Brands After Vibes: Branding in the Days of Slop

[00:00:01] Announcer: Today on VISIONS.

[00:00:04] Emily Segal: This talk could also be called branding in the days of slop. There's no real opportunity for storytelling. Instead, it's something more like monitoring sentiment. We're post peak vibe. What could genuinely be a brand, a successful brand after vibes?

[00:00:32] Phillip: In 1967, Andy Warhol declared that in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. What he could not have predicted is that by 2025, everyone would be a brand for fifteen seconds. We live in the age of the ambient brand. And the Spotify algorithm? It knows your emotional state better than your therapist. TikTok serves you Strawberry Girl Summer and Rodent Boyfriend Energy with algorithmic precision. Brands no longer tell stories, they emit frequencies. This is the landscape Emily Segal navigates as she poses a question that cuts to the very heart of contemporary commerce. If brands have become nothing more than vibes, which are fleeting atmospheric disturbances in our endless scroll, then what comes next? We go live to the VISIONS LA Summit where Emily presents her research on Brands After Vibes, which is a meditation on density versus emptiness, on human labor versus artificial generation, and what it means to be truly present in an age of constant ambient distraction. And stay with us until the end for a special offer to join us on June 10 at the VISIONS Summit in New York City.

[00:01:58] Emily Segal: Hi. I'm Emily Segal. Thank you for having me. So I co founded Nemesis, which is a strategic consultancy, and we help ambitious founders and brands understand cultural change, design, and brand specificity. And we also present our own original research, some of which I will be sharing with you for the first time today. It's called Brands After Vibes. No one's really heard any of this yet, so you're in for a treat, I hope. This talk could also be called Branding in the Days of Slop, which is of course the low grade AI material we find ourselves surrounded by online these days. And the provocation for this talk was TikTok video about the idea that storytelling and branding might be totally outmoded and sometimes the vibe is enough. And this video goes on to say that in the fire hose of information today, your brand shows up in a two second moment between footage of catastrophic climate change and a monkey that learned to do makeup tutorials. And there's no real opportunity for storytelling. Instead, it's something more like monitoring sentiment. Like if you look at a busy Twitch stream, it sort of shows you a vibe. It shows you a sense if people are happy or sad, a feeling, a sort of it like puts some sort of sensation in your body or your heart, but it's not a clear story. And this got me thinking about the ways that vibes have reached this sort of peak overload moment. So there've been a lot of articles lately about how there are a lot of like kind of nonsense vibe trends like Blueberry Milk Nails and Strawberry Girl and Rodent Boyfriend, and there are these sort of like bare minimum articulations of trends that then brands try to hop on. And to me, it seems like sort of the inevitable result of this era of mood boarding where a collection of inputs kind of comes to stand in for something else over and over again. It's become almost like an absurdist consumer hobby at this point, articulating these different types of mood boards and sort of vibes. And of course, it's also a part of our sort of everyday algorithmic reality. So this is from Spotify of course. And you know, it's led a lot of us to this feeling that there's no there there, like a lot of too much stuff looks the part but doesn't really feel the part, and that was the provocation for this piece of research. So we're post peak vibe. Here's a little graph.

[00:04:41] Audience: {laughter}

[00:04:41] Emily Segal: You know, once Camry's major ad campaign is all about vibes, you know it's gotten as mainstream as possible. And also, wouldn't it really be something if someone told you that your vibe is a Camry vibe?

[00:04:55] Audience: {laughter}

[00:04:56] Emily Segal: This is another great example of vibes related comms, "Beats don't kill my vibe." And then, you know, just as as mainstream as an Instagram CTA, so current vibe is what you're asked to provide in that little circle. Then there's also Margiela vibes perfume, which is slightly classier, and it's just everywhere. And this is just from a Reddit thread kind of trying to figure out for people who are new to speaking English what a vibe is, and a vibe is a feeling and a vibe has something to do with belonging. So this got me thinking about all the different ways historically brands have been understood because before they were vibes, were lots of other things. And the brand as a person is a really important one. I was trained at Wolff Olins branding agency that defined the corporate identity as something distinct as a discipline from advertising, and as something that needed to be sort of harnessed and polished and created. And this is also something that you see kind of over and over again in the twentieth century in different forms. So there's, of course, the girl of the fashion brand. That's the way that a brand could be a person. There's the energy of a mascot. There's something like Siri or now like Claude, you know, the kind of personified different technologies that become their own characters. And then there's the OG way that the personality of a brand was articulated. This was one of Wolff Olins first brands Apple records for the Beatles, so just by image and text and logo. There's brand as story, you all must be familiar with this. This is one of the truisms of marketing. The idea that if you tell the story of your brand well, if you understand narrative structure, if you understand the hero's journey, perhaps you can basically make more money. And then also the idea that a story itself is an opportunity for branding is something that we're quite familiar with or at least were before Hollywood started collapsing. Brand as a pattern is another way of looking at it. The idea that a brand creates an opportunity to iteratively create something. So instead of repeating message, you sort of create a pattern. So this has very traditional examples like this, and it also has memetic examples as well. These come up often among our more decentralized clients at Nemesis. The brand as an interface is a more sort of philosophical idea from the theorist Celia Lury in her book, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy. And she says that a brand is basically a way to access the global economy. It stands in for the hard and soft things that we encounter in the economy that are not just price. Brand as world, you know, keeps coming up for good reason. It's sort of the slightly more contemporary version of brand as a story. And it has some very major sort of examples like this one. And then it also has a sort of more immersive and digital feeling. Brand is coherence, is sort of the idea that the brand is the thing, is the je ne sais quoi that makes all these different elements come together. It's the X factor that creates a system. And then, of course, there's a different type of coherence, a coherence that is also an incoherence, and that is brand as vibes. So brand as vibes are not just about the brands that make us say, "There's no there there." It's also about brands like Marc Jacobs Heaven, which sort of created a whole new revenue stream based excellent mood board, this sort of dreamy, Gen Z friendly collection of disparate elements across history and culture and different art forms that really appeal to a younger consumer and allowed a brand that was heading into its legacy years to find a whole new audience. And then of course there's A24, the most vibesy brand of them all. Now you might be wondering, you might be asking yourself what is a vibe? And it's a really good question. There are a couple of really interesting theorists who have worked on what a vibe is. So one of them is Peli Grietzer who wrote this canonical essay in 2017 called A Theory of Vibe. And in A Theory of Vibe, basically the philosopher makes a very important connection between machine learning and vibes. And he says that what an auto encoding technology is doing when it picks up on the alignments among a whole set of objects is analogous to what a person does when they catch the vibe of a set of objects. So that there's some sort of link philosophically between machine learning and vibes. And then Robin James, who's another theorist, sort of builds on this work saying that when we are looking at the world in terms of vibes, we are seeing the world the way an algorithm sees it. And what a vibe does is of make certain perceptual things more obvious and certain perceptual things less obvious. So she gives the example of liminal space vibes. So you might imagine a screen filled with pictures of liminal spaces, lobbies, you know, places that look kind of like empty and ominous that might have a void that might not have many people in them. The actual pictures might not be all that similar, but when you tag them as liminal space vibes, you start to see what brings them together. And the thing about that is that while it works, it's also very porous and sort of fleeting. So you pick up on liminal space vibes, more things could be added to that set. Maybe if you're someone who's really moved by Liminal Space Vibes, it sort of makes you feel connected to it, but there's something fundamentally blurry about it. That's what brings me to the question of this research, which is of course a work in progress, and that question is what comes after brand as vibes. There's, you know, when a brand is a story, it entertains you. When it's a pattern, it gives you something to replicate. When it's a world, it sort of gives you an opportunity for escape. But vibes keep bleeding out, like there might be a sense of belonging for a moment, but then the kind of endless replacement of one thing for another leaves us feeling a little dissatisfied. You might try and buck the trend by going to the opposite thing. You might say, "Okay vibes are super contemporary, they're based on this like maxed out mood board culture, let's do the most sort of like OG heritage authentic thing." But of course, heritage itself is a vibe. Nothing kind of escapes this like constant vibe machine and there tends to be this sort of overabundance of vibes as we sort of see an algorithmic representation of conspicuous consumption. And that got me thinking of this post that I saw recently about luxury and the idea that taking a picture with a Birkin is much easier than a yuppie deluxe lifestyle where you raise two kids and don't run out of money. So there's something about the way that things are being represented online, the hollowness of that, that people are starting to puzzle out and puzzle through. And of course, even trying to make things that are very overexposed, underexposed always leaves a trace of exposure. There's always the black card, the news story saying that the fashion show is only available to those who won't use their phone at it. There's the little stitch that shows that something's designer. This is what stealth wealth was all about. And so everything gets, you know, recuperated into vibes again. So this is just a little bit of our thinking about what could genuinely be a brand, a successful brand after vibes. Something so dense and irrefutable and filled up with human work and labor that there's no possible way it could be reduced to vibes. Something so exceptionally simple that even a logo is too much, we're talking a ticker, a single letter, a pure point of speculative energy as the only coordination point of a brand. Or something like Dazzle, which is the face paint or makeup that makes it impossible for face recognition software to pick up your own face. A brand that is so totally incoherent that it escapes detection by the algorithm altogether. If you wanna read more about this and some other ideas, you can check out our substack, nemesisglobal.substack.com. And if you wanna stay in touch with me, these are some ways to do so. Thank you so much for having me today, and please keep in touch.

[00:13:12] Audience: {applause}

[00:13:21] Phillip: The philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote about the aura of art. Its ineffable quality that exists only in the presence of the original work, something that mechanical reproduction can never capture. Emily Segal suggests that we are witnessing the inverse phenomenon, brands that purely exist as reproduction, as endless iterations of mood and feeling, stripped of their original aura entirely. Yet in the stripping away, this reduction to pure vibe perhaps we find is not an ending but a beginning. If brands can no longer hide behind narrative or aesthetics, if they are reduced to their essential frequency, then what remains must be something more fundamental, purpose, craft, the irreducible weight of human intention. The question Emily poses is not just academic. In boardrooms, in design studios, and in the feeds we scroll, and the products we purchase, we are all participants in this experiment. We are testing what happens when vibes meet reality and when the ambient becomes actual, and when the algorithm's understanding of desire confronts the stubborn particularity of human need. Emily's work offers us a map for navigating this territory, but the journey is ours to make. The conversations that Emily began in LA will continue in just a few days at the VISIONS Summit New York City on June 10, where we will explore the future of brands, culture, and commerce with the world's most forward thinking practitioners and theorists. And as promised, we have a special offer for you. Use our code AFTERVIBES for 50% off your ticket to VISIONS Summit New York City. That's AFTERVIBES, all one word, for 50% off, and you can get it right now by registering for your ticket with just a few seats left at FutureCommerce.com/VISIONS.