The end of the loud brand

For most of the last decade the safest thing a brand could do was get louder. Bigger type, brighter colour, more posts, more launches, a founder on every stage. It worked because attention was cheap and the feeds rewarded whoever fed them most. The strategy was not wrong. It was simply available to everyone.

What we have watched over the last three years, across every category we work in, is that the loudest brands are now the least distinguishable. Two luxury hotel groups with the same saturated campaign. Three electric cars with the same specification-led launch. When volume is the norm, volume is invisible.

The houses that are winning now are doing something that looks, from the outside, like doing less. Fewer placements. Slower film. Identity systems that do not change every season. The discipline reads as expense, because it is: restraint costs more than noise, and buyers of expensive things can tell.

This is not an argument for silence. A brand that says nothing is not restrained; it is absent. The argument is for a single true sentence, repeated with enough craft that people start repeating it for you. We have spent fourteen years learning to write that sentence. It is still the hardest part of the job.

The practical test is simple. Take the last thing your brand published and remove the logo. If it could be anyone's, it is noise, however well it performed. If it could only be yours, you have found the thing to say quietly, for a long time.