“Nobody gives a sh*t about brands anymore.”
A few weeks ago I found myself wondering whether it might make sense to revive a dead brand publication. Not metaphorically dead. Actually dead.
I’ll keep the name to myself – but what was once a meaningful publication in the marketing and branding world – has effectively disappeared. Along with it, a huge amount of the institutional energy that once surrounded “brand work” itself seems to have dissipated.
One colleague of mine, who is in a very good position to observe these trends up close, said something that initially struck me as cynical but has stayed with me ever since:
“Nobody gives a sh*t about brands anymore.”
At first glance, that feels obviously wrong. People still obsess over companies, products, identities, aesthetics, experiences, status, loyalty, trust, design, culture, interfaces, and affiliation. Entire economies are built around those forces. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized he may have been directionally right – just not in the way he intended.
Maybe people don’t care about “brands” anymore because brand has dissolved into something larger. Or perhaps more accurately: branding, as a standalone discipline, no longer adequately describes the systems we’re actually living inside.
That realization sent me down a rabbit hole I probably should have resisted. But once you start pulling on this thread, it becomes difficult to stop. Because the modern world increasingly operates through systems that used to be adjacent to brand but are now inseparable from it.
Product is brand.
Interface is brand.
Customer service is brand.
Founder behavior is brand.
AI behavior is brand.
Pricing transparency is brand.
Logistics reliability is brand.
Recommendation algorithms are brand.
Incentives are brand.
Community is brand.
Trust is brand.
The old idea that “branding” existed primarily in messaging, campaigns, advertising, visual identity, or storytelling now feels strangely incomplete – almost quaint.
We have entered something else.
A post-brand condition. Not a world without brands. A world where brand has dissolved into behavior, systems, and lived experience. People absolutely still care about what brands used to represent: trust, identity, aspiration, coherence, emotional resonance, belonging, status, meaning. But increasingly they experience those things through systems rather than messaging.
Costco is one of the most trusted entities in America not because of sophisticated brand storytelling, but because its operational behavior creates emotional meaning. People trust the system.
Trader Joe’s generates enormous affection not because it optimized itself into modern retail perfection, but because it somehow still feels human inside an increasingly optimized world.
Apple no longer operates merely as a product company or a brand. It operates as an ecosystem, an identity infrastructure, and an emotional operating system.
Even loyalty systems – something I’ve spent years studying professionally – increasingly function less like “marketing” and more like behavioral architecture. They shape habits, identity, emotion, aspiration, and belonging. Meanwhile, platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Discord are conditioning perception, status, aesthetics, relationships, and selfhood itself.
Which raises a much larger question: If modern life is increasingly mediated through designed commercial systems, what exactly are we living inside now? And perhaps more importantly: what does that do to people?
That, I think, is the more interesting territory. Something broader and harder to define: an exploration of how humans navigate modern systems.
Not “branding” per se.
Not “customer experience” per se.
Not “marketing” per se.
Not even “media” per se.
Because increasingly we experience institutions primarily as consumers. We move through algorithmic environments, loyalty architectures, recommendation engines, identity systems, convenience systems, trust systems, AI systems, and emotional systems all day long – often without fully noticing their influence on us.
Which may explain why so many old categories are beginning to fail.
The old branding world feels incomplete because branding escaped its container.
The old media world is collapsing because institutions lost their monopoly on interpretation.
The old customer experience discipline feels too operational because human behavior cannot actually be separated from culture, identity, trust, emotion, and systems design.
And perhaps this is why so much “thought leadership” feels emotionally dead on arrival. It attempts to explain systems from a safe institutional distance while people are desperately trying to understand what it feels like to live inside them.
That may be the real opportunity emerging now: not to build another business media hub, but to develop better ways of observing, interpreting, and navigating modern life as it increasingly unfolds through commercial and technological systems.
Not as futurism. Or trend reporting. Or optimization strategy. But as human observation.
At one point during this exploration, someone said something that has lodged itself in my brain ever since:
“We all live in Customerland now.”
What started as a throwaway line now feels strangely accurate. Because Customerland is no longer merely a place where companies compete for customers.
It has become the environment itself.
Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash
