The Evolution of Modern Branding in a Polarized World
There’s one thing that’s become clear in the branding world: we’re on the precipice of a sea change in what it means to build a brand. With dramatic geopolitical shifts occurring on the global stage and AI changing the way we think of thinking, creativity, originality and consumer attention, brands need to evolve both their self-conception and approach if they’re going to survive and thrive in this brave new world.
Over decades, BrandCulture has looked across the evolving landscape of what it means to build a brand with the goal of discovering what really works for the long haul, evolving and helping our clients evolve with us through multiple major seismic shifts in what successful branding looks like.
As we embark on the next era of brand creation, we wanted to take a look back as well as forecast what lies ahead. What will it mean for entrepreneurs, creators and visionaries, along with established leading brands, as we segue to a new mode of thinking about what it means to establish a creative brand that is built to last?
Brand as Image
In the early days of branding, companies established their identities through the creation of Brand as Image. That meant establishing and maintaining control through voluminous and exhaustive rules. Brands established clear, and sometimes inflexible, ideas of what it meant to exist in their shared identity, communicating these identities to the public through branding that valued order, structure and discipline.
This period of branding was all about consistency, with rules, rigidity and enforcement. There was a focus on type, color and overall brand presence, with massive brand guideline bibles and a do this, not that attitude. Legacy brands like IBM and Coca-Cola worked during this period to establish identities we recognize even today.
Brands that lead with image often have a very clearly established visual and rhetorical identity, but often lack the ideological underpinnings to support it. As Andre Agassi memorably said in 1989, “Image is Everything,” even while he sported a heavy metal-inspired hairpiece and failed to win a major championship despite his prodigious skills and outrageous sartorial combos (his first major came at Wimbledon three years later, demonstrating there was substance behind the image after all). For brands, “image” appears like messaging that’s tonally coherent but whose content feels disjointed, or an image that’s sleek and polished but may be lacking true coherent substance.
Still, image-first brand building has lingered into the digital age. We see this in social platforms where aesthetics is everything, regardless of bona fides. But even here, users are carving out their own visual identities in these increasingly democratized spaces. In a time when the public craves substance, brand as image alone no longer builds the kind of firm, established connections that unlock and cement loyalty in the marketplace.
Brand as Experience
In the age of Brand as Experience, brands moved away from this overly stringent focus on the visual. Structures became slightly more relaxed, with flexibility rising to the forefront once more, as brands moved away from their overly rigid approaches to identity. The focus became building consumer loyalty through consistency of product, voice and experience.
In the Brand as Experience era, we brought brands into the real world. Multisensory, multidimensional presentation became important, and the idea of bringing brands to life in a physical space was key. Immersive retail environments like Nike’s Niketown stores, The Body Shop’s soothing dark green storefronts and Starbucks´ coffee cafe became as much a part of the branding experience as the products stocked on their shelves.
Consistency has its virtues when it comes to maintaining consumer allegiance. To a certain extent, brands could move into autopilot, letting go of the harsh parameters that identified the Brand as the Image era. The focus became reliability, showing up predictably in the same places with the same emotional resonance over and over again. Consistency of customer experience became key, moving the focus more broadly beyond the consistency of image, which predominated in the Brand as Image era.
Brand identity as a consistent, reliable experience in a shifting world helped build consumer trust, but it also shared Brand as Image’s weakness for maintaining an overly prescriptive approach. As the culture began to value change and flexibility, it became clear that delivering on consumer experience required more than communicative interventions. More and more, we learned that the people behind the experience were critical, making company culture of primary importance. The next evolution in branding was waiting in the wings.
Brand as Culture
The Brand as Culture era is the most recent stage in the evolution of brand identity. Brands sought to transcend consistent, replicable experiences to create a sense of connection in their consumer bases by forging a commonly understood and embraced Shared Purpose. Brand as Culture requires brands to develop an inward focus, engaging the worker and workplace first; customer experience becomes not an initiative but an outcome of employee experience. Employees become full stakeholders, with a reason to believe in what they do and deliver on that experience in a way that gives customers a reason to buy.
Brands built understanding through clarity of vision and commonly shared values, co-creating identities through design thinking and shared meaning. In this era, the primary focus of successful branding became grounded in customer self-selection and opt-in based on the substantive truth of what an organization was actually like vs. what its image purported it to be. The Brand as Culture era is defined by the growing realization among brands that it was futile to attempt to be something they were not, even if the trends and fads of the moment pulled them in certain directions. Brands needed to articulate their bigger picture sense of meaning to assert not just what they did, the services or products they provided, but why.
Reciprocal design thinking principles also began to inform brands and culture. The most successful brands have a human-centered approach driven by empathy for user needs, fostering collaboration and valuing diverse perspectives. Brands like Southwest Airlines, Trader Joe’s and Airbnb worked to create brand presences that were based on valuing people, prototyping to iterate innovative solutions. The next stage of branding does not so much transcend Brand as Culture, but moves it further forward to assume the mantle of leadership in sociocultural and economic change.
Brand as Leadership
The next stage of visionary thinking for brands seeking to make a true, indelible impact in the collective experience is Brand as Leadership, starting with the principles and perspective of inspiration, innovation and stewardship.
Brand as Leadership expands a successful brand’s vision beyond the realm of the brand itself and into the larger world. Stewardship encompasses vision for the brand and its impact on the world at large, a focus on regenerative innovation that builds on past successes, real accountability and links to collective mobilization that drives positive real-world change.
The time has come to move from talk to action, making a better world not only with incremental improvements but with bold steps forward to build a future that is both brighter and more resilient and sustainable. When leaders lead, consumers follow. A company with vision is a company that produces results.
This era of branding steps into a time of uncertainty, when the public is looking for leadership and seeking guidance. Partisan polarization has left many wondering whether our elected officials can work together to advance collective progress. New anxiety continues to build about AI not only stealing our jobs but also coopting our essential human function as thinking, creative problem-solvers – and perhaps, destroying humanity in the process. As doubts prevail, brands that can successfully enter the vacuum and influence the culture at large can fill the void. Brands like Patagonia (despite the incongruous affinity of finance bros for their fleeces) and Costco are respectively standing up for sustainability and workers and forwarding their ideals on the public stage as a way of reifying their branding in the commercial sphere. As Costco admits up front, the company does not have all the answers, but commits to positive ameliorative impact (our words, not theirs).
Brands are afraid to make political statements or wade into the crosshairs of the “culture wars.” Yet there is much to be learned by powerful brands sticking to their professed principles vs. running for the hills when the winds of change blow in the opposite direction. Targeted by an activist investor for its DEI policies, Costco chose not to resort to reflexive euphemism aping the acceptable patois of the moment but instead noted, “Among other things, a diverse group of employees helps bring originality and creativity to our merchandise offerings, promoting the ‘treasure hunt’ that our customers value.” Leadership doesn’t have to mean choosing sides, but it does require some resistance to reflexive flip-flopping. Earlier this year, Marriott’s CEO Anthony Capuano issued a statement: “The winds blow, but there are some fundamental truths for those 98 years…. We welcome all to our hotels and we create opportunities for all – and fundamentally, those will never change. The words might change, but that’s who we are as a company.” Within 24 hours, 40,000 of Marriott’s 800,000 employees sent Capuano personal emails to thank him. Also, think of Coca-Cola’s Hilltop ad. It dates from the Brand as Image Era, but with important things to say about the Brand as Leadership evolution. Positivity and optimism are sorely lacking in the present cultural moment. When we deliver these things, we build true consumer confidence and trust.
It’s not just established brands that are building a path to a better future vs. handwringing over present challenges. Early-stage brands that are doing the right thing and inspiring companies include Samsara Eco, recycling previously unrecyclable plastic to achieve true circularity and inking a 10-year deal with Lululemon to do so. Then there’s Net Power, based in Durham, North Carolina, using carbon capture and storage to maintain zero-emissions natural gas electricity production and Fuel Gems in Austin, working to make traditional fuels more sustainable. Of course, these are but a handful of examples of companies’ scores making real progress outside of the major brand limelight. By combining values with vision, brands like these are building both businesses and customer loyalty that lasts.
At BrandCulture, we help ambitious leaders build optimistic brands, regardless of the vagaries of the economic cycle or political pendulum. This is how we founded our agency and how we will always operate. We look forward with a spirit of perpetual improvement, intellect + inspiration, ever-attuned to the next evolution of what it means to create and maintain a successful brand vision and voice for the long haul. By building Leadership into our brands, we help them stay a step ahead of the next step in cultural evolution, achieving both enduring value and impact.
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