From Brand Strategy to Brand Anarchy

Recapturing the magic of being a brand.

Lately we’ve been ringing the bell of Brand Anarchy. We admit that, like most things that interest us, it’s very confusing at first. But it also almost always gets someone to comment: why would I want that? And that’s partly why we like it. Its divineness provokes a question, and questions are necessary for any kind of change.

Branding, after all, has historically been about projecting a semblance of a consistent idea. Most often this has taken shape as brand managers intent on controlling the narrative. And Brand Anarchy doesn’t exactly scream “control.” But if you’re like us and you have a particular allergy to banality, you’ve also noticed that most brands have slipped into bland and boring irrelevancy, especially since the D2C and pandemic-marketing flop eras. Quite simply, there is too much emphasis on perfection and control, and not enough interest in creativity or risk taking. We rarely see brands that exist with the fullness of real people.

Instead, many spin the same ho-hum songs and rely on tactics they’ve seen work for others. Or they simply have not tried much at all (this is very common). In most mainstream marketing, there is an obsession with repeatable playbooks and frameworks, but often they are used to police rather than inspire anything that might give off a whiff of humanity. “Don’t offend” seems to be the rallying cry from the mountaintops, and frameworks act as a kind of shield for marketers. An idea doesn’t have to be interesting or compelling if it makes logical sense on the worksheet. It’s the exact opposite of what excites us and drew us to this type of work: the creative leaps that were so obviously the fingerprints of real, human, creative personalities. Brands, when at their best, are meaning-making machines—and most have stopped trying. But to achieve icon status, the best of us are going to have to turn to burning the rule books, toward an embrace of what seems like anarchy.

Something sinister happened over the past algorithmically driven decade: brands took a sharp turn toward efficiency and benefits mindshare, often focusing on a laundry list of functional and emotional whoop-de-doos.

It’s this paint-inside-the-lines mentality that stokes irrelevancy and meaninglessness. And the whole point of a brand is to create an advantage by meaning something. As the market tides change, what most brands need now is to increase demand. The biggest thing they can do to get there is connect with people. And to connect with people, you need to behave more like a human—one with desires, anger, frustrations, hopes, dreams, and spirit—and less like a robot. The future will have enough robots. Your brand will stand out by not acting like one.

We have seen a fracturing in perspective and a reliance on data create a collapse in ideology and identity-based branding. We have seen the atonement of brand meaning-making. Most have relied on platforms and algorithms rather than tapping into exciting cultural myth markets. In many ways, brands have lost the magic of being brands: the advantage they generate when they create outsized meaning for people.

In 2024, it’s easy to forget that iconic brands—those that win by riding cultural waves and becoming deeply associated with new cultural aspirations—must look to cultural idea markets first. A cultural idea market comes from the collective consciousness; it’s an aspiration or belief that a culture can unite around and become excited about.

The best brands begin with inventive cultural aspirations: I don’t see this reality out in the world today, but I see what the culture is hungry for. I see what should be. They build a world that solves for this tension. They live this cultural emergence out loud and proud. They approach these markets voraciously, as anarchists willing to burn down the processes and projects that do not serve us to instead operate in this exciting world.

Brands, at their best, can be deeply aspirational drivers of humanity. They are optimistic creative objects, which make them among the best vehicles for human self-determination that we have, especially as other vehicles for meaning-making and impact decline in importance.

Brand meaning makes your product more interesting, more valuable, and more loaded with cultural and creative potency. And this creates sway, a wave of influence and meaning that can do more for your brand than ad spend. Cultural resonance is what makes brands iconic. It’s what makes their halo 10 times as influential and 10 times as dominant. Cultural ideas are a brand’s vehicle for exponential growth.

The most iconic brands have a point-of-view. And to have a point-of-view, you need to play with fire, so to speak. You need to be highlighting some kind of cultural tension in the world and you need to offer some kind of antidote to it. Most brand strategy frameworks do the opposite: they paint brands as human, caring, optimistic utopia-makers set against the backdrop of…. nothing. They list consumer needs and struggles that are quite functional or surface level. There is very little in the way of designing brands for a kind of aspirational, interesting, ideological muse—someone who wants the world to be something better.

Which is sad. Because as brand people this is our opportunity: to help an otherwise meaningless thing shape a richer world.

Brand Anarchy is not terrifying chaos, but instead the new order that emerges when old paradigms and playbooks crumble, giving way to unexplored creative and cultural potential. And honestly, it’s just a more fun and human way of doing things. We think it’s the mindset needed to create Emergent Brands. This is why we’re training everyone to bring more of an anarchist’s mindset to their work.

Brand Anarchy is the radical idea that a brand can be more than just a commercial entity, but instead a living, breathing world that has the power to challenge, to change, and to create culture.

So what does Brand Anarchy look like? In short, it’s a mindset of encouraging change. Break up with what your brand is today. Take your most emotional, intuitive, impulsive, and deeply charismatic friend—and put them in the brand driver’s seat. Do things that please people, yet make sense for them. Be brave and put new experiments out into the world.

In the coming weeks of our Brand Anarchy series, we’ll explore what it means to create emergent brands by putting on the hat of a Brand Anarchist. We’ll be talking about how to get there by highlighting five key mindset shifts that differentiate the Brand Anarchists from the marketers stuck in the past.

Does your brand need to grow in cultural relevance? Let’s talk. Reach out to hello@zeusjones.com.