In a Sea of Bland Brands, Deploy Dissonance To Break Through
The typical brand experience has become so streamlined that it fails to create moments to connect.
At Zeus Jones, we’ve been preaching the gospel of Emergent Brands. These brands break the mold by creating constant motion and striving to be deeply human, often by showing uniqueness and (sometimes bizarre) individuality. They, like all emergent things, are growing, changing, and shifting. It’s almost like they’re living things! And Emergent Brand behaviors are not limited to new brands alone — some existing brands are exploring these same themes.
Today we’re taking a deep dive into what we see as the third principle of Emergent Brands: It’s all about using dissonance and distinctiveness to connect. Another way we’ve been talking about this is building “emotional friction”—which may seem a bit surprising, but hear us out.
What we mean by emotional friction is purposefully creating striking brand moments that stand out from the clutter. The use of surprise, whimsy, and wonder couldn’t be more important in a noisy world.
Let’s face it: Almost everything has become ignorable. It’s time to deploy dissonance to break through. For years, since the inception of the digital era really, creating seamless experiences has become a virtue for brands. And it makes sense: I want my services, products, and interactions to be as easy to execute as possible. How many times have you sat through a clunky digital brand experience only to pull your hair out and ultimately give up on that Noodles & Co order?
But the online experience, in general, has become so streamlined that it fails to create moments of magic that connect with us. We’ve become a fan of using unexpected physical and digital moments to capture attention and create more positive moments in people’s lives. Brands connect their best when they stand out, not when they’re ignored.
What is Dissonance?
Dissonance refers to a lack of harmony or agreement between various elements. This may not sound like a great thing for brands, but it’s actually crucial to creativity and storytelling. In short, we notice the things that break the mold.
So what does dissonance actually do? It provokes thought, often by driving strong emotions, and it challenges people to think or feel deeply. This engagement is crucial to making any kind of mark in the world. In addition to acting as a provocation, dissonance keeps people engaged by breaking up monotony and introducing the element of surprise. It also can lead to innovation, making people see things differently or change a person’s framing of a situation; dissonance also enhances aesthetics by creating tension, ultimately leading to a sense of resolution or satisfaction. And frankly, dissonance also just reflects reality. No one connects with perfection for a reason: it’s not human.
Here’s what brands are doing to create more dissonant interactions.
Create More Self-Guided Experiences
In our algo-driven world, where recommendations are based upon what machines think you’re going to want and not upon your innate uniqueness or randomness, building experiences that require self-guided exploration is essential.
Experiential amusements like Meow Wolf, or even the continued success and evolution of Disney Parks, point to an interesting need in our culture: so far, nothing has supplanted our connection to multi-sensory, self-guided experience.
Meow Wolf was built by a collective of artists with the intent of creating immersive worlds for guests to explore freely. The engagement formula is simple: When you stumble upon a curious portal, you want to take the leap. Digital experiences still can’t compete with the awe of self-guided physical exploration. Disney Parks obviously pioneered this space, and they continue to see its parks’ profits grow while its streaming services decline.
But self-guided experiences don’t need to stay handcuffed to the physical world. In many ways, one promise of the metaverse is the ability to build more freedom and exploration into the digital realm. Self-guided experiences can also provide a lot of utility, not just entertainment.
We’re already seeing this in luxury set-ups like Gucci Garden. Located in Florence, Italy, Gucci Garden is a multi-level galleria offering a retail space, a restaurant, a cinema, and vintage Gucci displays. Visitors can explore the space at their leisure, with an entry fee for the upper floors. It’s also becoming more and more common for brands to provide distinctive new services that enable experiences for guests they couldn’t have had otherwise. Airbnb Experiences allow hosts to offer local activities like cooking classes, guided tours, or yoga classes, which users can explore and book online. The future of distinctive brand experiences looks more like a choose-your-own-adventure than a paint-by-numbers.
Prioritize Place-Making and World-Building
The best brands aren’t just talking about an exciting future. They are building it by releasing sensorial delights into the world. The aim? Capture the feeling of the world they’d like to make real.
Flamingo Estate, the always lush and gorgeous personal care brand that takes pleasure from the garden, has expanded into multiple dimensions—not just with their creative direction and beautiful visuals of their Estate. One of their most recent forays into the disruptive physical world took root as an “Inconvenience Store,” a curated collection and pop-up of 30 curated products that were hand-grown and hand-made (hence the inconvenience).
Cartier and its retail innovation outpost, Cartier Lab, have dealt with the unique problem of high-end product scarcity (there are only so many $6 million rings in production) by creating unique physical-digital retail experiences that allow you to step into an immersive AR-powered historical narrative of a specific product’s history, only available in-store. And recently they made waves for beaming diamond rings directly to your finger. IKEA has made similar product-projection moves with their app, allowing you to imagine what your physical world could be like.
Subvert the Algorithms
Every brand wants to play the “go viral” game, but very few succeed. That’s because virality often involves breaking the rules to win.
MSCHF focuses on the irreverent and tangible to create break-the-internet level shock waves. And their often mysterious drops, from the Satan shoe to the PRODUCT, sell out in minutes. Breaking even more rules, they have massive price elasticity, ranging from $15-$1,500. And some products aren’t even real, they’re just gags, of course.
Liquid Death has become the most badass water company around. They’ve built a world around algorithm subversion, launching artifacts ranging from actual products like Liquid Death x MeUndies (who doesn’t want undies from their favorite hardcore water brand?). The beverage company has succeeded at a long-used fashion brand tactic, deploying frequent newsworthy drops, also in the style of MSCHF, to release punny products such as their Slaughter Bottle.
The TLDR: Breakthroughs Require Breaking Traditional Thinking
It may sound obvious, but in the age of efficiency, it’s increasingly rare to see differentiated, original creative in the world. Yet the most efficient brand activations all have creative dissonance—and originality—at the center. (Just look at Duolingo.)
Next time, we’ll talk about how real brand-consumer relationships have fallen apart, and what Emergent Brands are doing to connect with great depth.
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