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I've been mulling over the same idea of belonging for awhile now, and more and more it keeps showing up from people coming at brands from very different directions.
And while my focus tends to be on middle market, rolled-up infrastructure companies or other such complex entities, I’ve spent most of my career working alongside of some of the best consumer brands. And I learned first-hand that people are people and the old binary of B2B vs. B2C misunderstands this.
Recently, Silvio Campara, CEO of Golden Goose, was talking about younger consumers and the importance of belonging. What I noticed the most was how often he came back to participation during the interview. Golden Goose customers aren't simply buying into the brand. They're invited into it.Invited to alter the product, personalize it and put something of themselves into it.
They’re invited to be active participants in the brand’s evolution. To co-create. Which extends the belonging into agency and their agency facilitates the assignment of deeper meaning.
Then there was the recent interview with Lea Karam of Mindscope and Elias W. Bassil of TikTok, discussing changing consumer behavior. Different conversation, similar framework, same idea: people increasingly wantagency.
They don't want brands to hand them a finished story and tell them how they fit inside it.
They’re disinterested in a manufactured sense of meaning and would rather discover what it means to them personally. They want to decide what feels authentic and they won’t make that decision based on what they’re told or shown or made to believe.
Today, being made to believe is pure make-believe. Authenticity is no longer a design decision. The old language (the millennial/Gen X coded era of what is real) is dead.
Brands as identity anchors is certainly not new. We all know that people (especially young people) have been using brands to help themselves form their identity. But until recently it’s been a process largely controlledby the brands.
Now it’s moving further and further from their hands and the world-making that was prefabricated in a board room has leapt into the hands and screens of people all over the globe. That’s agency we're seeing and it's everywhere.
Earlier this year VML's Future 100 reported that 75% of GenZ and millennials are interested in becoming more involved with their favorite brands, including through co-creation and influencing innovation. It’s not just the TikTokification effect either, it’s more of a generational spirit.
Future 100’s "Brand Democracies" trend points to companies like the consumer technology company Nothing including their customers directly in product development and Škoda turning to a Reddit community to help configure a version of the Octavia.
Even niche clothing brands like À Main Levée are utilizing a sense of community in how they sell their clothing through a scarcity driven,members-only model of IYKYK products that are made in extremely small runs and primarily dropped via a Discord group and strategically placed on TikTok. They source opinions on design and what items to make next. They even created a tiered members club that sends membership cards that are metal, designed to look like Amex cards.
Ogilvy gets even more direct in its 2026 Gen Z research. Their finding is that this generation has opted out of being an audience altogether. Advising brands to use a paintbrush, not a rule book and to create the conditions for expression rather than prescribing what that expression should look like. Loosening the grip to get a more control seems counter to what we have been taught or practiced.
Stepping back from this It's tempting to read all of this as another story about Gen Z. It’s not. I think it's a story about what Brand (capital B) is becoming and honestly the post-millennial approach feels inevitable and better. The sense of friction it adds feels nice, especially after a decade of soft, frictionless and often mindless consumption.
Enough telling us what to feel and think and buy. We’re all tired of it.
The relationship between brands and people has been fairly straightforward. Brands made things. Brands created meaning around those things. Advertising communicated that meaning. Consumers received it.
Obviously, it was never really that clean. People have always interpreted brands through their own experiences and used them to say things about themselves. But the balance of power was different.
Today, the mechanisms of culture are participatory by default. People remix things. Comment on them. Customize them. Meme them. Review them. Build communities around them. Create content with them. And now they expect some of that same agency from brands.
Ogilvy's research makes the belonging side of this particularly interesting. 42% of Gen Z respondents say they find consistent belonging through hobby groups, interest communities and fandoms. Two-thirds find some form of brand community appealing.
That doesn't mean every brand needs a Discord server. It means brands increasingly exist inside the same systems people use to construct identity, find other people and express what they care about.
That changes the job. The brand isn't simply something toconsume anymore. It can also be something to participate in.
Brands have spent decades trying to become more consistent. Now we're telling them to give some of that control away?
Let customers customize the product. Let communities influence what gets made. Let the thing get remixed by people who were never on the payroll.
That's a massive shift for most organizations, and it's not just a marketing or brand problem. It's an operational one. Every one of those hand offs, to a creator, a customer, a community, a platform's AI summary, requires the organization behind the brand to already agree internally on what the brand is.
You can't hand people a paint brush and conditions for expression if leadership, the product team and the front line haven't converged on what's true about the brand in the first place. Participation doesn't remove the need for internal alignment. It raises the price of not having it.
At the same time, the number of places where a brand has to exist keeps multiplying. Search. Social. AI. Retail. Employees. Creators. Products. Experiences. Communities.
Every one of those creates another potential version of the brand. And the more versions there are, the easier it becomes for the center to disappear.
That is why I think all of this conversation about participation is actually an argument for more brand coherence, not less.
A recent study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute looked at what the researchers call Portfolio Branding Cohesion: essentially, how consistently recognizable brand elements are carried across a portfolio.
Across 125 brands and more than 1,000 products, the researchers found that cohesion becomes harder to maintain as portfolios expand. More visual elements and the presence of sub-brands were associated with greater fragmentation.
The study is about packaged goods and visual identity, but the underlying principle travels well. As the number of expressions increases, maintaining the connections between them gets harder.
And those connections matter. The researchers provides enough evidence that cohesion aids recognition, makes familiar information easier to process, supports loyalty and allows associations built around one part of a portfolio to transfer to another.
In other words, coherence is doing more than making everything look tidy. It's helping us understand that all these different things belong together.
That's becoming a much bigger job for brands, because a modern brand portfolio isn't necessarily just a collection of products anymore. It's everything through which the brand becomes knowable: a TikTok made by an employee (e.g. the “Staples Baddie”), a collaboration with a creator, a customer's customized sneaker, an answer returned by an AI platform, a physical experience, a new product, an acquired company.
None of those things needs to be identical. But we should be able to recognize what connects them, and that recognition has to be built somewhere upstream of all of that. In the leadership decisions, the hiring, the operational reality that produces the brand in the first place.
Coherence isn't something you simply apply to the outputs after the fact. It's a property of the organization that made them and it should be applied far upstream.
This is where the distinction matters. Consistency can easily become sameness. But coherence doesn't actually require it.
In fact, the Ehrenberg-Bass researchers explicitly acknowledge that perfect portfolio cohesion may not even be desirable. Make every product too similar and consumers may have difficulty distinguishing one from another. The opportunity is somewhere between recognition and differentiation.
Golden Goose is an almost literal demonstration of that principle. The customer is invited to change the product. Draw on it. Write on it. Distress it. Make it different from the one sitting next to it. Make it their own and a part of their identity.
The variation isn't a failure of the brand system. It's the entire point. And yet the product doesn't suddenly stop being recognizable as Golden Goose, because the thing being customized was never the brand itself. It was the surface. The brand, the point of view, the materials, the codes that make a Golden Goose a Golden Goose, sat underneath the whole time, undisturbed by what the customer did on top of it.
That's a departure in how we’re thinking about brand governance at Measure Creative Group. The objective isn't to determine every possible expression of the brand in advance. It's to build the center strong enough and clear enough internally, that you don't have to. You can be adaptive and iterative rather than monolithic and reactive.
AI is what turns this from an interesting idea into an absolute operational necessity.
We are entering an environment where brands will be expressed, summarized and interpreted by more people and systems than they could ever realistically control. An AI platform answering a question abou tyour category doesn't ask your permission first. It works from whatever is legible about you, wherever it can find it. You’re responsible for it.
Which is great news because a brand with a clear, coherent center is easy for those systems to represent accurately. A brand held together mostly by a style guide and good intentions is not. That's a different essay,but it's the same underlying problem: coherence is what makes a brand legible to anyone, or anything, encountering it without your involvement.
Trying to manage that by creating another 200-page standards document isn't going to work. Neither is abandoning structure in the name of authenticity, community or participation.
The answer is to become much more precise about the things that really make the brand the brand. Its point of view. Its language. Its recognizable assets. Its behaviors. Its beliefs. The ideas it consistently returns to. The things that should survive even when the expression changes,and everyone inside the organization, not just the brand team, has to fully know and understand what those things are.
Because the clearer those things become, the less precious abrand has to be about everything else.
That's the paradox sitting underneath much of the consumer research we're seeing right now. People want more agency. Culture wants more participation. Technology is creating more expression than brands could ever hope to control.
The instinct might be to hold on tighter. A stronger move is to build a stronger center and then let go of everything else with confidence, because the center will hold it together even when you're not the one holding it.
Written by: Jeff Skatzka
