Over the last decade, consumer brands have sought to build “communities”. Vast marketing budgets have been expended, copy has been reworked and social strategies reconceived. Yet this mass mobilisation of marketing capital expended in pursuit of “community” has failed. The desired transformation of atomised consumers into horizontally organised groupings has not transpired. Instead, we see declining brand loyalty among savvy, well-informed consumers who have never been so empowered by the choice and speed of online shopping. This is set against the backdrop of the loneliness epidemic that the WHO has declared a pressing global threat. There is a paradox in our present predicament, in which corporations co-opt social connections while appearing to encourage them, what theorist Will Davies has called “neoliberal socialism”. As Davies explains, this represents a fundamental shift in how businesses approach human relationships and community: “Where once [socialism] implied something concerning society or the common good, increasingly it refers to a technique of psychological intervention on the individual.” Social bonds have become instruments of commercial gain, with friendship itself transformed into a measurable and manageable resource.

Designing community around products, services or entertainment franchises has long been an elusive goal for corporate America, ever since Disney’s EPCOT planned communities in the 1960s sought to coalesce America’s scientific and creative elite into a blueprint for future cities. Disney has a long and torrid engagement with urban and town planning, which runs as a parallel narrative to American post-war utopian urbanism. If Disney’s rigid vision of controlled and managed community responded to the expansion of suburbia across the hills and plains of America, Coca-Cola’s famous co-option of the hippie movement with its 1971 “Hilltop” advert featuring the song “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”, was a crystallisation of the market’s desire to capture the psychic and emotional world of consumers, simultaneously celebrating and demoting national, religious or ethnic identities in favour of an inclusive and futuristic community oriented around consumption. More recently, and perhaps illustrative of a generalised decline in corporate imagination, WeWork promised (and failed) to “make a life, not just a living” in the shape of a never-ending, tequila-fuelled office party for millennial marketing executives. Though in business literature and pop culture the EPCOT and WeWork case studies are interpreted as quixotic deviations from consensus marketing praxis and symbolic of corporate hubris, brands have nevertheless renewed their instinct to instantiate brand-led simulations of community.

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Caught in the maelstrom of shifting technological and social currents, the advertising industry faces a profound identity crisis

The last twenty years have seen a high watermark of “brand purpose”. The quintessential icon of this is undoubtedly Unilever Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty”, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2024; according to AdAge, the campaign increased sales of its products from $2.5 billion to $4 billion in its first ten years. Successful purpose-driven initiatives coordinate product benefits (the role and use of the product in people’s lives) with a higher-order sense of social mission. In Dove’s case, the brand drew a profitable vector between its gentle product formulation and a tonally “gentle” cultural message of inclusivity and body positivity. Dove’s early success foreshadowed an era in which brands positioned themselves as moral arbiters and apparent guarantors of inclusivity in an increasingly fractious society.

This would reach its apogee in the context of the so-called “resistance” to President Trump’s first term. Following the political uncertainties of 2016, which led many consumers to feel out of step with their government, brands adopted a high-minded and purpose-driven role in people’s lives with increasing confidence. In 2019 Nike released a campaign featuring NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick who since 2016 had been kneeling for the pre-game anthem in protest at racial injustice in the United States, to the apparent detriment of his career. In the ad Kaepernick stares squarely at the camera with the copy reading: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” This stark and serious style in advertising, reflecting the seriousness of the cause, would reach its apogee during the BLM protests when brands signalled their support by posting black squares on social media.

Brands didn’t save us, though. In the wake of Trump’s second presidential election victory in November 2024, it seems increasingly clear that a commitment to brand purpose has been denatured. As we enter Trump’s first 100 days, “resistance” figures have not galvanised in response to the authoritarian threat. Rather an ascendant, revanchist current in American capital has declared war on “woke advertising”, seeking to reinstate a more single-minded pursuit of market share. Jaguar’s colourfully inclusive “Copy Nothing” rebrand in December 2024 drew vicious backlash from right-wing accounts, culminating in Elon Musk tweeting “@Jaguar Do you sell cars?” Whether Musk’s perception of this “late-stage” brand purpose campaign percolates down, beyond X and into the attitudes and decision-making of Jaguar’s consumer base remains to be seen. However, the fact the campaign’s creative team were named and shamed – effectively doxxed – in mainstream media will undoubtedly have a chastening effect on the industry, further dissuading creatives and their brands from pursuing purpose-driven campaigns that ally with progressive causes.

Corporations are now rolling back DEI initiatives that were so recently fundamental to their marketing strategies. Days before Trump’s inauguration Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta was ending third-party fact-checking programmes and moving to the Community Notes model favoured by Musk on X, claiming that this would enable greater free speech and encourage a more “personalised approach to political content”. In his candid to-camera announcement, Zuckerberg wore a $900,000 watch and gold chain, typical of his recent rebrand. In recent months, Zuckerberg has turned away decisively from the dominant archetype of the diffident and humble tech entrepreneur “nerd”, an attitude and aesthetic encapsulated by the 2010 film The Social Network (2010) or the network series Silicon Valley (2014-2019), in loose hoodie and nimble Allbirds shoes whose platforms were once venerated for their orientation towards informational transparency and encouraging progressive movement building.

While the tide may be shifting among the “CEO community”, the marketing and brand function of global corporations remains dominated by the nominally progressive values of the cadre cultural theorist Catherine Liu calls, after Barbara Ehrenreich, the “professional managerial class”, or PMC, which insists on its “ability to do ordinary things in extraordinary, fundamentally superior and more virtuous ways”. For the past decade the brand-purpose playbook has provided an aesthetic and goal-oriented horizon through which this cadre could enact its value system. The rapid loss of this horizon alongside the increasingly real threat of artificial intelligence and a possible white-collar recession has left the PMC and the brands on which it works creatively adrift. It seems unlikely that liberal creative directors will be replaced with a right-leaning class of communicators any time soon, and few brands have been able effectively to align with a seemingly ascendant “post-woke” ideology. Nevertheless, as the Jaguar example shows, attitudes to brand purpose are shifting, and quickly. Bud Light, which garnered vast conservative backlash online and even a boycott after a 2023 campaign featuring trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, recently worked with comedian Shane Gillis who was fired from Saturday Night Live in 2019 after a clip surfaced of him mocking East Asian accents. The about-turn in attitude is head-spinning. Caught in the maelstrom of shifting technological and social currents, the advertising industry faces a profound identity crisis.

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Approaching the new millennium, Susan Sontag was forced to admit that the call for a return to seriousness in art and public life for which she’d spent her career advocating had failed. In 1996, in her essay “Thirty Years Later…” she assessed that “the very idea of the serious (and the honourable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic’ to most people”. The era of big cultural gambits was over. Critical engagement was off the table. This trend has only intensified, and as brands abandon their moral compass, they surrender their creative agency to the trend cycle. Across online platforms, “culture” has never been more “relevant”. TikTok’s pace and high-density informational format facilitates the restless scanning, sorting and elevation of niche pseudo-subcultural trends, providing increasingly absurd predigested material on which legacy media can breathlessly report, whether the latest outrageous Gen-Z dietary habit or summer hashtag. Whether or not the elevation of fringe and absurd subcultures into mainstream consciousness is encouraged by the restless boredom of the (collective) user experience, they are more virulent as hegemonic narratives collapse and new ones have yet to fully coalesce.

In hindsight the blinding media hype around “brat summer”, initiated by Charli XCX’s album – a paean to messy Gen-Z girlhood – seems like a strange fever dream. On 22 July 2024, the day after Kamala Harris announced her presidential campaign, the hyperpop star tweeted “kamala IS brat”; shortly thereafter the Harris campaign adopted the album’s lime-green, lower-case aesthetic on its social-media accounts. The move may only have served to obscure the rudderless fundamentals of the candidate’s campaign, and deeper cultural shifts at play. The Democratic Party’s high-minded and soaring style, so expertly engineered by President Obama, has been replaced with the mechanical repetition and stupid jouissance of TikTok. Perhaps it was a yearning, in lieu of a sense of mission for some, any, kind of cultural relevance. Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, adopted the disco-era Village People song, “Y.M.C.A.”, a song of homosocial jock culture and profound nostalgia.

The result is a compound of meaninglessness and a sense of emotional saturation. Writer Kim Córdova and security technologist Bruce Schneier’s coining “cultural hacking” describes a bidirectional process in which platforms “extract data while pushing engaging content”, creating a feedback loop where “the extracted data is used to determine what content a user would find most engaging, and that engagement is used to extract more data”. The result is a cybernetic ouroboros of continuous surveillance and manipulation in which every social interaction is consummated only to beget another, to see what’s next in the feed. The creative consequences of this have been described by the marketing collective Nemesis as the “vibe effect”. It describes how brands have moved beyond concrete signification into pure relation: “When brands are built on vibes and vibes are built on other vibes things default to a Ponzi dynamic where value is created by the production of the next thing. Everything is inspo, but nothing actually gets made.” This dissolution of stable meaning creates what the group calls “an amorphous, vibey puddle” where “everything is kind of like everything else”. The vibey puddle, as it accelerates through the abundant visual catalogue, tilts naturally towards the absurd and grotesque. Like Trump, the icons of our contemporary media landscape – the Hawk Tuah girl and the Costco Guys – are straightforward examples of this. There has been a fundamental collapse in the quality of attention that cultural agents can expect from their audiences, and a concomitant rise of distraction and meaningless absurdity as the only means of connecting through vast reams of digital slop.

Our new paradigm demands and rewards a fundamentally different mode of literacy – one built not on contemplation and interpretation, but on scanning and reaction. Where brand encounters were once rare enough to warrant sustained attention, they now operate in what might be called a continuous partial engagement, with success measured in microsecond responses rather than lasting impressions. This shift from deep reading to surface scanning hasn’t just changed how we process brand communications – it has altered the very nature of what brands can communicate. In this environment of perpetual distraction, the careful construction of meaning gives way to what might be called a kind of semiotic triage, where immediate impact takes precedence over coherence, and quick reaction over lasting resonance. Designer Michael Rock of 2x4 describes the ascendancy of “mood boarding”, a process by which brands collect cultural and aesthetic references to generate short-lived emotional coherence. Chased from their pedestal as moral arbiter of civil discourse, brands instead cycle through the internet’s super-abundant catalogue of images and cultural references in the hope of generating affinity and friendship with digital communities.

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Sontag’s mid-1990s analysis beheld “customer-relationship management” in its nascency, where both consumer and media brands were figuring out what it meant to be able to speak directly and simultaneously to millions of people online. This more conversational and consequentially lower-stakes paradigm challenged any preceding ideal of the brand as purveyor of vertical big-picture mythologies. This transition is crystallised in Time’s 2006 “Person of the Year” – not a singular figure of authority or achievement, but “You”. This choice marked both the peak and the beginning of the end for “tentpole” mass media. Where Time had once celebrated figures who shaped history from positions of power, it now acknowledged the networked masses, anticipating the broader surrender of cultural authority that would follow. Armed with a camera phone, the “citizen journalist” of Occupy and the Arab Spring would emerge as a potent agent of change from below. And this shift from vertical to horizontal authority would be mirrored in marketing initiatives like Diet Coke’s personalised name bottles and Cadbury’s customised chocolate bars – mass-produced simulations of intimacy that prefigured brands’ broader retreat from cultural elevation to peer-to-peer familiarity.

During the Covid lockdowns, when “real” community was taken away from us, this horizontal instinct re-emerged in the form of Web3, a new iteration of connectivity across decentralised digital enclaves that oxygenated the GameStop short squeeze, crypto, and NFT hype of 2021-2022. Anticipating this decentralisation in 2019, strategist Toby Shorin described a new type of “headless brand” built by distributed networks of user-influencers with a financial stake and incentive cooperating autonomously and horizontally: “the community finds product solutions themselves.” While the business model did not come to widespread formal fruition, it does describe the implicit marketing objectives of brands that court the unpredictable creativity of “the mob”. Guinness is a good recent case study. Social-media accounts playfully policing the quality of Guinness pours (most notably @shitlondonguinness) have helped transform the brand into a touchpoint in Gen Z’s pursuit of authenticity. The result was demand so outpacing supply that UK pubs suffered Guinness shortages in the lead-up to Christmas 2024. Rather than capitalising on this moment with a creatively potent campaign to build on its famous mythology, Guinness instead released Nitrosurge, a gimmicky £30 stocking filler that is attached to a can to allow the user to replicate the iconic two-part pour at home. In this case, as in many others, what consumers “want” is not what they truly desire.

Fast-paced symbiotic creativity between brands and their consumers appears to spark a temporary network of communal affinity across online and physical spaces. For a few weeks or months at most, adopting a “starter pack” of consumable objects and cultural references gives consumers an active, generative role in an ephemeral grouping that market analysts reabsorb into their models. During the TikTok-fuelled Stanley cup craze of 2024, the vessel became a formative visual synecdoche signifying the tastes and voting inclinations of a female stratum of the American population that accompanied its giant cup with Lululemon athleisure and taupe interiors across its socials. Other brands quickly moved in to leverage the hype. Starbucks collaborated with Stanley on a limited-edition Quencher only available at Target stores that sparked brawls on its release day. The rise of brand collaborations to stretch footprints for mutual benefit and piggyback onto the trend cycle has seen Wedgwood partner with Palace skateboards on “street-kitsch” tableware, and Absolut partner with Heinz on a vodka tomato sauce. Brands frame these collaborations as acts of cultural generosity – eliding the commercial imperative – and present them with all the excitement and “hype” of a punk band or streetwear designer launching its new creative project.

Most brand interventions in the trend cycle are either late or feel nakedly opportunistic. Despite this, the McDonald’s Szechuan sauce crisis is an instructive – and apparently organic – case study. In 2017, a chef in its R&D kitchen had the fateful idea of creating a real-world version of a fictional Szechuan sauce sachet referenced in cult adult animation Rick and Morty. A global media story ensued when superfans – of the show and the brand – performed absurd protests angrily demanding stock replenishment in McDonald’s restaurants. It’s impossible to know whether McDonald’s deployed any learnings from the Szechuan sauce crisis into its future marketing strategy, however the “Sicko Mode” TikTok trend in 2020 in which customers pulled up to drive throughs blasting the Travis Scott song bears similarities. As does the 2023 Grimace Shake trend in which customers filmed themselves trying the limited-edition shake and then staging their own gruesome injury or death in the following frames. In each of these viral events consumers smelled the whiff of authenticity, helping them to believe they were members of a community genuinely steering the direction of the ongoing media fiasco, rather than pawns in a dry corporate game.

Rather than as creators of a discrete and singular product or service, brands increasingly see themselves as dissolute “world-builders” depositing a chaotic array of equities, participatory protocols and meme formats across media and market ecosystems. This drive was inspired by the period of Covid-era hype surrounding the so-called metaverse in which evangelists claimed community (and retail) would detach itself from physical anchors and float into the virtual realm. The hype inevitably receded as workers returned to the office and brands quietly closed their tiki bars and catwalks on Decentraland. However, marketing teams nonetheless retained a perception of their brands as “phygital scaffolding”, an interactive cross-platform infrastructure on which customers would collectively build the narrative. In this quest, they drew inspiration from global fandoms. Taylor Swift often drops clues in her lyrics and videos provoking fans to frantically and obsessively decipher her intended meaning. Inspired by this “breadcrumbing” tactic, in 2022 a mysterious cloaked figure appeared on the Fortnite online game and began destroying freezers. It was revealed to be a brand activation by fast-food chain Wendy’s cementing its promise never to use frozen patties. Game players puzzling over the mystery became inadvertent participants in the brand’s marketing campaign, encouraged to fork the source code in fan-led directions and co-create the ongoing narrative.

Successful digital activations are the exception that prove the rule, and even those can serve to distract marketing from the brand-building mythologies that draw consumers into a meaningful horizon of desire. Too often brands have been seduced by the latest crypto-adjacent scheme heralding an altogether new modality of digital connectivity in the crude and simplistic hope of maximising impressions. This surrender to the algorithm of a capricious and misunderstood crowd reflects media scholar Anna Kornbluh’s critique of “immediacy” as the defining style of contemporary capitalism. She identifies a broad cultural shift towards what she terms “disintermediation” or the systemic elimination of productive distances and interpretative spaces in pursuit of “frictionless, instantaneous, propulsive exchange”. When all space for interpretation and imagination is eliminated, she argues, the very possibility of making meaning is extinguished. Brands are no longer something we gaze at on the horizon of our aspiration; they’ve become instead a totalling fog we struggle to see through, their very ubiquity rendering them simultaneously omnipresent and illegible.

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Brands are no longer something we gaze at on the horizon of our aspiration; they’ve become instead a totalling fog we struggle to see through

In an attempt to assimilate into digital communities, most brands have taken on personalities, often with an overtly friendly and familiar tone. When retailer Marks & Spencer took supermarket chain Aldi to court over a “Cuthbert the Caterpillar” cake it deemed to be too similar to its “Colin the Caterpillar”, an iconic stalwart of British birthday parties, Aldi launched a #FreeCuthbert campaign across their socials mimicking the discursive conventions around digital movement-building. This campaign resembles what Will Davies calls “friendvertising”, the strategic weaponisation of social connections for commercial gain: “the trick is to induce individuals to share positive brand messages with each other, almost as if there were no public advertising campaign at all.” These assumptive expressions of comradely intimacy can often inspire user backlash. Memorably, Burger King tweeted “Women belong in the kitchen” on International Women’s Day 2021 to raise awareness of the lack of gender diversity in the restaurant industry. In the fine print of the thread, they promoted a new scholarship scheme for female employees, but users only shared the opening clickbait. The brand was forced to apologise and delete the tweet.

Some brands are beginning to adapt to the limitations of overt friendliness. Knowing their customers have no other affordable means of travel, budget airline Ryanair ruthlessly roasts users on X who complain about delays or a lack of legroom. The unsettling undertow of violence in this dynamic has the unfortunate ring of authenticity, and there is some morbid satisfaction in witnessing brands puncture the cloak of fake familiarity, even while we witness our unfortunate online peer mocked by a corporate account with millions of followers. In September 2024, it was reported that Nutter Butter, a benign sandwich cookie in the US, was “freaking the internet out” with surreal and deep-fried meme content on its TikTok channel that 10 years ago would have constituted avant-garde net art on Tumblr. These case studies mirror Twitter’s transformation into X: from the cute “bird app” and friend of progressive movements into a chaotic playpen for the world’s various cultural and political conflicts. As with Zuckerberg’s right-wing makeover, reinstating and celebrating the structural hierarchies of capitalism chimes, for better or worse, with the times.

Of all the global brands, perhaps McDonald’s has most coherently adapted to this emergent paradigm. Inverting outdated perceptions rooted in the abundant optimism of 20th-century consumer culture (an era undimmed by the various crises of the 21st century), McDonald’s has dragged its brand assets through the fractal disturbances of digital culture. The restaurant space, once a refuge for the all-American nuclear family, is now a platform for chaotic and disruptive TikTok performances. Grimace is no longer a cuddly children’s entertainer, but the instigator of an ironic and macabre parable about overconsumption. This trippy reimagining of the past is in sync with a political moment in which voters gleefully tear down the carefully constructed semiotic veils cloaking our civil institutions and revel in the grotesque and violent reality they find beneath. President Trump embodies this libidinal energy, taking voters back into the gaudy and materialistic 1980s with his marble-and-gold triplex apartment, friendship with Hulk Hogan and ravenous, unreconstructed appetite for fast food. It’s no surprise that one of the most iconic images of the final days of the 2024 Trump campaign was that of the former and future president shovelling fries at a McDonald’s franchise in Philadelphia.

Few other brands have shown such nimbleness; they instead have sought the path of least resistance, surrendering to the frictionless pathways of the digital ecosystem. Placing a cloying hand on the small of our backs, they have deferred adoration and desire in pursuit of an insipid and unsubstantiated form of gratitude that has left many once too-big-to-fail brands facing a cultural credit default. Apple, once compared unironically to an organised religion, has stagnated, the butt of jokes and frustrations relating to its ever-changing charging ports. Pepsi’s frantic response to the growing trend of brand collaborations was to partner with Captain Morgan’s on a ready-to-drink beverage; a mismatch only serving to invite consumers to recall Coca-Cola as the rightful rum collaborator. As marketing professor Detlev Zwick notes, brands possess unique “systems of representation” capable of creating coherent meaning across fragmented cultural terrain. Marketing teams have miscalculated in believing that omnipotence and omnipresence are one and the same. Customer-acquisition costs cannot be measured in impressions, but rather by assessing the size of the dents left by brands on the collective psyche. Growing “lifetime customer value” demands a large initial narrative down payment, not the drip-drip of loan-to-buy engagement metrics.

A crisis of coherence – the systematic elimination of the distances necessary for meaning-making – has left both brands and consumers unmoored, frantically pursuing ever-closer proximity even as this pursuit erodes their ability to establish stable relationships. As this crisis stems from the collapse of necessary distances, it can be more precisely understood – and potentially resolved – with an adapted version of marketing professor Silvia Bellezza’s “distance framework”. Her research demonstrates that signals must lie within what she terms an “optimal distance range” – close enough to resonate but far enough to inspire desire. When this range is violated, either through excessive proximity or remoteness, the signal loses its power to generate meaning. This helps explain why brands’ pursuit of total intimacy has proved so self-defeating. Inspired by Bellezza’s framework, we have described four vectors – culture, aesthetics, exposure and velocity – across which brands can begin to reconstitute a horizon of desire for their customers.

The fallout has left brands seduced by the promise and hype of post-pandemic digital communities and scrambling to achieve cultural relevance at almost any cost to their long-standing cultural mythologies. They surrendered their creative agency and descended from their pedestals to befriend us on socials, but in this process they abandoned the horizon of aspiration. Climbing back up is no longer an option, so brands must build a new vantage point. First, by acknowledging that vast swathes of consumers harbour a volatile sense of resentment directed at the power centres of capital. Eliding this fact with transparently manufactured intimacy is only likely to incite indifference amid a glut of tediously affable brand communication. Second, by re-dedicating analytic and creative energy towards developing a relationship of “tension” with the underlying desires of customers that is productive in both substance and affect. .