Re:Brand (The Revival)

Hello! Ethan here again – though this one was technically a team effort (I’m still happy to take the writing credits). This is because we all wholeheartedly agree, without bias or prejudice (despite being a brand & design agency), that brand is back!

Brand has had a rocky old journey the last few years – from the queen of disciplines to somewhat obscurity, and now back to its glorious best. And we can’t see this latest, fundamental shift in the market towards brand changing any time soon, so let’s get into it.

A Very Brief History

While not old enough to experience this myself, I have it on good authority that brand was a hot topic in the 2000s. Prior to the digital revolution, businesses knew they had to invest in brand and traditional advertising to be noticed. Strong campaigns backed by solid brands with clear identities was essential to any kind of marketing success.

And then came the two newest wonders of the modern marketing world: Facebook and Google. I don’t need to go into detail about how these changed everything – just go for a quick scroll, count how many businesses you willingly and unwillingly interact with, and you can see the results of digital marketing.

In marketing and brand world that I was educated in, content was everything – and it didn’t have to be good. This, in many ways, was fantastic – you didn’t need to spend a 100k on a TV ad to reach your audience. A fun clip on your phone with a bit of spend behind it could potentially generate just as much traffic as an expensive billboard or TVC campaign. But as always, trends swing like a pendulum, and this overwhelming focus on digital meant budgets were quickly diverted away from brand and traditional advertising to quick-win content and lo-fi campaigns.

And it worked – so absolutely fair enough. From 2015-2022, it was – (again, I’m told on good authority) – almost impossible to miss with digital marketing. ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) expectations were high, and you didn’t have to do anything too special to achieve those goals.

But as anyone who owns a business will tell you, things have changed recently. Everyone with marketing budget is at least spending a portion of this on digital ads, and the result is a very crowded marketplace in which small-budget players are finding it harder and harder to compete. It’s still essential to be in the game – it’s very much a ‘pay to play’ model with most digital channels – but achieving the same ROAS you did in 2021 is not easy, unless you play the game very, very well.

Full Circle

So, here we are back where we started: in a saturated digital space, businesses needs a persisting, cohesive identity to ground their content, to create trust in the market, to invite their customers into their community. They need a personality that’s clear, that’s authentic, that’s welcoming. They need a singular message communicated effectively through every touchpoint. They need, in other words, a good brand. And a good brand strategy backed by good design. But particularly a good brand!

We recently went to design week and the founder of Blunt Umbrellas – Greig Brebner – talked about two things a lot: his obsession with his product and his obsession with his brand positioning. Blunt has carved out a place in the market that was previously non-existent – a world of sustainable, reliable, and ‘sexy’ umbrellas. Blunt brand and messaging is so consistent and so authentic that they were able to quickly build trust in the market – and have obviously flourished since.

On a bigger scale, I was recently listening to Alex Hormozi on the Diary of a CEO podcast and he, interestingly enough, said he used to think brand was irrelevant – and would never be relevant again. He, like a lot of entrepreneurs over the last 10 years, built his businesses on high volume, lo-fi social media content – so brand was just viewed as superfluous spending. He then went on to admit that he was wrong and that brand is 100% important. Throwing content at the proverbial wall and hoping it sticks is no longer a viable strategy. Even content-driven entrepreneurs like Alex are waking up to the importance of creating an identity that builds trust in the marketplace – and if you’ll allow me to make a prediction about the future, I can only see this importance growing.

Brand and AI

With template-based websites, AI-generated copy, and algorithm-optimised campaigns, even small businesses can present themselves at a level that would have required significant investment just five years ago. But this democratisation of "good enough" has created a new problem: everything looks the same, and it’s really sad.

When everyone uses the same tools:

• Websites follow identical patterns and structures

• Marketing emails adopt similar tones and formats

• Social media content blends into a homogeneous stream

• Ads share an uncanny visual and verbal similarity

You also see lots of colons and long dashes because that’s what ChatGPT loves. And I find this particularly annoying as I love colons and long dashes, but now I have to second guess every time I use them.

The answer (as we see it): find your brand identity again, and lean into it. Develop a clear brand voice – a tone that’s unique to you – and embrace it. Authenticity means aligning your external presentation with your internal reality. It's about identifying what genuinely makes your business different – your particular approach, perspective, or purpose – and leaning into it unapologetically. The list of brands that have done this well and reaped the rewards is too long to include here, but I’ll name a few: Nike, Patagonia, Spotify (think about your crazy daily playlist names), Liquid Death, and more locally, Pak n Save and Pals.

To summarise

The marketing world is experiencing a profound paradox: as technology makes execution easier, strategy becomes harder. As tactics become automated, brand becomes essential. As AI makes more decisions, human distinctiveness and connectedness and authenticity becomes the differentiator.

We're watching it play out across industries:

• Companies with clear, distinctive brands maintain pricing power even as AI comparison tools make price shopping easier

• Businesses with authentic stories attract talent in competitive markets without paying premium salaries

• Brands with genuine points of view build communities that algorithms can't easily replicate

The real irony is this: in our rush to embrace the most advanced marketing technology in human history, people are rediscovering the most fundamental truth in business: people don't always connect with algorithms. They connect with identity, meaning, and feeling. The future of marketing – we believe – is still human.

Ethan

Each month, we share thoughts and insights from our experience in brand and business. If you found this valuable, feel free to pass it along.