The old brand temple is collapsing.

It's time to get bent or go broke.

Jul 29, 2025

Brand elasticity, the future of agencies, and the b2b2c rainbow.

Touch Grass is my Substack about early-stage ideas, brand clarity, and the creative murk in between—written with dirt under the nails. Subscribe for essays that blend strategy with story, business with backbone. If this is our first time meeting, I also write about nature and slow living over at Lowcountry, High Life.

Everything is bendy and nothing is real.

That’s been the working theory of my brain for the last few weeks. Maybe something’s in the water or maybe we’re all just collectively witnessing both an actual genocide and the slow and painful collapse of our own empire in between pings and zips and zooms, but it feels like we’re living in a moment where every old framework is up for questioning and every new one feels like it’ll expire in six months or less. Brands. Agencies. Roles. Work. Identity. It’s all... wiggly.

And weirdly, I don’t hate that last part.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways our jobs (mine, maybe yours) are quietly being redefined—sometimes in ways that feel liberating, and sometimes in ways that make me want to move into the woods and sell soup (this is more believable if you’d had my soup). I don’t have a neat thesis per se, but I do have some thoughts.

Brands are getting very stretchy (and strategy needs to catch up).

I was talking with Jordan Egstad (of DBCo) recently and he floated this idea that brands used to be cathedrals and now they’re tents. My mind was blown because he’s so right. Hear us out:

Cathedrals were masterpieces. They took forever to build, made by people who were absolute artists in their craft, and often never lived to see the thing finished. They were designed to last centuries; to be admired; to feel sacred.

And for a long time, branding kind of mirrored that energy. We’d build these capital-B Brands that were meant to be fixed, enduring, precious. You’d define your purpose, your pillars, your pyramid, and then you’d protect it at all costs.

But that’s not where we are anymore.

Culture is moving too fast. People are paying attention differently. And brands that want to stay relevant have to be able to stretch, shift, and show up in the moment. That’s why the tent metaphor hits. Tents can be designed. Tents can still be beautiful. But tents are meant to be picked up and moved when the landscape changes.

That’s the world we’re building for now. Brand as a nomadic system, not a shrine.

So what does that mean for strategy?

I’m still noodling on this, but my gut says: strategy needs to loosen up too. There will always be pieces that stay put (like your purpose, your values, your north star) but things like positioning, narrative, and differentiation should probably evolve way more often than we’ve been taught to allow.

Maybe it’s less about one perfect positioning statement and more about giving brands the tools to tell the right story to the right person at the right time.

Strategists: my comments and DMs are open to your hot takes. 🔥

The future of agencies is small and unabashedly human

Here’s the bet I'm making: small houses that value individualism, deep and different thinking, and original thought will win.

That doesn’t mean necessarily scrappy or under-resourced. I’m talking about intentionally small teams made up of sharp, specific people—each bringing their own lens, not just executing someone else’s vision.

AI is rearranging the entire agency ecosystem. Teams are getting leaner, briefs are getting murkier, and clients want everything faster, cheaper, and more original than ever.

But what they really want—what they don’t always know how to ask for—is creative judgment. Taste. People who know when to follow the process and when to throw the process out the window and try something gutsier. AI can get you options. It can give you output. But it can’t give you the leap. The "wait, what if we did it this way instead?" moment. That still comes from human instinct.

The only way I can make sense of that is to get smaller, not bigger. More specialized, not generalized. Fewer decks, more ideas.

Teams that move fast because they trust each other. Not because they’re rushing, but because they don’t have twelve layers of internal approval slowing the work down. Teams that understand the brand and the broader culture it has to swim in. That’s what small shops can do that big ones struggle with.

Think less “trusted production partner,” more “weird little council of thinkers with taste.”

AI will probably take over 98% of production in the next 5 years anyway. And when that happens, what’s going to matter is not how fast you can execute. It’s how well you can decide what’s worth executing in the first place.

Strategists need to think more like creatives about how they creatively do strategy

I’ve been thinking about how creatives are encouraged (and expected) to define their personal style or approach, but strategists rarely get the same space to do that.

It’s not that we don’t have a style, it’s just that the nature of the job makes it easy to hide behind objectivity. We’re supposed to be the ones zooming out, mapping the territory, making sense of the mess. And when you’re in that role, it’s easy to forget that your process is personal. That how you see patterns, where you dig, what you zoom in on—that’s your lens. Your taste. But no one’s asking for that the way they ask a designer about their style or a writer about their voice.

If strategists are mirrors, creatives are more like stained glass—still reflective, but with a visible style.

And I think a lot of us—especially the ones who’ve been behind the curtain for a while—have gotten so good at adapting to the brand or the client or the context that we’ve started to forget what our own way of thinking looks like when it stands alone.

We’re great at identifying patterns and solving problems for others, but often pretty quiet about how we do that work and what makes our approach distinct. I’ve been asking a few of my strategist friends to help me understand how they articulate their POV, but if you’re reading this, let’s spark a convo in the comments. 👇

Shout out to Daniel Vidal for sparking this one.

B2B2C2B2C2C2B

I recently co-authored a Substack with Michelle Blaser on how B2B is boring but it doesn't have to be, and we're starting to continue the conversation around how B2B2C brands in particular are opening the door for embracing that broader spectrum visually and verbally.

There’s a lot of fun happening in the middle space right now. If B2B and B2C are the two cis genders on the binary, B2B2C is our non-binary poly woke rainbow that might be a little hard to define at times but damn are they having fun expressing themselves.

These are brands that have to speak upstream and downstream at the same time. They’re having to both stay relevant to a general audience and earn trust with executives. Which means they don’t have the luxury of being too stiff or too silly. They have to find a voice that flexes—something smart enough for the boardroom but casual enough for the feed.

Not every brand can and should adopt this business model, but the brands playing in this middle space are writing the new rules for brand tone, flexibility, and relevance. They’re the reason (I think) we’re seeing B2B brands with personality again. They’re why enterprise companies are launching campaigns that feel closer to DTC. It’s a fun rainbow spectrum where a lot of interesting brand work is happening.

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