No Rules Rules: Brand and the "social" media
We got brand rules, let's count 'em.
The 2025 Challenge is to navigate Opposing Forces: Community vs Individualism & Chaos vs Clarity. Social media continues to shape culture at warp speed. Brands need to navigate the tensions while avoiding irrelevance, cringe, or backlash.
Hi, I’m
– a brand, comms, and innovation strategist focused on where tech meets culture. My sweet spot is helping brands figure out how to show up on people’s favorite channels. I’ve spent most of my career agency-side, including seven years at BBH where I led digital, social, and content strategy (and helped get Tesco on TikTok with the Voice of the Checkout campaign).This piece grew out of the ongoing conversations Jaskaran and I have about what it really means for brands to show up in 2025 – navigating the chaos while staying principled (but also playful), avoiding easy mistakes, and creating work that lasts.
We both hope you enjoy this one.
Rule 1: Balance Belonging with Individuality
Social media is excellent at making people feel like they belong to a community, until they don’t. You either start feeling proud or ashamed of yourself as an individual.
That community-individualism loop impacts everyone. You might think, as a brand, you have nothing to do with the male loneliness epidemic, culture wars, or everything else happening on social media and real-life. But all of those problems are very similar to how brands sell and keep customers.
Brands consistently switch between selling a product as an act of belonging to something, like Labubu dolls, and selling a product as an act of differentiating yourself from others, like Apple’s "Think Different."
On social media, this loop or trap is more visible than ever. It takes different shapes: “Propaganda I’m not falling for” videos, tweets about performative stereotypes, r/TrueUnpopularOpinions, r/NYCinfluencersnark, and a few Substack articles. You can visibly track when a creator or user goes from engaging in the community-individualism loop to either hyper-individualism or incel behavior.
As brands, you have to maintain a balance between community and individualism. If you don’t, one part of your audience will slowly but steadily start to feel like they don’t belong or like they’re on the other side. Influencer trips are out of the playbook for many brands; short-term collaborations are the new Avon ladies.
Rule 2: Time Your Moves: Punctuality vs. Patience
I’ve been seeing this argument against AI all over social media: Taste is the only currency in a world filled with AI slop. But that’s not the case. At least when we talk about social media, it’s different. Taste is niche, not broad.
Nearly everything that gets immediately recognized on social media benefits from established taste. Often, we confuse that with acquired taste. When a brand jumps on a trend or does something culturally relevant to an XYZ audience, they’re touted as iconic or unhinged based on timing and general identity, not necessarily their brand or creative.
Meanwhile, when you post something that isn’t a trend and is only culturally relevant to your audience, you hear silence, even if it’s actually good. If we’re going to make the taste vs. brand differentiation argument on social media, we have to be okay with not being touted as marketing geniuses. It takes time for people to love your brand for what it is.
Think of all the people you avoid or love at your local store. How many of them did you appreciate on day one? Good things get appreciated as time passes.
You get touted as iconic, unhinged, or cringe for being on or off timing. You get appreciated for always being there. Pick your role: Punctuality vs. Patience.
Rule 3: Choose Principles over Performance
Being political is no longer optional, but performative allyship can backfire harder than silence. Brands on social media need to focus more on the process instead of the end result or campaign initiative. When they don’t, the context collapses, inviting audiences that don’t support or care for the brand, but want the brand to pull back their campaign.
Brands like Ben & Jerry’s, The Ordinary, and Patagonia don’t get labeled as “performative activists” because they control how the message is distributed and by whom.
Despite what you think about brands supporting Pride Month only as a token of appreciation, and many straight up abandoning those initiatives this year. There was, and still is, an exchange of value and power. That made some in the community feel appreciated. There was something real, but most brands never manage to escape the performative label.
This happens because they spread the message but don’t control it through PR or infotainment content focused on the initiative. When you allow social audiences to interpret your message openly, without any guidelines or limitations, you allow them to shift the context. That, in turn, changes how the algorithm pushes the content. And suddenly, you’ve reached an unintended audience. The blame then falls on your media and distribution, not your creative.
Rule 4: Empower Real Voices
People trust people. That’s why employee-generated content had its big moment in 2024, and brands shot day-in-the-life TikToks, product demos, and casual vlogs, all to help humanize the brand. It worked – for a while. EGC built credibility because it showed the people who help make up the brand. But people are always more than what we see on the surface – like brands, they also have a mental identity all about their internal story and essence.
That’s why 2025 audiences expect more: they want to see if the employees reflect the brand’s values, participate willingly, and if leadership is also willing to show up. So before you put another employee in front of the camera to enact the latest trend (more on that below), ask yourself: is this real representation, or just filler content? Does your team have permission and support to shape the brand voice? And is leadership ready to match that authenticity, or are they hiding behind it?
Tools to Help You
You need to check the vibe before you start speaking on social media. How are you perceived beyond your own channels?
Use brand listening tools to track unprompted vs. prompted brand awareness. It’s important to understand how people react to your brand when you’re in the room, and when you’re not. This helps you create content pillars and guidelines around what topics and formats to engage with or avoid.
If you’re a small to mid-level business, tools like SparkToro, Google Alerts, Reddit for Business, and Pinterest Trends can help you track consumer awareness around your brand and category. For agencies and enterprise businesses, a brand tracking tool like Tracksuit is more suitable, as it also supports brand safety.
In partnership with Tracksuit
The Awareness Advantage: Performance Starts with Brand
Brand Awareness, everyone nods like they get it, but no one really knows what they’re doing. CEOs know brand is important. They’re aware of the relationship between brand equity and pricing power, and how it’s manipulated by Tesla, Apple, and the like. What they need to know is how brand building and performance marketing are BFFs.
While brand awareness doesn't correlate with clicks (a typical performance metric), it strongly correlates with conversions (the ultimate goal of performance marketing).
Tracksuit and TikTok’s Awareness Advantage study has found that high-awareness brands achieve 2.86x the conversion rate of low-awareness brands. Put simply: the more familiar your brand is to all category buyers, the more efficient your performance advertising becomes.
As brand awareness increases, performance marketing conversion rates improve significantly on TikTok. Awareness and performance aren’t enemies on TikTok — they go together.
For example, results showed that a brand with 40% prompted awareness is 43% more efficient in driving conversions than one with 30% awareness. A brand with 50% prompted awareness is 29% more efficient than one with 40%, and so on and so forth. This finding proves the mutually beneficial relationship that exists between brand and performance marketing.
This shows that brand and performance marketing have complementary strengths. Brand building creates the foundation that allows performance marketing to truly shine.
These findings prove that if you want to drive business metrics, brand matters. Next time someone tries to pit brand against performance, hit 'em with the facts included in the report below.
Rule 5: Choose Co-Ownership over Clout
Your content doesn’t just land – it gets sorted before AND while it’s reaching people. Everything you post is sorted (both instantly and gradually) based on everything from aesthetics to the language used. That’s the algorithmic gaze: the way platforms and users instantly assign labels to your content.
You might think your brand is youth-focused, but one overproduced TikTok and you’re suddenly “giving millennial.” You might imagine your content as polished and aspirational, but the algorithm reads it as sterile – or worse, ad-y. This happens fast: through the styling of a model’s hair, the background of a product shot, or whether you used a photo dump or a quote tweet as a format.
It’s especially visible in beauty and wellness. Rhode and Merit feel more “Gen Z” because of the lighting (soft), captions (blunt), and edits (clean). Chamberlain Coffee (yes, from creator Emma Chamberlain) leans into lo-fi chaos. Even Olipop, which reads like an aesthetic Instagram brand, tweaks its tone just enough on TikTok to keep the algorithm onside.
What matters isn’t whether your brand feels Gen Z or millennial. It’s whether that label is intentional – and if the algorithm agrees. Because if it doesn’t, your content quickly ends up where it won’t resonate as much.
Creator Collabs Need a Reset
Brands turn to creators to deliver what they can’t easily manufacture themselves: emotional credibility, authenticity, and cultural fluency. But when a creator doesn’t understand the brand, audience, or broader moment, the whole thing falls apart.
More than ever, audiences are calling out creators who feel out of sync. It’s not always what they post – it’s about vibe and tone alike.
Smart brands are adapting. The strongest partnerships look less like transactions and more like co-publishing deals – shared values, shared language, shared responsibility.
That includes not just working with the same five overused people of the month, and instead asking harder questions about representation. If your brand talks about inclusivity, your creators should reflect it, not just perform it.
Lululemon works with creators with limb differences; Fred Perry has an ability-inclusive connection, and Bandit Running quietly sponsors unsponsored athletes with logo-free merch. The most effective collabs feel like real alignment, not PR.
So in 2025, don’t just look at who has reach. Ask: do they understand the world they’re entering? Does the partnership feel personal, not performative? And how do we balance amplifying with letting it speak for itself?
Rule 6: Be Fluent in Trends, but Don’t Depend on Them
Something goes viral – and brands feel the pressure to react. But jumping on every trend (especially if it was started by another brand, like one with a green owl mascot) quickly makes a brand feel like background noise rather than part of culture.
Trend fluency means knowing when something aligns with your brand’s tone, role, and audience mindsets. It’s about pacing – sitting out some moments, or remixing them. Trend dependency quickly becomes exhausting, so the most impactful brands choose the trends they pursue carefully, and focus their energies on their own formats and ideas.
Rule 7: Be the TV Show, not the Ad Break
When brands create content around memes and social media formats like event reactions, sports moments, and more, the work functions more like an ad break between everything else happening online. It can take a less chaotic form if you use moments like the Oscars or Emmys to educate your audience through infotainment. Waterstones is a good example of this, recommending books based on red carpet looks.
Meanwhile, when brands create plot-driven content around their consumers or category, the work functions more like a TV show. In these cases, people are drawn in by your creative. Nutter Butter, Mohawk Chevrolet and Pine-Sol are strong video-focused examples of a TV show-style content strategy. MERIT Beauty and Jacquemus focus more on aesthetics-driven storytelling.
Everything these brands do is designed to be consumed as part of a recurring narrative. The "ad break" is the branding, through distinctive assets like mascots, employees, or brand merchandise that build memory over time.
A recent System1 x TikTok study shows that branding in the first two seconds doesn’t lead to users skipping ads. The results are likely even stronger for organic content. That’s a signal for brands to be more playful and intentional with branding in story-driven content.
If you don’t have a big budget for scripted content, it’s okay to take inspiration and adapt storytelling styles from other creators and brands. One example is Kaprica X, an Italian restaurant. One of their videos, centered around the idea of “revisiting a memory,” went mega-viral. Now, almost every Instagram restaurant and brand like GANT has tried to reuse that structure to make people recall their own memories with the brand or venue.
The problem is the failure to calibrate the tone of the plot and message to the brand. It’s become almost a trend on Instagram for fashion and experience-based brands to create content with inner monologues spoken out loud, as if you’re watching a movie trailer for a rom-com.
Maybe I’m being too harsh, but the takeaway is this: if you’re going to copy a structure, you have to nail the tone, otherwise, it falls flat.
Without a plot, your brand feels like an ad break, because everything is about the brand and people might get tired of it. With a plot, your branding becomes the only ad break. And if you integrate it well, no one gets tired of it.
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Rule 8: Let Medium Shape Message – it’s all About Context
Social and non-social formats provide additional context, allowing brands to reconfigure the vibe of a specific post. A brand sharing a screenshot of their tweet overlaid on a Canva background feels completely different from simply pasting the tweet text onto that same background.
Taco Bell using iPhone messages is a non-social, yet digital, example of a brand using user interface as a medium to amplify its message. We’ve also seen brands use billboards and other out-of-home (OOH) advertising to optimize big announcements for social. Starface, for example, used a real billboard and fake newspaper to promote their launch at Ulta Beauty, leveraging in-real-life formats to win over social audiences. These traditional formats are also being used as social proof, signaling how established and relevant a brand is.
Another example is McDonald’s announcement of the “Snack Wrap” on Good Morning America last year. The early announcement became the second most viewed video on GMA’s TikTok, gaining nearly 47 million views, even though it featured a typical brand message and spokesperson. They used a traditional PR format and pushed it to social to establish momentum for the future launch. Fast forward to 2025, they’ve switched to a social-first format to appeal to digital audiences who felt some resentment over the delay in bringing the product back.
This combination of traditional and digital formats is what social-first brands need to reach a new level of distribution, something that can’t always be captured through native formats like carousels or still posts.
Fighting with a Plot
For a while, TikTok comments were a place where people were genuinely delighted to see brands – cat video creators loved engaging with Dreamies. But brands, as they tend to do, overstayed their welcome. Now, the comment sections of popular videos are crowded with engagement-baiters and the ghost of “lol, admin here.”
Commenting DOES still work, but only if you have a role to play: when you speak it has to add something. That’s why smart brands don’t just react – they treat comments like spin offs. They’re not just bantering, but adding footnotes and telling a story in the margins.
This only works if your main content is weighty enough in itself, and your tone of voice is weird and witty enough to keep people clicking. Otherwise, you’re just a rando crashing the group chat.
Narrative Systems Fail Without Platform Context
Brands that diversify their content format playbook tend to win in the long term. Taco Bell and Morning Brew are great examples of brands that optimize every format, from carousels to serialized skits.
Adapting your brand platform and product updates into different formats not only benefits the brand, it also gives marketers room to experiment with new ideas.
Carousels: Ideal for educating your audience on brand initiatives and use cases. They’ve also become a go-to format for publishing interviews using just one or two key quotes. Business of Fashion and The Cut frequently use this strategy.
Single Images: Used by everyone from brands to theme pages on Instagram, this format is great for announcements, breaking news, and engaging polls focused on a specific topic.
Short-form Videos: The most algorithm-friendly format. Even if you don’t have the strongest creative or message, short-form video gives you a higher chance of reaching a wider audience.
Text-based Content: Best for testing the validity of your meme-driven or value-based content. Platforms like Reddit and Twitter are where your blog and webinar content gets pressure-tested for quality and relevance.
Captions on IG and TikTok: These act as a support system for meme and visual content, especially for posts that may seem random or even cringe to certain segments, like an anniversary post or niche joke.
Long-form Content: Needs a better rollout strategy. Most platforms don’t organically push long-form video, so brands should start promoting it at least a week in advance. Include teasers at the end of short-form videos. Like Twitch streamers, brands should be “clip farming” their long-form content and events.
Once format is addressed, the next step is platform strategy. Every platform has different rules, but they’re not as different as many think. Brands simply need to understand their role in relation to user behavior on each one.
On community-centric platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Discord, you can’t act like an authority right away. You have to earn your position by contributing value without dominating the space. Think of these platforms like a classroom, you don’t speak unless you’re asked.
On content-centric platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn, the dynamic is more like a debate room without a moderator. You have to speak up, assert authority, and maintain your presence with consistent content.
Very few brands manage to keep their communities happy across all these platforms. But long-term effort pays off. Semrush is a great example. While they’re now known for employee-generated content on LinkedIn and TikTok, they originally built community trust by actively engaging with marketers and SEOs on Reddit and Twitter.
When building a cross-platform presence, you don’t need to be everywhere at once. The only rules are to understand user behavior, know your place, and adapt your content to native formats.
Rule 9: Measure Impact Over Vanity
You can’t fix what you don’t measure, and you’ll keep making the wrong things if you’re tracking the wrong signals. Likes don’t tell you much. Comment sentiment – when done well – shows more (but remember that a lot of people won’t comment). Memes and reactive content might outperform product-led posts in the short term, but unless you're reporting on both, you'll never know if it's the creative or the media doing the work.
Some brands are starting to listen better. Currys applied econometrics to its TikTok output, linking social effectiveness directly to brand growth. Spotify Wrapped has become a benchmark for cultural relevance and for how to design content with feedback loops built in.
Measuring social effectiveness comes down to four main questions: Did anyone care? (Performance), Did we show up loudly enough? (Visibility), Did it shift how people see us? (Brand), and Did it actually drive impact? (Commercial).
Basically: Don’t just report what happened. Report what to do next.
Reminders
Don’t hijack comment sections unless it’s strategic
Drop fake engagement baits (bad hooks, “hot take?” captions)
Don’t sound like a teenager in 2022 unless that’s your actual audience / youre being ironic.
 | A guest post by
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