The art of brand building in the age of AI

This article was first published on Consultancy.uk on July 6, 2026.

With over 20 years of marketing leadership across financial and professional services, Gabriela Henault, CMO at Third Bridge has deep expertise in brand strategy, digital transformation, thought leadership. She explains the secrets to brand building and reputation management, amid constant change from digital transformations and AI.

Marketing in professional services is increasingly expected to drive growth, not just awareness. How has the marketing model had to evolve to meet this challenge?

Honestly, the old days of marketing acting like an internal events or design agency are completely over. You can’t just make pretty collaterals, organize a couple of client dinners, and call it a day.

The biggest shift is that we’ve had to completely tie ourselves to the commercial teams i.e. account management and sales. This manifests in two ways. We’ve moved away from ‘just’ supplying them with collaterals, to adopting a mindset of co-owning business impact alongside them. We also no longer put generic, high level corporate messages out there to see what sticks. Instead, we look closely at who our clients and prospects actually are, what keeps them up at night, and how we can reach them with targeted messages through the right channels.

Marketing can’t just be about building "buzz" anymore; we have to ensure (and prove) that our work is actually bringing in new business and helping retain the clients we already have. It’s about being a true partner to the business, where success is measured by actual growth, not just brand awareness.

What are the biggest changes to marketing you’ve seen during your career?

Looking back over the last twenty years, two things really stand out to me: the fact that people don’t want to hear from a faceless corporation anymore, how much data and tech have changed the game.

When I started out, the corporate marketing team held all the keys to the brand. Now, the corporate voice frequently takes a backseat to our actual people. With employee advocacy, it’s our in-house specialists and front-line teams who build trust online by sharing their own genuine insights to their networks.

The second change is how data-driven and tool-enabled we’ve become. We used to rely a lot on gut feeling and anecdotal qualitative feedback from front-line teams. Today, by bringing our website management in-house and using tools like HubSpot, LinkedIn, Oktopost, and Gong we can see exactly what’s working. We can literally see if front-line teams are using new messages we push out - and what is working and what is not. We can also trace a client’s journey from a single social media click all the way to a signed contract. It has taken a lot of the guesswork out of what we do.

At Third Bridge, you’ve helped reposition marketing as a strategic commercial driver. What were the biggest challenges in making that shift, and how did you overcome them?

The toughest part was changing the internal mindset. In high-growth firms built on relationships, people often assume marketing is just a support function that makes things look nice. To break that stereotype, I knew we had to prove our worth with hard numbers, not just creative ideas.

We overcame this by getting close to our commercial leaders and listening to what they actually needed. We wanted to understand our clients’ real pain points and how our sales cycles worked. Instead of just asking for a seat at the table, we earned it by delivering results.

For example, when we relaunched our website and revamped our social media and email strategies, we saw organic traffic jump by 34% and generated hundreds of digital and email leads in just one quarter. Once the commercial teams saw that marketing was actually feeding them live opportunities, the scepticism completely vanished and we became true strategic partners.

How do you measure the commercial impact of marketing in a business where relationships, expertise and reputation are critical assets?

In a relationship-driven business, looking at traditional metrics like standard click-through rates doesn’t give you the whole picture. You have to look at how marketing supports the relationship over time.

I like to look at it through three main buckets:

1. Pipeline influence: We track how much of our traffic and client engagement is driven by marketing. For example, knowing that 45% of our website traffic comes via organic search, social media interactions, and direct brand searches, rather than paid ads, tells us our market footprint is strong, and our reputation is driving active, independent interest from clients and prospects.
2. Lead generation: We look at how many of the leads generated by our social and email campaigns actually convert into closed deals.
3. Lead nurture: We look at how much engagement our clients and prospects had with our social and email campaigns. If a prospect comes to a meeting already knowing who we are and what we do because they’ve been engaging with us online, marketing has done its job to speed up the sale or renewal.

Ultimately, it’s all about showing how marketing helps drive steady, long-term revenue growth.

Thought leadership remains a major investment area for consulting and advisory firms. What separates genuinely influential thought leadership from content that simply adds to the noise?

The simple answer is delivering distinct, high-value insight. The internet is absolutely flooded with generic corporate content that reads like a standard brochure and doesn’t actually say anything new. Truly great thought leadership must be tailored to a specific audience so the message remains sharp and directly relevant. It needs to have a clear point of view, take a stance, and address a concrete challenge or pain point that the reader is actively facing.

It also comes down to who is sharing it. Instead of publishing a massive, anonymous PDF from a corporate account, it’s way more powerful to let your employees lead the conversation. When you empower your internal experts to use their own voices and share their genuine insights online, that’s when you build real trust. It stops being just ‘noise’ and turns into a real conversation that gets people talking.

You’ve led marketing through significant periods of digital transformation. What are the most important capabilities marketing teams need to develop today?

Modern marketing teams need a real mix of skills. They have to be part analyst and part storyteller. You absolutely need people who understand technology, love data, and know how to target the right audiences.

But data and tech skills alone won’t cut it. Marketers today need to have strong business sense and a real curiosity about how the company actually makes money and how front-line teams operate. You need to understand the sales cycle just as well as the sales team does. On top of that, you need a lot of resilience and agility.

Digital platforms and algorithms change almost every day, so you have to be comfortable with trying new things, seeing what works, and quickly pivoting when things don’t.

AI is rapidly changing the marketing landscape. Where do you see the biggest opportunities for professional services firms, and where should leaders be cautious?

The biggest opportunity is our ability to personalize things at scale. AI lets us look at data to figure out exactly what kind of insights a specific client needs, right at the moment they need them. It also handles a lot of the repetitive, heavy lifting in our day-to-day operations, which frees up the team to focus on bigger strategic ideas and creative work.

Where we need to be really careful, though, is diluting the sharpness and relevance of our insights. Because AI makes it so easy to generate significant volumes of content, there’s a massive temptation to just pump out generic articles, which can quickly erode client trust. In our industry, your reputation and socialised human expertise are everything. If your entire digital presence becomes generalized and untailored, you lose the precise relevance that makes you valuable. We should absolutely use AI to streamline our operational processes, but we can’t let it replace the sharp, customized messaging and real human relationships that drive our business.

What advice would you give to aspiring female leaders looking to build influence and progress into executive positions?

First, lean into resilience and never stop learning. Throughout my own career, whether spending 13 years growing at a consultancy or starting my own business venture, the times I grew the most were when I stepped completely out of my comfort zone.

Second, make sure your work is tied directly to the commercial success of the business. Real influence comes from proving you can move the needle. Figure out what drives revenue for your company and make sure you can back up your achievements with solid data.

Lastly, focus heavily on building strong relationships with the people around you. This could be with your line manager, direct report or colleagues across the business. People easily forget that success is a team sport - your most important job is to ensure people want to help you do well. This is even more important when trying to progress into executive positions. True leadership isn’t about you; it’s about your team. Take the time to mentor others, help them grow in their careers, and give them the spotlight whenever you can. When you become known as someone who not only delivers great business results but also builds up the next generation of talent, you naturally set yourself up for executive leadership.