The Contentification of Marketing

Everything is content now, including marketing. Which raises an uncomfortable question for anyone building a brand. Are people buying the brand, or are they buying the marketing?

I dislike the C-words in marketing. Culture, community, cult. They get thrown around because it is getting harder and harder to define why people buy brands at all. The research tells us most buyers are irrational, and brand loyalty is more fragile than we pretend. Every supermarket now runs a loyalty program, and retail media has turned even a retailer's own shelves into third-party space.

Consumer confidence barely recovers before it crashes back toward pandemic lows. Brands still have Temu and fast fashion to fight. Meta and Google promise every advertiser an edge with AI agents, the same service for everyone, and the old gatekeeping advantage of the agency starts to disappear. All of that points to one thing. Keeping a buyer loyal is hard.

Meanwhile the gurus keep repeating the same lines. Nike is culture. Apple is a cult. Duolingo is community. Oatly is a cult. A year ago Drunk Elephant was a cult and a community too. Where is it now? Sales slid sharply and the parent company's earnings fell with them. The story we are told keeps drifting away from the system underneath it, and from the people who actually buy.

If founders say build a product and they will come, and marketers say build cult-like marketing and they will buy, neither side has it quite right. So it helps to look at where brands actually try to win, one channel at a time.

The four places brands try to win

Social media. The algorithm only grants you access to a slice of a network. A brand needs consistent access to a specific group of people to build anything resembling community. If you are not consistently engaging that network and pulling them somewhere you own, you do not have a community. You have reach you are renting.

Advertising. Most campaigns go unnoticed even with budget behind them. The brand you see everywhere will not be recalled unless it builds memory through distinctive assets, or carries some element of localism. One recent attention study put it plainly. With typical creative you need roughly 2.5 seconds for memory to form, but with distinctive assets the benefit starts appearing closer to 1.5 seconds. That one-second shift matters when most digital impressions never reach 2.5 seconds at all.

Culture. Most brands are just engaging with whatever trend has hardened into a template. The contentification of culture happens daily, and grabbing a fragment of it is not enough. What brands actually want is cultural differentiation, which means doing more than chasing the monoculture.

Two old campaigns show the difference. When Sprite and the Sony Walkman were both trying to win audiences, each faced the same fear of being called a culture vulture, and each solved it differently. Sprite met collaborators where they were. The rappers it worked with, KRS-One, Nas, MC Shan, were at the top of their craft, and the songs were good enough that you would actually listen to them. The Walkman went the other way. It made people reflect their own identity through design, music, and the way they dressed, until it felt uncool not to own one.

One brand met people where they were. The other made people come to it, because it was everywhere and woven through the culture. Can you still do that today and be the culture rather than a vulture? Maybe. More brands than ever engage with popular culture, but most have no clear idea of how they move it forward. We keep hearing about reactive marketing, and that is exactly what it is. A reaction, not an action.

Distribution of action and consumption is the key to cultural differentiation, and to becoming a brand of the people.

The boardroom. Brands need fewer frameworks and less short-termism, and more creativity and experimentation. The data backs it up. Most small businesses say their KPIs prioritise short-term sales over long-term brand building, and the same holds at plenty of larger ones. Paid media still eats the largest share of CMO budgets. Only a small minority of companies rate their ability to develop genuine insight as very good. An industry spending against short horizons, unsure it even trusts itself, is not going to build many lasting brands.

When everything is treated as a product, a brand's social image included, the return on that image is supposed to transfer into a future purchase. My worry is that brands are making the virtual product, the feed and the aesthetic, too detached from the physical one. People now consume marketing from brands they never buy, partly for entertainment and partly because producing and sharing content has become a way to feel a sense of ownership and self.

I don't think it's a coincidence we're so fiercely protecting our intellectual property in an era when it's harder to purchase physical property.

Kate Lindsay, The IP Generation

So brands jump on trends and make marketing that gets consumed as content rather than as product, and consumers buy into that marketing by posting about it. In the end both lose. The system rewards the engagement game, so you either play it or pretend you are above it. But you still have to do the work that makes someone buy the brand and not just the marketing. A transaction that creates real value, not an escape from reality.

The brand market crash

As Dave Trott puts it, brands don't build products, products build brands. Imagine I launch a car you have never heard of, call it the Zink, with the line "if only everything in life worked as well as a Zink." It would not work, because the Zink has no history of working. Volkswagen could run that kind of line because it had decades of advertising about how well its cars actually performed behind it.

The fashionable flow today runs the other way. Sell the feeling first, the product second. Be relatable. Lean into vibe marketing. It can work when the product and the business strategy genuinely support it. But most companies adopting it are not doing that math. They are following aesthetics and social proof. And all it takes is one disappointing purchase to shatter a carefully built perception.

There is still value in shaping how people read your brand before they buy, because it colours how they interpret both the good and the bad. But you can get the same result, often better, by selling the experience instead of the identity. Target and Costco do not force-feed you a story. They win you over with real moments. Food courts, free samples, the feeling of the place.

Marketers have to stay self-aware about this. A lot of the brands held up as cult icons are selling ordinary things in nicer packaging. The pre-purchase experience protects a brand far better than trying to sell a story the product cannot back up.

Mara Dettmann, a strategy director who writes the newsletter In Interesting Times, adds a useful counterweight. Trott is right that products build brands, because experience is the ultimate brand builder and few taglines survive an underperforming product. In a downturn that matters even more, since no one buys a second time for the branding alone. But the flip side is real too. Even a great product fails if no one knows it exists. It still needs a reason to try, a story to believe, and a memory structure to recall.

People do not experience products in a vacuum. They experience them through the brand. So brand and product have to stay in sync. The story cannot overpromise what the product underdelivers. Innovation keeps established brands current, product makes emerging brands last, and brand is what gets either of them noticed and believed. Meet in the middle, or you crash.

The dying art of brand strategy

Why are we so obsessed with ideas and aesthetics? Anti-intellectualism is everywhere, marketing included. We keep rebranding problems as if they only affect a narrow demographic, which is part of why marketing starts to feel out of touch the moment you age past your twenties. Brands no longer invest in research and culture the way they once did.

Ideas are everywhere. Insight is rare, and even when it walks into the room it is hard to spot and harder to sell to people who value ideas over reality. Brand strategy without insight and a sense of truth is nothing.

Take the AI-generated fashion ads people have been sharing. Most assume they spread because of the AI novelty. They do not. They work because so much luxury art direction has flattened into the same studio product shot. Nearly every luxury brand now looks like Zara, product over storytelling. You do not need AI to make an image of a model standing in a studio. You need a Photoshop preset. We are living through a creative drought, and adland is recycling old work.

The newer problem is the wave of marketing creators and online entrepreneurs who are all ideas and no strategy. You watch the "how I would build this brand" videos. It must be Bushwick, it must use punk aesthetics, but they never say why Bushwick or why punk. They cannot cite the reference. They will sell tactics, the visible surface, and call it strategy.

And too many people, myself included, interpret strategy without a single day of research behind it. That hurts small and mid-sized businesses most, because they get sold ideas that only work if a hundred other things happen to line up. The line that "the strategy works because we are all talking about it" is usually wrong. Talk is not the outcome.

Marketers also live in a bubble, and social media made it worse. As Harry Guild of BBH has noted, marketing is one of the most like-minded professions there is, more insular than you would expect, full of people who style themselves as mavericks while quietly conforming. It is hard to understand and sell to a whole country from inside a monoculture.

So how do you build a strategy with fewer of these errors?

• Root it in a truth. Universal or cultural, but a truth. Truth protects a brand and gives it meaning even in a downturn. It is why fashion lovers still hope Balenciaga will find its roots again. You will not find that truth inside the corporate walls. You have to go outside, look locally, and research as deeply as you can.
• Care about category and distribution. These shape long-term growth more than most teams realise. If you do not define how your market sees you, you get trapped in labels like "social media brand" or "Gen-Z brand," and those labels are hard to escape. Brands fall into this the moment they abandon every other channel for social.
• Mean the words you use. You are a writer first and a strategist second. Authenticity, lifestyle, storytelling, influence. Alone they mean nothing and give no clarity about what the brand actually does. Strategy demands clarity. Speak plainly to the audience and sell the product.

Strategy begins with truth and ends in action. Stop acting before you know your truth.