Strategy – The Steady Science Of What Humans Really Want
Jed Price, Head of Strategy
Summary
Marketers face constant pressure to prove they’re innovative and commercially disciplined at the same time. Every quarter brings a new technology, a new channel, a new ‘paradigm shift’ that demands a strategic response. Most of these trends burn out within two years. The research that explains how brands grow, how people make decisions and how persuasion works has held steady for decades. This paper argues that understanding your brand and committing to proven principles will outperform chasing whatever LinkedIn is excited about this week. It draws on peer-reviewed behavioural science, the largest advertising effectiveness dataset in the world, and the wreckage of recent trend cycles to make the case.
You got the emails. ‘Trends you can’t ignore in 2025’ Dozens of them. You opened some, skimmed most, thought about a few. And the trends themselves? Most didn’t happen.
The marketing industry runs on a cycle: a technology emerges, consultants attach billion-dollar projections to it, agencies build pitch decks around it, your CEO forwards a LinkedIn post about it, and you sit in a meeting wondering whether ignoring it will end your career.
Most of the time, ignoring it would have been the right call. But you didn’t know that at the time. Nobody did.
I want to make a simple argument. The principles that drive brand growth haven’t changed in decades. They won’t change in 2026. The platforms and channels shift constantly, but human psychology stays put. And the research proving this is far more robust than any trend forecast you’ll receive in your inbox.
Part One: The Predictions That Weren’t
The recent history of marketing trend cycles follows a reliable pattern. A technology arrives with enormous hype. Massive market-size projections circulate. Competitors make visible moves. Stakeholders apply pressure to respond. And then, within a year or two, the trend quietly collapses. The brands that jumped in absorb the loss. The brands that held their nerve are vindicated but rarely credited.
Consider three examples from the past decade.
When Facebook rebranded as Meta in October 2021, projections of an $800 billion metaverse market flooded every trend report in the industry. Brands allocated real budget, bought virtual real estate, and issued press releases. By 2022, Meta had lost $13.7 billion on Reality Labs. Decentraland, the platform where brands spent hundreds of thousands on virtual land, averages 810 daily active users.(1) Only 7% of its virtual land parcels have ever been visited. By early 2025, Meta had pivoted to AI and closed the chapter.
The NFT cycle ran in parallel. The market peaked at $41 billion. Nike, Adidas and Taco Bell launched collections. People were buying pictures of apes wearing hats for more than your salary. By late 2022, trading volume had collapsed 97%. Over 70% of NFT projects lost all value. Nike faced a $5 million lawsuit after shutting down its platform. Shaq paid $11 million to settle his.(2)
Go back further. Between 2017 and 2020, the claim that “50% of all searches will be voice by 2020” appeared in every marketing conference and trend deck. SEO agencies sold voice optimisation packages. Content teams restructured for conversational queries. The stat was fabricated. The original researcher never said it. Someone misquoted it, the quote was repeated, and it became industry scripture.(3) Voice commerce never materialised.
These aren’t isolated failures. They share a structure: a massive projection, a deadline, competitor examples, stakeholder pressure, and one missing element that should have killed them early. Nobody asked whether real people wanted any of it.
Right now, your inbox contains the next generation:
“AI agents will mediate all customer purchases”
“You need a Generative Engine Optimisation strategy”
“Gen Z requires a completely different approach”
“Traditional search is dead”
Different words. Same structure. Same pressure.
Part Two: The Research That Sticks
The contrast between trend predictions and academic research is stark. Predictions have a shelf life of months. The studies below have held up for decades, across categories, geographies and market conditions. They explain how people choose, what they remember and why they buy. If you know this material, you can evaluate any trend against first principles rather than reacting to pressure.
How Brands Grow (Byron Sharp)
Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute analysed decades of sales data from hundreds of brands across dozens of categories. The findings are clear: brands grow by reaching more buyers more often.(4)
Two concepts do the heavy lifting. Mental availability is being thought of when someone needs your category. Physical availability is being easy to find and buy when they decide they want you.
Growth comes from light buyers, the people who buy you occasionally. Your job is to increase the chance that they think of you when the need arises. Elaborate loyalty schemes and superfan strategies target people who already buy you. The bigger opportunity sits with the millions who don’t, yet.
This explains why Coca-Cola still advertises. Why Apple still advertises. Memories fade without reinforcement. This was true in 1950, and it’s true now.
The test for any new initiative: Does it increase mental or physical availability? If not, question whether it deserves the budget.
How Humans Decide (Daniel Kahneman)
Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for demonstrating that people aren’t rational decision-makers.(5) Our brains run on two systems. System 1 is fast, automatic and lazy, running on gut feelings and shortcuts. System 2 is slow, deliberate and exhausting, showing up only when forced.
Most purchase decisions run through System 1. People grab what’s familiar, what’s easy, what feels right, what everyone else is buying. Good marketing creates these shortcuts by building emotional attachments and unconscious biases towards your product over others.
The test for creative work: Does this make us easier to choose, or does it ask people to think harder? If it asks people to think, it probably won’t shift behaviour.
Why Emotion Outperforms Information (Binet & Field / IPA Effectiveness Data)
Les Binet and Peter Field analysed 996 campaigns from 700 brands across 83 sectors, spanning over 30 years of IPA Effectiveness Award submissions.(7) Emotionally-driven campaigns are nearly twice as likely to generate large profit gains compared to rational campaigns (31% for emotional vs. 16% for rational).(8)
We assume advertising works by giving people information. It works by creating emotional associations. A Nike ad doesn’t teach you about shoes. It creates a feeling about who you could be.
Binet and Field also found that the most effective budget split allocates roughly 60% to long-term brand building and 40% to short-term sales activation.(7) Brands that over-index on activation see short-term spikes followed by decline. Brand effects compound over time, and cutting them creates a gap that only becomes visible years later.
Why Expensive Signals Quality (Costly Signalling Theory)
From evolutionary biology: when a peacock grows an enormous tail, it’s signalling that it’s healthy enough to waste resources on something impractical. The biologist Amotz Zahavi formalised this as the Handicap Principle in 1975: costly signals are reliable because only high-quality individuals can afford to produce them.(9)
Marketing works on the same logic. A Super Bowl ad or celebrity partnership signals confidence. The expense is the message. Your audience reads production quality as a proxy for product quality, whether they realise it or not.
This is the answer when your CFO asks why you can’t use cheaper production. Low-quality output signals low confidence in the product. High-quality output signals conviction. Audiences read these cues faster than they read your copy.
Part Three: A Framework for What Lands in Your Inbox Next
You can’t ignore every new development. You have stakeholders, a board, a CEO who reads things. You need a filter that separates signal from noise without making you look like a luddite.
Three Questions
1. Does this solve a real customer problem?
Not “is this cool?” or “are competitors doing it?”, are there groups of people who genuinely wish this existed and would use it?
The metaverse failed this test. Nobody was asking to buy virtual sneakers in a virtual store. Mobile passed it. People wanted to do things on the move.
2. Does this increase mental or physical availability?
Will it make people more likely to think of you when they need your category, or make it easier to buy from you when they decide they want you?
3. Can you explain it to someone normal?
E-commerce: “You can buy things without leaving your house.” Simple. NFTs: try explaining those to anyone outside the industry and watch their eyes glaze.
If a concept requires extensive jargon and complex diagrams, it’s probably innovation theatre.
Where to Put the Budget
Consistent presence.
Steady, repeated exposure that builds and maintains mental availability. Not burst campaigns followed by silence.
Broad reach.
Reaching more people more often. Not hyper-targeting or superfan strategies that shrink your potential market.
Emotional connection.
Creative work that makes people feel something. One campaign that lands is worth a hundred posts that don’t.
Peak experiences.
Making the moments that count, purchase, delivery, customer service, worth remembering.
Physical availability.
Making it absurdly easy to buy from you the moment someone decides they want you.
None of this will make quick headlines at a tech conference. All of it will grow your brand.
The Point
The trends will keep coming. AI agents, Web 4.0, quantum time-travel marketing, whatever’s next. Each will arrive with massive projections, stakeholder pressure, and examples of competitors diving in.
Most will fail. They’ll fail because they’re solutions looking for problems.
Meanwhile, the fundamentals will hold. People will still take shortcuts when making decisions. They’ll still buy what they remember when they need it. They’ll still respond to emotion over information. And they’ll still know when someone’s cutting corners.
Your job isn’t to predict what’s next. Nobody can do that reliably. Not consultants, not trend forecasters, not Zuckerberg.
Your job is to hold your nerve. To know your brand deeply enough to distinguish between a genuine opportunity and a distraction in a good suit. To invest in fundamentals while everyone else chases novelty. To build brands that last while others build campaigns that trend.
The platform changes. The psychology doesn’t.
Trust what you know.
This paper was produced by Wonderhatch. We’re a creative and production agency that builds brand strategy on evidence, not trends. If you want to talk about what the research means for your brand specifically, get in touch.
References
- DappRadar. (2023). Decentraland usage data: Daily active users and land parcel activity. Available at: dappradar.com
- CoinDesk. (2023). NFT market trading volume data 2021–2023. Litigation figures: Nike (RTFKT class action, 2023), DraftKings ($10M settlement, 2023), O’Neal ($11M settlement, 2023).
- Comscore / Search Engine Land. (2019). Debunking the “50% voice search by 2020” prediction. The original misattribution traces to a 2014 forecast by Andrew Ng, which was taken out of context and widely misquoted.
- Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know. Oxford University Press. Research conducted at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University of South Australia.
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work with Amos Tversky on judgement and decision-making.
- Goldstein, N.J., Cialdini, R.B., & Griskevicius, V. (2008). “A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels.” Journal of Consumer Research, 35(3), 472–482.
- Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA). Analysis of 996 IPA Effectiveness Award case studies from 700 brands across 83 sectors, spanning 30+ years.
- IPA Databank / Pringle, H. & Field, P. (2008). Brand Immortality: How Brands Can Live Long and Prosper. Kogan Page. Analysis of 1,400+ IPA Effectiveness Award case studies showing 31% profitability increase for emotional campaigns vs. 16% for rational.
- Zahavi, A. (1975). “Mate Selection: A Selection for a Handicap.” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53(1), 205–214. See also: Zahavi, A. & Zahavi, A. (1997). The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle. Oxford University Press.
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