Hollow Awareness

In 1959, Volkswagen ran an ad telling Americans to “Think Small.”

This was the age of tailfins, chrome and Detroit excess. Volkswagen was selling a tiny, funny-looking German car. Doyle Dane Bernbach did not disguise the problem. It turned the problem into the point. The Beetle was small, inexpensive to run and almost defiantly unglamorous. The advertising made those qualities feel like evidence of honesty.

A few years later, Avis declared, “We try harder.” The line worked because Avis openly acknowledged that it was number two. Then it converted weakness into a behavioral promise: if it was not the market leader, it had to work harder for your business.

Then Wendy’s asked America, “Where’s the beef?” Beneath the joke was a product claim that competitors were selling oversized buns around undersized hamburgers.

These campaigns were memorable because the creative idea had something underneath it. Each was attached to a fact, product characteristic or behavior customers could test for themselves.

The advertising compressed evidence. That matters even more now, because awareness is getting cheaper. Belief is not.

Fame without weight

For much of the past century, modern marketing treated awareness as an obvious good. Mostly, it was. A familiar brand was more likely to enter the consideration set. A memorable campaign could lodge itself in a buyer’s mind long before purchase. Fame reduced the commercial burden of being unknown.

Hollow awareness is recognition without enough evidence behind it.

None of that has stopped being true. But knowing a company exists is not the same thing as believing what it says. A customer can recognize your logo, quote your slogan and understand your pitch without having much reason to trust you, choose you or pay more for what you sell.

That is hollow awareness: recognition without evidence behind it.

Kantar’s brand research has long separated salience from being meaningful and different. In one analysis of more than 5,000 growing brands, only about a quarter grew through increased salience alone, and those brands already had stronger meaning and difference.

Being remembered matters. But eventually the market asks a harder question: what exactly am I remembering you for?

Polish is cheap

For most of the media age, polished communication carried at least some signaling value. Producing a serious research report required researchers, writers, designers, money and time. Publishing thoughtful executive commentary usually meant somebody thoughtful had been involved somewhere along the line.

None of that guaranteed substance. It simply imposed friction on bullshit.

Generative AI is removing much of that friction. A three-person startup can now produce the apparent media output of a Fortune 500 communications department. An executive can publish daily without writing. A vendor can generate a 30-page “research report” without conducting much research. Every company can have a point of view on everything, whether or not it has earned one.

The result is a peculiar inflation: more signs of expertise, less value in the signs themselves. Good writing and design still matter. A great campaign can still change a business. But polish is weaker evidence than it used to be.

That matters especially in enterprise markets, where choosing badly can cost millions of dollars or derail a transformation program. Forrester has found that buyers are far more likely to recommend companies they trust and more willing to pay a premium to keep working with them.

Knowing a company exists is not the same thing as believing what it says.

Awareness means I know who you are. Trust means I'm willing to take a risk on the basis of what I believe about you.

Gartner reported in 2026 that 67 percent of surveyed B2B buyers preferred a sales-rep-free experience and 45 percent had used generative AI during a recent purchase. Yet 51 percent said they were more likely to encounter misleading information from GenAI, while 69 percent preferred to validate AI-generated insights with sales reps.

That tension is revealing. AI can make information abundant. It cannot make information trustworthy.

Judgment is evidence

The obvious response is to demand more proof. Yet marketing departments have a way of turning even good ideas into collateral. Evidence becomes another customer quote, another ROI statistic, another benchmark with a heroic upward-sloping chart.

Those things can help, but evidence is much bigger than data. A product that reliably does what the company says is evidence. So is a customer willing to describe measurable results, a methodology outsiders can inspect, independent validation, or a pattern of behavior that repeatedly confirms the company’s claims.

Judgment is evidence too. An organization that sees an important shift before others do is demonstrating competence. Same goes for a company that gives customers a way of understanding their market that proves useful later.

That's why genuine thought leadership can matter commercially. A 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn study found that 73 percent of decision-makers regarded an organization’s thought leadership as a more trustworthy basis for judging its capabilities than traditional marketing materials and product sheets.

The best thought leadership doesn't tell the market that a company is smart. Instead it lets the market watch the company think.

Compressed proof

This brings us back to Volkswagen, Avis and Wendy’s. The Beetle really was small. Avis really was number two. Wendy’s really did have a different product story around its beef. The creative worked because it was attached to something customers could test against reality.

Over time, strong brands do this at much greater scale. They compress enormous amounts of evidence into a name, symbol or expectation. You don't conduct a fresh investigation every time you encounter a company you trust, nor do you reconstruct every prior product experience, recommendation, review or interaction. Your mind does the compression for you.

Marketing is downstream from thought leadership. Before a company can promote an idea effectively, it needs ideas worth promoting.

The brand becomes shorthand for accumulated evidence. You see the name and retrieve an expectation.

That is why a strong brand can be so economically powerful. It carries accumulated trust into the buying decision, so customers don't have to re-evaluate the company from scratch every time. But that shorthand only works when the brand rests on real experience, performance and judgment.

Benetton showed how far attention itself could be pushed. Beginning in the 1980s, its “United Colors of Benetton” campaigns, developed under photographer Oliviero Toscani, increasingly abandoned conventional product advertising in favor of stark images about race, AIDS, war, religion and death.

The campaigns made Benetton one of the most talked-about brands in the world, but they also exposed the gap between attention and evidence. Benetton became culturally unavoidable without necessarily telling customers why its clothes were better or what durable expectation should attach to the brand beyond provocation itself.

Attention and evidence can travel together. They can also come apart.

Fill the brand

The strategic question for organizations is not simply how to make more people aware of their brand, but what that awareness should amount to. Claims about performance should lead to performance evidence. Claims about expertise should show up in judgment. Claims about where a market is going should be supported by ideas that survive contact with the future.

Narrative still matters. Positioning still matters. Creative still matters enormously. But they can't manufacture belief out of thin air.

In that sense, marketing is downstream from thought leadership. Before a company can promote an idea effectively, it needs ideas worth promoting. Before it can claim expertise, it needs to demonstrate judgment. The strongest marketing takes what an organization genuinely knows, sees and does differently and gives it reach, form and memorability.

Thought leadership, at its best, creates evidence of how the organization thinks. Marketing compresses and distributes that evidence so the market can understand, remember and retrieve it.

That may be the real brand challenge of the AI era. Machines are getting remarkably good at manufacturing awareness. The harder job is making sure there is something worth remembering.

Sources

• Volkswagen “Think Small,” Who Built America?

• Time, “Advertising: Trying Harder,” 1964

• Kantar, “Brands need to build more than just salience to grow”

• Forrester, “The Trust Advantage for B2B Firms”

• Gartner, B2B buyers and AI validation

• Edelman and LinkedIn, 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report

• V&A, “A short history of the poster”