Brands that last tend to have one thing in common that isn't talked about in most strategy discussions: they named something before they built the campaign around it. Not invented, but named.
There's a feeling that communities carry quietly, sometimes for years: a shared frustration that hasn't quite been spoken aloud, an identity that exists in the culture but hasn't been put into words in public, a pride that goes unacknowledged by the institutions that claim to serve those communities. I call this latent tension. And the brand's job, when it gets this right, is not to manufacture it but to find it, give it language, and put that language back into circulation in the community where it came from.
Most brand communication operates on the opposite assumption. If you believe a brand creates desire, you treat communication as a production problem: build the message, test it, distribute it. The community is the audience. You are the author. This approach produces a lot of campaigns and very little belonging.
The harder approach starts before there's anything to say. It requires being inside a community before you have a message for it. Research that doesn't begin with the product. The discipline to sit with what you've found before moving toward execution. In a marketing department with timelines and briefing templates and quarterly deliverables, that discipline is genuinely difficult to maintain.
And, well, it requires a kind of humility that the structure of most marketing organizations actively works against.
How this looks when it works
The clearest contemporary case isn't a campaign. It's a company origin story. Emily Weiss built Glossier's community through her publication Into The Gloss before she launched a single product. By the time the brand existed, she had been in conversation with her audience for years. The tension she eventually named was the gap between prestige beauty culture and what people around her actually used and liked. She could name it with credibility because she had been inside it, not observing it from outside.
There's no formula to replicate there. But the underlying principle is: you can only name what you've already encountered, and you encounter it by being present.
The other well-documented case is Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, launched in 2004 after research across ten countries found that only 2% of women described themselves as beautiful. Dove didn't invent women's complicated relationship with beauty advertising. That tension existed long before the brand entered it. What the campaign did was give it language, publicly, at a scale the conversation hadn't reached before. The brand became part of that conversation rather than just a product on a shelf, and that's a different kind of relationship.
When it goes wrong
There's a failure mode that's less discussed, and it's more instructive than the successes. A brand does the research. They find what looks like a tension in the community. They name it, build a campaign around it, launch with confidence, and the community rejects it. Not because the execution was poor. Because the tension they named wasn't the one the community was carrying. It was the one the brand needed to exist so their product made sense.
This is projecting, not listening. Listening follows the evidence even when it leads somewhere inconvenient. Projecting searches for cultural evidence to confirm what's already been decided.
Pepsi's 2017 Kendall Jenner ad is the most-discussed example of this. The brand tried to attach itself to the tension of social protest and collective action, which were real and active tensions in American public life at that moment. But Pepsi had no sustained relationship with the communities that actually carried those tensions, no history of engagement, nothing at stake in the outcome. They borrowed the visual language of the moment without the relationship to it, and the community recognized the gap immediately.
What made the failure worse was not the error itself but the confidence the ad projected. It was polished and expensive, which made the disconnection between the brand and the tension it claimed to name more visible, not less. A cheaper, sloppier attempt might have been forgiven as naive. The production value suggested Pepsi genuinely believed it had earned a place in this conversation.
Why naming matters beyond the brand
The reason latent tensions are worth naming is not primarily commercial, even if the commercial benefits are real. A tension that hasn't been named is harder to act on, harder to organize around, and harder to recognize in yourself. When a brand names it accurately, it makes the shared feeling legible. Other people can see themselves in it. The community has a clearer picture of its own experience.
That's a social function, not just a marketing move. And brands that perform it genuinely tend to build something that outlasts any single campaign: the community uses the brand as part of how it describes itself. The brand becomes part of the identity vocabulary of the people it serves.
That doesn't happen through strategy alone. It's the result of sustained attention over time, which is why it's so hard to manufacture and so visible when someone tries.
This article draws on ideas developed in Marcas que Pertencem: Branding sociocultural e o poder do discurso by Rinaldo Zirrah (2026), available in Portuguese and English on Apple Books, Google Play, and Hotmart.
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-group-of-people-beside-a-wall-with-graffiti-and-a-basketball-ring-5560220/
