What makes brands feel alive? What makes them feel natural to engage with as a human? Why do some just feel off? Like they're trying to shove themselves into a space where they just don't belong?
Opening a social media app in 2025 means being met with stampede of thousands of brands vying for our attention at every moment, most gravitating around the idea that simply mirroring the moment will create room for the consumer to buy-in. What's actually seen isn't anything of value at all, but a fucked-up and mocked simulacra of what the "now" looks like.
Commodification of culture is a vacuum that sucks the life out of any organic movement that finds its niche. It's what creates the uncanny valley effect for the savvy consumer. The engagement isn't as natural as it should be. Something doesn't click with people. If anything, consumers will keep you at a safe distance.
Co-opting symbols of a niche, ironically in an attempt to project authenticity, is a strategy that too often reduces the brand to an over-choreographed performer, jingling keys for an audience that left last week. At a moment where people value humanity over everything else, what's "too perfect" is looked at with a cautiously raised eyebrow. AI powered listening & analytics tools, fully automated agentic businesses, LLM-written copy, generative ads & music have fully saturated consumer spaces to the point where it's become nothing but noise filtered through one fatigued ear out the other. What was once a grassroots movement is now scraped by crawlers and sloppified inside a GPU sitting in a warehouse somewhere. It's never been easier to appropriate identities, it's never been easier to spot an appropriator of identities. Engaging with a brand who desperately wants to look and act like you, wears your clothes, and insists on taking up space in order to gain your trust is off-putting. As a consumer, it signifies that whoever is marketing to me isn't confident enough in their the value they offer, they might not even have any at all, I'm probably being lied to. That's the uncanny valley in effect. Left unchecked, what was once countercultural momentum paradoxically becomes a signifier of the clothes that capitalism wears for this season. Rinse and Repeat. Commercialization blew up the spot, and your target audience moved far away from the stench of what's now monotonous and drained of all that made it human.
The voices that feel the most natural to engage with have a grounded self-awareness built-in that coexists the consumer, confidently aware of their cultural footprint and their spot in the zeitgeist, adjusting to changes and evolving at a human pace, going through graceful rebrands and never making the brash decisions that feel like a kind of mid-life crisis. They're grounded in material reality, not fleeting concepts that exist within the bubble of the moment. They do not communicate with their audience as a means to a click, they treat culture as a living, breathing form of expression, not as an exploitative commodity ready to be printed en masse. That is evergreen, and cultivating evergreen appeal, especially in a world that's moved well beyond the monoculture that television, radio, and print offered us presents a real challenge for both new and legacy brands. The post-COVID rise of streaming & short content, algorithmic curation giving rise to micro-communities that each have their own cultural cachet's is clearly what's making brands scratch their heads and scramble on what "-ism" to appropriate next. Eventually a brand unsure of its space in the moment builds a house of cards from borrowed cues of the last sweeping moment, and the cards fall once the next sweeps in.
What separates a fragile house of cards from a stable, inviting home is almost always going to be literacy and contextual understanding. Specifically, the ability to read, and tap into the why behind a moment, rather than the what. Brands build staying power by reading the room and confidently stepping in without blowing up the spot. If the audience discovers value, they'll gravitate, and value will communicate naturally if you stop wearing today's clothes for tomorrow's audience.