Marketing’s had a good decade convincing itself that being remembered is the whole job. Own a colour. Own a sound. Say the same thing, the same way, for seven years, and let the neuroscience do the rest. It’s provable and we know it works, there’s no doubt about that. But that’s not the argument I’m trying to make here.

The argument is that plenty of brands have got very good at one half of the job and stalled on the other. 

Walk down most category aisles and you’ll find brands who’ve done their homework on mental availability; all recognisable, all present and still somehow interchangeable the second the price changes. That’s because being remembered was never going to be the reason someone picks you – it’s the reason they think of you at all. Different job.

The other job is meaning, and it doesn’t get built the same way. 

A brand can spend millions on a campaign, hit every reach and frequency target, and come out the other end having created no meaning whatsoever, because meaning was never a media problem to begin with. 

Meaning means having an actual point of view and being willing to hold it, even when it’s inconvenient. It’s emotion, and getting people to actually care about what you’re saying (or doing). But, it’s also a spine problem, and spines take a different kind of investment than your standard media plan.

The IPA’s own database backs this up with a huge sample. Binet and Field went through nearly a thousand effectiveness case studies, spanning 700 brands and 83 sectors, and found campaigns built on emotion produced substantially more brand and business effects than rational ones, and were close to twice as likely to deliver long-term profit growth. Thirty years of case studies tell us that meaning plays an important part in long-term brand building, only if you’re patient enough to let it pay out.

Unfortunately, at the exact moment SAMY’s 2026 global CMO survey found nearly half of marketing leaders now rank cultural relevance as the most effective way to connect with audiences, (ahead of creativity, creators and personalisation), plenty of CMO’s are still cutting that budget first while leaving the mental availability spend untouched. 

Not because anyone thinks meaning doesn’t matter. Because it’s the harder of the two to defend in a board meeting, and when the quarter’s tight the easier case wins, even if it’s doing only half the job.

So here’s where a lot of categories actually sit. Brands who’ve nailed recall and left meaning to chance, and a much smaller number who’ve gone hard on meaning and never quite got round to being easy to remember. Neither group is really finishing the job. Whichever half you skip, you’re leaving growth on the table for the competition to pick up.

The reason meaning keeps losing the boardroom argument isn’t that it’s weaker. It’s that memory’s had forty years of measurement behind it and meaning’s had none. 

You can put a number on recall in an afternoon, but try putting a number on whether anyone actually gives a shit about your brand and most measurement sections in EOC decks are left blank. So it gets treated as the ~vibes~ half of the business; the bit you can’t defend, and the bit that gets cut first when finance starts asking questions on where all that money and effort went.

That’s where the gap is in our industry. It’s not that meaning matters more than memory (it doesn’t, they’re not competing for the same job), it’s that one of them has always shown up on reporting dashboards and the other’s had to make do with a testimonial and a hope. 

For this reason, we built the Cultural Salience Index because we got tired of watching that argument get won by whichever half happened to have a number attached to it.

It doesn’t score one and ignore the other. It measures memory (how present, how recognisable, how easily a brand comes to mind) and it measures meaning right alongside it, with the same seriousness, on the same scorecard. 

Because a brand that’s everywhere and stands for nothing is just noise with good production values, and a brand that means everything but nobody can place is a brilliant idea nobody’s buying. Neither one on its own is a growth story but together, they are.

So keep building your distinctive assets. That work is real and it’s worth doing properly. Just don’t stop there and call it job done, and don’t let the fact that meaning’s harder to measure be the reason it never gets measured at all.

‍Want to check where your brand sits? Reach out to us at hello@hopefulmonsters.com.au to learn more about our Cultural Salience Index.