As Brouha Marketing, a leading comms agency in the fenestration sector, celebrates its 20th birthday, MD Fiona Lund looks at what has really changed in marketing over two decades (and what hasn’t).
Fiona explains more: “When I set up Brouha twenty years ago, marketing and PR were very different crafts. Apart from the inevitable need for Crisis PR, the pace was slower, more predictable, and often more forgiving. Campaigns were planned in quarters, not sprints. Data was sparse. Creativity carried the day, partly because it had to. But then the world was a very different place.
“With the birth of Facebook, Twitter and the landing of YouTube, 2006 was a pivotal year defined by this new world of social media and big technological innovations that shape the world we live in today. Well, and I say this affectionately, sadly the Blackberry didn’t make the cut.
“Twenty years ago, marketing revolved around campaigns. Big launches. Defined timelines. Clear starts and finishes. You “went live,” you measured results, you moved on.
“Two decades later, marketing has evolved into something faster, more measurable, more fragmented and arguably more powerful. We’ve moved from shorter term tactics to interrupt attention, to creating more sustainable strategies to earn and sustain attention. And the word ‘earn’ is critical with trust and ethics of brands vital.
“Data is abundant and sometimes overwhelmingly so. Real-time behavioural analytics, granular audience segmentation, attribution models, predictive tools, AI-driven insights. As marketers our challenge is no longer access to data, but rather making sense of it. We need to distil signal from noise, translate insight into action, but above all, balance data with creativity. Because despite everything, data doesn’t replace judgment. It sharpens it.
“We are entering a phase where content can be generated at scale, personalisation can happen dynamically and insights can be surfaced instantly. AI isn’t just a tool. It’s an accelerant which comes with a big warning: it amplifies good and bad marketing. Strong strategy becomes more powerful; weak thinking is exposed more easily and faster.
“For all the transformation, some marketing fundamentals remain exactly the same:
- Psychology: at its heart, marketing is still about human behaviour, motivations, emotions and decisions.
- Clarity of Message: complexity has increased, but clarity still cuts through.
- Creative Impact: communications that resonate emotionally still outperform work that merely informs.
- Trust: more than ever, trust is the foundation of brand value and the easiest thing to lose.
“The pace has increased. The tools have evolved. The stakes have risen.
“But the core challenge remains the same: to connect meaningfully with people and to do so in a way that matters.
“That hasn’t changed in twenty years. And it won’t change in the next twenty either.”
