BCG’s Latest Research: Two New Brand Communication Gatekeepers in Town
Boston Consulting Group's (BCG) latest research is unambiguous: brands must be discoverable, desirable, and trusted across the touchpoints that matter to consumers. The touchpoints just changed completely.
Forty-three per cent of consumers now research and compare their options before buying, and digital channels are outperforming traditional media in both information discovery and purchase conversion. This is not a generational quirk. More than half of Gen-Z and millennial journeys are research-led, and so are 42% of journeys among consumers aged 45 and older.
Two New Gatekeepers - Social Media and AI.
Social media has moved from a communication channel to a primary research channel, with 97% of internet users active on social platforms at least monthly. Depending on the category, 90% of consumers who engage with social media rank it among their five most influential touchpoints — well ahead of traditional media such as TV advertising. The bigger shift is what's happening alongside it.
The share of consumers using LLM tools for research has more than doubled in recent years, and 85% of consumers who interact with GenAI tools rank them among their top five most influential touchpoints in the purchase decision — on par with social media and significantly ahead of traditional media. Sixty per cent of consumers now say they trust AI-generated results, citing clarity and objectivity as the main reasons.
For any organisation still measuring visibility through website traffic and traditional media placement alone, this is the uncomfortable part: a growing share of your prospective customers are forming an opinion of you before they ever reach your website — based on what an AI system tells them.
What This Means in Practice
I have watched Romanian boardrooms treat "we're not really on social media" as a minor gap rather than a structural one. It is no longer. If a brand isn't discoverable, coherent, and credibly represented across social platforms and AI-generated answers, it is effectively invisible to a large and growing share of research-led buyers — regardless of how strong its traditional reputation is.
This is precisely why Lighthouse PR treats media relations, social media strategy, and reputation management as a single connected discipline rather than three separate service lines. The information an AI system surfaces about your organisation is shaped by the same media coverage, executive visibility, and online narrative that strategic communication has always been responsible for building. The channels multiplied. The underlying discipline didn't change.
The Leadership Question
Boards evaluating marketing and communications investment should ask a different question in 2026: not simply "how visible are we to customers," but "how would an AI system describe our organisation right now, and is that description one we would recognise or endorse?"
For most companies, nobody has actually checked. Lighthouse PR's approach — building a coherent, well-documented public narrative across media, social, and digital touchpoints — is precisely the groundwork that determines how a brand shows up when a consumer, or an AI, goes looking.
———
About the Author
Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.
Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.
About Lighthouse PR
Lighthouse PR is a leading PR agency in Romania that works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of business growth and business continuity services — always led by senior practitioners.
We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the CCNE, Europe's leading crisis communications network.
Lighthouse PR: Clear. Concise. Convincing.