Here is an uncomfortable number for anyone responsible for brand protection: when consumers ask an AI tool about a brand, the brand’s own website supplies only 1–2 per cent of the sources the model cites. That finding sits at the centre of McKinsey’s State of the Consumer 2026 report, which maps four forces reshaping consumer behaviour — AI-mediated discovery, the health revolution, the experience economy, and the resourceful (resale-minded) consumer. Read it as an IP strategy document and one theme dominates: the channels are fragmenting, but the assets that travel across all of them are the ones you own. When an AI agent, a social platform or a resale marketplace sits between you and the customer, your trade marks, your distinctive get-up, your characters and content, and your control over how third parties present you are what remain. McKinsey’s standout example makes the point from the upside: Pop Mart converted a collectible character into what the report calls an intellectual property flywheel — blind boxes to theme park to merchandise — precisely because the underlying asset was owned, protectable and licensable across every new format.

The strategic implication is that brand equity now has to be engineered to stand alone, not assumed as a by-product of distribution — the same lesson the Bodum design case taught in When the Monopoly Ends, Your Shape Has to Stand on Its Own: distinctiveness must be deliberately built and evidenced before you need it. Three questions worth putting on the agenda this quarter. First, if an AI intermediary described your product tomorrow, is the information ecosystem it draws on accurate, consistent and shaped by content you control — and are your registrations broad enough to act when it isn’t? Second, does your portfolio cover the formats growth is moving toward — experiences, licensing, characters, collaborations — or only the products you sell today? Third, as resale and customisation become mainstream, do you have a position on what third parties may do with your branded goods, an Nike just tested in Nike Settles Trademark Dispute with The Shoe Surgeon? These are board-level questions, not filing-docket questions — the theme of Your IP Strategy Is Only as Good as Your Board’s Questions. The consumer is being re-intermediated. Companies whose competitive advantage rests on owned, enforceable, extensible IP will ride that shift; those relying on channel position will feel it first.