Last week, I posted a hot take on my IG and LinkedIn: your vibe is not your value.
It was a seedling thought, sparked by the onslaught of look-alike brands that are all vibe, very little else.
Over the last few days, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that there’s more to say on the topic. A deeper dive is deserved.
I'm a brand developer. A storyteller. A myth maker. I marry strategic frameworks with human insight to create brand universes. Worlds built from vision, emotion, aspiration, story, desire.
Moodboards. Emotional territories. Inner worlds.
This is Vibe.
But it's not enough. To build a brand, I also need to articulate the innovation, experience, craft, and outcomes. I need to understand the problem, and how the brand solves it. I need to show receipts.
This is Value.
The best brands balance both. POV (vibe) and UVP (value) carry equal weight and are communicated uniquely. When they merge, something soulful emerges. The brand becomes distinct.
But something has shifted in our culture. I see two troubling trends emerging simultaneously:
1. Too many brands are starting to look and sound the same.
2. They’re giving all the vibes, but delivering no real value.
Lately, it seems the scales of brand have tipped towards the emotionally formulaic. The aesthetically predictable. The algorithmically pleasing.
Brands are hyper-optimizing their content and images to match and amplify what's trending and performing. “Culturally relevant” often just means “algorithmically attuned.”
Cultural strategy has always been a vibe-creation strategy. This isn't wrong, it's just incomplete.
In my 6C GTM Framework™, we begin with Cultural Strategy: Cultural Fit, Cultural Positioning, Cultural Narratives. This is how a brand embeds itself in the moment. How it enters the conversation. How it shows up with authenticity and relevance.
This is valuable. But it’s not the brand’s value.
Brand building begins with cultural strategy, it just doesn’t end there.
Good Vibes Only
Vibe creation is emotional persuasion, and the beauty industry excels at this. It always has. It trades in feelings: insecurity, aspiration, self-optimization, idealization. As AI continues to learn and reward our collective behavior, vibe creation and emotional persuasion will become even more pervasive, effective, and flat.
Brands that are trading only on vibes are selling an illusion. A vision for a life that's not one's own, often not even the real life of the brand founder or the company culture. This is different from aspiration. It’s fabrication.
These brands are projecting rather than empowering. They are reflecting a collective narrative rather than inspiring automony, authenticity and personal agency — the very values so many modern beauty brands claim to promote.
When a brand hooks us with sight and sound, but fails to deliver substance, we remain searching, scrolling, unsatisfied.
Real Value Is Invaluable
Real brand value is to provide people with the products and experiences that enable them to create their own life. The life they actually want to live — offline, outside of the social media echochamber. A life guided by self awareness, personal choice, and original self expression.
The best brands curate an original vibe that centers the human on the other side. They care about how the brand is experienced in real life, not just how it performs in the feed.
They connect their value — their innovation, experience, craft, and results — to what it makes possible in someone’s life.
Brand value encourages us to live, not just consume. Connect, not just scroll. Self-reflect, not just buy now. And when we do buy from a brand that offers real value, we feel settled. Somehow, the new thing gives us what we want and need while reminding us that we're already whole.
We are in an age where AI makes it nearly impossible to tell fact from fiction. Our original ideas and expressions are being flattened and homogenized. Aesthetic POV’s are starting to all look the same. We will either accept this in the name of “optimization”, or we will resist it to salvage some soul.
But, if the metrics still matter more to you than what you mean to your customer, just remember:
Vibe is acquisition. Value is retention.
Vibe can be measured by CTR. Value is measured by CLV.
Vibe gets the sale. Value gets the scale.
This was a great read and so simply and clearly articulated. Style vs substance!
Always so brilliantly captured! I knew you had more to say on this topic after last week’s smart take on the Rhode sale. I can’t wait to see how 2025 pans out in beauty and what you foresee happening in the coming years.