What’s Driving Results in Fashion and Beauty Marketing Today: Real-world views from those inside the industry

On February 25, 2026, Ekimetrics was pleased to host a private panel event called ‘The Future of Marketing in Fashion and Beauty’ in association with the French American Chamber of Commerce (FACC). Joined on the panel by leading media and marketing executives in luxury and fashion, we explored what’s driving results in fashion and beauty marketing today. Our resident sector expert and partner at Ekimetrics, Sona Abaryan moderated the conversation. Key takeaways:

‍

Fashion and beauty marketing is in flux

The US macro-economic environment, including rising customer acquisition costs and shrinking discretionary spending, is colliding with rapidly changing consumer behavior. The ongoing reduced attention across saturated channels, rise of LLMs and seismic shifts in consumer decision-making factors are making cut-through to the consumer harder to drive.

In the last year, inflation, tariffs and the impact on pricing in response have upended emotion as the primary decider of consumer purchasing, especially in luxury. Today’s consumers want to know deep, rational product information before parting with their hard-earned dollar. Emotion opens the door, and often closes sales too, but cold, hard facts about the composition of the product – including price – and side-by-side comparison matter more than ever in the final reckoning.

The collapse of the traditional marketing funnel

Brands need to communicate their value proposition more clearly at every stage and across every factor of consumer decision-making.

But consumer funnels are rarely more thana broad concept now. Discover-to-purchase intervals are rapidly shrinking while decentralized commerce is emerging and maturing as the likes of TikTok, Meta and ChatGPT push consumers to stay and buy inside closed ecosystems. But with the increase in consumer appetite for the detail, they’re also getting stuck in consideration mode.

To meet these challenges, all our marketing levers must work seamlessly across these different worlds, each optimized for their specific job but interconnected. Content must be optimized for LLMs. Websites must evolve into rich storytelling hubs, not just transaction endpoints. Product feeds must be shoppable in the right places. And still, we must balance long-term brand building that can still give an edge to a functional decision, with short-term performance.

But marketing budgets are finite, while making those investment decisions is infinitely more complex.

What helps us move the dial today?

Winning in this market requires both the emotional and rational. Emotional and rational consumer engagement – storytelling and product detail. Emotional and rational marketing decision-making – creative identity and optimization.

But let’s be clear, the emotional is fueled by the rational. This is not a math vs art conversation, but a question of how to blend the two to deliver the best commercial outcomes in both the short- and long-term.

Unlocking the full potential of creative

Just as AI is disrupting consumer behavior, it is also disrupting the creative process. As a creative tool, as an operational accelerator and as a means to understand creative and marketing effectiveness.

Increasingly, brands are developing AI-generated assets and then testing them with AI tools. What was once an expensive process that required early commitment to an idea now cycles through myriad options to deliver optimized assets. But it doesn’t mean emotional engagement in creative should be solely AI-generated and tested. Or that there is no place for taking creative risk.

Brands must exercise control and caution. The brief must be explicit in the desired goals – for example, “memorability” – and creative decisions must be grounded in experimentation and evidence. Where experimentation and measurement are also the route to taking and managing creative risk. The opportunity is immense. A recent Ekimetrics study with Google revealed that 81% of creative campaigns fail to follow best practices, yet optimizing could allow brands to double their ROI.

In our new AI-driven world, the role of the art director doesn’t disappear, but the opportunities to use AI to generate assets and optimize for audiences remain. In many cases, consumers are unable to distinguish AI-generated content. However, when it is perceived to be human-made (whether accurately so or not), engagement rates tend to be higher.

Trust now must be an explicit pillar of marketing. For example, content is insatiably demanded by LLMs, where volume and variety matter, but it must uphold the brand’s values and positioning. Increasingly, brands will be judged on whether they use AI with integrity and clear guidelines; AI slop won’t be tolerated long-term.

The strategic role of pricing

Elsewhere, we know that, done well, price and promotion can contribute more to incremental revenue than media. But they can also bring the biggest risk. Over 70% of consumers say that “sudden or excessive” price increases negatively affect their perception of a brand. At the other end of the spectrum, heavy discounts may drive short-term sales but erode margin, brand equity and long-term business value.

Pricing must now take center-stage as a strategic lever with marketing’s role clear: marketing contributes considerably to elasticity. It is marketing that tells the brand story. The stories of attributes such as quality, craftsmanship, and trust. These stories support perceived value, and the price consumers are willing to pay.

That’s why pricing conversations must be three-way: the CFO, focused on margin; the merchandizing / product team, looking in detail at the assortment strategy to drive sales and margin; and the marketing team, armed with the data to show sales, margin and where there is potential for elasticity. How to walk the fine line that supports long-term performance with each customer segment.

A new world of decision-making

Fundamentally, marketing teams will be about more deciding and less about doing. Which means they need a closed loop of insights to ensure intentional movement over reactive tinkering.

As our marketing ecosystem continues to evolve and fragment at an exponential pace, they must be both agile and data-literate. They need a grip on the big picture of budget allocation and the ability to make micro-optimizations on a daily basis. Which means understanding the components of demand and how and when to drive them through the right investments. A clear structure on how you measure impact for your organization – both the metrics and the tools – is a pre-requisite in modern marketing.

The tools must be able to understand the whole, including pricing and creative, and how each lever contributes to commercial value within the macroeconomic context. Which is why Marketing Mix Modeling is now the tool of choice, central to a unified view of performance.

Five key takeaways

1. The collapse of the marketing funnel and consideration mode inertia means it’s more important than ever to balance both brand and performance – chasing short-term growth only won’t deliver long-term brand health.

2. AI is not just disrupting how we develop creative ideas and assets, but how we test and measure creative effectiveness too, bringing real opportunities to unlock the full potential of creative and support emotional engagement with rational decision-making.  

3. Pricing often excludes marketing teams yet it is marketing that supports price elasticity. A three-way conversation between the CFO, product / merchandizing and marketing ensures sales, margin and long-term business value are considered and optimized.

4. We’re in a new world of decision-making. Be clear about the role of each channel within the whole ecosystem and optimize accordingly. And be clear about the changing role of marketing teams and the switch from doing to deciding.

5. To win today, quantify brand equity, creative effectiveness and pricing in a holistic measurement capability to truly drive results and ensure long-term commercial performance.

‍