Brand strength shifts beyond paid media

Jones Knowles Ritchie and Kantar research has found that most brand equity is built outside paid media, strengthening the commercial case for customer experience, owned channels, earned media, reviews, word of mouth, and direct encounters with products and services.

The study attributes 28% of brand equity to paid media. The remaining 71% comes from what people experience for themselves and hear from others, with owned channels contributing 30% and earned media 41%.

The findings challenge a narrow view of brand building that concentrates too heavily on campaign reach. Advertising remains important, but brand strength is increasingly shaped by the full customer environment: websites, stores, packaging, apps, customer service, product quality, social conversation, reviews, referrals, and post-purchase experience.

The research also links customer experience with growth. Brands improving customer experience were found to be 2.5 times more likely to grow market share, underlining how service, product interaction, and customer memory influence commercial performance.

The pattern is visible across retail, financial services, hospitality, technology, and consumer goods. A brand promise made through advertising can be strengthened or weakened at the point of purchase, during delivery, through customer support, in-store, in an app, or through a review seen by a prospective buyer. Marketing strategy increasingly depends on what the wider organisation can deliver, not only on what a campaign can say.

Retail media, loyalty data, social commerce, AI search, influencer channels, and customer reviews are reshaping discovery and evaluation. The acceleration of Sainsbury’s retail media activity showed how supermarket data and closed-loop measurement are becoming strategic assets for brands and suppliers trying to understand the path from attention to purchase.

Customer experience is also affecting brand visibility in less direct ways. Search engines, recommendation systems, social platforms, and AI assistants increasingly draw on signals beyond paid media. Reviews, structured content, reputation, service quality, and consistency can influence whether a brand is recommended, trusted, or ignored.

That changes the role of brand management. A campaign may be led by marketing, but customer experience depends on operations, product, sales, logistics, customer service, digital systems, finance, and leadership. Poor delivery times, confusing renewal notices, broken returns processes, or weak in-store service can quickly undo the value of media investment.

Measurement is becoming harder and more important at the same time. Paid media has familiar metrics, even where attribution remains imperfect. Owned and earned experiences are more difficult to quantify because they happen across many channels and over longer timeframes. A clear bill, helpful employee, quick refund, reliable product, or positive review may not sit neatly inside a campaign dashboard, but each can shape future behaviour.

Budget pressure is sharpening the issue. Marketing directors are being asked to defend spend, prove incrementality, and improve growth efficiency. If most brand equity is built through experience and earned signals, investment decisions need to take service design, product reliability, digital journeys, store experience, and reputation management into account.

The agency market is responding to the same pressure. Creative, media, customer experience, shopper, commerce, data, and retail activation disciplines are becoming more closely linked as clients seek clearer routes from awareness to purchase. Agencies that can connect brand distinctiveness with measurable customer behaviour are likely to have an advantage over those built around narrower campaign delivery.

Physical retail still plays an important role in that system. Research into Gen Z store behaviour has shown that shops continue to shape discovery, identity, and memory for younger consumers. Stores are not simply distribution points; they can become brand-building environments when experience is designed with care.

The larger shift is toward brand value as an operational asset. Companies can still buy attention, but lasting memory is built through the experience that follows. Paid media may create recognition, yet reputation is increasingly formed through whether the customer encounter confirms the promise.