Why LinkedIn is amplifying dangerous marketing myths at scale

This is not a post about marketing theory. It is a post about a specific and observable thing happening on LinkedIn right now that is risks costing businesses real money, and I want to describe it precisely.

A post goes up making confident claims about marketing. “Brand is dead. Everything should be measurable and attributed to the £1. Performance is the only thing that matters”. The post sounds credible. It is written with conviction by someone with a large following.

The comments fill up. Hundreds of them in many cases. They sound informed. They read as consensus. The algorithm interprets this as meaningful engagement and distributes the post to a wider audience of people who again largely don’t have the context to push back.

A significant proportion of those comments were generated by AI. Not maliciously. By people who found the post persuasive, wanted to engage and used the tool that produces ‘engagement-shaped text’ quickly and easily. The AI reflects the post’s argument back in slightly different words. It sounds like an informed professional agreeing. It is indistinguishable at the algorithmic level from a genuine considered response.

The result is that the system amplifies confident wrongness at scale and presents it as professional consensus. The junior marketer reading it has no reason to doubt it. The CMO going into a budget meeting has less ground to stand on because the CEO has spent the week absorbing it.

Nobody made the misinformation worse on purpose. The incentives of the platform, the accessibility of AI writing tools and the entirely human tendency to agree with things that sound authoritative combined to produce an environment where commercially dangerous ideas get significant reach and solid commercial counter-arguments have to fight for attention.

This matters beyond professional pride. It matters because some of those posts are influencing real budget decisions in real businesses with real consequences for the people inside them.

1. What happens when businesses cut brand investment for performance-only marketing

The argument for going performance-only is superficially compelling. Everything is measurable. Every pound can be attributed. You can see exactly what you’re getting and cut what isn’t working.

What this misses is why the performance numbers were as good as they were.

Performance marketing reaches people who are already in the market, already considering a purchase, already aware of the category. It is efficient at capturing that existing demand. But it does nothing for the significantly larger proportion of your potential market that isn’t ready to buy today.

Brand does the work in that space. It builds the familiarity, the trust and the mental availability that means when those buyers do eventually reach a decision point, your name is already in the frame. You are not starting from scratch in that conversation. You are already ahead of it.

2. The hidden cost of the performance-only pivot

Remove the brand and the performance channel still works, for a while, on the buyers who were already warm. But the pipeline that feeds it stops being replenished. And that is when the numbers start to move in the wrong direction.

Sometimes in twelve to eighteen months. Sometimes in a month, when large pools of buyers who were quietly converting because brand was warming them while performance was harvesting them suddenly stop converting and nobody connects the collapse to the decision that caused it.

The CAC climbs. The sales cycle stretches. Prospects sit in the pipeline going gradually off the boil because the prior awareness that would have shortened their journey was never built. And the position can be very expensive to recover. Some of the ground conceded to a competitor while you were dark doesn’t come back when the budget does. Customers form habits. Competitors compound. Some of it doesn’t shift back.

3. The underresourced marketing team: doing more with less and paying the price

When brand investment gets cut, there is almost always a marketing team who saw it coming.

Who made the case. Who explained the risk. Who lost the argument and then had to manage the consequences of a decision made above them, with reduced resource, across a remit that was already broader than it should have been.
The breadth and depth of what modern marketing teams are expected to cover is, in many businesses, genuinely eye-watering. Strategy, content, digital, brand, campaigns, sales enablement, data, customer insight, events, social, internal communications, and increasingly the expectation that AI tools will somehow make all of this manageable with fewer people.

These teams are expected to justify what they are doing in a way that is simply not asked of any other function. Nobody asks the finance director to explain why the business needs accounting. Nobody asks the operations team to prove the ROI of having an operations function. But marketing? Justify the spend. Prove the attribution. Explain why brand matters. Again. In a slide. By Thursday.

They were put there to do the job. They should be trusted to do it.

I have been fortunate in my own career to work with leaders who understood this. But I am hearing the other version constantly, at events, on LinkedIn, and in calls from former colleagues who are genuinely burnt out. Talented, experienced people carrying impossible remits and getting very little recognition for the fact that they are still standing.

4. Brand is not a logo, and confusing the two is costing companies

There is one more thing worth addressing, because it underlies everything else and it is, in my experience, still surprisingly widely held.

Brand is not a logo.

The logo is a mark. It is the flag you plant on territory you have or are earning. The brand is the territory: what a customer believes about you before they meet you, the reputation that precedes you, the accumulated commercial value of every interaction and every impression over time.

When a business invests in a new logo without doing the brand strategy work underneath it, it has bought a new flag and planted it on ground it hasn’t earned. The flag looks nice. The territory is unchanged.

Brand strategy is the work that establishes who you are, who you are for, what you stand for and why that matters to the specific people you are trying to reach. It is not a creative exercise. It is a commercial one.

5. Why brand strength is now the single biggest factor in AI-powered search

AI is changing how buyers find businesses. Not overnight, and not in the way the breathless posts suggest. Search remains significant, and much of what constitutes good SEO practice translates well to performing in AI retrieval too.

What has changed is the weight that brand carries in that environment.

When a buyer asks an AI platform for a shortlist, the response is shaped by what the AI associates with authority, credibility and relevance, the kind of reputation that accumulates through consistent presence, credible content and a clear point of view communicated over time.

You cannot buy your way into an AI recommendation the way you could once buy a ranking. The businesses that appear in those responses will appear because they have genuinely earned the authority the model has learned to associate with their category.

This is the urgency you can see coming and the inertia you are working against. The businesses that act on this now will arrive in that environment already trusted and already visible. The ones that wait will be starting from behind.

Brand is not just how you are perceived today. It is whether you get recommended tomorrow.

6. "The evidence for long-term brand investment is unambiguous"

The evidence is not ambiguous. It spans decades of research across multiple categories and multiple geographies. It points consistently in the same direction. Businesses that invest in brand through downturns recover faster and grow more than those that don’t.

The marketing team in the room already knows all of this.

The least the rest of us can do is stop amplifying the posts that made it easier to ignore them.