Brand Pillars Are Starting to Beat the Trend Cycle

TL;DR

• Evelyn & Bobbie named three brand pillars competitors can’t copy: consumer-generated content over influencers, six industrial patents on bra design, and a founder story
• Bradshaw Home runs specific, category-level messaging across thousands of SKUs instead of one broad pitch, using multiple exposures to tell the fuller story
• Watering a message down to appeal to everyone erodes both distinctiveness and credibility
• Standard measurement, including ROAS, consistently understates the value of brand investment, which makes the case to finance harder but no less necessary
• The panel’s best advocacy wins, real customers as fit models, an unpaid celebrity fan turned affiliate, came from brands that already knew what they stood for

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Every brand can jump on a trend this week. Fewer can explain why they shouldn’t.

That tension ran through eTail Boston 2026’s “The New Era of Storytelling” panel, where four brand leaders argued that the real challenge in content right now isn’t creative execution. It’s restraint. Tell a specific enough story and you narrow your audience. Water it down for everyone and you stand for nothing at all.

The panel, moderated by Jamie Bolton, Chief Strategy Officer at Fospha, brought together Jodi Sittig, former CMO of Evelyn & Bobbie; Rachel Sorkin, VP of Brand at M.Gemi; Karen Schnelwar, SVP Brand Strategy & Marketing at Bradshaw Home; and Meredith Holder, CEO of Fracture.

Pillars outlast the moment

Sittig’s clearest example came from Converse. Unable to run a traditional photo shoot during the pandemic, the brand cast a global community of athletes, artists, models, and DJs and put them in front of and behind the camera. What started as a workaround became a philosophy. “It’s not really a campaign,” Sittig said. “It’s a way of doing business.”

She carried that philosophy into Evelyn & Bobbie, where the wire-free bra category has gotten crowded fast. Rather than chase every new entrant, the brand named three pillars it could defend and no competitor could copy. Customer-generated content took priority over paid influencers. Six industrial patents on bra design, the first the category had seen since the 1930s, backed up the innovation claim. A founder story rooted in her own frustration with the industry gave the brand a reason to exist beyond product. Sittig’s advice for other brands was simple. Don’t chase competitors. Look internally at your own brand instead.

Rachel Sorkin backed the same instinct from a different angle. “Jumping on trends, they’re cheap tricks,” she said. “Anyone can jump on a trend and get a bunch of views one day.” The payoff comes from tying a moment back to the brand’s actual story, not from the moment itself.

Multiple exposures can carry one identity

Schnelwar is living this trade-off in real time. Bradshaw Home’s portfolio spans thousands of SKUs across categories, and the media plan she’s built runs specific, category-level messages with enough repetition that the fuller brand story still comes through. Talk only about cookie sheets, she said, and the brand looks like it only sells baking products. The fix is deliberate. Individual, specific messages run often enough across categories that they add up to something bigger than any single one.

She named the opposite failure mode too. “If you water yourself down and try to be all things to all people, you won’t stand for anything,” she said, “and your appeal will shrink, as well as your credibility.” Sorkin’s own example made the same point from the product side. A backpack she personally used for three years became, without any repositioning, the go-to diaper bag for a wave of mom creators, precisely because it wasn’t designed to look like one.

Schnelwar borrowed her reference point from theater rather than marketing, a line from Hamilton about standing for nothing and falling for anything. Digital trends, she argued, are where brands are most at risk of doing exactly that.

The core doesn’t move

One question tested every panelist. How do you hold onto authenticity when the term itself keeps shifting? Schnelwar’s answer separated two things that get conflated constantly. Messaging, campaigns, and communication all change over time. What a brand is at its core does not, and that core should filter every decision rather than the trend of the week.

Holder pushed the idea further by distinguishing what’s authentic to a brand’s identity from what feels authentic to the consumer, since the two aren’t always the same thing. Fracture serves buyers across an elevated wedding gift and an inexpensive Father’s Day present, so the brand has to stay broad enough for both audiences without losing its center. She called it more art than science, reading consumer insight to find where the brand map can flex and where it can’t.

Measurement is where belief gets tested

If the first half of the panel was about knowing who you are, the second half was about proving it works. Holder said standard measurement misses this entirely. “Even ROAS doesn’t equal ROI,” she said. Fracture leans on branded search, engagement trends, and awareness tracking that requires real patience, since none of it ties directly to sales in the short term.

Schnelwar named the real obstacle. The industry got addicted to false precision in performance attribution, and it’s living with the fallout now. Her fix isn’t a better dashboard. It’s a different conversation with finance, built around risk versus reward over a longer time horizon, brand-lift analysis, and leading indicators rather than immediate revenue. Bolton described the pattern the panel returned to from a different angle each time. Brand spend is slow on and slow off. It takes six to ten months to become profitable, and cutting it early can look fine right up until the foundation starts to crumble.

What this means for senior marketers

The panel’s advocacy stories reinforced the same discipline. Sittig’s fit models at Evelyn & Bobbie are customers, not agency talent. Holder’s biggest recent affiliate win started with an NFL commentator who spent $20,000 of his own money on Fracture product before any partnership existed. Neither moment came from a media plan. Both came from brands that already knew what they stood for well enough to recognize an authentic fan when one showed up.

Trend-chasing is available to every brand in every category. What a competitor cannot copy is the only advantage that lasts.