For a long time, brand marketing operated according to a model defined by ruthless control. Define a tight set of associations you want to own. Codify them in guidelines and messaging matrices. Produce a hero campaign from the centre, approve every asset through the chain of command, then push it out through media with enough weight and consistency that stable associations begin to form in people’s heads.
Strategy, creative, media. Plan, create, burst, repeat.
We have treated this model as if it is some iron-clad law about how brands should be built. But it only ever held true under a specific set of assumptions about the media environment, all of which have, almost concurrently, fallen apart.
What replaces it is not the absence of control, but orchestration: building coherence out of a system you no longer fully command. This demands an entirely different set of skills, one most marketers are yet to learn.
The Control Era House of Cards
The Control Era rested on a relatively stable media environment. Channels were uncomplicated, output was limited, and there was relatively little to approve. ‘Creative’ was the key variable. You could see the entire extent of your brand in the palm of your hand, so you could hold it in an iron fist.
This environment is now fractured across several lines:
We assumed a shared culture. Brand meaning could historically be centrally defined and distributed because of a monolithic media environment in which we all broadly consumed the same media diet. That monoculture gave marketers a cultural lingua franca to work from – a universal meaning for icons, symbols, language that could be used and widely understood.
Media fragmentation has busted this up. Audiences are now scattered far and wide across platforms, channels, moments, marooned in their own reality bubbles.
We assumed control of sequence and context. Algorithmic distribution has destroyed linear campaign logic, replacing it with a feed where all context is collapsed.
Information is now delivered to users online in a single unbreakable stream–first-class airplane walkthroughs sit next to catastrophic climate change news sit next to ‘Get-ready-with-me-to-try-this-viral-matcha’ sit next to images of children being starved. There is no safety of the 3-minute ad break. Each day your brand is parachuted right into the middle of this street riot, and every encounter has to work as though it’s the first.
We assumed we were the messenger. Brands often no longer even have direct control over what they are putting into the world. Increasingly, their messages now show up mediated through the voices of others: creators, employees, community activations, AI search, Reddit comments. Attempt to stuff your brand voice into them like a sock puppet and observe the audience reject it immediately as it breaks the pattern of expectation.
We assumed output could be approved by hand. Platforms now demand hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of “meaningfully diverse” creative every week. Local outposts are managing the output levels that global brands managed less than two decades ago.
Yet many brands still embrace the sovereign military, ‘run-it-up-the-chain’ sequence of creative approvals through creative reviews and steering committees and exec presentations until eventually it hits someone paid enough to take the fall if things go wrong.
If a brand is a series of core associations continually reinforced through messages and behaviours, when we no longer control the sequence, the context, the messenger, or even the message, we no longer control our brands.
This is the core challenge for marketers trained under ‘Control’ Era principles. It seems the options are to be strangled by creative bottlenecks, or lose the brand to incoherence.
Either way, we fail the actual iron laws of brand. The bottlenecked brand isn’t seen enough to be remembered. The incoherent brand is seen, but cannot form a stable enough set of associations to be remembered for the right things.
Welcome to the Era of Orchestration
The brand marketer of the future surrenders the fantasy of total control and, instead, learns to orchestrate coherence out of this chaos.
The challenge this era throws up is that there are no hard-and-fast rules to follow.
Sharp can tell us to build mental availability through distinctive brand assets, Hurman can tell us to build future demand, Binet can tell us to invest in the long and short, but all of the real challenges now live in the how, in the dozens of decisions that need to be made autonomously each day.
The senior marketer of the future must learn to think in systems, not campaigns. Leadership must understand their role is to define and monitor an aggregate system, but as execution is increasingly automated, it falls to junior and mid-level staff to manage and approve individual outputs.
This shift demands two key capabilities most organisations haven’t built.
Distributed judgment
Every employee, at every level, now needs the judgment that used to sit only at the top, because they will increasingly hold responsibility for managing the volume of creative output the modern brand requires. Each of them needs to know how to articulate what is right, what is wrong, and why.
That judgment has to be backed by infrastructure that supports individual contributors to manage outputs at scale.
Constantly updated reference libraries of strong vs. weak executions with rationale. Regular, active review sessions where teams can debate which pieces reinforced the core associations vs. weakening them, why something performed, where the brand disappeared behind the mediator. Clear escalation criteria for what makes something worth senior time reviewing.
Cultural intelligence
As the mass market fragments, brands are increasingly built bottom-up through culture, or rather, cultures.
Cultural intelligence thus becomes a primary skillset, not one contracted out to agencies. Marketers must understand how to accurately interpret the icons, symbols, signs, language, and ritualsrituals of the dozens of niches they wish to target (or even hundreds, if they wish to hit mass-market).
Mediators like creators may allow brands opportunities to ‘rent’ access to these communities, but they are not a substitute. Marketers must still understand how to brief, manage and provide feedback so that core brand associations are maintained despite the tone, style and form being radically different.
Both these capabilities are taught in my course, The New Fundamentals of Brand.
The old fundamentals were delivered as rules. In the new era, there is only our judgment, which can no longer be left to idly accumulate over decades. It must be taught deliberately, at every level, under structured learning that grants marketers the language to interrogate the work and argue for their decisions in environments where there can be no clear right answers.
It’s chaos out there, dear marketer. Have you got the guts to let go?
Eugene is the co-founder of The New Fundamentals of Brand, and has formerly lectured at the University of Melbourne’s postgraduate Business School. He has consulted for global brands like Google, Spotify, Red Bull and FEELD on how to survive a climate where media is fragmented, attention is fracked, and algorithms have dissolved mass culture into soup. He has been included on SXSW’s 33 Visionary Thinkers for 2026, and his thinking has been featured in The Guardian, Financial Times, Vogue Business, Dazed Magazine and Dieline. The next cohort of The New Fundamentals of Brand begins on October 12.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Brand Innovators.
