Marketing Lost Its Nerve

The trend of the last twenty years or so was a soulless, bureaucratic flattening of the world. We are well past the point where that flattening helps anyone, and yet a lot of companies are still asleep at the wheel.

It is actually a great time to be a marketer. We keep seeing national conversations about brands break into the zeitgeist. People care about marketing. They love it when it is done well, they hate it when it is done poorly, but the one thing they never do is ignore it. The idea that marketing is irrelevant, or that it could be quietly replaced by AI, is something only people who badly misunderstand the world believe. Usually they have never had real professionals on their team ship real creative, and have only ever worked with lifeless managerial-class bureaucrats. None of those people understand that risk is part of the job, or how to actually calculate it.

Every so often a legacy brand unveils a stripped-down new logo and the internet erupts. The easy read is that the anger is a culture-war proxy. It is not. The anger is aesthetic, and it is visceral. People look at the redesign, see that something warm and specific has been replaced with something generic and safe, and they are offended on behalf of the brand they used to like. The riskiest thing a consumer brand can do right now is ship the blanded idea, or the logo that looks like an evil villain quietly took over the company.

For a while, everything moved in one direction. Logos stripped down. Colors muted. Design simplified to the point of anonymity. There were practical reasons for some of it: app icons had to be legible at tiny scales, signage had to be clear. Apple did the simplicity thing first, and did it best. But not every company is Apple. When everyone follows the same formula, you end up with a landscape of brands that look like clones, each one indistinguishable from the next. Not everything should look like a tech company, or be ruined visually simply because smartphones exist.

People will not tolerate being treated as a captive audience for paint-by-numbers slop.

Adam Singer

This is closer to self-destruction than to marketing. And because the field is mostly rudderless, very few people are willing to raise a hand and push back. In my experience you can get professionally punished for saying the right thing, or even for just asking questions in the room, at a lot of large companies.

Plenty of chief marketing officers arrive and change things purely to change things, without thinking through why, without really understanding the brand or the audience. It is malpractice, and it happens constantly. Maybe that is part of why I ended up at a startup. I could not handle the politics and careerism, which is its own real risk for most brands.

What people actually hate is the sense that a committee has sucked all the humanity out of a company. Every decision made to avoid offense, to check a box, to stay safe. The result is work that feels condescending and bloodless. It does not connect, it does not inspire, and it certainly does not sell. It is everything normal people have grown to despise, and yet marketers keep producing it.

Compare that with what great marketing once was. Coke's "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" was not safe, it was audaciously sentimental. Nike's "Just Do It" came from a real, raw cultural current about pushing limits. Volkswagen's Beetle ads did not look like anyone else's. They looked like themselves, and they were funny, charming, and human. None of these were designed to appease managers. They were designed to delight people.

Somewhere along the way we lost that nerve. We let branding become about looking respectable to other corporations instead of creating an emotional spark in actual human beings. We let design become about not missing the mark instead of making any kind of mark at all. Most of it is empty, and that is why most of it fails.

The one good thing about the latest rebrand drama is that it kills the lazy refrain that nobody cares about marketing. People care deeply. They just will not tolerate being treated as a captive audience for committee-approved, paint-by-numbers slop. They want to feel something: delight, pride, humor, beauty, ambition. They want brands with the courage to stand out, not melt into the gray slurry of corporate sameness.

The opportunity is right here for anyone paying attention. It takes rejecting the bad ideas that consultants sold you as best practice, and remembering what marketing is supposed to do, which is move people. Stop letting bureaucrats quietly dismantle your company, and let creatives build it again.