At the start of every year, the marketing industry engages in a familiar, high-stakes ritual: the prophecy game. The industry enters a season where charts flash, experts nod, and thousands of data points are flung across boardrooms like confetti.
However, as the stacks of statistics grow higher, I believe a critical gap is widening: the industry is drowning in data, yet we are starving for humanness. As marketers, that’s not just lazy, it’s lethal. The real revolution isn’t in the algorithms; it’s in reclaiming the messy, human truths they obscure.
For marketers to succeed in 2026, they must move past the data and reconnect with the human stories hidden beneath the spreadsheets. A growing trend of marketers are leading with metrics rather than insights, a practice that is a backwards bad habit.
Consumer patterns
In 2026, South Africa’s consumer patterns stare back at us with a haunting familiarity, but we seldom investigate the why. Numbers are excellent at telling you what is happening. They track clicks and carts with surgical precision.
But only people can tell you why those things happened. If we continue to lead with measurement, we are essentially trying to read a book by only looking at the page numbers.”
The real shift ahead for 2026 is not technological, but a return to a disciplined marketing sequence. Mxosa advocates for a four-step approach that prioritises observation over immediate measurement:
1. Observe
2. Understand
3. Describe
4. Measure
Asking the raw questions
Brands should move away from dashboard metrics and instead ask raw human questions that reflect the current South African lived experience.
The edge in 2026 will belong to brands that ask the difficult questions. We need to ask: Who is bleeding time or dignity for our stuff? Where do we gift back hours to a tired consumer? What ritual earns trust in the darkness of a blackout? What is our handoff when the national mood lifts or drops?
These aren’t data questions; they are human questions, and they will matter more than ever this year.
The 2026 mandate
As the industry prepares for a flood of tech-driven predictions, Penquin believes that the magic of marketing remains its ability to connect one human need to one human solution.
The real shift ahead is not technological, it is a cognitive one. If your 2026 plan is built solely on ‘what’ the data says, you aren’t marketing; you’re just accounting. To truly move the needle, we have to find the pulse beneath the percentage.” Ditch the backward habit. Observe first. The real story? It’s beating beneath the stats.
Thando Mxosa is strategy director at brand and communication agency Penquin.
