The New Humility
I spent the week at Brand Innovators during Adweek at Paramount, sitting through panels and talking with marketing leaders in the gaps between them. A strong undercurrent I came away with is that the market, marketers and brands are going through a distinct shift. Brands are getting more modest about their role, and the modesty is a form of empathy: attention to what people seem to be craving in this moment. I call it the new humility. The ambition is intact but now points at its role in people's lives instead of at the brand's own (often self-appointed) importance.
Where it came from
The last fifteen years or so rewarded big claims. Purpose became a requirement (ugh!), and every brand needed a reason to exist beyond its product. The reasons kept growing until a soda was uniting people and a checking account was changing how you feel about money. Many of those brands sold something good. The claim grew larger than the thing being sold, and the gap is where trust and maybe connection leaked out.
Culture-making arrived alongside purpose. The pitch said a brand can create culture, when culture is made by millions of people choosing music, sport, food and each other. The Vans CMO said on stage that he finds the idea absurd and hears it far too often. I agree. A brand is a guest in culture, and a guest who tries to run the party gets noticed for all the wrong reasons.
Taste has moved too. Younger consumers grew up inside the purpose era and learned to read it for what it was. Gen Z calls out inauthenticity quickly, in niche communities like gaming above all, and attention has drifted toward smaller creators and tighter communities where the wrong message in the right space still fails. What feels real to people has changed, and brands are adjusting to it.
Why it matters now
Several forces are pushing the same way, and the loudest is the environment in which we now find ourselves - lost. Society is absorbed in its own disruption. Political leaders, tech leaders and others with large platforms make sweeping claims, accusations and declarations, and while the news repeats them every morning, they've already been pored over by social media, tripping over ourselves to get to the comments. We're worn out by it, and it's left a void. Very little in a person's day feels steady, attentive or practical. Don't we all need some normal about right now?
A brand can fill part of that void with empathy, by which I mean attention to what this person needs right now, followed by a product or a presence that meets it. A modest claim that gets met leads to repeat purchase. Repeat purchase leads to recommendation, and a recommendation from someone who used the product and gains nothing from saying so carries more weight than a campaign. Customer intimacy is the only advantage I have seen last. A product can be matched and a campaign can be imitated, and a relationship built on kept promises takes years to copy. I think there's a return to this equation.
The budget follows the logic. Money that went into manufacturing meaning can go into the product, the service, distribution and showing up where customers already are.
I've seen and been involved in brands pursuing this a few times in my career - and usually during tough times - a recession, a war and a crack in society - and there've been no shortage of those in the last 25 years! Whether it was with UBS and its promise of just "You & Us", Intel's promise that "it's what's inside that actually matters", or even Raisin Bran crunch (of all things) proclaiming right after the dot com bubble burst that, at least among younger people, its taste meant "breakfast is back".
How it is showing up
The cases people shared during the week were not offered as proof of a trend, though together they point one way.
| BRAND | ROLE | INSIGHT |
|---|---|---|
| Tylenol at Coachella | Relief for the morning after, with no claim on the music | A festival produces a predictable headache and a moment when relief is wanted |
| Gatorade | Everyday hydration, including the headache that comes with dehydration, beyond athletic performance | Gatorade reports more than 150 million Americans feel mild or moderate dehydration each week, and most are not athletes |
| Hawaiian Tropic | Makes applying sunscreen a small pleasure, with Alix Earle | Application is a chore in a clinical category, so the brand went back to its sensual, emotional roots |
| Samsung Switchers | Helps people talk through the feelings of switching phones, led by Dr. Orna Guralnik | Switching is emotional before it is technical, so the campaign leads with feelings and not specs |
None asked for a bigger role. Each found a small useful one, started with something true, and let a real person carry it.
One line from the week has stayed with me: "When you know who you are, you know how to behave." Identity tells a brand what to say no to, and that filter matters more than chasing every cultural moment. It also shapes how brands treat fandoms. A target audience is a demographic. A fandom has its own codes, inside language and shared ethics, and a logo placed on top of it interrupts it. Spotify's data on Brazilian punk shows why depth earns permission: the genre has grown for seven years, and the growth sits in gaming and workout moments that a surface read would miss.
Consistency makes small moves add up. Levi's has carried the same 175-year foundation from Bruce Springsteen to Toy Story, and Dove has held its beauty foundation fixed while the expression changes with each generation. A brand with clear memory structures can afford to be modest about any single moment, because the recognition builds elsewhere.
Where this leaves us
The risk is that humility becomes the next purpose, a theme in the deck with nothing behind it. My test is the invoice test. Did the humility change something that costs money, such as the product, the service, where the brand shows up, or a claim it stopped making? If it only changed the copy, it is purpose with a softer voice. And a value is not a value unless it costs you something.
This is a read and I hold it as one. I coach executives as well as advise brands, and the pattern I see is the same in both. People and companies get stuck on a story about themselves that has outgrown the facts, and the ones that put the story down and ask how they might be useful tend to move again.
Let's talk
If you are working out what a useful, relevant role looks like for your brand, I would like to hear about it. Send me a message on LinkedIn or email us at hello@mixtapepartners.com, and we can look at where your brand fits in your customers' lives and which of your current claims would hold up after a week of real use.