When you move between categories in your career, you notice something quickly.
I have had the good fortune to pivot between three key ones:
Mobility, that teaches you how to build the pressure to sell something in a sea of products that are very similarly priced, designed and marketed to each other.
FMCG, which gives you the rigour of a category where brands need to remain memorable, because despite the high rate of repurchase, when the customer enters the aisle and sees a discounted price on the competitor’s packet, he forgets everything.
And then the automobile, currently led by motorcycling in my case, built on the premise of being a unique voice in a sea of products, staying ahead of the game by keeping the customer at the centre and never talking spec sheets.
And what this exposure has taught me is that brand teams don’t all treat their audiences the same way.
Some invest seriously in understanding the full person behind the purchase. Consumer research, live conversations, psychographic studies that go well beyond what someone buys and into why they buy it, what they believe, what they are quietly aspirational about. These are the brands that know their customer is a runner and a parent and someone who cares about where their food comes from, all at the same time.
And then there are the brands that built their position on exactly that kind of instinct, got there, and stopped. Not out of arrogance. Out of protection. They have a cult following, films that perform, analytics that validate, and a community that reliably responds. So they shelter. They narrow the conversation to the things they know will land. And slowly, without anyone deciding it, the audience’s world keeps expanding while the brand’s world stays the same size.
That is not safety. That is the beginning of a slow drift apart. And this is where aspiration starts to leak. The cult brand, so focused on protecting what it has built, stops reaching for what it has not yet earned. The younger brand, the lifestyle brand, the one with a fraction of the heritage and none of the history, steps into that gap. Not because it is better. But because it is willing. It shows up in moments the established brand left unclaimed, speaks to parts of the person the bigger brand stopped being curious about, and quietly begins to own the aspiration that the cult brand assumed was permanently theirs. Cult status does not transfer automatically to the next generation of customers. It has to be re-earned, in their language, in their moments, on their terms.
Cult status is not a destination. It is a pressure to keep earning. The same instinct that built the following is the same instinct that has to keep shaking the category, finding new ways in, new mediums, new angles of communication that make a person feel something about the brand in a context that has nothing to do with the moment of purchase. Your analytics will tell you what is working inside the world you have already built. They will not tell you about the world you have not entered yet.
The brands that understood this did not wait for permission. Ariel’s Share The Load did not come from a detergent brief. It came from someone asking a completely different question: what does the person doing the laundry actually carry, beyond the laundry? The answer cracked the category open and made a washing powder brand part of a cultural conversation about gender that people are still talking about years later.
Apple’s work around accessibility did not come from a product feature checklist. It came from a decision to show the world through the eyes of people the world usually ignores. One film. One day. An audience that felt genuinely seen, and a brand that earned something no campaign budget can manufacture directly.
Neither of those moments came from community feedback. Neither of them came from watching what was trending and deciding it was safe to respond. They came from a brand deciding it had something to say, and saying it before anyone asked.
That is the difference. Not budget. Not production value. The willingness to move first. Here is the part that nobody talks about enough. The brands losing ground right now are not losing it because they stopped caring. They are losing it because they started waiting. Waiting for the community to surface a moment. Waiting for a topic to gain enough traction that acting on it feels safe. Waiting for the very people they should be leading to tell them where to go.
That is not community building. That is followership with a logo on it. The brands that built genuine cult status did not get there by reading the room. They built the room. Supreme did not ask its community whether a limited drop was a good idea. The Grateful Dead did not poll their audience on set-lists. These brands understood something that gets lost the moment a brand becomes successful enough to have a brand guardian: the job is not to reflect culture back at people. The job is to add something to it that was not there before.
A brand that only speaks when the community has already spoken is not a cult. It is an echo. A good marketer is the one who observes multiple categories and challenges the norms of the system they are working inside. And a great one keeps asking the right questions, time and again, even when the resistance is loud, even when the answer is not yet yes. Because the marketer who gives up on the cause altogether is the reason the next generation on that brand stays in fear. Stays safe. Never builds on the cultural moments that could have taken the brand somewhere it had never been before.
Some of that ownership sits specifically with the social and content teams. Not because they post the most, but because they are the ones closest to what is actually happening. And that job demands more than tracking trending formats, trending audios, hook steps and viral templates. It demands a depth of observation that most people underestimate. What is the customer feeling right now? What are they pivoting towards? What fears are they expressing, not in surveys, but in the comments, in the content they share, in the creators they are suddenly following, in the silences between the things they used to engage with and no longer do?
Social is not a broadcast tower. It is the most honest focus group that has ever existed. And the brands that treat it that way, using it to listen as seriously as they use it to speak, are the ones that find the adjacent moment, the unexpected conversation, the cultural shift worth owning before anyone else has claimed it.
That is where restraint becomes the enemy. Because the easiest thing a brand team can do is show up on Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Children’s Day, every year, in the same format every other brand is also showing up in. It is safe. It is expected. And it is exactly how a brand trains its audience to stop paying attention.
The job of a great brand team is to keep people on their toes. To find the moment nobody else claimed. To take the brand’s values and express them through a conversation that surprises, that feels instinctive rather than scheduled, that makes someone stop and think about the brand in a context they were not expecting. Not because it is provocative for its own sake. But because that is how you reach the person who is not thinking about your product category at all right now. The person who is thinking about something they noticed in culture, in human behaviour, in the world around them, and suddenly your brand becomes the thing that articulates it for them.
That is the adjacency. Not a product extension. A moment of recognition. And sometimes that recognition comes from the outside in. A collaborator, a creator, a community that exists adjacent to your brand’s world, who sees a version of your brand that you have not yet allowed yourself to see. The brands that stay open to that are the ones that find new rooms to grow into. The ones that don’t, protect a universe that is quietly getting smaller every year, while calling it consistency.
A well known brand, used well, becomes a sounding board for the cultural shifts its audience is already living through. That is a different ambition than selling a product. And it is a much harder brief to write. But it is the brief that separates the brands people talk about from the brands people simply buy.
Social is where you test whether you have found that moment before you bet everything on it. Not to do what everybody else is doing on the same days in the same formats. But to try something that feels genuinely yours, watch what happens, and let that teach you where to go next.
These are the questions I bring to work every day. Some of them still don’t have easy answers. That’s usually a sign they’re worth asking and pushing the envelope :)
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