you can’t performance-market your way out of a brand that stands for nothing.
paid reach rents attention, meaning is what makes it stay.
as an e-commerce entrepreneur, brand owner or ad specialist you might ask yourself: why do some brands sell out without discounts while others, with better margins and smarter ads, keep pushing and pulling for every sale?
it’s rarely the product. i bet more chances it’s the service. and increasingly, it’s not the price. so what is it then?
it’s demand. culture. the reason you don’t have to sell, but you attract. something that happens by explaining who you are as a brand, what opinion you have on the world, aka what the brand means.
we’re operating in a world of abundance. everything is comparable. everything ships fast. everything has reviews. functional differentiation is shrinking by the day.
so what are people actually choosing on? identity.
that changes the game compared to how we approached the market before. you’re no longer just competing on product. you’re competing on meaning. on who you belong to and who belongs to you.
brands like nude project, rhode, lense and david protein aren’t just selling. lense works because people want to be like daniel van dalen. rhode, same story. they’re building a creative community people want to belong to. lense and david protein also play the same game: they’re not pushing features, they’re inviting people into a world.
and in that world, the customer has a role. they represent the world. they have the same opinion as the brand, participate in the same conversations, have the same dreams and they buy to belong to the world the brand creates.
that’s why performance marketing alone isn’t enough. performance optimizes what already exists. but if there’s no clear identity underneath, you’re optimizing emptiness.
gen z doesn’t buy products to own something. they buy to signal something. to belong to their own, and to express who they are or who they’re becoming.
the brands that understand this aren’t just focused on ad spend, revenue and views. they’re building culture, so their audience becomes their brand ambassador for the rest of their lives.
