Growth Belongs to the Brands That Lean Into Tension

This post was created in partnership with Kantar

When you consider the top brands that have had staying power over the last few decades, one of the common threads between them is that they’ve all embraced tension well. They’ve found balance in battles like reinvention vs. core values, short- vs. long-term success, and experimentation vs. consistency.

During a Brandweek 2025 session co-hosted with Kantar, ADWEEK CEO Will Lee sat down in conversation with Jeff Greenspoon, CEO, Americas of Kantar, to discuss how some brands have turned tension into transformation and the valuable lessons CMOs could learn from these endeavors.

Be meaningfully different

To start, Greenspoon defined tension as what’s created when two opposing forces pull us in different directions. And in the world of brand