By: Jovian Browne

Times Newᵀᴺ conducted a study in 2024 about the present and future of brand building. We live in the same world as you do, so we were not surprised to learn that brand building today strongly favors short-term growth tactics over long-term brand development. Brand builders lean into common languages to quickly establish their presence as a socially acceptable and culturally intact offering to potential followers. That means that viral social formats, memes, and copy-paste brand systems make everything look the same across the digital landscape.

Interestingly enough, the same technology that recently connected us all into one homogenizing mainstream of cultural consumers is now leading us back to smaller aligned networks. This pluralism or re-localization is about to change everything about brand building trends in the future.

We can already observe a trend showing up in early adopter spaces where audiences are hyper connected across multiple platforms, forming highly aligned groups that are more active than their mainstream counterparts. Brand building is responsively becoming more culturally sensitive to the attitudes and preferences within those specific groups, and community members have a real say in the future success of new projects. Brand building in these emergent spaces is more considerate of the natural ways people gather into communities, share knowledge via social networks, build trust, and create culture. With more technological adoption radiating outwards, could this be where all of brand building is headed?

Heading up the research endeavor, my co-founder Jordan Nerison and I spoke with people from in-house marketing teams, creative agencies, indie creatives, and community curators. These individuals all participate in building brands through their writing, creative work, or strategy, and were qualified as brand builders for the sake of the study. We also performed secondary research on the topics of creative agency-brand relationships, in order to interpret our data in the relevant social and organizational contexts in which work unfolds.

All of the evidence gathered can be perused in Resiliency Report 001.

Present reality of brand building 🔍

The research revealed that the art of brand building today is hooked on simple performance metrics, with brand builders becoming increasingly myopic as the trend continues. Brand builders excel in activating short-term growth, often at the cost of forming a deeper connection with their audience or fostering loyalty over time. We see a lot of copying over creating, and following over curating. Participation in cultural movement is shallow, with brands overusing ¨we’re starting a movement,¨ without really digging in to what the movement stands for.

Future predictions ✨

We predict a return to the deeper, natural, and complex ways in which people connect with ideas, initiatives, and each other. We anticipate an increase in strategies for organic engagement, cultural development, original artistic creativity, and curation, making their way into new branding playbooks. Additionally, we expect the use of more advanced metrics to help assess behavior instead of discrete actions. We anticipate more long-term thinking and focus on lasting brand equity.

Before we go much further, let us agree on the meanings of some terminology that we will be using in this article pertaining to brand.

BRAND BUILDING: The dynamic process of shaping how an organization is perceived (its identity and manner of expression) by its audience (target market), as well as what it communicates (its value proposition). This process is carried out by in-house teams, agencies, or independent contributors.

BRAND SIGNALS: Expressions of a brand, which are interpreted, assigned meaning, and recirculated by an audience. They can include images, text, music, clothing, or other elements, which convey feelings or information about a brand.

BRAND EQUITY: The lasting impression of a brand in the memory of its followers, brand equity is a form of social proof and cultural capital, built to last. Once acquired, brand equity has a myriad of business uses. It can help an enterprise stand out in a crowded market, stabilize the authority, reputation, or trustworthiness of a brand in the eyes of its followers. Brand equity also provides organizations resilience through tumultuous markets, cultural shifts, and makes them durable to criticism.Brands amass brand equity by giving off unique expressions of the brand identity that resonate in current cultural contexts. They also accrue brand equity by making their values clear and expressing those values consistently through interactions with their community of followers.

Why is growth is consuming culture?

While brand builders in the study agreed on the importance of long-term planning to cultivate brand equity over time and make their marketing spend last, they reported that they weren't always encouraged to do so. Let's unpack why.

“Growth is consuming culture. We are tracking metrics before we even know why we are doing that and what we want to achieve.”

- Study Participant

Commonly, study participants reported that long-term goals were undefined at the organization and department level, so introducing them at the campaign level felt like overstepping. Teams were expected to measure the "success" of their projects by short-term changes in surface-level metrics, such as the number of likes, followers, or sign-ups. In fact, proving that a campaign could have an immediate impact on a simple metric was often critical in getting a budget approved or deciding who to hire. These habits carried out across the organization only reinforced repeated cycles of short-term planning.

Consider the differences between long-term and short-term orientation towards brand goals.

It's not always the case that brands are tracking too many metrics, but rather that they aren't analyzing those metrics in context to make clear predictions. In a 2023 study by Frontify for Adweek, brand builders revealed that they struggle to understand users as complex human beings and interpret changes in their behavior. When data is not properly contextualized, it becomes difficult to read users' choices and be able to anticipate future actions. Either way, brand builders confidently indicated that the current use of metrics negatively impacts their ability to make moves oriented towards long-term gain.

If your brand is always chasing fads, eventually, audiences will get the ick.

A playbook for rapid growth inevitably involves taking shortcuts. How else can you get ahead in a limited amount of time? Reusing viral templates is a popular strategy that content creators often resort to in order to quickly gain recognition from an audience. They think that if they can make their brand feel familiar, audiences may pay attention, at least temporarily. However, if templates are chosen that don't support the brand's message or contradict its signature style, we risk eroding the brand's identity for quick wins.

If a brand's entire schtick becomes copying and meme-ing other creators' original ideas, audiences notice that the brand lacks soul and pull away. Creating organic content doesn't mean that we can't be inspired by others who are doing great work. In fact, nurturing creativity at a certain point requires exposing ourselves to what is out there in the collective consciousness. However, for our brand expressions to feel authentic and resonate with our followers, we need to explore the deeper ways that people align with brands, ideas, and each other.

This principle applies very well to content strategy. When we preview content that our target audiences like, we can ask questions such as: What must this audience believe in order for this content to ring true (funny/poignant/touching/significant) to them? We use the meaning behind the content to craft a more robust profile of our audience. When we form a more nuanced understanding of our intended audience, viewing them as diverse, intelligent and empowered, we move beyond copying-to-match-tastes on a surface level into attuning-to-needs-and-desires on a deeper level.

Copying has risks people don’t talk about

Short cuts have a long term cost to establishing a strong and distinct brand identity that will help us stand out in a crowded market. Mimicry, and dependence on viral content formulas makes it hard for an audience to remember us. If there is nothing truly special about a brand, the minute a competitor can offer what we do cheaper, or faster, goodbye, loyal customers. It is expensive to create the quantity of low quality brand signals you need to keep moving eyeballs, when very few of these folks actually connect with our value prop and want to stay under their own effort.

Building brand equity demands strengthening our curatorial sensibilities. Here are three techniques from a curator to follow:

( I ) Feel & Attune

Continuously examine why content resonates with our audience, taking into consideration the social, political, or ethical contexts that might be at play. This is the emotional labor by which we attune to our audience.

( II ) Engage in dialog

Speak directly with our audience through threads or other two-way communication formats. Maintaining an open dialogue (uncurated, but earnest) helps our audience feel seen and valued.

( III ) Go within

At the center of every brand are its core values. If we feel like we are getting lost in a sea of fads, we can always go back to these values. When audiences feel our ethical consistency, they gain trust.

According to official Times-New slang the measurement of a brand’s equity equals its TVL, or Total Vibes Locked.

Ours is a spin-off of another version of TVL, which stands for Total Value Locked. Total Value Locked is a metric commonly used in decentralized finance to measure the total value of the digital assets stored on a dApp. Total Value Locked is shared whenever speculators want to bring attention to the overall heft of a decentralized finance protocol. Citing a protocol’s TVL is proof that the experiment is successful, as people are investing funds into it, and it has reached a certain overall size.

Total Vibes Locked works similarly. When people invest their attention into a brand through experiences, they vibe with the brand. If the experience is memorable enough to become part of the community’s lore or—even broader—part of an ecosystem narrative, then we call it a locked vibe. That experience is part of collective memory and will not fade away. These lasting memories can be counted towards brand equity.

How to produce & lock high-quality vibes in your network

Just because a brand once existed and made some noise, it doesn't mean that people will care enough to organically share it. Just because it had a high volume of sales one year, doesn't mean it customers will finds the same offers as appealing the next. Low-quality brand signals may attract attention, but we need to also go after high-quality experiences, that spark feelings and beg to be remembered.

Increasing TVL (the measurement of brand equity) necessarily affects the way several interrelated marketing priorities are set. It makes sense to look at all marketing activities holistically, from creating a brand identity that resonates with an audience, to creating vibrant campaigns that signal continuous cultural alignment, to building virtual spaces for experience & interaction. We are considering how all experiences work together to create a lasting impression.

One of the best ways to stimulate organic growth and build network resilience at the same time is to curate higher quality brand experiences that are geared towards select, highly-aligned brand ambassadors. Doing this creates pathways for lurkers to become fans, and for fans to become ambassadors, based on increased alignment. Show contributors that there are clear possibilities ahead of them to engage with the brand and get more out of the experience.

In this way, we can graduate participants based on their alignment and interest and create deeper ties within our the audience/community. Not everyone needs to become an ambassador to build resilience in a network, however, we need to create pathways for fans to demonstrate increased alignment. Are each of these routes clear and accessible? Sometimes, we don’t realize in our lack of preparedness we inadvertently lock people out, prohibiting them from making high-value contributions to the brand. We also stay dependent on constantly renewing our followers and proving that we are worth the attention. Empowering people who are already in the community is both cheaper and a more stable option.

Working with a community architect to add definition to these pathways and monitor their success is recommended. (I would love to talk more about Community Architecture in another article, but for now all you need to know is that it is related to activating your network and retaining TVL.)

The type of organic growth strategy we are talking about relies heavily on understanding of network models of growth, community architecture, and cultural development. This isn’t short-term growth; this is cultivation. Organic methods require remembering that our “targets” are members of a networked group of intelligent and empowered individuals. They have full agency to leave spaces of interaction or exceed expectations with their support, depending on how they feel about us.

What I’m going to say next will make our inner control freak go a little nuts, but it truly is the unlock for organic growth to work: We must surrender some control to create empty space for engagement and contributions to naturally arise. Giving participants space to act on their authentic desires, we relinquish control over the exact outcomes, allowing people to give us more than we bargained for.

To grow organically, we must do things that feel scary AF.

Especially when branding has been all about driving immediate results in short timeframes, with a lot of control over the narrative, what we are discussing here feels like a new chapter in branding best practices.

Cultivating organic growth means making progress towards… specific, measurable, actionable and time-based

1. Customer Acquisition, aka “Define the Vibe” Distinguish an authentic brand voice and identity

• Distinguish an authentic brand voice and identity

• Identify and connect to an audience based on their attitudes, beliefs, and needs

• Create robust and specific target personas

2. Network effects, aka “Resonance Frequency” Contribute to the larger cultural conversation through meta-narratives

• Contribute to the larger cultural conversation through meta-narratives

• Relevance, feels like “the place to be” relative to other places and groups

3. User experience, aka “Quality of the Vibes”

• Maintain a healthy ecosystem of engagement and activity through active moderation and safety measures

• Refresh our spaces regularly to maintain the vibrancy of our signal

4. Brand Equity/Longevity, aka “Total Vibes Locked ”

• Build loyalty and long term alignment with followers who show special enthusiasm for what we do

• Dedicate resources to community architecture and empowerment pathways

• Strengthen our network to create resilience

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At Times Newᵀᴺ, we embrace periodic research endeavors, like this one, to examine trends in our industry from a high level and gain awareness of the dynamics at play. The knowledge we uncover empowers us to innovate! It also protects us from believing that current ways of doing things are the only ways. We offer this research and discussion to the brand builders. Use it to question and escape old cycles. Or, put it to work in creating new futures of brand building, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen.

Analysis and writing: Jovian Browne

Research and design: Jordan Nerison

Photography: Death to Stock

Special thanks: Alejandra, Melissa, Navi, Nicole, Tom

Copyright: Times Newᵀᴺ 2024

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Times Newᵀᴺ is a full-service creative studio working with community-driven brands. We champion collaboration, authenticity, and culture with a highly specialized and synergistic set of services to accelerate mission and business goals into the future.