Senior marketers spend careers telling the world why brands matter. But as we sit down to Thanksgiving, it’s worth asking a more uncomfortable question: If your brand were a guest at the table, would people be genuinely grateful it came…or just tolerate it because it brought a discount code?
Brands are now baked into the macro story. Consumer spending still makes up more than two‑thirds of U.S. GDP, driving the majority of real growth in recent years. Adobe forecasts that U.S. online holiday sales will hit roughly 253 billion dollars this season, with ten separate days topping 5 billion dollars each. Cyber Monday alone is expected to generate about 14.2 billion dollars and Black Friday 11.7 billion dollars in online sales. This isn’t a side dish; it’s the main course of the modern economy.
When Brands Earn Their Seat (and Budget)
From a CMO lens, there is a real case for gratitude:
- They upgrade lived experience. AI-assisted shopping and meal planning are exploding; one forecast expects AI-assisted holiday shopping activity to grow more than fivefold, as consumers use it to research, compare, and personalize purchases. The same engine that powers “one-click excess” is also what lets a stressed parent pull off a plant-based, allergy-friendly Thanksgiving without burning their career—or the turkey.
- They build real communities. The strongest brands convert distribution into meaning: Patagonia-as-uniform for a certain worldview, Spotify Wrapped as an annual ritual that prompts millions of people to share identity through data. At their best, these brands create micro-communities that feel more coherent than many legacy institutions.
If you run one of these brands, your marketing budget is not a “nice-to-have”, it’s oxygen
When Brands Are Just Beautiful Extraction Machines
But senior marketers also know the darker side better than anyone:
- We’ve industrialized the dopamine hit. Adobe expects 17.2% of all online holiday spend to happen in Cyber Week, with BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) alone accounting for over 20 billion dollars in November–December transactions. That is a behavioral engine at full throttle. Are we proud of the experience design when we look at the downstream reality of debt stress, clutter, and regret?
- Purpose vs. performance theater. While we celebrate “brands with purpose,” Feeding America’s latest analysis suggests nearly one in five children in the U.S. lives in a food-insecure environment, with some counties approaching 40–50% child food insecurity. We’ve built a system capable of moving 253 billion dollars of online holiday spend, but not one that guarantees basic nutrition. That gap is not lost on increasingly cynical consumers.
- We colonize culture. As every human moment becomes a monetizable touchpoint, rituals risk feeling more like campaign extensions than lived culture. When AI-generated holiday content, branded “gratitude challenges,” and shoppable livestreams crowd out actual human connection, are we amplifying meaning, or strip-mining it?
This is the part nobody admits on stage at Cannes, but every seasoned CMO recognizes off-mic.
The Real CMO Question: Who Would Miss You?
So, should we be thankful for brands? As senior marketers, maybe the sharper question is:
If your entire brand and marketing budget vanished tomorrow, who outside your company would actively fight to bring it back?
Some prompts to test your own brand:
- Can you prove—with evidence, not anecdotes—that your brand creates net-positive value for people and communities, relative to the economic and environmental load it adds?
- How much of your growth story is genuine value creation versus increasingly sophisticated attention capture, algorithm gaming, and financial engineering (BNPL, promos, data arbitrage)?
- If you had to justify your brand’s line on the P&L and balance sheet in a hard-nosed budget meeting, could you show that the world is measurably better with your brand than without it?
This Thanksgiving, name one brand you believe genuinely deserves gratitude at scale and one that, if you’re honest as a CMO, has built a stunning growth engine on a pretty thin layer of real human value.
And for your own brand: what’s one decision you can make in 2026 so that next year, people wouldn’t just notice if you were gone, they’d feel the loss?