Natalie Druion, Executive Head of Conversations at Momentum Group, says ‘I have been obsessed with stories for as long as I can remember. The longer I spend building brands, the more I realise this: a story told into silence is simply noise. It is the conversations that follow the response, the debate, the shared meaning that make a story matter.’
Right now the global marketing industry is gathered on the French Riviera for Cannes Lions, the biggest celebration of creativity our business has. Tens of thousands of delegates. Hundreds of stages. An ocean of rosé. And one question running underneath all of it: what actually makes creative work matter? Not reach. Not budget. Conversation.
It is telling that this year Cannes introduced a new Creative Brand Lion, rewarding brands that use creativity across the whole organisation to build lasting growth rather than chase a single campaign. Natasha Woodwal, the festival’s Director of Content, framed the 2026 programme around ‘new voices, new communities and new conversations’. The industry is finally naming the shift I have spent years living.
‘Most brands have mastered the telling, but very few have mastered the listening.’
We Are Drowning In Noise
The average consumer is exposed to thousands of brand messages every day. Across television, radio, social media, streaming platforms, outdoor advertising, and mobile devices, brands are competing for increasingly scarce attention, and yet many marketing teams still believe their campaigns are cutting through. Most are not.
We have become obsessed with reach, impressions, click-through rates, and conversion funnels. In the process, we have forgotten something fundamental: brands need to be interesting. Content has become wallpaper. Brands are talking. People are scrolling. The uncomfortable truth is that we have optimised ourselves into irrelevance.
The Creativity Crisis
Research tells us we’re born with 98% creativity. By adulthood, that number collapses to 2%.
Two percent. Somewhere along the way, marketing became less about curiosity and more about certainty. We stopped asking ‘what if?’ and started asking ‘what worked last quarter?’ The result is predictable. Much of today’s content looks the same, sounds the same, and delivers the same outcome: very little.
At the same time, people are engaging in thousands of conversations every day through WhatsApp groups, comment sections, DMs, podcasts, online communities, and face-to-face interactions. Yet many brands continue to treat their most powerful engagement channels as digital noticeboards. The opportunity is not to produce more content but to become part of the conversations people are already having.
Social Media Is Not A Billboard
Social media was never designed to be a broadcast channel. It is the world’s largest conversation platform. The brands winning today understand this. They are not asking, ‘How do we reach our audience?’ They are asking, ‘How do we create something with our audience?’ This shift represents a transfer of power.
Consumers are no longer passive recipients of marketing messages. They want participation, they want ownership, and they want to contribute to culture rather than simply consume it. The brands that understand this do not just build audiences. They build communities, and when communities reach scale, something more powerful emerges: fandom.
Fandom Is The New Brand Loyalty
Fandoms are earned, not bought. Think about the organisations and personalities that command extraordinary loyalty. They stand for something bigger than what they sell. Their communities share language, rituals, values, and identity. The same principle applies to brands.
Within Momentum Group, the #SheOwnsHerSuccess platform offers a compelling example. What began as a commitment to advancing women’s financial independence has evolved into a broader ecosystem of workshops, masterclasses, digital tools, funding initiatives, and resources. Its longevity has not come from a campaign budget, it has come from consistency.
People do not build emotional connections with campaigns; they build emotional connections with causes, communities, and convictions. Research consistently shows that younger generations increasingly expect brands to reflect their values and create opportunities for participation. For marketers, that represents one of the most underutilised opportunities available today. Building a fandom does not require massive budgets. It requires a clear point of view and the discipline to show up consistently over time.
Emotional Connection Is A Business Metric
This is where conversations become commercially valuable: when you analyse how people speak about a brand not just what they say, but how they feel you uncover insights that traditional performance metrics often miss. You begin to understand the anxieties, aspirations, frustrations, and victories shaping customer behaviour. You see the moments where trust is earned, strengthened, or lost. Tools such as sentiment analysis, topic mapping, and conversation monitoring are often viewed as reputation-management functions. In reality, they are empathy tools; they help brands understand context as they reveal where a brand can contribute meaningfully rather than interrupt unnecessarily.
Three Things Brands Need To Stop Getting Wrong
1. Stop Fence-Sitting
Brands cannot mean something to everyone. The organisations that create lasting relevance are willing to take a position. They understand their values, articulate them clearly, and consistently demonstrate them through action. Being brave does not mean being reckless. It means having the conviction to stand for something.
2. Stop Treating Communities Like Demographics
Audiences are not neat categories. The most vibrant communities are often complex, contradictory, and difficult to segment. They contain people with different motivations, identities, and perspectives. Brands that embrace that complexity build stronger relationships than those trying to force people into predefined marketing boxes.
3. Stop Broadcasting. Start Belonging.
The strongest communities are built through participation, they celebrate customer milestones, respond to content, invite collaboration and offer behind-the-scenes access. People do not want to feel like followers, they want to feel like insiders.
The Rise Of Smaller Communities
One of the most interesting shifts happening today is that meaningful engagement is increasingly moving into smaller, more focused spaces. Consumers are gravitating towards platforms and communities that feel more personal, more intentional, and more authentic. The success of platforms like Substack demonstrates this clearly. In a digital environment dominated by algorithms and endless feeds, people are actively choosing spaces built around direct relationships, trust, and shared interests. The lesson for brands is simple: meaningful engagement doesn’t require the largest audience; it requires the right audience.
Closer to home, Checkers Sixty60 demonstrates the power of this principle. What began as a grocery delivery service became something much bigger because customers genuinely loved the experience. The enthusiasm surrounding the brand wasn’t manufactured; it was amplified by people who felt emotionally invested in it. That is what happens when usefulness, consistency, and community intersect.
Five Principles For Modern Brand Builders
After years of building brand voices and managing conversations, five lessons continue to hold:
– Think like a producer. Consistency matters. Audiences love familiarity, provided it evolves over time.
– Act like a storyteller. Prioritise human moments over polished perfection. Authenticity is memorable.
– Edit like a detective. The strongest ideas survive scrutiny. Write freely, then refine ruthlessly.
– Experiment like a scientist. Protect a portion of your budget for testing. Innovation rarely emerges from certainty.
– Stay curious. Inspiration often comes from unexpected places. The most effective strategists remain lifelong students of people and culture.
The brands earning loyalty today are not necessarily the loudest, they are the most conversational. They understand that attention is earned through relevance, not volume. They recognise that community creates more value than reach. And they know that belonging drives behaviour more effectively than broadcasting ever could. The world is not getting quieter. Content volumes will continue to rise, and algorithms will continue to change. But brands that learn to listen, participate, and contribute meaningfully to the conversations shaping people’s lives will remain relevant long after the latest marketing trend has passed.
By Friday the Lions will be handed out and the Croisette will empty. The trophies matter for a week. The conversations a brand builds matter for years. That is the difference between winning a moment and earning a place in people’s lives. The rise of the conversationalist is not a trend; it’s a response to a world that has stopped listening to brands and started listening to each other.
MOMENTUM GROUP
https://www.momentumgroupltd.co.za/
