands do their marketing.

80 per cent of marketing spend has now pivoted from ‘top down’ media spend on brand-led comms to ‘bottom up’ spaces like retail media and paid search. The IPA’s Bellwether shows that marketing departments have evolved to reflect this shift. On the face of it, this is a natural shift in focus to areas of highest impact. But the challenge is these marketing practices have matured in siloes - with very little best practice concerned with how they interface with each other. This is fine in isolation, but terrible in combination, with everyone managing the parts and no one really thinking about the whole. A dangerous place to be given that at its most reductive, ‘branding’ is the job of turning disparate parts of a complex organisation into a single idea in people’s heads.

The race towards GEO is rapidly exposing these cracks. The internet’s great integrators, LLMs do not just send people elsewhere; they pull together what the wider web can infer about you across the whole funnel from social chatter to product pages to PR. A joined up view of your brand assembled from the fragmented parts of your marketing ecosystem. In our recent GEO work for Nivea we’ve seen social responsibility initiatives show up deep into the buying moments of a shopper journey. And vice versa.

Search users now rely on AI summaries for at least 40 per cent of their searches. So when designing marketing on specific channels, brands also need to be thinking about what story is told when these channels are collapsed back together again into a single answer. If your product story says one thing, your reviews another and your social feed something else, the algorithm does not tidy that up for you. Instead it magnifies the contradiction.

This is also why design matters more now than ever - not as decoration but as the ultimate tool for coherence. The job is to give the brand the same lustre, vibe and energy whether it shows up in a six-second social cutdown, a retail environment, a cutting edge festival or an AI answer. Design is one of the few things capable of holding a brand together as everything around it breaks apart. Why? Because we have all evolved as visual creatures - over 50 per cent of brain power is dedicated to processing visual information.

But this isn’t just about showing up with the same colours and fonts. Our brains aren’t just parsing visual information for what it looks like, but for meaning. Genuine integration means coherently both standing out and standing for something. Delivering symbols, stories and semiotics that combine the brand to the cultures it is operating in. Oliver Sweet’s excellent new book ‘The Rules that Make Us’ is an excellent exploration of the extent meaning is carried by cultural codes and symbols people process completely unconsciously.

The brain’s impression of a brand is built like a collage - piecing all these elements together into a single narrative. If each impression is meaningfully coherent, the total collage makes sense. But if each impression is built to suit the local logic of the platform without enough regard for the whole, the brand starts to fragment. System1’s work with the IPA found that consistent brands create 27 per cent more very large brand effects and report double the very large profit gains, while inconsistency could cost the studied brands nearly £3.5bn over five years.

A management problem before a creative one

None of this gets solved by better asset kits alone. Ultimately it is an organisational issue. Too much marketing management now is really channel management: separate teams, separate agencies, separate dashboards, separate incentives. We’ve been in GEO kick-off meetings recently, where a brand’s digital teams across SEO, social, corporate, and comms suddenly need to collaborate really closely, having worked independently for years.

And as the data sets feeding LLMs are constantly changing, this collaboration will only need to get tighter and more agile. Many brands are currently pivoting heavily towards Reddit, after seeing how prominent it was in early AI training datasets. Yet the latest data shows that LLMs have already recalibrated towards more independent niche PR titles and official pages as trusted sources. Strategies that blend PR, SEO, corporate comms, social need to adapt overnight, and teams need to be organised in a way that enables this. Meanwhile retainers are getting slashed, strategy becomes tactics and no one is asking the ultimate question of what brand are we actually building in people’s minds?

If marketing leaders want to get ahead of fragmentation, they need to spend less time asking what the channels want and more time asking what the brand needs to remain coherent across them. This starts with remembering why those big, wooly indicators like brand health measures were so important - and probably shouldn’t be sidelined in favour of either pure short term signals or synthetic responses.

One thing worth remembering with all this is that we’re only really at the start of the fragmentation journey. There will be more platforms, more personalisation, more new media needed as AI, voice gather steam. In this context, brand is not one of the jobs to be done. It is the vehicle for making the sum of these jobs greater than the parts. Modern brand building is integration. And if ‘coherent meaning making’ isn’t top of your marketing priorities list right now, it should be.

Ben Essen is the global chief strategy officer for Iris