Quiet Brands Don't Win Anymore

At some point while scrolling I noticed that a budget European airline was funnier on the internet than most people I actually follow. No particular post. Just a general accumulation of evidence that something had shifted and I had not fully registered when.

That was the article. Here it is.

---

The Attention Problem Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Attention is genuinely scarce now in a way it has never been before. Not because people are busier. Because the competition for the same eyeball, in the same second, has never been more intense.

Every brand, every creator, every media company, every person with something to sell is fighting for the same finite resource. And the traditional tools that brands used to win that fight, clean aesthetics, controlled messaging, aspirational distance, the sense that the brand existed slightly above you and you were reaching toward it, those tools are losing. Fast.

The reason is generational and structural at the same time. Gen Z is now the consumer class. Not the emerging consumer class, not the future demographic to plan for. The actual present-day buyer with real purchasing power and real brand preferences forming right now. And Gen Z grew up inside the internet in a way that previous generations did not. They are not impressed by polish. They are suspicious of it. Polish reads as corporate. Corporate reads as inauthentic. Inauthentic is the fastest way to lose them.

So brands had a choice. Keep the controlled, minimalist, aspirational identity that worked for the last thirty years. Or figure out how to sound like a person.

Most of them, eventually, chose the second option.

When I Started Noticing the Pattern

Once I started thinking about it I could not stop seeing it everywhere, which is always the sign that something structural is actually happening rather than a few isolated examples.

Dbrand, the phone accessories company, has built an entire brand identity around being aggressively sarcastic. Their website copy reads like someone who finds the conventions of website copy genuinely embarrassing and decided to do something about it. Their responses to criticism are sharp, self-aware, and often funnier than the criticism itself. They have turned a company that sells phone cases into a personality that people follow the way they follow accounts they actually like. Which is insane if you think about it for more than three seconds.

Ryanair is a budget European airline that somehow became one of the most entertaining accounts on the internet. Their actual product is cheap flights that get you there and everyone knows the experience is not glamorous. The traditional brand response to that positioning would be to lean into the value narrative. Lowest prices. Reliable enough. Safe-ish.

Instead they leaned into the absurdity of their own existence. The memes acknowledge openly that flying Ryanair is not an experience anyone is romanticizing. The content is self-deprecating in a way that feels honest rather than spin. And that honesty, paradoxically, builds more trust than a carefully crafted brand voice ever could with the audience they are talking to.

Professional tone creates distance. Humor creates proximity. That is the whole mechanism.

The India Chapter Deserves Its Own Section

I want to pause here because I think the Indian angle on this is genuinely underappreciated and I have a front row seat to it.

Blinkit commenting on meme posts that have nothing to do with grocery delivery. Swiggy participating in threads that are not about food at all, just because something funny was happening and they had something to add. The verified brand account showing up in your notifications not because you ordered something but because they had a better joke than everyone else in the comments.

A decade ago the Indian corporate communication playbook looked like: award ceremony photographs, press releases about quarterly growth, carefully worded statements about brand values, and maybe a festival greeting card posted on the official handle with the logo very prominently placed. That was the whole strategy.

Now it looks like a social media manager at Blinkit, probably in their mid-twenties, deciding in real time which posts to engage with and which to scroll past. And yes, before you ask, someone is absolutely making that call deliberately. They are not commenting on everything. There is a filter. They will not, for instance, drop a witty one-liner under a post that has nothing to do with their brand and everything to do with content that would get their account flagged. The impressions are not worth the PR disaster. The chaos is managed chaos. Someone just made it look effortless.

That distinction matters. Spontaneity at scale is always a production.

The Zuckerberg Problem, The Altman Effect, and The Burger Incident

The same shift that happened to brands happened to the people running them. Sometimes publicly. Sometimes painfully.

Zuckerberg first. We see you, Mark. We know who you were first, the man whose company spent two decades collecting personal data while he spent two decades appearing to find human behavior interesting to observe but not necessarily to participate in. The congressional hearing clips alone built an entire meme genre. Then the gym content arrived. The MMA. The self-aware interviews. Whether calculated or genuine is beside the point. The perception shifted and that is the whole game now.

Sam Altman posts cryptic six-word poems about the singularity on New Year's Day. He tweeted "can yall please chill on generating images our team needs sleep" when the internet broke his servers. He offered to buy Twitter for $9.74 billion in response to an Elon acquisition threat. He has made himself a narrative tool for OpenAI in a way no previous generation of tech CEO figured out. The press release is dead. The post is the press release.

And then there is McDonald's, which is the most perfectly distilled example of what happens when a CEO does not understand this and tries anyway.

Chris Kempczinski posted a video eating the brand's new Big Arch burger. Sterile office. Sweater vest. He held the burger, called it a "delicious product," took what the internet described as the smallest first bite in recorded human history, and the camera cut before he swallowed. Comments were immediate. "What a delicious product my fellow humans." "Man's aura screams kale salad." "What a great ad for Burger King."

Burger King, who claimed with a completely straight face that the timing was coincidental, posted their president Tom Curtis the next day. Kitchen setting. Flame grilling apron. Monster bite of a Whopper. Gets it everywhere. Laughs. Asks for a napkin. Top comment: "Wow, their CEO is not a robot." Another one: "This is a CEO who believes in his food, unlike the other one who sees it as a product."

That word. Product. Kempczinski used it to describe his own company's burger. The internet caught it instantly because that is the word you use when you are performing enthusiasm for something you are not sure you actually like. Institutional distance, dressed up as a taste test.

The CEO stopped being a title. It became a content format. And the content gets reviewed in real time by people who are very good at detecting the performance.

Apple Is the Most Interesting Case

Apple is the one I keep coming back to because the stakes are highest there and the shift is most uncomfortable to watch.

For decades, Apple's brand was built on restraint. The white backgrounds. The single product on a clean surface. The copy that said very little and implied everything. Think Different. That campaign worked because Apple was positioning itself as the brand for people who did not need things explained to them, who understood quality without being told to.

The minimalism was not just aesthetic. It was a statement about the customer. You are smart enough to get this without us spelling it out.

Now watch what Apple does on TikTok. It is considerably louder, more meme-aware, more willing to be silly. The MacBook marketing has started feeling native to platforms in a way that would have been genuinely unimaginable ten years ago. The brand that built its identity on quiet confidence has realized that quiet confidence does not perform well in an algorithm that rewards novelty and engagement over everything else.

This is the core tension. Minimalism was a signal of confidence when attention was something you could earn gradually through sustained quality. Now attention is something you compete for in three seconds or lose entirely. The environment changed faster than the instincts. And even Apple, which has more brand equity than almost any company alive, had to follow.

If Apple had to follow, nobody gets to opt out of this conversation.

What This Actually Costs

I want to be honest about the other side because the enthusiasm around brand personality can miss something real.

When brands get this wrong, and many do, the result is exactly as embarrassing as you would expect. A brand attempting humor and landing on something tone-deaf. A CEO trying to be relatable and revealing something they should not have. A company participating in a trend three weeks after the trend died, signaling very clearly that they do not actually understand the culture they are trying to enter. There is a specific secondhand embarrassment that comes from watching a brand use slang incorrectly in a tweet, and it is one of the more painful things the internet has produced.

The brands that navigate this well are the ones where someone inside genuinely understands the culture rather than having been briefed on it. That is a hiring decision more than a strategy decision. And it is harder to get right than any brand guideline document will ever capture.

The spontaneity is always managed. The question is whether the people managing it actually belong to the culture they are performing.

The Structural Reason This Is Not Going Back

The minimalism era was built on specific conditions. Fewer channels. Slower information flow. A clear hierarchy of who got to speak and who got to listen. Brands spoke. Consumers listened. The feedback loop was slow enough that you could afford to be careful.

Social media did not just add new channels. It inverted the hierarchy. Now anyone can respond to a brand in public and that response can accumulate more attention than the original post. The consumer is no longer downstream of the message. They are inside the conversation.

In that environment, institutional distance is not prestige. It is a liability. An institution that speaks carefully and slowly in a conversation moving in real time just looks absent. And absent is worse than imperfect.

So the brands adapted. Some gracefully. Some awkwardly. Most are still figuring it out in real time, which is itself kind of fascinating to watch.

What Is Actually Happening Underneath All Of This

What looks like a branding trend is actually a deeper shift in what trust looks like and where it comes from.

Trust used to come from authority. The established institution, the premium aesthetic, the careful distance. You trusted Apple because they acted like they did not need your approval. You trusted a brand that had been around for fifty years because longevity implied reliability.

Now trust comes from legibility. You trust the thing that feels like it exists in the same world you do, that acknowledges the same absurdities, that does not perform confidence it has not earned in front of you specifically. You trust Ryanair's comment section more than you trust their press release because the comment section is at least not pretending.

Gen Z did not invent this dynamic. They just accelerated it to the point where brands could no longer afford to ignore it.

The attention moved. The brands followed.

Whether they followed gracefully is a different question. But the ones still waiting for the moment to pass are going to be waiting for a while.