Dynamic Adaptability: The New Imperative for Brand Growth

The year 2025 marks a watershed for brands and consumers. If 2024 was about upheaval and persistent, iterative disruption – from numerous critical elections to climate change and beyond – then 2025 is that on steroids. A year of unprecedented events and challenges, it demands new – sometimes radical – approaches for people and brands to survive and thrive.

Havas’ 2025 Meaningful Brands™ study, which launches today, reveals a fundamental challenge for brands: people wouldn’t care if 78% disappeared tomorrow. Apathy towards brands is big. And it’s growing, with this figure up 5% year-on-year.

This truth is inconvenient at best, but at worst it is an existential threat. Apathy can quickly flip to action following a negative experience. The risk of people switching or even cancelling a brand is high.

While apathy towards brands is a growing challenge, we find the opposite of this in people’s lives with the emergence (first identified in our 2024 report) and rise of personal agency, with people reclaiming control of their lives in the face of ongoing crises. In 2025, this sense of agency has evolved – with attitude giving way to action through greater intention, sharper choices, and more diverse expectations of brands.

But with people’s needs changing not just at scale but at pace, most brands are failing to keep up.

It’s not all doom and gloom: our research has identified a group of brands that have cracked the code and are thriving. Their dominant characteristic is dynamic adaptability.

These dynamic brands have a different relationship with people that shifts to meet and get ahead of people’s needs. While people are apathetic towards most brands, these dynamic brands matter to people. And they are thriving as a consequence, enjoying significant advantage over other brands across a range of KPIs.

These winning brands have cracked the code and are embracing behaviours of empathy, fluidity and agility. This emerging group of dynamic brands is next-gen: poised for the future and ready for change. They are already moving at pace with culture, consumer, and events. These brands are creating a new playbook for success in this tumultuous moment, and one to which other brands must pay close attention.

The key principles of this playbook are:

• Treat ‘brand’ as dynamic and fluid, rather than a fixed asset.
• Be open to dialogue – listening, learning and responding to what matters most to different people.
• Create the tools and means to empower people with personal agency.
• Speed up the cycle of listening, creating and executing at speed to dial up relevance.

Seventeen years after we first launched this exploration of the relationship between consumers and brands, we are seeing people think and act with greater agency, and with increasingly higher expectations of brands in response to the challenges and uncertainties that surround them.

If 2024 was about the emergence of personal agency, then 2025 is about the adaptability that brands must embrace to meet it. Dynamic adaptability is the new imperative for brand growth.

Download Havas’ 2025 Meaningful Brands™ studyhere.