Written in Fire
Or why the most absurd thing about the absurd is that it's not absurd at all.
It all started with a Coke. Falling from the sky.
A gift from the gods. Perfectly shaped. Oddly sturdy. Capable of making music if you blew across its open mouth. Until it became a source of envy, of greed, of every dark thing the human heart contains.
If you have not seen The Gods Must Be Crazy, you have missed something. It has nothing to do with Coca-Cola. It has nothing to do with marketing. And yet it captures, more honestly than any campaign deck I have ever sat through, what a brand is.
A set of associations held together in a shared imagination. A belief. A desire. A collective hallucination.
The etymology of the word tells its own story.
The word came from a wound. A burn pressed into the hide of cattle that said this belongs to me. The wound cooled into a scar. The scar became a stamp. The stamp became a promise: what is inside matches what is on the outside.
The brand was, at its origin, skin in the game. The maker was visible. The maker was responsible. The brand was the address of accountability, written in fire.
The distance between what the word once meant and what it has become is the entire history of marketing.
To understand the way the brand has evolved, we should view it through the lens of four philosophical schools. The Platonic, the Aristotelian, the Wittgensteinian, and the Absurdist. The first three are not wrong. The fourth is not a brand.
The Platonic believes the brand has a perfect form, an ideal floating somewhere above its manifestations. The bottle, the ad, the package, the social post are imperfect shadows of something more real that lives in a document called the brand book. Stay on brand. Brand integrity. Brand consistency. This is the inherited theology of advertising. Nobody outside the boardroom has ever met a Platonic brand. They have only ever met its shadows.
The Aristotelian objects. There is no perfect form. The brand is what the brand does. A thousand small acts: the bottle on the shelf, the voice on the phone, the driver who delivers the box, the friend who shrugs and says they’re fine. The brand emerges from practice and is measured by effect. The Aristotelian has dirty hands. He understands that what does not exist on the shop floor does not exist at all.
The Wittgensteinian goes further still. The brand is a language game played between the company and the culture. The Apple of the marketer’s deck and the Apple of the teenager’s text are not the same Apple. The Nike of the boardroom, the Nike of the courtroom, and the Nike of the protest are three Nikes sharing an asterisk. The brand belongs, finally, to the people who talk about it. The company contributes. The company does not own.
Whatever the worldview, the strongest brands have always had one thing in common. They have lasted not because they shouted louder but because they refused to change. Coca-Cola has been making the same brown drink since 1886, and refuses to change the recipe. When it tried, in 1985, the market revolted. Hermès has been making leather goods since 1837, and refuses to scale beyond what the artisan can produce. The Catholic Church has been in the absolution business for two thousand years, and refuses to renegotiate doctrine for marketing purposes. They have survived wars, depressions, plagues, and every marketing hack the consultant class has thrown at them, from algorithms to social hooks to whatever LinkedIn is calling growth this quarter.
Each refusal is a costly, public, irrevocable commitment. Skin in the game. The kind that says to the buyer: we will hold to this even when the market begs us not to.
In a world that changes at the speed of the algorithm, the strong brand is not what it adds. It is what it refuses to change. Subtract every passing trend, and what remains is the brand.
Then a fourth thing arrived. From Absurdism.
The Absurdist brand has no fixed identity, and it is not trying to have one. It hijacks whatever conversation, format, or trend the platform is rewarding this hour. It is made of millions of impressions, never of one thing, contorting itself in real time to whatever the algorithm has decided someone in the next ten seconds wants to feel.
It does not care about the brand. It cares about the click. It is built for sensation, not insight. For the pause that registers on a dashboard, not the moment that lands in a person. It is hooks, fonts, music cues, and trending sounds, none of which has anything to do with the brand and all of which is preying on the clicks.
What makes it even more absurd is that the Absurdist brand does not perform for the audience. It performs for the algorithm.
And the audience itself has dissolved into a random crowd organized around the latest trend, not around a brand.
As for the brand, it became a prop hiding somewhere in a TikTok post in the hope of not being recognized by the algorithm, since it’s been told people don’t click on branded content.
And perhaps the biggest absurd of all absurds is that it works. Sort of. Garbage in, engagement out. The dashboards glow green. You can argue it is very efficient at building memory structures, except there is no structure and the memory has the span of a goldfish.
Eventually, the brand develops a Midas touch. Except instead of gold, everything it touches becomes content. The post. The launch. The crisis response. The CEO’s statement. Even the customer, who has learned to perform back, because the customer is not stupid and has correctly inferred that a relationship in which one party is performing is a relationship in which the other party should not invest the interiority of her mind.
Then the content devours the brand. The dashboard still reads green while the deep structures of the brand promise are starting to rot. What is left is salience without content. A footprint without a foot.
This is not a brand. This is a flimsy little soap bubble made of clicks. Inconsequential. Absurd. Random. Trivial. It is all the game, and no skin.
Whatever rises by the algorithm dies by the algorithm. Attention is borrowed. The lender always takes it back.
Marketers building algorithmic soap bubbles should be charged a tax every time they use the word brand. They are not in the brand business. They are in the clicks business. The two have never been the same. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
So where does this leave us? Plato is still in the boardroom. Aristotle is still in operations. Wittgenstein is still in culture. The Absurdist is in the feed nobody invited it into, performing for an algorithm and pretending to be part of the social conversation. Three philosophies of a brand. One click chaser pretending to be a brand.
The older words still come out of our mouths in meetings. Essence. Purpose. Identity. Equity. But the feed is not listening. The feed only wants to be fed. Preferably nonsensical content, against which cat videos look like old Hollywood classics.
What survives the feed will be what was always going to survive. The brand anchored in something the algorithm cannot move. The artisan’s signature. The promise that says what is inside matches what is on the outside. Skin in the game, written in fire.
The brands that outlive the feed will be the ones that remembered there is a difference between being seen and being meant. Between kept promises and a graph on a dashboard. Between a brand and a soap bubble.
Because the wound, at least, leaves an imprint. A bubble vanishes as if it never was.
The meaning of a brand has been mutilated by marketers who have never been held responsible for the consequences of mutilation. Mostly because they got promoted before the rot started to stink.
We may not be able to change the state of marketing today. But let’s just please don’t call it a brand.
Whatever rises by the algorithm dies by the algorithm. Attention is borrowed. The lender always takes it back. Profound.