The "contentification" of marketing and decline of brand strategy
Your brand doesn't need to be iconic, cult or anything. What it needs is...
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by our friends at Tracksuit, who have a message for marketers, one that’s meant to be forwarded to CFOs across the globe.
Everything is content, including marketing. That makes you question…
Are people buying the brand or marketing?
I hate the use of C-words in marketing: Culture, Community, and Cult.
Because it’s getting harder and harder to define why people buy brands. The research tells us most buyers are irrational, and the concept of brand loyalty is fragile.1 Every supermarket brand now offers a loyalty program, and retail media space is making a retailer’s own business more third-party.
Consumer confidence barely gets up before it crashes back to pandemic levels. Brands still have Temu and Fast Fashion to fight. Zuckerberg and Google say: we’re giving every advertiser an edge with AI Agents, the same service, the ad agency and gatekeeping culture is over. All of that (and more) tells you: keeping a buyer loyal is hard.
Meanwhile, social media and marketing gurus are telling us: Nike is Culture, Apple is a Cult, Duolingo is Community, Oatly is Cult, Jacquemus is Culture, and so on. Up until last year, Drunk Elephant was a cult and community. Where are they now? Shiseido earnings decline 8.5%. Drunk Elephant sales slide 65%.
The story we are being told is different from the system that inhabits those stories, and their consumers. If the founders say, build a product and they will come. Marketers say, build cult-like marketing, they will buy. Neither has a point.
Social Media – The algorithm only grants access to a set of user networks. Your brand demands consistent access to a specific group of people to build a community. If you aren’t consistently engaging that network and pulling them into a private space, you don’t have a community.
Advertising – Most advertising campaigns go unnoticed, even with distribution and media budgets in place. The brand you see everywhere won’t be recalled unless it builds memory through distinctive assets, or carries an element of localism in its marketing.
The recent VCCP x Dr Karen Nelson-Field study shares, “With typical creative, you generally need 2.5 seconds+ for memory to form. With distinctive assets, memory benefits start appearing as early as 1.5 seconds - meaning your effective threshold shifts lower by ~1 second. That’s
a big deal when 85% of digital advertising impressions fall under 2.5s.”
In partnership with Tracksuit
Have you got a CEO or CFO who just doesn’t seem to get brand? This guide will help you speak their language and secure the spend.
As a marketer, you likely know that if you don’t start investing in brand now, your company isn’t going to see the growth it wants in the next five years. But convincing your CFO to believe in your brand marketing efforts is harddd (god forbid they are listening to Scott Galloway).
A CMO Insights report found that only 35% of marketing leaders work regularly with finance, down from 42% the previous year.1 We’ve gotta fix that.
Every finance team is different, and some will have a greater understanding of “brand” than others. What does your leadership profile look like?
For example, if your CFO is actively against the idea of “brand,” it might pay to reorient the term brand-building as “future revenue building” instead.
“Raising awareness” should become “increasing the obtainable market.” “Brand” could even become “reputation,” if that’s what will cut through the marketing noise.
It’s all about speaking in business outcomes and lining up your language with the lingo your finance team trades in daily.
You need to lead with how your brand activity will impact different areas, like customer lifetime value, market positioning, and more. Brand activity can be expensive—and, even worse, doesn’t provide an immediate, shiny ROI.
Tracksuit’s free guide gives you actionable advice on how to approach conversations with your finance team, including a to-do list of what marketers need to consider before making their case for brand investment.
Culture - Most brands are simply engaging with whatever cultural trend becomes a template or format. The contentification of culture happens every day. Engaging with that fragment of XYZ is not enough. What brands are actually seeking is cultural differentiation, which means doing more than following monocultural trends on and off social media.
People like to say “kids are too woke/cancel culture is getting out of hand,” but the reality is we are less woke than ever when it comes to letting brands use our culture and allowing celebrities to sell out.
When Sony Walkman and Sprite were trying to win the audiences, the pressure of being called culture vulture was high for both the collaborator and brand. Both brands went two different ways to solve the same problem: Acceptance.
Sprite’s strategy was to meet collaborators where they were. Unlike many music collaborations you never revisit, Sprite’s ads and the rap songs about the brand were extremely listenable. You can’t ignore the collaborators were the best at their games: KRS One, Nas, MC Shan and more.
Meanwhile Walkman was all about making people reflect their identity through design and music. They are one of the few brands at that time making people resonate with the product by highlighting good media consumption and other form of consumption like fashion, use of boots as personalities to market the product.
The brand built the product around so many cultural artifacts and consumption traits that it became uncool to not have a walkman. One brand met people where they were, the other made people meet the brand because it was everywhere through use of popular culture and mass media.
Question: Can you do the same in 2025 and be the culture, not a vulture?
Maybe. More brands than ever engage in popular culture but they don’t have a clear understanding of how they distribute/move it forward. We continue to hear about reactive marketing and it’s just that. A reaction, not an action.
Look at Spotify, they do reactive marketing and events that everyone enjoys but they don’t take the action to cause a change or even protect their brand. People use them but hate them too. Even if there is an action to create a change, brands should take distributive actions to escape the callouts. Liquid Death is an example of this problem, they are very Sprite-like in terms of marketing but the representation they give their collaborators isn’t as consumable as Sprite.
Distribution of Action & Consumption is the key to create cultural differentiation and succeed as a brand of the people.
Corporate - Brands need fewer frameworks and less short-termism. More creativity, more experimentation. No explanation needed, still, here’s the data to move the boardroom toward creativity.
74% of small businesses say their KPIs reflect a prioritization of short-term sales over long-term branding results, versus 63% at medium businesses and 70% at large businesses.
Paid media is still the top spending bucket, at over 30% of CMO budgets.
Only 13% of companies rate their ability to develop high-quality insights as very good or excellent.
Ad professionals do not view the industry as trustworthy (40%) or has a positive social impact (44%).
The average Fortune 500 advertiser could save $7 million annually—equivalent to a Super Bowl ad's worth of spend—by improving their Creative Quality Score.
When it comes to brands, everything is a product. The ROI of a product like a brand’s social media image can transfer to a physical product through future purchase. My concern: brands are making these non-physical, virtual products too detached from the physical ones. I believe they are.
While primarily done for engagement, there’s another reason consumers are consuming more marketing from brands they don’t actually buy. Consumption and content production have both become means of producing Intellectual Property, a way for brands and Gen Z alike to feel control, to feel self.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence we’re so fiercely protecting our intellectual property in an era when it’s harder and harder to purchase physical property. Home ownership has flatlined for Millennials and Gen Z. Owning a house satisfies our base hierarchy of needs and IP doesn’t, but IP promises a ticket to the better life that average person can no longer afford.”
For awareness, brands are jumping on trends and doing marketing that gets bought as a form of content, not product.
For acceptance, consumers are buying that marketing, creating posts about that brand.
In the end, both lose. Yes, the system is broken and you have to play the engagement game to survive. But you’re either giving in or being delusional. You have to do the work to make people buy your marketing, your brand, and whatever else you’re selling. A transaction that creates real-life value, not merely an escape from reality.
The Brand Market Crash is coming soon…
Brands are increasingly doing marketing that looks like this. But…
As Dave Trott shares: Brands don't build products, products build brands.
If I came up with a car now that you've never heard of the “Zink” and I advertised the Zink and my launch campaign was “if only everything in life worked as well as a Zink.” Is that likely to work?
No, because it has no history of working. You could do that with VW because brand had 50 years of advertising about how well their cars worked.
The last flow is being adopted more and more by brands and creative agencies. While it certainly works if your product and business strategy supports it.
The companies engaging with this flow aren’t doing the calculations, they are influenced by social media and aesthetics. The marketing industry is filled with sentiment like “sell a feeling”, “be relatable” and the newest phenomenon of “vibe marketing”, the idea of XYZ brand is being sold first, product second. But all of that is a gamble and a lie.
The possibilities of building a brand through content, marketing, and creativity are endless. But that’s starting to shift. With marketing budgets and consumer confidence on the decline, all it takes is one purchase to shatter the carefully crafted perception of a brand.
Sure, there’s still value in selling your brand identity before the purchase, it helps shape how people interpret both the good and the bad.
But you can get the same, if not better, results by selling experiences, not just branding. Look at Target and Costco. Their marketing doesn’t force-feed you an identity in the start. They win you over with real-life moments: food courts, free samples, the vibe.
Most importantly, marketers have got to be self-aware. The brands we’re talking about are selling everyday stuff dressed up with better packaging or a nice aesthetic. They should know: the pre-purchase experience is a better play for protecting brand image than trying to sell a lie of a brand.
On another note, this model and the upcoming crash are the fault of consumption strategists, not real marketers.
It’s a similar phenomenon to what we see in the fashion community on social media, dominated by creators who promote and only know consumption instead of style. In marketing, it’s the same thing.
A brand should do this to get attention. Gen Z wants XYZ. Brand collab ideas that make no sense, but it’s two trending companies. All of that is hyper-consumerism: doing more marketing for the sake of consumption, not for the brand.
As a small brand, you don’t win by promoting consumption, unless you’re the biggest brand in the market. Then you have to, because market size heavily influences purchases for the big players. Nonetheless, the point is: small brands need to keep their brand closer than their consumers. You can’t be out there disobeying your brand just to feed consumption.
It’s important not to confuse “product builds brand” with “product is the brand.” The second statement is often made by the likes of Scott Galloway and other CEOs. Brand-building is like Newton’s laws. Your brand is in motion; the product keeps it moving. Marketing is the acceleration, while communication and experience are the external forces that can cause it to stop, or change direction.
Most brands think marketing is for growth alone. In reality, it’s like acceleration in Newton’s laws, it’s about managing forces to maintain momentum and balance.
Mara’s reality check
Mara Dettmann, Strategy Director and writer of In Interesting Times newsletter.
What Dave Trott Got Right.— “Products build brands.”
This holds true, because experience is the ultimate brand builder. Few taglines can survive an underperforming product.
Especially in an economic downturn, product matters more than ever – no one’s buying a second time just for the branding.
What Dave Trott Misses.
He underplays the flip side: Even the best product won’t survive if no one knows them. It still needs:
A reason to try it
A story to believe in
A memory structure to recall it
Because people don’t experience products in a vacuum – they experience them through the brand.
What Dave Trott Got Right. Why It Matters Now.
When things get recessionary, consumers become more cautious.
You don’t get infinite changes or budget – brand and product need to be in sync, because you can’t have the story overpromise if the product under delivers.
Innovation keeps established brands current.
Product makes emerging brands last.
Brand makes both get noticed – and believed.
Some companies focus on brand building, emotional appeal, creative stories, ideas that make people comment.
The ideal customer, however, eventually wants facts, what it is, how it works, why it matters. You have to meet somewhere. Or you crash.
The Dying Art of Brand Strategy
Why are we so obsessed with ideas and aesthetics?
Anti-intellectualism is everywhere, including marketing.
People tend to categorise and rebrand problems as if they only affect specific demographics or audiences. That's one of the reasons marketing often feels out of touch once you age beyond your 20s or 3os, and it's only getting worse, thanks to social media.
Today, Gen-X is the most underrepresented generation in advertising. No one speaks to them about the rise of nostalgia, even though their past has become the dominant source of nostalgia for Millennials and Gen-Z.
Another reason is that brands no longer invest in research and culture the way they once did. Remember when billionaires used to build libraries and institutions that uplift society? Most don't do that anymore, nor do brands invest in what truly matters. But why is this your problem?
If you've seen 12 Angry Men, you know the situation. For every twelve marketers, only one cares about substance.
Ideas are everywhere. Insights are rare. Even when insights enter the room, they're hard to spot. They're even harder to sell to people who value ideas more than reality.
Brand Strategy without insights and a sense of truth is nothing.
A strategy without insight is believing the boy killed his father simply because someone said they saw it. A strategy grounded in insight is understanding the boy through facts, careful observation, and reason.
A recent example is the Al-generated fashion ads by @saintlouvent_. They're viral and getting attention. Most people think it's because of the "AI factor." It isn't.
The ads work because of the current state of fashion art direction and product photography. Nearly every luxury brand has become Zara, prioritising products over storytelling in visuals. You don't need AI to create images of models standing in studios, you just need Photoshop presets.
This isn't limited to fashion. We are living through a creative drought. Brands are repurposing old work. Adland is a wasteland.
AI isn't getting better. Advertisers are getting worse at their job. But why? Not just the usual answers. The new one is "marketing creators & online entrepreneurs". They are all ideas, no strategy and insights.
You watch their videos, "How I will build this brand." Pure gentrification. Must be Bushwick. Must use punk aesthetics. But why Bushwick, why punk? They never say. Can’t even cite the reference, they think rhode beauty invented Sensory Marketing.
The Pretty Little Thing rebrand is an example of strategy without insight, only ideas, aesthetics.
Why does a female-led brand cater to conservative men? Data and culture around young women in the UK clearly show their ideal audience is progressive. Even conservatives aren't wearing old-money fast fashion. At reform party rallies, they wear puffers, not dresses.
My interpretation could be wrong. Maybe they are chasing the money behind old money fashion. But is their strategy guided by truth, by culture? Hard to say.
Too many brands now follow Tik Tok trends turned into Substack essays turned into BuzzFeed write-ups, Culted articles recycled into pitch decks, then campaigns.
I recently saw an article titled: "Maximalism replaces Old Money." Why treat trends like physics? Not every action demands reaction, especially when both particles never shared the same room.
Now, what you just read about PLT is another problem. The interpretation.
Too many people like me interpret strategy without a single day of research. In a way, creators' interpretations help brands. Some creators praise nearly every campaign, drawing attention. I won't name names. Recently, Cera Ve collaborated with a few creators paid to upsell the marketing behind their campaign.
Yet these creators and marketers harm the strategy industry. Small and mid-level businesses get sold ideas and strategies that fail unless a hundred other things fall into place.
Also annoying: the number of commenters saying, "The strategy works because you're talking about it." It doesn't. The people saying this are the same ones who offer to pay creatives with exposure.
Strategy is not tactics. Not just the visible outcome. Yet the creators infiltrating your feeds sell only tactics.
The older and bigger reason behind Brand Strategies becoming out of touch is...
Marketers live in a bubble and social media only made it worse. As Harry Guild from BBH shares:
"Looking at cohesion by profession, Marketing is by far the most like-minded industry that TGI measures. This is advertising's biggest problem in a single chart. This is the monoculture. How can we possibly understand, represent and sell to an entire country when we exist in such a bubble?
We like to style ourselves as free thinkers, mavericks and crazies, but the grim truth is that we're a more insular profession than farming and boast more conformists than the military."
Marketers are the face of "your culture is my costume." Creatives and market researchers have the job of making sure the costume looks real. How do you create a brand strategy free of these errors?
Your brand strategy should be rooted in either a universal or cultural truth.
Truth protects a brand. It gives meaning, even in downturns. Truth lets people hope your brand will endure and return.2
My favorite example is Balenciaga. Fashion lovers still hope the brand will find its roots again, embodying the founder's vision.
A universal, cultural truth is essential to your strategy. It shapes lasting beliefs about your brand, beliefs that outlast you and anyone at your brand. You can't find that truth within corporate walls. You must go outside, explore locally, and research as deeply as possible.
2. Care more about your category, market, and distribution for long-term success.
These factors will likely affect your brand's growth more than you realise.
If you don't define and shape how your market and category perceive your brand, you risk being trapped inside labels like "social media," "Gen-Z," or "trendy." Such labels hurt brands in the long run, as consumers often struggle to think of your company as anything other than the trendy Gen-Z brand.
From the start, brands must pay attention to how their marketing and branding establish them clearly within their category, not just in front of a potential audience. These days most brands fall into this trap by immediately abandoning other form of marketing channels for social media.
3. The words you use and hear matter the most.
A lesson learned the hard way, "You are a writer first, strategist second." Never use words you don't mean to describe a strategy.
Even the best strategists sometimes fail here. Clients often push us to use empty words. And now, with social media turning everyone into a strategy client, buzzwords multiply.
Authenticity, lifestyle, storytelling, influence, these words mean nothing alone. They offer no clarity about what the brand truly does.
Strategy demands clarity. Look beyond your client or partner. Speak clearly to the audience and sell the product.
Strategy begins with truth, ends in action. Stop acting without knowing your truth.
Inspiration Corner
This 2018 research on brand mascots offers insights that feels quite relevant in today’s era of mass marketing on social media. I’m sharing an excerpt below from “The Penguins Are Coming”: Brand Mascots and Utopian Mass Consumption in Interwar Britain.
“In creating a fully fledged mascot for his new series, Lane built on the semantic achievements of other advertising characters who, since the early 1920s, had presented branded commodities as a force of social progress. Fifteen or so years, before Lane launched Penguin Books, anthropomorphic brand mascots had come to dominate British advertising and retail.
As production costs fell, wages rose, and more overseas companies sought to enter the British market, mass-produced goods became increasingly ubiquitous within ordinary people’s lives. More and more prepackaged items competed for attention, both on the grocery shelves and on the hoardings, and mascots proved particularly adept at keeping certain products at the forefront of consumers’ minds.
During the early 1920s, such prewar pioneers as Johnnie Walker, the Quaker (Quaker Oats), and the Kodak Girl were swiftly joined by a vibrant host of others to create what struck many observers as a portentous commercial scene.
Despite their role in framing the social meanings of interwar mass consumption, brand mascots have appeared as only minor characters, if at all, in histories of British advertising and consumerism. Recently, however, they have gained more attention within marketing studies, whose scholars have been keen to determine the factors that distinguish the successes from the failures. Here mascots are generally under-stood as literalizations of “brand personality,” a term coined by Burleigh Gardner and Sidney Levy in 1955 to describe those associative qualities that consumers use to differentiate between similar mass-produced items.”
I’m referring to How Brands Grow and Eat Your Greens.
My strategy insights in this section are influenced by @markpollard and Byron Sharp, Bob Hoffmann, @juliancole , Stephen King and few others. Didn’t do as good a job as they did, but I tried my best.
 | A guest post by
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Thoroughly enjoyed this read - incredibly well written, considered, and with critical analysis. Found myself restacking over and over. Nice!
A corporations brand starts from its customers! Time we make them care!
https://open.substack.com/pub/growingupaspen/p/people-make-brands-not-boardrooms?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web