Marketing's involution and the new economic value of difference

In China, there’s a word that’s increasingly used to describe modern competition: Neijuan. It means ‘involution’, a system where everyone runs harder and harder for diminishing returns, where prices collapse, margins evaporate and competitive advantages decay faster than they can be defended.

If it sounds uncomfortable, it should. It would be easy to dismiss Neijuan as the bi-product of China’s industrial supremacy, deflationary pressure and ability to deliver world-leading innovation at extraordinary pace. But it’s starting to happen here too.

Les Binet passionately pointed out in the last IPA Effectiveness Group meeting that April 2026 was a hugely significant month for the industry. According to data from Circana, for the first time ever volume sales of own-label FMCG goods outstripped sales of branded goods, both in the UK and across most of Europe. This is not just the result of inflation, tighter household budgets or consumers trading down. It is a signal that competitive advantage itself is becoming more fragile. We’re experiencing our own marketing involution.

But hang tight, it’s a signal not a surrender.

Asking ourselves an uncomfortable question

What’s changing is the basis for competitive advantage that many brands have relied upon for decades. The operational and product superiority that has protected a brand’s position through scale, distribution, buying power and of course, creative and memorable marketing is now under threat.

As products become easier to replicate and distribute, perceived and actual quality gaps narrow which means value shifts elsewhere. Trust, memory, distinctiveness and cultural meaning become more important because they are the things that make it feel permissible to pay a little more for one brand over another.

So we need to look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves an uncomfortable question. Have we spent so long optimising the measurement of marketing activity that we have lost sight of the true measures of what made brands commercially valuable in the first place?

If the economics of competitive advantage are shifting, marketing’s field of view needs to shift with them. It is understandable that the intensifying economic pressures that bear down on clients and markets have made us grip even tighter to the metrics most comfortable within reach; familiar measurements become reassurance systems.

Systems tend towards the behaviours they reward. If our current systems of marketing measurement disproportionately reward what can be immediately captured, optimised and reported then effort naturally gravitates towards those short-term, highly attributable effects.

Breaking out of marketing’s restrictive field of vision

Our challenge remains that many of marketing’s most commercially significant effects behave differently from the metrics we have become most comfortable measuring. They compound slowly, shape future demand and influence resilience long before they appear neatly inside campaign windows or attribution dashboards.

Measures like pricing power, willingness to pay, perceived quality, preference and demand resilience will often tell us more about long-term commercial health than immediate response metrics ever could. When these measures are hard to determine, effectiveness risks becoming trapped inside marketing’s own shrinking field of vision.

Breaking out of that shrinking system starts with understanding the financial logic of clients’ businesses more deeply than ever before. It means knowing where value sits, what drives margin and what the market rewards. Because when most operational advantages become easier to replicate, investment has to move towards the things competitors cannot easily copy.

When most things can be copied, competitive advantage moves elsewhere. Distinctiveness, trust and memory become commercial assets because they sustain preference, reduce price sensitivity and protect margin over time. When competitors move towards parity, brands need to move ahead. We need to reframe effectiveness to reflect this basis of investment.

Focus on driving economic contribution, not response

We need to stop seeking ever greater sophistication in proving activity and refocus on the economic contribution of our creativity. It means looking beyond media efficiency alone and understanding the total economics of growth; martech stacks, AI tooling and tokens, human time, content creation and the sheer organisational effort to keep modern marketing systems running all contribute to whether marketing is genuinely creating value.

The question is no longer be whether marketing drove a response but instead whether it created economic value once the total cost required of producing and sustaining growth is accounted for.

Without intervention, complex systems naturally optimise towards lower energy states. It’s the equivalent of airport music: familiar enough not to offend, optimised not to distract but almost impossible to remember. Marketing is not immune from drifting towards the same state.

There is another uncomfortable irony sitting behind those own-label volume figures mentioned earlier. Many of the businesses manufacturing the products gaining share are often the very same companies producing the branded equivalents sitting beside them on shelf. Perhaps this is a signal that some manufacturers are choosing the shorter-term certainty of own-label production over the harder, slower and more expensive work of sustaining more profitable growth through marketing meaningfully different branded goods.

In a world where almost everything becomes comparable, the brands that survive will not be the ones producing the most activity. They will be the ones still worth paying more for once everyone else catches up.

The most important job of marketing will now be defending the value of difference itself.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.