The end of top-down branding

Why Brand teams should stop writing brand guidelines

Aug 26, 2025

“The final form of a brand is decided by the public” –

at VISIONS Summit

TL;DR: Brand teams can no longer control their narrative and story. Gen Z see through it, and the way we communicate today means strict controls and guidelines are irrelevant. The smartest brand teams are starting to take note.

One of my favourite things about long bank holidays is it gives you a small window to reflect. For me that means getting out of the work day-to-day and taking a “10,000 ft view.”

I’ve read or seen or discussed multiple themes this year that indicate that what we see as Brand is changing.

Some of this is anchored in what is likely to be generational cycles.

Some of it driven through the total revolution of how we communicate and consume content.

Some of it reflects societal shifts at large.

But today, I’m going into share some of these thoughts together as I’m piecing them together. I’m not a cultural theorist, and so recognise that some parts of this discussion may be more shallow than others. If that’s the case and you disagree, please, please, please comment and disagree.

I want this post and ensuing discussion to help shape thinking more, so that we can all help brands grow more.

The old world of Brand: control

I was too young to really remember the Ogilvy & Mather Beyond Petroleum ads for BP. But I do remember that when Deepwater Horizon happened, my view was that it was a little bit surprising considering how green they were meant to be.

As Steve Jobs said, brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

Subconsciously, something had entered my mind during the eight years that campaign ran, which indicated BP were more than just oil. They were green.

It turns out also, that I was not the only one. By 2008, a third of people believed BP was “green”.

Not only that, but the change in public perception towards BP after the spill was less negatively impacted in the areas with heavier ad exposure.

This was a total top-down ownership of the narrative.

It was totally controlled messages, delivered effectively in completely owned channels.

The year the campaign went live, we were still in the Web 1.0 era. It was three years pre-MySpace, and four pre-Facebook.

By the time the campaign finished in 2008, Facebook had 100 million users, YouTube was in its ascendency, and Twitter had broken through during the 2008 election.

The reigns of control were starting to cede.

Brand guidelines are broken

Here is the way our logo should be displayed
This is the rule for when our secondary logo should be used over our primary one
Here is the way we discuss this subject matter
This is the tone of voice we have when talking to customers
This is the language we use to describe our product’s features
This is the list of product features that always have to be mentioned in all advertising
This is the style of photography we use in ads, on landing pages, in newsletters, on billboards
This is how we layer text on top of photography
This is the set of grammar rules we follow, and which we ignore
This is the colour palate we use online, and here’s when we use each colour
This is the set of font sizes we use for different formats and means
This is how these change and differ if designing for web vs print
This is who our brand would be if it were a person
This is the reason we exist as a brand
This is the vision for the future we have
This is our mission on how we will solve for that future
This is the reason our customers love us

Brand guidelines are inherently top-down and authoritarian.

They dictate a strict set of rules on how that brand can operate and exist within the world.

But, as

Nikita Walia

said in her VISIONS talk this summer, “the final form of brand is decided by the public.” All of this stuff is trying to create top-down control on something that is ultimately out of your hands.

One of the most important traits you can master as a startup or brand founder is becoming comfortable with uncertainty. Humans default to wanting control, but life is largely uncontrollable. Brands are no different.

“The era of brand is over”

Earlier this year, Scott Galloway and

Rory Sutherland

discussed what it is to be a brand today.

‘I spend 180 days a year on the road… until 10-15 years ago, I stayed at either the Four Seasons or the Mandarin Oriental… [but today] I have these weapons of mass diligence called Instagram.’

The discussion touches on Instagram and TripAdvisor, and the much broader culture of reviews and information-spreading of the modern day internet.

Brand today doesn’t make sense, Scott argues, because we have ways to verify and disseminate information, and make more informed decisions.

Rory replies that “you’re conflating two things, when you say brand is over, what you often mean is advertising-created brand is over.”

I’ve always been of the view that brand is a mental shortcut to remember the name of a product that has already solved a problem for you. Rory says of this that “people use brand as a shortcut: it’s a heuristic, a fast and frugal decision-making tool.”

What do we mean when we say advertising-created brand? We mean a top-down brand where a company tells you what it is, and how it should make you feel.

The great brand narrative doesn’t fit into our modern world

eugbrandstrat

A post shared by @eugbrandstrat

Brand strategist

Eugene Healey

shared a brilliant video discussing the fact that narrative storytelling is in decline.

Today, the way we consume content on TikTok and Instagram means that we are fed microcosms of culture. Tiny fragments of stories. We swipe within seconds or milliseconds.

And as a result of that, it’s not just that we don’t want to hear a brand’s narrative.

It’s that there’s no platform for it.

The true platform of the great brand narrative was TV and maybe print to a certain extent before then. But linear TV watching is in decline.

Between 2021 and 2025, we've gone from three hours and 16 minutes of TV per day to two hours 401. At four adverts per 15 minutes, and 271 million US adults, that’s 32.4 billion fewer locked-in impressions per day.

Streaming is on the rise, and YouTube is now the most viewed platform on actual TV sets. These have different forms of adverts, and second screening is permanent.

Eugene argues that we are moving towards a time when brand should be considered a “mosaic” rather than a “story” which echos the talk that

Nikita Walia

and Elliot Vredenburg gave this year when they said that brands need to be more compass and less map.

“I’m in my new-identity era”

Kyle Chaka’s book Filterworld explains our world as one of algorithmic similarity. Globalisation began this journey, but the algorithms have continued it.

When we asked in our grad interviews for people to describe their For You pages, we heard what felt like 100 different feeds. But given our interaction with this content is seconds long, it means that the niches we swim in are shallow and transient.

As one friend

Alexi Gunner

described it to me once, “it’s almost like cosplaying the subculture rather than being fully immersed in it.”

This butts up against something that we as millennials saw as vital in the way we bought into brands. We bought into things that reflected something about who we were.

When Hims launched in 2017, the message was empowering (with the backdrop of classic millennial brand signals of pastel colours and heavyweight serif fonts). It spoke to a certain type of man: a post-toxic-masculinity man.

But today, identity seems to be more fluid. “I’m in my ******** era” is a common reflection of an algorithmically-driven short-term approach to identity.

The Hims Website Adds Approachability To Men's Health & Wellness With A Clean Digital Destination | DesignRush

The death of millennial sincerity

Last month, someone on X asked what the worst songs of all time were. Someone replied with the 2009 song Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Home was always a kitsch song. It came off the back of a decade of singer-songwriter earnestness, and the ongoing pursuit of authenticity in musical hipsterdom. But Home was already a crossover: I can imagine it on a perfume ad, and I remember that it was played relentlessly on Radio 1.

A few weeks after these tweets, Kyle Chaka wrote about it in the New Yorker2. He talks about the sincerity of that generation:

“Their music provided a suitably self-important soundtrack as Great Recession-era artisanal hipsterdom faded into the careerist hopefulness of the latter Obama years, when Everlane minimalism supplanted lumberjack plaid.”

It’s a generation thing

Associations with brands changes with each generation.

Boomers, in that long post-war run of hope and stability, were the deep lovers for strong, stable brands. “More Doctors smoke Camels” read the long series of Camel ads, recognising that authoritative figures ruled all. Throughout the boomer run of the 60s and 70s, “Big Business” was the least of the big threats Americans felt to their future.

Gen X rebelled with its anti-corportaism. MTV. South Park. And there was Naomi Klein’s 1999 book No Logo, which was instrumental in drawing attention to the ills of globalisation, the corporations and ad agencies that went with it. Savvier brands mocked advertising in their own adverts.

And then came the millennials, my generation. We were more sincere. I hear Dove’s Real Beauty campaign get mocked today, but at the time felt like a real moment of change we could rally behind. Patagonia told us “Don’t buy this jacket.” It’s no surprise that it’s this generation that voted in Obama twice.

And then there were brands like Innocent Smoothies, which while starting off with a tone of voice that aimed for “a naïve and affable ingénue,” quickly became “twee, cloying and creepy” as wrote Paul Burke, the man responsible for their first tone of voice docs3.

But if the creator thought the language had become twee, it didn’t seem to stop dozens of brands in the 2010s emulate them.

And meanwhile the blandification of DTC was happening. Every millennial DTC business in the 2010s looked identical. Soft pastel tones. Heavy serif weight fonts. Empowering messages. Innocent, like Home, ends up as millennial cringe, but it all starts off as millennial sincerity.

And then there’s Gen Z. The generation that has completely grown up with the internet swimming in marketing messages. The generation that can spot scripted UGC a mile away. The generation that, like Gen X 30 years before it, can enjoy the irony of it all. But in general have a distrust for brands4, and believe that if brands stay silent on political issues, it means they’re hiding something5.

And so there’s a chance that this is all just a generational thing. And that Gen Alpha will be back in full swing crying out for brands to tell them stories, and believing – as we millennials did – in the best of times. With the world currently as it is, that future feels far away.

How to be a Brand today: borrowing from social – both organic and paid

Social is the beacon here.

I worked alongside an organic social agency in the early 2010s, and with hindsight they were able to do lots of fun experimental things. Mostly, I think, because social was still seen as a toy.

As soon as it wasn’t seen as a toy, companies became more prescriptive and tighter on guidelines. But the very best social teams fought back. We need memes, we need a different writing style, we need a different tone of voice. We need a way we can play with trends.

As a result, the very best of organic social today is highly culturally relevant. It reflects the zeitgeist and changes just as quickly as it does. Brands now have far better understandings of how organic social can work, and generally give less strict guidance to those teams.

The creator and influencer economy too has reinforced this.

Today, a huge growth lever is getting your product into the hands of as many influencers and creators as you can do. Not scripting them or giving them too much guidance, just letting them do their thing.

Nothing kills a creator campaign – whether organic or used in paid – faster than being too prescriptive with what’s said. Forget how they describe your product, they’re also going to shoot in a way that you might not like, the product might have a smudge on it, the lighting might highlight one of the bits you hate. Why did they have to include that plastic there?

The best social teams and creator teams and influencer teams recognise this and give freewill to their creators.

And then you have paid social. The biggest shift that’s happened to paid social in the last two or three years isn’t about data or tracking or measurement. It’s about creative diversity.

Meta platform updates mean that every users’ individual preferences are taken into account when matching them with ads. All of those micro-differences that their feeds take on, the micro-trends, the short-lived identity shifts… all of that is taken into account. And that means you need ads that talk to all of those individual preferences. That’s creative diversity. If all your ads look the same, they’ll speak to just one audience, and you’ll hit diminishing returns.

Paid social teams are currently going through the battlegrounds that organic social teams and influencer teams went through before it.

But if you look at organic social at its best, it can become part of a conversation, which even if its shortlived, still holds itself in our memories. It’s not the top-down storytelling that did it, it’s the way the brands leant into what was already going on in the world: more fluidly, more reactive, less prescriptive.

Not all organic teams get it right. If you’re trying to hard, that obviously 🚩 s amongst those who know. And while millennial sincerity hasn’t quite returned yet, there’s still a desire for authenticity and an openness to irony.

What should a brand guidelines doc contain today? Maybe it’s as simple as:

Your vision and mission
The one thing about your product that really makes you stand out
The reason why your best customers love you
The one core message you want to get across

There still needs to be some guiding principles. It shouldn’t be the wild west, but if these principles were simpler, maybe there’d be more room for growth.

If those were the guides for how we interacted as a brand across our marketing, in our product, in our comms, it would likely set us up far better to lean into those new moments when they arrive.

Sure you can try to fight it anyway, but as Nikita says, the final form of brand is always decided by the public.

Early Stage Growth • Ballpoint

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