The hottest Branding Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Business Topics

A Feral Guide to Marketing

Knowingless • 2552 implied HN points • 19 Mar 26
💼 Business Branding
  1. Pay attention to where your gaze and tiny desires actually land, even on things you dislike; those subtle attention signals show what will grab other people.
  2. Marketing is mostly selling a story and a self-image, not just a product; make narratives that give people meaning and make the marketing itself enjoyable.
  3. Be brave and experimental: publish lots of things, get feedback, notice what sticks, and lean into those hits instead of trying to perfectly predict viral success.

What is next for collaborations?

The Sociology of Business • 737 implied HN points • 28 Oct 24
💼 Business Branding
  1. Brands are now combining different areas like food, art, and fashion to create unique experiences for customers. This helps them stand out and attract more attention.
  2. Collaborations allow brands to show their taste and connect with customers in a deeper way, almost like building a community around their identity.
  3. Creative directors play an important role in making brands culturally relevant by exploring new collaborations outside their core market, which helps them grow and stay appealing.

I’m Proud to Call Myself a Disney Adult

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 343 implied HN points • 18 Mar 26
🎭️ Culture Branding
  1. Disney stays popular because it promises tradition and timeless rituals in a world fixated on innovation and disruption.
  2. The cruise ad succeeds by showing a quiet, magical family moment. It taps into people’s longing for simple, shared, wholesome experiences.
  3. Disney’s marketing makes cultural moments that spread widely and feel more resonant than many other modern events, showing how much influence and emotional pull the brand still has.

The story of Sublime's logo

The Sublime Newsletter • 534 implied HN points • 26 Oct 24
🪑 Design Branding
  1. Logos represent more than their appearance. They carry deeper meanings that connect with feelings and ideas, like innovation or nostalgia.
  2. Choosing a designer that breaks the mold can lead to unique and creative outcomes. Sometimes the riskier choice is to step outside the norm.
  3. The journey of creating something, like a logo, is just as important as the final product. It's about collaboration, sharing ideas, and making something beautiful together.

The age of SUPERCONTENT

The Sociology of Business • 957 implied HN points • 21 Oct 24
💼 Business Branding
  1. Brands are becoming content creators to engage a wider audience, not just their customers. They create fun and informative content to attract fans and observers.
  2. Today's successful content is often found in show business style, blending storytelling and entertainment across various platforms. This means brands are constantly producing engaging material that keeps their audience interested.
  3. Content is vital for a brand's success, often affecting how products are viewed and sold. Good content can help a brand stand out and become more discoverable, especially in a crowded market.
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Brands, ads, and video games

SuperJoost Playlist • 416 implied HN points • 17 Oct 24
💼 Business Branding
  1. Brands are realizing that video games offer a better way to connect with younger audiences compared to traditional media like TV and magazines. This shift is important for capturing the attention of the next generation.
  2. There is a growing trend for brands to work directly with gaming companies to create engaging and immersive experiences. However, many brands still struggle to commit to long-term strategies instead of just one-time campaigns.
  3. As user acquisition costs rise, game developers are looking for new ways to make money, leading them to collaborate more with brands. This partnership is changing how audiences experience both gaming and advertising.

Guest post: Met Gala on Black Style: Superfine or Superflop?

The Sociology of Business • 378 implied HN points • 17 Oct 24
🪞 Fashion & Beauty Branding
  1. Brand affinity helps create good feelings about a brand, but it’s important to also think about a brand's context in the world.
  2. Positionality means understanding how a brand is viewed based on its place in society and culture.
  3. For brands, the Met Gala can be a chance to blend excitement with deeper meaning by recognizing both connections and the bigger picture.

Perceived Value

The Breaking Point • 279 implied HN points • 17 Oct 24
💼 Business Branding
  1. Value is based on how the buyer sees it. For example, ice cubes can be very valuable on a hot day, but not so much on a cold one.
  2. Customers often find high value in features that are easy to create, rather than the complex ones. A simple 'Export to Powerpoint' function ended up being super useful for many users.
  3. Sometimes, the reasons customers buy a product aren’t just about how useful it is. They might buy it for the customer service, prestige, or other factors that might surprise you.

180,000 People Made Me Bearish On "Better For You" Sodas

Snaxshot • 539 implied HN points • 30 Sep 24
🍲 Food & Drink Branding
  1. People are showing a strong interest in classic flavors, especially sodas that remind them of their childhood. Brands that focus on nostalgia are getting a lot of attention.
  2. New drinks like AG1 are trying to reach mainstream audiences by teaming up with popular spots like Starbucks. This helps them gain visibility without the high price tags.
  3. Condiments and butter are seeing fresh ideas, with new flavors becoming popular. It's exciting to see how brands are innovating everyday products to attract younger buyers.

Best of Advertising: Forget Influencers, Focus on Narrative

The Social Juice • 66 implied HN points • 14 Mar 26
💼 Business Branding
  1. A product needs a strong narrative; without a compelling story, influencer marketing and ads become more expensive and less effective.
  2. Brands can create big attention cheaply by controlling the story — through events, keynote-style reveals, familiar faces (even CEOs), or stunts that make the product unignorable and invite organic creator coverage.
  3. The industry is shifting: brands are experimenting with rebrands, mascots, partnerships and AI-driven creative, while agencies restructure and new measurement tools change how advertising performance is judged.

AI won't kill marketing. We'll do it ourselves.

The Social Juice • 151 implied HN points • 07 Mar 26
💼 Business Branding
  1. AI is overhyped and partly a bubble — many AI tools promise productivity but often add workload and don’t solve new marketing problems. Marketers should use AI to learn and research, but not fall in love with packaged productivity that replaces real work.
  2. Ethics and trust must guide AI use: disclose AI-generated content, guard against deepfakes, and keep real people in testing and creative decisions. Don’t let dependence on black-box chatbots replace human judgment or customer research.
  3. Brand, creativity, and human insight still matter most: big holding companies chasing AI ecosystems risk losing creative trust while indie agencies and brands that invest in long-term brand building will fare better. Focus on honest brand search, real customer contact, and avoid vagueposting or short-term attempts to game AI.

Moats in the Age of AI

Tanay’s Newsletter • 113 implied HN points • 03 Mar 26
💼 Business Branding
  1. AI erodes labor-based moats like switching costs, application-layer scale, and generic process advantages, making it cheaper and faster to build features, migrate systems, and iterate.
  2. Defensibility shifts to hard-to-reproduce assets: proprietary first-party data, real marketplace liquidity and reputation, regulatory or physical rails, and unique processes that rely on exclusive signals.
  3. Some powers strengthen or split — model and infrastructure scale plus institutional trust grow in importance, while marketing-driven consumer brand shortcuts weaken as agents can deeply evaluate options.

Chartbook 421: The end of American soft-power? From Coca-colonization to Fanta-ization

Chartbook • 1974 implied HN points • 23 Dec 25
🌍 World Politics Branding
  1. American soft power was once built not just by the US government but by private networks—big brands, universities, philanthropy, entertainment, and global corporations shaped how the world saw America.
  2. That soft power is weakening as major American brands deliberately downplay their U.S. origins and localize their image abroad, so consumers in places like Germany are increasingly choosing brands framed as local.
  3. Soft power is a flexible network shaped by geopolitics, markets, and consumer tastes, so corporate branding and historical context can reconfigure influence and weaken old cultural ties between the U.S. and Europe.

When your audience owns you

Random Minds by Katherine Brodsky • 140 implied HN points • 02 Mar 26
🎭️ Culture Branding
  1. Creators and commentators can get trapped by their audience and ecosystem because their income, status, and belonging depend on sticking to predictable beliefs.
  2. The incentive structure rewards certainty, consistency, and performance while punishing nuance or changing your mind, so people often double down or stay silent instead of revising views.
  3. The escape is to build an audience that values curiosity and principled reasoning and to refuse to perform for applause — follow the evidence and be willing to change even if it costs you.

From Gucci to WPP, marketers are rethinking AI, ad agencies, and the rest is marketing campaigns

The Social Juice • 75 implied HN points • 28 Feb 26
💼 Business Branding
  1. AI is upending marketing: companies are using generative tools to make ads, cutting roles because of automation, and facing backlash when AI work feels low-quality or ethically shaky.
  2. The agency landscape is being reshaped as holding companies and clients reorganize, consolidate accounts, and rethink commissions and media models to stay lean and more integrated.
  3. Brands are leaning hard into bold creative moves — stunts, cultural partnerships, celebrity tie‑ins and purpose-driven campaigns — to cut through noise and stay culturally relevant.

The Branding of Bob Dylan

The Honest Broker • 11702 implied HN points • 01 Feb 25
🎭️ Culture Branding
  1. Branding has changed from a painful process to something people want to do for themselves. It used to mean being marked permanently, but now it's about building a personal image.
  2. The internet plays a big role in how people see themselves and how they present, often turning individuals into products or brands.
  3. Bob Dylan is highlighted as a former rebel who seems to have embraced branding, which can feel surprising to many fans of the 'counterculture' movement.

How You Can Eliminate Your Competition

VERY GOOD PRODUCTIZED GUIDES • 159 implied HN points • 02 Sep 24
💼 Business Branding
  1. You don't have to be the first in the market. Being different is more important. Focus on filling gaps in what others offer instead.
  2. Understand what your customers truly want. They often seek value and connection, not just the service itself. Learn their needs to attract more clients.
  3. Instead of only cutting costs, focus on providing great value to your customers. Sometimes spending more can actually improve your service and satisfy customers better.

Brands kill culture, feed the zeitgeist, and neglect tradition.

The Social Juice • 102 implied HN points • 21 Feb 26
💼 Business Branding
  1. Brand building is steady work that hasn't gone away. Chasing every trend or declaring old formats dead wastes energy and erodes long-term value.
  2. Culture belongs to no one and moves with young people, so brands can't capture it outright. The smart play is to find a clear role, support creators, and earn a place in that culture over time.
  3. Moments and momentum both matter: use smart distribution, honest slice-of-life creative, and long-term advertising to build trust instead of squeezing viral creators for immediate attention. Over-collaborating or treating creators like disposable assets dilutes both the creator's and the brand's meaning.

The UATX Brand

In My Tribe • 410 implied HN points • 03 Jan 26
🚌 Education Branding
  1. UATX presents itself as a traditional, non-ideological liberal arts school focused on Great Books and in-person learning, but many outsiders mainly see it as a right-wing counter-institution.
  2. The institution is caught between three conflicting identities — a rigorous classical college, a conservative ideological project, or a political movement — and trying to be all three at once looks unsustainable.
  3. AI advisers recommend a pivot to a 'Practical Liberal Arts' combining a Great Books core with project-based, industry-linked concentrations and transparent outcomes, but the free-tuition, donor-dependent funding model could make the school prioritize donors over students.

How the Mad Men Lost the Plot Again

The Ruffian • 676 implied HN points • 23 Dec 25
💼 Business Branding
  1. Big, emotional mass advertising — like consistent TV campaigns that build fame — still drives long‑term growth because brands rely on millions of light buyers remembering them at the point of purchase.
  2. Chasing digital targeting, engagement and instant metrics can seem efficient but often fails to grow brands, since most buyers don’t meaningfully engage online and digital channels suffer fraud and short‑term thinking.
  3. The industry lost focus by prioritising tech and short‑term measurables over creative consistency; firms should keep brand‑building as their core strength and use technology as a supporting tool, not a replacement.

There’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever the UK

Wrong Side of History • 470 implied HN points • 18 Dec 25
🎭️ Culture Branding
  1. Many organisations and officials have replaced historic names like 'Britain' or 'Great Britain' with the shorter, corporate‑sounding 'UK', which feels less evocative.
  2. The shift appears politically and culturally driven — leaders prefer 'UK' because it sounds neutral and bureaucratic, avoiding the romantic or nationalistic baggage of 'Britain'.
  3. A mocking cultural meme, the 'Yookay', has emerged to capture and satirise this change, using the name to symbolise a bland, decline‑tinged image of modern Britain that media and commentators discuss widely.

Against Branding (and Sarah Fay)

Castalia • 4895 implied HN points • 01 Sep 23
🎭️ Culture Branding
  1. Writing should be about exploration and self-discovery, not just about building a brand or following. Writers should feel free to express their thoughts without worrying about market trends.
  2. The idea of 'branding' can limit creativity and individual expression. People should resist pressure to conform to easy, recognizable formats in their writing.
  3. Substack was meant to be a platform for genuine writing, not just a marketplace for consumer-driven content. It's important to keep the spirit of originality and experimentation alive.

Blogging class: Multiple blogs

Sex and the State • 15 implied HN points • 02 Mar 26
💼 Business Branding
  1. Running multiple blogs doubles the setup and maintenance work and makes it harder for new readers to discover all your writing.
  2. People follow people more than topics, so keeping your work in one place helps readers connect with you across different subjects.
  3. You can’t please everyone, so it’s better to have a distinct voice that attracts devoted readers; only split into separate blogs if the audiences or goals are truly incompatible.

You Can Buy This Sweater. Unless You’re a ‘Proud Zionist.’

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 1548 implied HN points • 14 Aug 25
🪞 Fashion & Beauty Branding
  1. Lingua Franca is a luxury sweater brand that sells sweaters with social and political messages. They are popular among celebrities and affluent customers.
  2. A customer ordered a sweater with 'Proud Zionist' on it but never received it. The company's customer service gave vague reasons for the order's cancellation.
  3. The brand has made a choice about which messages to support, indicating that some causes are not welcome in their product lineup.

The Sad Saga of Bud Light

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 2986 implied HN points • 07 Feb 25
💼 Business Branding
  1. Bud Light was once America's favorite beer, but it lost its top spot after a marketing move focused on social issues. Many customers turned away from the brand.
  2. The shift towards diversity and inclusion in corporate strategies can sometimes backfire. For Bud Light, it cost them loyal customers and sales.
  3. It's important for companies to balance social goals with their business interests. Ignoring customer preferences can lead to serious repercussions.

The 2024 state of social media

Taylor Lorenz's Newsletter • 3732 implied HN points • 18 Dec 24
🎭️ Culture Branding
  1. Social media is now more about fun and learning than personal chats. People want to be entertained as they scroll.
  2. Instagram is the top platform for engaging brand content. Many users love to see brands posting more there.
  3. YouTube is still important, especially for longer videos. Users enjoy in-depth content, even from brands, making it stand out in a world of short clips.

Storytelling is the new clickbait, can B2B capitalise?

Mehdeeka • 5 implied HN points • 03 Mar 26
💼 Business Branding
  1. New short, personal story formats grab attention by using first-person hooks, cliffhangers, and subtle or late product mentions to drive clicks.
  2. B2B can use storytelling, but only if your customers are actually on those platforms; focus on building an owned, engaged audience and a distinctive brand using platform-native formats.
  3. Don’t chase every trend — audit channels, compare time and budget to results, cut underperformers, and reallocate resources to focused experiments or to hiring/outsourcing so you can do fewer channels well.

The Marlboro Miles Edition

Why is this interesting? • 1146 implied HN points • 26 Jun 25
🎭️ Culture Branding
  1. The Marlboro Miles program was a clever marketing strategy that encouraged brand loyalty by offering rewards for collecting points from cigarette packages. It tapped into a desire for free stuff, especially among kids and teens.
  2. Despite its appeal, Marlboro Miles was promoting a dangerous product, and many participants, including children, received rewards through their parents' smoking habits.
  3. Today, similar gamification tactics are used in various industries, like credit card rewards and apps, showing how companies exploit psychological triggers to drive consumer behavior.

The Defiant Way to Build an AI-First Brand (Stop Playing Safe)

Crypto Good • 9 implied HN points • 10 Mar 26
💼 Business Branding
  1. Use AI to be defiant, not just efficient — make visuals that demand attention instead of blending in.
  2. Use bold images paired with fearless quotes. Pull inspiration from songs, books, or found objects and learn the AI skills to remix and superimpose text into unique visuals.
  3. Build with AI every day and combine multiple models and workflows to keep your brand voice unmistakable. Share your process, iterate publicly, and use practical tools to accelerate your mission.

Living Evil: Covid, Counter-Strike And An Unnecessary Rebranding

Richard Lewis • 1886 implied HN points • 28 Apr 23
🕹 Technology Branding
  1. Evil Geniuses faced challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic with management disregarding safety protocols and putting staff at risk.
  2. The Counter-Strike team's decline was highlighted by poor management decisions and player dissatisfaction.
  3. An unnecessary rebranding at Evil Geniuses led to public ridicule and internal disapproval, showcasing a disconnect between management and staff.

A good analogy can sell boring

Creative Samba • 19 implied HN points • 04 Oct 24
💼 Business Branding
  1. ETFs can be a smarter way to invest than buying individual stocks. They let you own a piece of many companies without the hassle of picking each one.
  2. ETFs are cheaper and accessible for everyday people, unlike traditional investing options that often favor big investors. This means anyone can get involved in the market.
  3. Using good analogies in marketing can make dull products exciting. For iShares, a clever ad strategy helped them reach a new audience when they were losing market share.

Brands are keeping celebrity culture alive, questioning role of politics, and the vibe shift

The Social Juice • 53 implied HN points • 31 Jan 26
🎭️ Culture Branding
  1. Celebrity culture is front and center — brands keep leaning on celebrities, creators, and star-powered stunts to grab attention across campaigns and big events.
  2. Brands are conflicted about politics and purpose. Some do real on-the-ground action, others post performatively, so know your customer and only speak up if your action will create real change.
  3. The vibe is shifting toward trend-chasing and AI 'slop' — lots of cheap engagement from memes and long Super Bowl teases, while the best work focuses on interactive OOH, clear storytelling, or meaningful use of AI.

How The Sparkle Icon Became The Universal Symbol For AI

Teaching computers how to talk • 83 implied HN points • 15 Jan 26
🪑 Design Branding
  1. The sparkle icon has become the common visual shorthand for AI, borrowing the “magic” metaphor to make the technology instantly recognizable.
  2. That tiny sparkle helps companies sell a sense of wonder. It can also hide the heavy costs and human work behind AI, like data scraping, annotation, and massive data centers.
  3. The sparkle will likely fade as AI becomes ordinary, and that’s a good thing because normalizing the tech invites more scrutiny of its real impacts on politics, labor, and society.

Sometimes, marketing comes down to a personal decision

{grow} by Mark Schaefer • 19 implied HN points • 02 Oct 24
💼 Business Branding
  1. Marketing works better when you follow your own unique path instead of just copying others. Making personal choices can help your strategy stand out.
  2. There’s too much focus on marketing 'best practices,' which can make everything look the same. Doing something different can become your competitive edge.
  3. Instead of worrying about what everyone else is doing, focus on being authentic and sharing your true story. People connect better with real emotions and experiences.

Sit Down and Be Sorted

Kneeling Bus • 146 implied HN points • 20 Dec 25
🎭️ Culture Branding
  1. Social media and airport lounges both turn personal worth into visible status tiers, making people feel measured and sometimes excluded.
  2. Lounges have spread beyond airports into other public places, becoming branded hangouts where access signals privilege more than actual need.
  3. Companies create and maintain these spaces so people ‘marinate’ in a brand, turning presence and attention into a gamified hierarchy of status.

Foxtrot Market's comeback?

Snaxshot • 419 implied HN points • 10 May 24
🍲 Food & Drink Branding
  1. Foxtrot Market faced a questionable auction process with potential bidders feeling left in the dark, leading to speculations of a rigged setup.
  2. Brands like Blueprint by Bryan Johnson are stepping into the market with products like supplements and olive oils, potentially shaking up established brands like Athletic Greens.
  3. Various CPG brands are undergoing rebranding and major changes to stay relevant and attract customers, reflecting a rebranding trend in the industry.

The Brand Savior Complex and the New Age of Self Censorship

The Social Juice • 31 implied HN points • 07 Feb 26
💼 Business Branding
  1. Brands are trying to become media and 'save' communities by farming attention with events and content, but that’s a short-term patch that won’t build durable value and often replaces real public solutions.
  2. People are self-censoring and changing how they speak to avoid sounding like AI or performative, driven by algorithms and social policing, which undermines honest feedback and makes social listening less reliable.
  3. Real brand growth needs distribution, product experience, and meaningful actions rather than celebrity stunts, irony, or nostalgia — the flood of gambling ads shows how careless marketing can normalize harm.

Brand names are all nonsense now

Embedded • 1316 implied HN points • 31 May 23
🎭️ Culture Branding
  1. Start-ups are using nonsensical words in brand names, creating gibberish.
  2. The tech industry is a major contributor to the trend of abandoning traditional words for syllables.
  3. This trend of nonsensical names extends beyond the online world to real-life aspects like advertising and social media.

Poppi slapped with lawsuit

Snaxshot • 259 implied HN points • 31 May 24
💼 Business Branding
  1. Curation as salvation: It's important to curate content in a world filled with overwhelming choices.
  2. Discovery is strength: Curating content can help brands connect with desired audiences and opportunities.
  3. Excess is death: Avoiding information overload through curated, ephemeral content can be beneficial.