Marketing in 2026: Between the Lines

McKinsey and Business of Fashion's State of Fashion 2026 report lays out the industry’s big structural forces: tariffs reshaping global trade, AI entering the shopping journey, mid-market acceleration, luxury recalibration, and wellbeing as a consumer priority. It’s a useful map of the system. But when it comes to marketing, the real shifts are in the subtext; in how value, desire, and trust are being redefined.

Here’s what sits between the lines.

Resource: The State of Fashion 2026 by BOF x McKinsey & Company

1. The Funnel Isn’t Dying, It’s Being Rewritten by Discovery

The report highlights the rise of the “AI shopper,” with generative tools becoming part of product search and decision-making. The interesting part isn’t that consumers ask AI what to buy; it’s that they offload filtering. Marketing used to be about visibility. In 2026 it’s about eligibility.

Consumers aren’t browsing; they’re refining. Brands are being sorted, compared, and contextualized by criteria they don’t fully control: function, quality, price, sustainability, taste, resale value, fit, mood, occasion. Discovery becomes infrastructure, instead advertising.

2. Price Has Become a Positioning Signal

McKinsey notes that consumers are becoming value-conscious, that the mid-market is accelerating, and that luxury is recalibrating. That’s true. But the deeper transformation is that price no longer describes the product; it describes the brand’s direction.

Price now signals strategic posture:

• confidence

• scarcity

• ambition

• maturity

• volatility

• or defensive tactics

When luxury raises prices without creative supply, consumers read it as inflation rather than aspiration. When mid-market elevates quality and retail experience, it’s read as competence. Marketing used to explain price; price now explains the brand.

3. Brand Equity Has Expanded Beyond Awareness

The old equation (awareness, preference, loyalty) feels insufficient for 2026. Brand equity now unfolds across three terrains:

1. Taste (cultural relevance)

2. Tech (discoverability and usability across interfaces)

3. Time (durability, resale, longevity of value)

This is why jewellery and resale outperform: they satisfy value, taste, and time simultaneously. And why luxury’s slowdown isn’t about saturation, but about the tension between price optimism and cultural fatigue.

Resource: The State of Fashion 2026 by BOF x McKinsey & Company

4. Luxury Is Moving from Status to Certainty

McKinsey describes a “recalibration” in luxury. That’s polite language for a deeper consumer shift: luxury purchases are no longer purchased for display; they’re purchased for reassurance. Certainty (in quality, craftsmanship, longevity, and cultural correctness) is the new status.

Luxury is being asked to justify itself again. Not loudly, but convincingly.

5. Marketing Has Quietly Become Operational

The report’s “Workforce Rewired” section focuses on productivity and talent. What it doesn’t emphasize is how deeply marketing now touches the operating system of a brand.

Marketing in 2026 influences:

• pricing

• merchandising

• demand planning

• discovery channels

• resale narratives

• customer lifetime value

• cultural positioning

It no longer sits at the end of the chain (“make people want it”), but at the beginning (“design the conditions under which it will be wanted”).

So What?

McKinsey maps the macro shifts. The marketing implication is simpler: The market rewards brands that help consumers make better decisions with less friction and less doubt.

2026 won’t belong to the loudest brands, nor the most innovative ones, but to the brands that are:

• semantically findable

• culturally legible

• economically reasonable

• and emotionally credible

The winners will feel obvious in hindsight; not because they shouted, but because they made sense.