Toniq

That’s true for people — and it’s just as true for brands. Because in the world of branding, exile happens more often than we think. Some brands walk away on purpose. Others get pushed.

But this isn’t Wall Street where the big brands play and play by the rules; this is The Brandscape, and here, everything you think you know is just an idea that gets blown away like cigar smoke from a toothless, stinking mouth.

Everyone talks about the brand icons—Apple, Nike, McDonald’s—the ones with their names carved into the skyline like mafia dons. But the rest? The other 99% of brands? They fight. They hustle. They die.

This is the essence of asymmetrical trust, a concept that might seem abstract but has powerful implications for how brands engage with their audiences.

Because it proved someone was paying attention. It wasn’t scripted. It wasn’t templated. It was human. And that small gesture meant more to me than any influencer campaign, ad spot, or loyalty discount ever could.

Because here’s the paradox: the moment you try to be authentic, you’re already performing. Authenticity, by nature, resists artifice. But branding is artifice — even at its best.

The problem isn’t that brands are talking about change. The problem is that they’re all using the same tired signals to do it, so much so that the language of innovation has collapsed into a kind of corporate white noise.

Tone is the emotional undercurrent of your brand’s language. It’s not just what you say, but how you make someone feel while you’re saying it.

Today, differentiation has collapsed under the weight of its own ubiquity. Everyone is claiming to be faster, smarter, simpler, cheaper, cleaner, more advanced, more sustainable, more thoughtful, more inclusive.

But personas aren’t people. They’re shortcuts. And more often than not, they’re a performance—a mask we make so we can pretend we’re connecting.

For years, branding has focused on the path to purchase. Funnels, awareness campaigns, consideration stages—all roads leading to the golden moment of conversion. But here’s the truth: the buy isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning of the relationship.

For decades, “positioning” was the holy grail of branding. Coined by Ries and Trout in the 1980s, the idea was revolutionary: own a place in the customer’s mind, carve out a mental niche, and hammer it home with consistency.

Turns out, brands have a fridge too. It's not stainless steel, but it does hum along in the background—full of things we thought we’d use, ideas we once loved, and leftover campaigns we keep telling ourselves might still be good if we just heat them up the right way.

There was a time when advertising didn’t fear silence, space, or storytelling. When headlines invited curiosity, and body copy had the room to build something more than a call to action, it could build a world.