Cornetto released their summer ad

As a brand strategist, I’ve been thinking about what emotional brand confidence actually looks like in practice after seeing a new Cornetto campaign where there wasn’t a single ice cream in sight — and yet it felt more like Cornetto than many ads that centre the product.

That’s not by mistake, it’s a positioning decision rooted in how brands occupy emotional territory. In brand strategy, we’re not just communicating messages, we’re shaping how human behaviour, memory, and perception form meaning over time. What this work does well is produce through emotional recall rather than product demonstration — the imagery, atmosphere, and scene don’t introduce the brand, they activate what already exists in memory.

That distinction matters, because some brands must lead with product clarity, like McDonald's where the product is the emotional experience, while others can step back because the emotional association is already culturally embedded. At its core, this is the difference between showing a product and owning an emotional space — and in brand strategy, recognition only happens when a brand is meaningfully present in human experience, not just visually present in communication.