By 2030, most interaction between brands and consumers is going to “bot-to-bot”. This was the stark prediction in WPP’s recent This Year, Next Year report. More telling still, 66% of the marketers surveyed believe this will be true.

That’s a future where algorithms talk to algorithms, where purchasing decisions are stripped of emotion and reduced to pure utility, where brand loyalty becomes as obsolete as the Yellow Pages.

But what if this widely accepted vision of our commercial future is fundamentally wrong?

I believe it is wrong. And I believe shopping lists show us why.

3,500 years of human behaviour can’t be wrong

The oldest recorded shopping list is from the 15th century and was discovered in Turkey. It’s a stone tablet in Akkadian, an extinct Semitic language, and it’s weirdly for an enormous quantity of furniture.

But it’s the modern shopping list that shows us how powerful brands are and how fundamental they are to people. Not because they are littered with logos and taglines, but because brands are so absent from them.

Most of the brands on our shopping lists are generic because we already know what brands we mean by those generics; we have a constant internal summary of which bread we like, which shampoo is good for our hair, which coffee we’ll buy when it’s full price and which we’ll buy when it’s on offer.

We have always carried our brands with us. They are part of what makes us who we are. And they don’t happen by accident. Brands are the result of investment, of nurturing, of choosing media and creative that can combine to create them.

But are brand building media’s skills still needed? As we head bot-to-bot, is there still any point in building a strong brand?

How to make smart budget cuts in times of uncertainty

A risky social experiment

We recently tested whether brands still matter. While the industry obsesses over chatbots and automated purchasing, we did something radical: we spoke to actual people.

Working with The Behavioural Architects, we designed a social experiment to understand what branding means, the implicit impact it has on our perceptions, and the difference it makes to our purchasing decisions.

Often, the connections we have with the things around us are so entrenched that they become subconscious – we only notice them when they have gone. Through depriving consumers of their most cherished brands, we could reveal how those brands bring meaning into people’s lives.

Some 16 participants – real people with real emotional connections to the products and services in their lives – completed a ‘life logging’ exercise designed to help identify which brands were the most pertinent to their lives.

Each recruit was then deprived of a couple of their most cherished brands for a week and sent a ‘substitute’ to use instead. In all cases, this substitute was the exact same product but cleverly disguised in neutral packaging – anything from tea to cleaning products to shampoo to breakfast cereal. The participants were unaware the products were identical and most assumed they had been sent a different brand to ‘test’.

The recruits filmed their thoughts and experiences across the week and were interviewed extensively before the experiment and afterwards.

Brands remain powerful tools for self-expression. They help us signal who we are, what we value, and which tribe we belong to.

The results were telling, compelling. It might sound a bit lofty, but brands give us meaning. Without their trusted markers of identity and belonging, our participants felt lost. They couldn’t navigate choices with confidence. They couldn’t express who they were through what they bought.

Lesley doesn’t just buy Yorkshire Tea; she relies on it for ritual and familiarity in an increasingly chaotic world. Melissa’s connection to Coke isn’t about taste; it’s rooted in family memories and shared experiences. These are the kinds of human truths no algorithm can replace or replicate.

More striking still was the visceral reaction to having the “wrong” brands imposed upon them. It wasn’t just disappointment; it was a disruption to their sense of self. Plus, the replacements tasted worse, didn’t clean as well… without the reassurance of brand, quality plummeted.

We witnessed how brands bring colour and connection to people’s lives, how they ‘anchor’ perceptions of quality. Participants were staggered to discover they had still been using their favourite products, but debranded. The experience had been so much worse.

The three pillars of brand relevance

As AI reshapes commerce, we should remember these three core reasons why brands continue to matter:

Stability – In a world of constant flux and uncertainty, brands offer familiarity and comfort. They’re the constants that help us navigate flux. When everything else feels unstable, that distinctive Warburtons packaging or the familiar taste of Heinz provides an anchor.

Identity – Brands remain powerful tools for self-expression. They help us signal who we are, what we value, and which tribe we belong to. In an age of increasing individualisation, this identity-shaping function becomes more valuable, not less.

Connection – The deepest brand relationships are built on genuine emotional bonds, often spanning generations. These connections are rooted in shared experiences, family traditions, and personal history – the kind of rich, contextual relationships that resist algorithmic replication.

Brand building is still crucial

If brands still matter – and they do, perhaps more than ever – then brand building is as important as ever.

This research also reinforced truths about how brands are built and sustained. While digital marketing excels at targeting and conversion, brand-building media creates the kind of broad, emotional associations that create lasting brand value.

In an AI-dominated future, this distinction becomes critical. Performance marketing may be increasingly automated, but brand building – the creation of meaning, identity, emotional connection – remains fundamentally human work requiring human insights and human creativity.

This doesn’t mean AI is irrelevant to marketing; quite the opposite. But it suggests we need to reframe how we think about AI’s role. Rather than replacing human connection, AI should amplify it. Rather than automating brand relationships, AI should help us understand and serve them better.

The future isn’t bot-to-bot; it’s AI-enhanced human connection. It’s using machine intelligence to deliver more personalised, more relevant, more emotionally resonant brand experiences.

The path forward

At this inflection point, the marketing industry faces a choice. We can chase the shiny promise of fully automated commerce, gradually stripping away the human elements that make brands matter.

Or we can use this moment to double down on what makes brands truly valuable: their ability to create meaning, express identity, and foster genuine human connection.

Brands still matter, perhaps more than ever. The question is whether we’ll have the wisdom to invest in them accordingly. In an age of artificial intelligence, the most intelligent strategy may be staying fundamentally human.

Elliott Millard is chief strategy officer at Thinkbox.