Romania now spends between 22 and 30 per cent of its digital marketing budget on influencers, more than three times the 4 to 7 per cent typical across the rest of the European Union. The local market has grown from roughly €18 to €23 million in 2020 to an estimated €112 million in 2025, with over 8,200 companies running influencer campaigns and around 55,000 creators actively collaborating with brands each month.

That is not a niche tactic anymore. It is where a meaningful share of Romanian marketing spend now lives.

Every CEO thinks their job is strategy, numbers, and operations. It is, but it is also something less comfortable for most of them: storytelling. The CEO sets the vision, frames the case for customers, and carries that same narrative both inside the business and out to the world.

If the story is muddled, confused, or simply absent, everything built underneath it wobbles, no matter how sound the underlying strategy actually is.

Years ago, a colleague of mine decided to become the first-aid representative for our entire floor, a hundred people. She attended every class and earned her certification.

A month later, a man at the next desk had a heart attack. She did not calmly step in. She ran around the office for a good ten minutes, telling everyone not to panic and repeating that she was the trained first aider for the floor, while doing nothing actually to help him.

The certificate was real. The competence and mental resolve that it was supposed to represent were not there when it mattered.

Istanbul is a wonderful city for many reasons, but it is also famous for counterfeit goods. Walk through the Grand Bazaar, and you can buy a "Rolex" for a hundred euros or a "Birkin" for fifty. The stitching is close. The logo is close. For a while, it works.

Then the clasp fails, or the leather cracks, and the truth comes out.

Forrester's 2026 predictions contain a number that should make every digital-first marketer pause. A third of consumers will actively choose offline brand experiences over online ones. Fed up with AI-generated everything, people are increasingly choosing to disconnect online to connect offline.

According to Forrester, 52% of online adults are actively pursuing in-person, tactile experiences, driven by a desire for richer, more sensory interactions that digital channels cannot replicate.

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.

Accenture surveyed 3,650 C-suite executives and 3,350 workers across 20 countries. The findings expose a gap that should worry any leadership team.

Executives enter 2026 confidently. But confidence at the top is not the same as readiness at every level of the organisation. Accenture's data makes the disconnect explicit: skilling programmes alone are not building trust, and the biggest barrier to realising AI's value is no longer the technology. It is bringing people along the journey.

Bain surveyed more than 1,100 senior executives across 18 industries for its 2026 B2B Growth Agenda report. One number stands out above the rest: only 4% of leaders say their organisation has a clearly differentiated value proposition.

Not "struggle to communicate it". Not "could be sharper". Only four per cent could actually articulate why a customer should choose them over the competitor.

Something has changed in how buying decisions are made. And most businesses in Romania haven't noticed yet.

PwC calls it agentic commerce. An AI agent — acting on behalf of a consumer or a procurement team — researches options, compares providers, evaluates trust signals and, increasingly, completes the transaction.

PwC is unambiguous: "Success in agentic commerce means becoming the top recommendation – we explain how to achieve that.

Nobody told me when I took my first CMO role that the job was essentially relationship management. Attracting new customers is seduction. Keeping existing ones is marriage.

And handling a crisis—a product failure, a service breakdown, or a pricing miscalculation—is the argument that either ends the relationship or, handled well, makes it stronger than before.

The kissing-and-making-up part is well worth it.

McKinsey doesn't say things quietly. So when its State of the Consumer 2026 report tells brands to strengthen public relations, keep messaging accurate and consistent across platforms, and show up in the forums where people already talk about them—that's not a trend piece. That's a strategic directive from the world's most influential management consultancy.

The reason is AI search. And the implications are significant.

Most corporate social media is failing. Not quietly — visibly. Companies post daily, track engagement metrics, hire agencies, and wonder why none of it moves the business forward.

The reason is simple. Traditional corporate social media tries to build trust through branded channels. That no longer works. Audiences don't trust brands. They trust people.

These three strategies consistently deliver results. Not theoretically. But measurably.

Impressions are easy to count. Reach is easy to report. Follower growth looks encouraging in a bar chart and requires almost no analytical discipline to present. These are the metrics in the majority of marketing and public relations reports produced in most organisations – and they are, with rare exceptions, the wrong metrics.

Not because visibility doesn't matter. It does. But visibility that doesn't connect to a commercial outcome is not a marketing achievement. It is an activity log with good graphic design.

There is a number that should stop every business leader in Europe cold. According to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, seven in ten people are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, approaches, or backgrounds.

We have moved, in the space of five years, from fear to polarisation to grievance to insularity.

And business is caught in the middle of all of it.

The Lighthouse PR group of companies closed 2025 with an 85% increase in turnover compared to 2024, reaching €550,000. The result marks an important milestone in the group's development and reflects the consolidation of a business model built on consultancy, high added value and long-term partnerships.

Lighthouse PR currently works with businesses in dynamic, competitive industries, including financial services and crypto, technology and cybersecurity, energy, retail and FMCG, industrial manufacturing, and transportation and logistics.

A marketing campaign has a timeline: weeks of briefing, concepting, scripting, shooting, editing, reviewing, approving, and scheduling. A CSR project runs for months — the research, the partnerships, the content, the launch event, and the follow-up coverage. Even a straightforward social media post moves through creation, review, and sign-off before it reaches an audience.

These are reasonable timelines for reasonable circumstances. But it is an absolute luxury to have a timeline for dealing with a reputation-damaging incident.

There is a question I ask every new client before we discuss anything else: Show me your crisis preparedness programme. Not the document — the programme. The training records, the simulation results, the spokesperson assessment, and the stakeholder communication protocols have been tested under pressure rather than drafted in a meeting room.

Most organisations approach risk assessment the wrong way. They build lists of what has gone wrong for others, apply a traffic light system to each item, present the matrix to the board once a year, and consider the exercise complete.

That is not risk assessment. That is risk documentation — and there is a significant difference.