Todd Irwin and Craig Bagno - Fazer

For thirty years, the rules of branding felt settled. Find a story. Tell it loudly. Make people feel something. Repeat.That era is over.On the latest Inspiring Futures, Todd Irwin and Craig Bagno of Fazer walked through what's actually replacing it — and the sequence is what makes it land.It starts with a flip. Brand used to be say, then do. Now it's do, then say. Customers experience the brand five times before they ever encounter the marketing, so the story has to be downstream of the truth.Which means storytelling isn't the currency anymore. Solutions are. The brands winning right now aren't the ones with the best narrative; they're the ones identifying a real customer pain point and solving it better than anyone else. Todd calls this depositioning, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's how Apple beat IBM. How the iPhone beat BlackBerry. How Blank Street is quietly eating Starbucks while Howard Schultz keeps trying to rebuild a world that no longer exists.And then AI enters the picture and accelerates everything. Buyers are starting decisions inside ChatGPT and Claude, not Google. The funnel is collapsing. The brand that shows up as the problem solver wins — and the brand that's just well-dressed gets skipped.Underneath all of it is Craig's bigger theory: that marketing has only ever had three eras, defined not by marketers but by infrastructure. We're in the third one now, and most of the industry is still operating like it's the second.The whole conversation reframes what brand work actually is in 2026.