WeWork's collapse is the most important brand strategy case study of the decade, and not for the reason most people think. The lesson isn't 'branding can't save a bad business' (obviously). The lesson is: branding can make a bad business look like a good business long enough to extract billions of dollars from intelligent investors.
The lesson is: branding can make a bad business look like a good business long enough to extract billions of dollars from intelligent investors.
Adam Neumann built a brand narrative so compelling that it overrode every rational analysis of the underlying business. WeWork wasn't a tech company. It was a real estate company. It wasn't creating 'community'. It was subleasing desks. But the brand told a story about elevating consciousness, about a new way of working, about community as infrastructure. And that story was worth $47 billion. Briefly.
Lululemon's ambassador program doesn't pay athletes millions. It empowers local fitness instructors. The brand is built from the yoga studio floor up, not the broadcast booth down.
As a brand strategist, I find this deeply uncomfortable. Because the same tools I use to help good businesses communicate their value were deployed here to manufacture value that didn't exist. The playbook worked perfectly. Too perfectly. And that should concern everyone in my industry.
The counterargument is that WeWork's actual product (flexible office space in nice buildings) wasn't bad. People liked using it. The brand problem wasn't deception at the product level. It was deception at the valuation level. The story of what the company COULD be was priced as what it already was.
Every brand tells a forward-looking story to some degree. We all present our aspirations as reality. But there's a line between optimistic positioning and fraud, and WeWork showed us how thin that line can be when the story is told well enough.