The Performative Marketing Trap: How Activity Hides Weak Brands

Marketing teams have never worked harder. More campaigns, more content, more platforms, more assets. And yet, 78% of consumers would not care if most brands disappeared tomorrow, according to a striking statistic cited at last week's Mumbrella360 conference in Sydney.

That figure comes from the Havas Meaningful Brands study. It has climbed five points year-on-year since 2021. The trend is not a blip. It is a structural problem.

Daniel Pankraz, founder of OPEN Brand Consulting, put a name to it at Mumbrella360: "performative marketing." His diagnosis is blunt. "Marketing has never been busier, but brands have never been weaker."

When Activity Replaces Strategy

Pankraz defines performative marketing as "visible activity that signals effort to internal stakeholders while quietly hollowing out the brand it's claiming to build."

It has two faces. The first is internal: marketing teams producing work to satisfy boards and bosses rather than customers. The second is external: brands feeling compelled to post constantly, trend-jack, and comment on every cultural moment regardless of whether they have anything meaningful to say.

"Whether it's the boardroom or the feed, neither is really performing for the human you're actually trying to reach," Pankraz said.

The numbers support his case. A decade ago, a major brand launch produced 15 to 30 assets across four platforms. Today, the same launch generates around 240 assets across 17 platforms. Brands are not 10 times more famous. They are not 10 times more engaging. They are just 10 times busier.

Research from Dr Karen Nelson-Field adds another layer of concern. 85% of digital ads receive less than 2.5 seconds of attention, the minimum threshold for memory formation. Brands paying for volume are largely paying to be ignored. Advertisers without strong, distinctive visual identities waste up to 66 pence in every pound spent on digital display. Globally, that adds up to an estimated £66 billion in lost value.

The Byron Sharp Misread That Made Things Worse

Part of the problem traces to a misreading of marketing science. Byron Sharp's concept of "mental availability" argues that brands grow by being easy to recall at the moment of purchase. Many marketing teams interpreted this as permission to be everywhere, all the time.

Sharp himself has pushed back on that reading, stating plainly that "Mental Availability is not awareness."

Pankraz is more direct. "What Byron didn't say was post seven times a day, have always-on social, comment on virtually every cultural moment, or launch a sub-brand every quarter. To be in every feed does not mean you're in every head of a customer."

The distinction matters because Facebook engagement has fallen roughly 36% over the past year. Brands are paying more to reach users who engage less. The economics of the volume strategy are deteriorating fast.

Quiet Brands Win Over Time

The antidote Pankraz proposes is not silence. It is discipline.

He calls it the "quiet brand" model, built on four principles: discipline, scarcity, anticipation, and belief. Aesop has refused every beauty category cliche for 30 years, no discounts, no influencers, packaging that looks like it came from a library. Bunnings has run the same brand story, same colors, same messages for three decades. Try recalling a specific Bunnings campaign. Most people cannot. That is not a failure. That is the point.

Brand Finance research confirms that strong brands achieve triple the sales volume of weaker ones and command a 13% price premium. Meaningful brands see a 24-point higher purchase intent and nine times more wallet share compared to non-meaningful ones.

For Asian executives, the challenge is sharper. WARC analysis identifies a structural bias toward performance marketing across the region, leaving CMOs without the localized data needed to argue internally for brand investment. The activity trap is hardest to escape when every dashboard measures outputs rather than outcomes.

Pankraz offers two practical tools. First, a "stop-doing audit": for each activity, ask whether it would exist if it could not be measured, whether customers would notice if it stopped, and who inside the company it is really for. Second, a "refusal list": a written commitment to what the brand will not do, which platforms to avoid, which partnerships to decline, which promotional tactics to skip.

"Writing it down makes the link between theoretical brand strategy and actual behavior," he said.

The goal, in Pankraz's framing, is simple: "Become a brand people would miss if it wasn't there." Most brands today would not pass that test. The calendar is full. The brand is hollow.