Marketing in the Age of Malaise: Brand Building in a Burnout Economy

You can’t out-campaign exhaustion. You can’t performance-market your way out of emotional fatigue. And you definitely can’t build a meaningful brand with a CMO shelf life shorter than pumpkin spice latte season.

Yet here we are. Consumers are exhausted. Employees are done. CMOs are spinning through org charts like a game of musical chairs, and somewhere along the way, the soul of brand building got left behind. Not because we don't believe in brand anymore, but because we're trying to build in a system that’s running on fumes.

We’re All Tired, Even Your Brand

Let’s call it what it is: we’re not just working in a down market. We’re working in a burnout economy. Customers are emotionally spent. Their attention spans are fractured, their trust is bruised, and their filters for bullshit? Stronger than ever.

Employees are silently disengaging behind Slack statuses and toggling between productivity hacks and existential dread. And marketers? We’re expected to drive growth, spark joy, speak 12 generational dialects, keep up with platform updates, and stay “authentic” while proving ROI in real-time.

All this while wrestling with shortened timelines, shrinking budgets, and leadership teams that still think that brand is a logo refresh.

Let’s Talk About the CMO Problem

Why is the average CMO tenure just 18 months?

That’s barely enough time to:

  • Learn the org culture

  • Rebuild the team that left before you arrived (or you fired because of delusions of grandeur)

  • Pitch your first strategy

  • Watch the CFO cut your budget

  • Update your LinkedIn headline

CMOs are expected to transform, perform, and conform, immediately. But meaningful brand building doesn’t work that way. It takes time. Trust. Internal alignment. Room to experiment.

Instead, CMOs are set up like guest stars on a reality show: high expectations, low control, quick exits. “You can’t build resonance if you're already prepping your resignation post.”

And sure, some of them are jumping ship for clout, comp, or chaos. But more often? They’re exhausted. They were hired to bring vision, then told to copy the competitor’s roadmap. They were asked to lead, then buried in dashboards and cross-functional turf wars. They were promised creative freedom, then handed a pile of pre-approved messaging from 2019…

…and now? They can’t even get on the exec team’s calendar because for some inexplicable reason, the person in charge of the brand still doesn’t have a seat at the leadership table.

This Isn’t Just Internal, It’s External

You can feel it and you can see it. The fatigue is baked into the brand and the audience knows it.

We’ve all seen the symptoms:

  • Recycled templates that read like a Canva graveyard

  • Rogue brand guidelines built in silos, slapped together under pressure because “leadership needed something by EOD”

  • Upcycled ideas from ex-creative directors trying to shortcut strategy with nostalgia
    Slogans that sound like ChatGPT on autopilot

  • A tone that screams “We’re cool, right?” while actually saying absolutely nothing

It’s not just bad branding. It’s exhausted branding. And it’s everywhere. The result? A sea of brands all blending together, hoping that performance media will save them from irrelevance. It won’t, so get it together. 

Empathetic Branding Isn’t Soft, It’s Strategic

In a world running on low battery, people gravitate toward brands that feel like relief. Not pressure. Not performance. Relief.

That means:

  • Less “grindset,” more grounded messaging

  • Less pop-up promo, more value-anchored storytelling

  • Less shouting “Look at me,” more asking, “How can I help?”

Empathy doesn’t mean your brand has to whisper. It means your brand has range. It knows when to show up with energy and when to simply hold space. It gets the emotional cadence of your customer and adapts to it, not around it.

Before You Even Say It: “Oh, but AI can solve our woes…” Nope.

Let’s be honest, some teams are hoping AI will be the silver bullet for burnout.

“Run it through ChatGPT!”  “Oh, just have the AI agent tool write the brief.” “Can Midjourney handle the campaign concept?” LOL

Sure, AI can raise your cognitive capacity. It can streamline production. It can help you move faster. But faster toward what? If your brand lacks vision, voice, or strategy, AI isn’t going to magically supply it. You’ll just end up publishing more of the same vanilla content that caused you to be ditched as a brand in the first place. AI amplifies what you feed it. If you feed it mediocrity, you’ll get automated mediocrity, at scale.

AI is a tool, not a compass. It can help you work smarter, not harder, but only if you’ve already done the hard work of defining your brand’s point of view. And without that? You’re just another brand drifting in the sea of sameness, faster than ever… with no real direction.

So, What Now?

If you’re building brand in the burnout economy, here's the reset:

  • Give CMOs the runway to build, not just perform

  • Stop chasing viral moments and build emotional consistency

  • Align leadership around a shared definition of brand value

  • Design for energy exchange, your brand should give, not just take

Because if you’re building something that’s supposed to last, it has to be sustainable, for your audience and your team.

Wrapping it Up

Brand building is not a hackathon. It’s not a sprint. It’s not another pitch deck with “authenticity” or “growth” slapped across every slide. It’s a long game. Built on connection, trust, and energy. And if everyone in your ecosystem is running on empty, your brand won’t just feel tired. It will be forgettable.

Brand, Leadership, MarketingMelissa Stefani BolinBrand, Marketing, LeadershipComment