I'm writing this from my couch in Portland, in the weird liminal week between Christmas and New Year's where time doesn't exist and my only responsibilities are feeding the cats and pretending to read the book I told everyone I'd finish by December. A perfect moment for reflection.
I'm writing this from my couch in Portland, in the weird liminal week between Christmas and New Year's where time doesn't exist and my only responsibilities are feeding the cats and pretending to read the book I told everyone I'd finish by December.
2024 was a year that broke several things I believed about brand strategy and confirmed several others. Let me sort through the rubble.
Emily Weiss built Glossier by reading 1,000 comments on her blog before designing a single product. The audience wasn't the market. The audience was the R&D department.
What 2024 confirmed:
Specificity wins. Brat summer. Coconut trees. Wicked's pink and green. The cultural moments that moved people were all radically specific. Not "inclusive summer energy" but brat green and lowercase type. Not "hope and change" but a coconut tree and a laugh. Specificity is shareability. Always was, always will be.
Brand debt is real and compounding. The UnitedHealthcare moment showed what happens when years of consumer resentment go unaddressed. You can't out-communicate your way out of a structural experience problem. Eventually the culture collects.
The polished era is over. The Harris campaign. Creator-led marketing. The Bluesky migration. Everything that worked in 2024 felt human, imperfect, and responsive. Everything that failed felt manufactured, over-produced, and pre-planned.
What 2024 broke:
The assumption that platform ubiquity is necessary. Brands successfully left X without dying. Audiences fragmented without disappearing. The "you must be everywhere" mandate of the 2010s is officially dead. You must be somewhere specific, with intention.
The assumption that AI enhances everything. Spotify Wrapped showed that AI applied to a beloved human experience can actively subtract value. The tool is not the strategy. The human need is the strategy. AI is sometimes the tool and sometimes the obstacle.
The assumption that rebrands create change. Jaguar showed that a new visual identity without a new product reality is just expensive costume change. You cannot declare yourself into a new positioning. You have to earn it with evidence.
What I'm watching in 2025:
The agent economy. How AI agents making purchase decisions on behalf of consumers will reshape brand building. This is going to be bigger and faster than anyone in traditional marketing expects.
The trust premium. In an environment where AI can generate infinite content, human-verified, human-created, human-recommended things will command a premium. Podcast advertising is an early signal. Expect "human-made" to become a brand attribute like "organic" or "sustainable."
The retail media reckoning. Brands are going to start pushing back on the retailer media tax. The math doesn't work for most categories long-term. Something will break.
The post-election brand positioning shuffle. Brands are going to quietly reposition relative to the political environment, and the ones that do it with integrity rather than opportunism will build lasting equity.
It's been a year. A big, loud, confusing, instructive year. I'm going to close my laptop now and go sing karaoke with friends who don't want to talk about brand strategy.
See you in January. Bring specific opinions and an openness to being wrong. That's all this work requires, really.