There are interviews where people answer questions.
And then there are interviews where someone quietly opens a trapdoor under the entire marketing industry and politely invites everyone to look down.
At the BPX event in Brussels, under the cheerful and slightly ominous title It’s a Brand New World, I sat down with Fons Van Dyck. For the three people in Belgium who may not know him: more than thirty years in marketing, branding and communication, professor at VUB, author of several books on brand strategy, consumer behavior and the strange little theater inside people’s heads where choices are made long before PowerPoint arrives with a segmentation model.
Fons has the dangerous habit of being calm while saying things that should make marketers spill their coffee. We talked about brands. Obviously. We also talked about consumers, media, young people, fear, nostalgia, AI, trust, data, authoritarian temptation and the peculiar Belgian ability to turn every social shift into a multilingual operational puzzle. You know, light lunch material.
The central idea was simple enough to fit on a coaster and uncomfortable enough to ruin a board meeting:
“We are in a change of era, not an era of change.”
That one line earned its keep. Brands are no longer operating in a period of open optimism. The consumer has changed because the world around the consumer has changed. The mood has hardened. The future feels less like a promise and more like a threat with a subscription model.
From exploring to defending
For years, brands lived comfortably in the language of openness. Explore, connect, include. Belong. “Yes we can.” “Connecting people.” Everyone can be an athlete. Everyone belongs. The 1990s and early 2000s gave marketing a beautiful emotional climate: expansion, tolerance, diversity, curiosity, social connection, digital innocence before the platforms ate the furniture and monetized the curtains.
That world is not gone completely. Nothing ever disappears completely, except perhaps decent attention spans during a Teams call. But the dominant current has shifted.
Fons works with four enduring forces that drive human behavior: exploring, connecting, conquering, defending. Three years ago he predicted in his research that the balance would tip. The BPX study, he said, confirmed it.
“Conquering and defending are becoming dominant. That does not mean exploring and connecting are gone, only that they are now moving against the current.”
Translation for the boardroom (where the new vocabulary still needs landing): the consumer is not simply looking for novelty anymore. The consumer is asking, often silently, will this protect me, my family, my status, my identity, my money, my neighborhood, my future? That is a very different marketplace… and a very different society.
The young as the warning signal
The most interesting part of the conversation was what Fons said about young people. Not in the lazy “Gen Z is different, please update the deck” sense. More as a social seismograph. Younger generations often announce a new era before the adults have finished pretending the old one still works. The 1960s had youth revolt. The late 1970s and early 1980s had punk, new wave, black clothes and “no future” as an aesthetic diagnosis. Charming times. Terrible hair. Accurate mood board.
Today, he sees the signal again among 18 to 25-year-olds.
“What surprised me most is the sense of insecurity among young people. To the statement ‘I feel safe in my neighborhood’, only 28% of 18-to-25-year-olds in Flanders agree. Three out of four do not feel safe.”
Three out of four. In Flanders. The youngest adults, in one of the wealthiest, most stable regions of Europe, do not feel safe in their own neighborhood. That is not abstract climate dread or geopolitical melancholy (although there is plenty of that too). That is the walk home from the train station. He was careful to flag that the 18-to-25 subsample is small and the margin wide. The signal, even so, is consistent with the broader data. Not just big-city. Provincial towns. Quiet municipalities where, as he put it, fourteen-year-olds are now turning up with weapons. Important for brands, because young people are not only consumers. They are early mood detectors. They show, often brutally, what the next cultural weather system looks like. If they retreat into defensive attitudes, nostalgia and closed communities, brands should stop assuming that the old vocabulary of frictionless openness will keep working forever.
A brand that keeps shouting “be yourself” into a society asking “am I safe?” may discover that nobody is listening. Or worse. That people are listening and finding it ridiculous.
The numbers nobody wants
Fons did not stop at the safety figure. He referenced his own 2023 work in parallel with the BPX findings, and the picture is not gentle.
“55% of Flemings are convinced that we are slowly sliding toward the 1930s, toward the prelude to fascist dictatorship.”
“40% of Flemings today prefer an authoritarian leader, a dictator who sets parliament aside.”
Read the brand brief on your desk that talks about purpose, optimism and community in language a 2007 ad agency would have applauded. Notice the gap? His point was not that history repeats. As he put it himself, “history does not repeat, it rhymes.” The undercurrents are familiar. The fears are not new. The job is to look at them with both eyes open instead of pretending the climate is still mild.
The age of defensive branding
This does not mean brands should all become bunkers with logos: brand strategy has to become more honest about the emotional climate. Consumers still want connection. They still want innovation. They still want discovery. But increasingly, they want those things with guardrails. They want technology that helps without taking over. They want AI that serves without secretly becoming the creepy uncle at the family barbecue. They want brands that understand uncertainty without exploiting it. There is a cynical way to respond to fear, and we see plenty of it. Sell protection. Sell tribe. Sell enemy images. Sell nostalgia as a gated community. Turn every customer into a frightened little fort with a loyalty card. Some brands will do this very well. They will grow. They will win awards. Someone will call it “cultural relevance” and a strategist in red sneakers will nod gravely.
But there is a more useful role for brands too. Fons pointed toward community-building, context, platforms where people can meet, ways to bring people closer together.
That sounded almost old-fashioned. Which probably means it is becoming strategic again.
In a defensive age, trust becomes the premium product. Not purpose theater. Not another brand manifesto written by people who use the word “impact” the way toddlers use ketchup. Trust. The boring, expensive, repeatable kind. The kind built through behavior, not vocabulary. The kind that survives contact with a customer service department.
Brands and media have a shared problem here. Both have to prove that they are more than noise in a noisy system. Both are being judged in a world where institutions are losing authority, where platforms flatten everything into content, and where the difference between a serious source and a deranged algorithmic soup can be one swipe too many.
Local media, global mess
That brought us to media. Earlier in the BPX day, the phrase “weaponized media” had been in the air. American media ecosystems. Big Tech platforms. Global giants. Algorithmic amplification. The GAFAM machinery, or G-MAFIA, as some like to call the beast when they have had enough coffee and not enough mercy. These global platforms shape what people see, what they believe, what becomes visible and what disappears behind the velvet rope of distribution.
The obvious question is whether Belgian news brands can still matter in that universe.
Fons’ answer was refreshingly sane: yes, but not by pretending to be the global giants. He went back to Chris Anderson‘s twenty-year-old “long tail” logic. A few global blockbusters will dominate the scale game. Around them, depth, proximity and specificity remain valuable. Belgian media do not win by becoming a worse version of a global platform. They win by being something else entirely:
“Trustworthy local media with a view on the world.”
That phrase deserves a frame: Local guide, world view. People still need someone to explain what is happening in their country, their region, their city, their street, and how it connects to the larger mess. They need context. They need interpretation. They need to understand why something is happening and what may happen next. Fons was direct about why that matters:
“Understanding why things happen, and being able to anticipate what is coming, has a de-stressing effect.”
That may sound soft. It is not. In a time of insecurity, explanation is a civic technology. Duiding, as we say in the Belgian language of people who still believe nuance is not a degenerative disease. When media help people understand what is happening, they do more than inform. They return a small piece of agency.
That is also why trust matters so much. As Fons put it:
“If media succeed in becoming and staying a trusted source, that is absolutely a future.”
A trusted news brand stops being just another content provider. It becomes a navigational instrument. A compass, if we are feeling poetic. A bullshit filter, if we are feeling operational. Both are useful.
AI and the safety instinct
Then came AI, naturally, because no conversation in 2026 is legally allowed to end without someone opening that drawer.
Fons’ point was balanced. Belgians, and Flemings in particular, recognize that artificial intelligence will have a place. The resistance is not against the technology itself (your aunt is not afraid of a chatbot). The anxiety appears when AI moves into sensitive decisions: health, money, personal matters, identity, safety, judgment. People are not stupid. They know the difference between AI helping draft a summary and AI deciding something intimate, risky or irreversible. That is where the defensive consumer reappears. Innovation is welcome, but not if it feels like surrender. Consumers may accept AI as assistance, acceleration, interface, translation, search, service. They will be much more cautious when it becomes authority. Brands that do not understand that distinction will walk straight into a wall and then publish a thought leadership piece called “lessons learned”. The lesson is already available. People want progress with boundaries. They want the new machine, but they also want to know where the off switch is, who is accountable, what data is used, and whether a human being remains somewhere in the loop with a name, a face and preferably a functioning conscience.
Data, intuition and the forest problem
The last part of the interview may have been my favorite, because Fons made a point too many marketing people politely ignore.
“Everything I propose has to be empirically grounded: through observations, through facts.”
Not the charming but lethal method where someone’s daughter says something at the kitchen table and by Thursday it has become “Gen Z demands authenticity” in a keynote. We all know the species.
The warning, though, was just as important. Do not drown in the data. The BPX study involved a mass of material: behavior, attitudes, beliefs, media consumption, article analysis. Lots of trees. As he put it, the job is “to still see the forest through the trees, not get lost in too many trees but on the larger picture.” Build the frame. Understand what the numbers are pointing toward. Avoid mistaking statistical output for strategic understanding.
This is where marketing often becomes either too fluffy or too mechanical. The fluffy side thinks intuition is enough. The mechanical side thinks dashboards think for them. Both are wrong, and both are usually very confident, which is how organizations lose money while speaking in acronyms. Good strategy needs both: data to discipline the intuition, intuition to ask better questions of the data, methodology to avoid hallucinating patterns, and imagination to understand why the pattern matters.
And statistics. Actual statistics.
I mentioned to him a line I had heard just before the interview: that we have more data than ever, and fewer people who really understand statistics. He just smiled.
“There is one certainty: statistics has not changed in more than 100 years. The laws of statistics applied in the last century and will apply in this one too. Unfortunately, many here never took the basic course.”
That should terrify every boardroom, newsroom and marketing department currently making decisions from dashboards and unverified datasets that look expensive enough to be trusted.
A new brand contract
So where does that leave brands? In a less comfortable place, which is probably good for everyone. The brand contract is changing. The old deal was often built around aspiration. Be more. Do more. Explore more. Connect more. Become the heroic version of yourself who apparently drinks the right beverage, wears breathable fabric and has mastered inbox zero. The new deal is more anxious, more defensive, more complicated. Help me understand. Help me feel safe. Help me belong without making me stupid. Help me use technology without being used by it. Help me navigate a world where the old institutions wobble, the platforms manipulate, the future accelerates and every idiot with a ring light can cosplay authority.
For media brands, this is existential. For commercial brands, it is strategic. For both, the answer starts with the same unpleasant requirement: take people seriously.
As humans living inside a time of friction, fear, hope, fatigue, contradiction and occasional beauty. People still want connection. They still want discovery. They still want progress. But they want those things without being treated as lab rats in a behavioral advertising experiment designed by someone who calls themselves a growth hacker without shame.
There is opportunity here. Dark periods are not only periods of retreat. Fons reminded us that the late 1970s and early 1980s, for all their anxiety, also produced major technological breakthroughs. The first browsers. The first personal computers. The early internet. Crisis does not stop invention. It changes what people need invention to do.
That is the part marketers should tattoo somewhere discreet. In calmer times, brands can sell possibility. In anxious times, they have to earn permission. The difference is brutal.
And useful.
