From Groupthink to Responsible Disobedience
The first of five mindset shifts that can help you create an Emergent Brand through the lens of Brand Anarchy.
A few weeks ago, we wrote about recapturing the magic of being a brand by shifting from brand strategy to Brand Anarchy.
Brand Anarchy, we explained, is not terrifying chaos. Instead, it’s the new order that emerges when old paradigms and playbooks crumble, giving way to unexplored creative and cultural potential. It’s the lens through which we can make mindset shifts that lead us toward Emergent Branding. And, if we’re being honest, it’s also just a more fun and human way of doing things.
While technically we did advise a (figurative) burning of the rule books, Brand Anarchy isn’t just anarchy for anarchy’s sake. We think it’s what’s needed to create Emergent Brands: brands that are always in motion, deeply human, constantly growing, changing, and shifting. Creating these brands requires new ways of thinking. And in an effort to adopt those new ways, we’re training everyone to bring more of an anarchist’s mindset to their work.
Over the next couple months, we’ll be diving deep on five crucial mindset shifts that can help marketers and strategists move toward a new practice for brand building. The first one, shifting from groupthink to Responsible Disobedience, is all about unlocking better outcomes. Breaking away from conformity and disobeying the expected, but doing so with a principled compass. Challenging not for the sake of rebellion, but for the pursuit of a sustainable, equitable, and human-centric future.
Where to start
So, how do you even start making a mindset shift like this? First, identify what practices and tools no longer serve your brand, and replace them with ones that do. This will involve taking stock of what tools actually help inspire you to build a brand of the future, and which tools you use simply because that’s the way it “should” be done.
In this mindset shift, it’s about setting aside traditional brand positioning frameworks that are based solely on attributes and benefits, absent the cultural context of the world the brand participates in. Instead, use Emergent Branding approaches that thoughtfully consider the communities and cultural forces driving the definition and meaning of those benefits—the societal values—within the cultural context today. Also, how humans and communities are engaging with those values: from the subcultures they participate in to how they show up there.
For example, a brand might ask: How is wellness defined today? How is indulgence defined today? What are the subcultures that support an evolving definition—and which ones give you hints as to how you can evolve to stay relevant with both the previous generation and the next?
Putting it into practice
Here are some important questions we recommend asking at the beginning of this process. They can help you begin to pinpoint how to nudge your brand in a more relevant, emergent direction:
👩🏾🤝👨🏼 What idea about people is your brand built upon? What is the deeper human truth that the brand is serving? What is the role that it played when it was at its peak—and how is that value showing up today?
🔮 How can your brand become known for more than its product or category definition? What cultural tensions does your brand resolve? What new aspirations are emerging around your category?
📗 Can your brand move through cultural moments without having to change its story? Do your brand storylines matter? How do they serve the communities that follow and buy your products and services?
How AI can accelerate
Building an Emergent Brand through the lens of Brand Anarchy is a deeply human process, but we’ve identified ways that AI can support, augment and accelerate it.
Brand strategy relies heavily on contextual data. Historically, sifting through this data has been largely a manual, human-driven process due to the fact that data is not always neatly structured; it often lives across PDFs, presentations, reports or even video files. With the help of AI, we can train models on this contextual data and ask it the questions that we’d ask ourselves after having read all of these reports or data inputs.
Zeus Jones has been developing a tool—we’re calling it the Living Brand AI Hub—to support brands as they shift into Emergent Branding. The goal is not simply to proliferate more, or better targeted marketing. It’s designed to support our clients in building living, breathing, iconic brands. It addresses questions like:
🗣️ Can you talk to your consumer data and ask it questions?
📑 Can you load all of your brand research and foundational docs and ask for positioning statements based on brand research and foundational documents?
🔁 Can you input a brief and receive relevant trends for your brand
Start building your Emergent Brand
We’ve created the Building Emergent Brands guide as a quick-hit resource for the five Brand Anarchy mindset shifts.
Click the button below to see the first chapter of the guide, which is centered around this first mindset shift and builds on what you just read here. Flip through to find what resonates, then share it with your team to get inspired to keep moving toward Emergent Branding. And stay tuned to Within Sight in the coming weeks and months as we reveal more chapters and tips.
Does your brand or team want to move toward Responsible Disobedience, or just inspire new ways you can challenge the status quo?
Let’s talk: hello@zeusjones.com.