The State of Brand Strategy in CEE: What 150 Sources Reveal.

Poland became a one trillion dollar economy in September 2025. The CEE-5 — Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia — collectively host 56 unicorns, a €243 billion tech ecosystem, and €2.83 billion in annual venture capital investment. The region’s advertising markets are growing at double-digit rates, outpacing Western Europe on nearly every measure.

Despite all of this, not a single institution — not McKinsey, not BCG, not Brand Finance, not Kantar, not Interbrand — has ever published a comprehensive study on how companies in this region build, invest in, and manage their brands.

We set out to understand why. What emerged from 150+ institutional reports, peer-reviewed studies, and official datasets is not a data scarcity problem. It is an institutional blind spot — and it has a measurable cost.

The per-capita investment gap

The most immediate finding is quantitative. When digital advertising spend per capita across CEE-5 markets is compared against Western European benchmarks, the numbers are not merely lower. They represent a different order of magnitude.

Romania — home to UiPath, Bitdefender, and eMAG — spends 43 times less per capita on digital advertising than the United Kingdom. Poland, a trillion-dollar economy and the largest market in CEE, spends 12 times less. These gaps are not fully explained by GDP differences. They reflect a structural pattern of underinvestment in brand.

The framework problem: CEE was never measured

The numbers alone do not explain the full picture. The deeper issue is that the frameworks used to assess brand maturity in Europe were never designed to include CEE — and in most cases, explicitly excluded it.

BCG and Google’s landmark Digital Marketing Maturity study — the most-cited maturity benchmark on the continent — assessed 67 brands across 10 EMEA countries in 2021. The countries studied were Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. No CEE country was included. The most widely referenced marketing benchmark in Europe has zero data points for any of the five markets we studied.

Sources: Brodny & Tutak 2021 (PLOS ONE) | MDPI Open Innovation 2022. Leader column = PLOS ONE; Laggard column = MDPI.

Academic research confirms the gap — and goes further. The Journal of East European Management Studies (2025) states directly: “Most existing literature on corporate brand management is rooted in a Western perspective where capitalism is the dominant economic system, and many aspects of corporate brand management in transitional economies remain under-researched.”

Western brand maturity models were built on Western market structures. CEE’s post-1989 brand landscape — shaped by late-stage privatisation, fragmented retail, collectivist consumer cultures, and first-generation brand relationships — is structurally different. Applying Western frameworks without adaptation is not just incomplete. It is misleading.

Each market has a different strategic gap

Each CEE-5 market has its own brand strategy profile. The common thread is not a single failure — it is that each market faces a different structural gap, and none of them have been documented until now.

Poland — growth without direction

Poland’s advertising market reached PLN 18.56 billion in 2025, growing at 8.9% — well above the European average of 5.8%. Brand loyalty is high: Polish consumers are more likely than regional peers to have a single brand in mind before they start researching a purchase. Yet only 3.5% of Polish consumers find traditional advertising meaningful.

The implication is worth sitting with. In Poland, brand loyalty is real — but the advertising infrastructure is not building it. The gap between ad spend and brand impact is widening, and companies are spending more while connecting less.

Hungary — strong domestic preference, limited strategic infrastructure

Hungary’s most distinctive brand signal is that over 80% of consumers actively prefer Hungarian brands, with one-third specifically searching for domestic products. This is a level of domestic brand preference unmatched elsewhere in CEE. The market, however, is still absorbing the psychological impact of 25% inflation at the end of 2022, which created a lasting restraint on brand investment budgets. The underlying opportunity is significant — and largely unaddressed.

Czech Republic — digital adoption without strategic deployment

Czech companies lead CEE in digital sophistication. 48% already use generative AI, compared with 37% across the EU. 87% invested in the past year, and 42% of investment goes to intangibles — seven points above the EU average. Yet the Czech advertising market grew at just 3.3% in 2024, the slowest in the CEE-5. The tools are advanced, but the strategic deployment of brand is not keeping pace with the technical capability.

Romania — global brands from a local vacuum

Romania has produced CEE’s most globally recognisable tech brands — UiPath, Bitdefender, eMAG. Its domestic advertising market, however, is just €778 million, with digital at only 36.4% — the lowest digital share in the CEE-5. Private equity investment runs at 0.041% of GDP, ten times smaller than the European average, and 71.6% of Romanian startups are bootstrapped. The brands that break through do so despite the ecosystem, not because of it.

Slovakia — a fragmented market without a strategic centre

Slovakia’s advertising and market research industry is worth €2.4 billion, yet no single company holds more than 5% market share. The startup ecosystem is growing at 23.9% annually, but from a base of just 260 startups with $191.55 million in total funding. There is no dominant brand consultancy, no market-shaping research firm, and no thought leader setting the brand strategy agenda. It is the least visible market in the CEE-5.

Brand is invisible to investors

Perhaps the most revealing finding concerns what is absent from the region’s most influential reports.

CEE attracted €2.83 billion in venture capital in 2024 — a 50% increase year-on-year. The ecosystem is valued at €243 billion. ICT accounts for over 50% of all VC investments, and AI startups captured 40% of funding rounds. The data produced by these reports is rich, detailed, and meticulously assembled.

Across every major CEE VC ecosystem report — Dealroom, Atomico, Invest Europe, Vestbee, How to Web — not a single one mentions brand strategy, brand investment, marketing spend allocation, or brand maturity as a variable. The entire brand dimension is invisible to investors.

The consequences are structural. Startups do not benchmark brand spend because no benchmark exists. Investors do not evaluate brand capability because no framework asks for it. The assumption that product comes first and brand comes later persists unchallenged — because no data challenges it.

The eight questions no institution has answered

We searched systematically for any comprehensive brand strategy study covering the CEE-5. Thirteen separate searches across every major consultancy, research firm, and trade body returned the same result: no such study exists.

These are not obscure academic gaps. They are the basic inputs any executive needs to make informed brand investment decisions. Every one of them has been filled for Western Europe. None has been filled for CEE.

What the contradictions reveal

Rigorous research surfaces contradictions rather than smoothing them over. Three are worth examining.

The Czech Republic is the most digitally advanced market in CEE, yet its advertising growth is the slowest. 48% AI adoption — the highest in the region — alongside just 3.3% advertising market growth, the lowest. One interpretation is that Czech marketers are spending more efficiently. Another is that digital capability without strategic ambition produces diminishing returns.

Polish consumers show strong brand loyalty, but find advertising largely irrelevant. Consumers arrive at purchases with a brand already in mind, yet only 3.5% consider traditional advertising meaningful. This suggests that brand loyalty in Poland is built through product experience and word of mouth rather than through advertising — a distinction with considerable implications for where brand investment should be directed.

Romania has the lowest digital advertising share in the CEE-5, yet has produced the region’s highest-value tech brands. UiPath and Bitdefender built global brands from a market where digital ad share is only 36.4%. They succeeded by operating at a global level from the outset, effectively bypassing the local ecosystem. Whether that path is replicable or an exception remains an open question.

The next phase of this research

This article summarises the secondary research phase. The data gaps documented here are real, but they cannot be filled with existing sources — because no one has collected the primary data.

The next phase is a survey of 500+ executives across all five CEE markets, designed to answer the eight questions that no institution has addressed. The methodology is built around the specific gaps identified in this research: brand investment levels, strategy ownership, maturity self-assessment, barriers to investment, and the allocation between brand and performance marketing.

The precedent is clear. The Edelman Trust Barometer defined the category of institutional trust by publishing original research annually for 25 years. Atomico’s State of European Tech became the reference dataset for European venture capital. There is no equivalent for brand strategy in Central and Eastern Europe. We believe there should be.