Why do all banks say trite things like ‘We put you first’? Why is every water bottle decorated with an alpine peak or a babbling brook? Why is every detergent sold in an opaque plastic jug in a primary colour that looks like it could just as likely contain motor oil or industrial solvent if not for the label having a picture of a smiling baby or a flower? Because all brand categories rely on invisible standards, genericisms and hackneyed tropes.

In an earlier post on Brand Eye, we laid out one of the core principles of Blink Twice’s approach to brand building, namely the concept of Blue Ocean branding. That’s the idea that a strong brand rejects those tropes in favour of a positioning that makes it one of one. This week we’re taking that theoretical approach and showing how it’s operationalized with the first step being what we’re calling Red Ocean Mapping.

What is Red Ocean Mapping?

Fairly intuitively, Red Ocean Mapping is about mapping the contours of the Red Ocean your brand sits in, that is to say – a crowded category with a heavy presence of tropes, cliches or stereotypes. This mapping process involves looking at the other brands in your category and breaking them down to find out what parts of their messaging, aesthetic or product design are tropes within the category. Patterns that are repeated, whether consciously or not, and which have become defining for brands. The idea is that if you can find what makes everyone else the same, that’s a potent vantage point from which to start ideating about what you can do to subvert internalized cliches in a way that speaks to your brand story.

But Red Ocean Mapping is more than opposition research. It’s about understanding the landscape of your category, what are the underlying assumptions that consumers have about it. It involves understanding not just what makes a brand in that category generic, but why those generic traits appeared, are they intrinsic to the product, are they imitations of past branding successes, are they simply best practice. If you simply set out to be different without bothering to try understanding why and how others do what they do then you’re not heading for a Blue Ocean, you’re just testing boundaries for the sake of it.

Let’s Look at a Red Ocean

Maybe the best move is to show you a glimpse at this type of investigation, rather than telling you about it.

Let’s take the smartphone market. Recently we’ve mentioned the brand Nothing, a few times and for very good reason. Nothing is a spectacular example of so many principles we adhere to at Blink Twice. In particular they have a crystal clear understanding of what the Red Ocean they’re escaping is.

The smartphone market is dominated by certain unexamined standards and assumptions. Remember in the 2000’s with Sidekicks and Razr Phones where new groundbreaking silhouettes and layouts were the norm for cell phones? That landscape of experimentation has long since given way to a standard design philosophy that has only changed iteratively since the late 2000’s with the release of the iphone. Pick up a Galaxy phone, a Google Pixel or an iPhone, without their logos or operating systems, are you even confident you’d be able to tell them apart? This anonymous sleekness is a reflection of the deeper mechanics of these brands, Google, Samsung, Apple these are as corporate as corporate gets. Incredibly polished at the cost of any and all personality.

Nothing is, pardon the pun, nothing like its competitors. Yes the design of the phone is unique, we’ve talked before about the exposed screws and industrial design language, but its rawness in product design is matched by a similar rawness in their company’s presentation.

Nothing’s founder, Carl Pei, is unabashedly open about the work in progress nature of Nothing. Where the aforementioned tech titans are wont to discuss product updates in hyper polished keynotes, Carl Pei is more likely to sit down in an office chair in front of a camera and upload a vlog-style YouTube video talking candidly about the process of making the tech

It plays with the semiotics and presentations of the world of tech-YouTubers and social media influencing to give a sense of transparency to the entire brand and its approach to design.

Carl Pei and his team understood that the brand tone of voice that existed in the world of consumer tech had become numbingly slick. There was no surface, so nothing stuck with consumers, and they also understood that this was a side-effect of the massive corporations behind the tech, not an inherent trait of tech marketing. Their unfair advantage was the very fact that they didn’t have a multi billion dollar stock valuation to think about every time they spoke.

This is why Red Ocean Mapping matters, because the amount of choices your brand could make to try and set itself apart are infinite. In order to understand which choices are actually going to resonate, and which parts of your category are not satisfying audiences’ appetites, you need to really understand the mechanics of that category in depth.

Red Ocean Mapping in the Wild

Nothing is a deep example, but the principle plays out across categories. Two quick studies in mapping a Red Ocean and using what you find to break out of it.

Who Gives A Crap

• Red Ocean: Big Toilet Paper.

• Tropes: Sterile plastic packaging. Pastel palettes. Smiling puppies. An arms race over softness and ply count.

• The Insight: The category was hidden under the sink for a reason. Nothing on the shelf earned a place outside of it.

• The Subversion: Bright patterned paper wrappers, an irreverent name, and 50% of profits donated to charities building toilets and improving sanitation in the developing world. A bathroom necessity became a shelf-worthy design object.

Casper

• Red Ocean: Legacy mattress showrooms.

• Tropes: Confusing model names. Commission salespeople. Awkward public testing. Opaque pricing.

• The Insight: Buying a mattress was an exhausting ritual nobody enjoyed.

• The Subversion: One mattress. One price. Delivered in a box. A 100-night trial that scrapped the showroom entirely. The unboxing itself became the brand moment.

Different categories, same discipline. Both brands looked hard at what their competitors had quietly accepted as standard, and then refused to play.

Do You Need Red Ocean Mapping?

Understanding whether or not the particular strategy of Blue Ocean branding and, consequently, Red Ocean Mapping are what your brand needs to orient its overarching brand strategy is actually fairly simple.

Ask yourself the following questions.

Do your sales rely on price or relationships or brand pull?

Can you explain what makes you different without listing features?

Could your logo sit on a competitor’s packaging?

Could your campaign ideas and content swap with theirs?

Do your type, colours, and tone of voice blend into the category?

These are simple ways of figuring out both the strength and distinctiveness of your brand profile. If you find that the answers aren’t the ones you want, your brand would likely benefit from differentiating itself in a way that both embraces what makes it unique, its story, and runs counter to the tropes of its red ocean. As we’ve outlined above, that means research, analysis, and a rigorous understanding of the territory you’re operating within.

Look at a Dyson vacuum and the very first thing you notice is the motor. Not hidden behind moulded plastic like every other appliance in its category, but put on display, front and center, unmissable. Transparent housing, exposed cyclones, the engineering sitting there in your kitchen like it has something to prove.

And that’s the entire point.

Instead of being just another household appliance, Dyson is telling you a different story about its products. It’s a feat of industrial engineering worth paying a premium for, and the exposed motor makes that story impossible to miss. You don’t need a tagline when the product is the argument.

This is the second pillar of Brand World Building, and this week we want to take a deeper dive into signal in its own right. Why it works, why you need it and who does it well.

Where Signal Sits in the Framework

A few issues back we broke down the three pillars that make up a brand world. Story. Signal. System. The story is the North Star, the belief that makes every other decision for you. System is the architecture that compounds those decisions over time, turning every asset and touchpoint into a reinforcement of who you are.

Signal is the bridge between them.

It’s the single asset that takes the abstract thing (your story, your philosophy, your worldview) and makes it concrete enough to hold in your hand. A piece of packaging, a silhouette, a material, a character. One thing, so rooted in the story that no competitor could credibly lift it.

Without a signal, your story stays theoretical. Without a story, your signal is wallpaper.

Signal Is Not a Logo

What most brands get wrong, is treating Signal as a visual identity exercise. A logo. A colour palette. A typeface. These things matter, but they are not Signals. A Signal is far more than that, because while a logo tells you who made something, a Signal shows you why it exists.

The test is simple. If you could put your visual identity on a competitor’s packaging and it would still make sense, you don’t have a Signal, you’ve got styling.

Plenty of brands have tried to lift Dyson’s exposed engineering look. Shark borrowed parts of it. But a borrowed Signal never lands with the same force, because Dyson’s story (a vacuum as industrial engineering, worth the premium) is what gave the exposed motor its meaning in the first place. Strip the story away and the Signal becomes a styling choice. That’s how you know it’s a real Signal. It’s so tied to the underlying story that it couldn’t belong to anyone else.

And if you’re not actively designing your Signal, you risk just defaulting to the category’s. Green glass for olive oil. Pastel palettes and lowercase sans serifs for direct-to-consumer beauty. Minimalism and beige tones for every wellness brand that has ever existed. These are category cliches. They telegraph one thing staring down at you from the crowded row of alternatives: “I’m another one of these.” Utilising Signal properly is about bucking these stereotypes, and making sure that your brand is unmistakably yours and undeniably different.

Who Gets It Right

Rains. The Danish apparel brand built its whole world on reframing rain as an environment to live in, rather than an obstacle. To reinforce that story and to set themselves apart they used the material of their products itself as their signal. That glossy PU and rubber textile is so conspicuous it functions as well as any logo, but unlike a logo the fabric is integral rather than superficial. It doesn’t just tell you who made the coat. It tells you what the coat is. Rain, made wearable. A testament that functional fabrics and garments don’t have to be separate from fashionable ones.

Nothing Phone. When you’re a challenger taking on the most dominant hardware brand in the world you need to maximise your signal for recognition. For Nothing, the signal is the transparent back of their phone, with its exposed screws and visible components. The architecture of the machine made legible. If Apple’s story is seamless, polished, impenetrable, Nothing’s story is the opposite. Scrappy. Honest. Built in public. The signal telegraphs that positioning before you’ve read a single word of marketing copy.

The Ordinary. A skincare brand whose story is radical transparency. Science instead of marketing. Accessibility instead of a luxury markup. For the Ordinary, the signal is the packaging. A clinical white label printed with the exact chemical concentration as the product name. Niacinamide 10%. Hyaluronic Acid 2%. Frosted dropper, serif wordmark that could sit in a chemistry textbook. Where wellness brands hide behind the veneer of nature with floral logos, natural scents and soft pastels, the Ordinary embraces the fact that it’s a product of chemistry. It doesn’t look like skincare, it looks like a reagent pulled from a lab shelf. And in their story, that’s exactly what it is.

David. A protein bar sold as a precious object. Metallic gold and bronze foil wrapping. A serif wordmark borrowed from luxury rather than fitness. The nutritional panel printed as a spec sheet. Every detail signalling the same idea: this isn’t a gym snack, it’s an instrument of optimisation. The name does half the work. Michelangelo’s David. The most celebrated depiction of the human form in history. The product is the answer to what the name promises. Optimal protein for your optimal form.

The Test

A logo tells. A product shows. A signal has to do both.

Your signal can be a silhouette, a material, a colour, a character, a piece of packaging, a way of photographing your product. The form is flexible. What isn’t flexible is the rule behind it. It has to be reproducible. It has to be ownable. And it has to make your story visible in a way that no one else could credibly borrow.

If your signal could belong to anyone else, you haven’t built one yet.

Everyone loves talking about the rebrands that fail.

Jaguar. The Gap logo. Tropicana’s redesign that lost them $30M in two months. Cracker Barrel, more recently. Shudder.

But what about the ones that completely transformed a business?

When a rebrand is backed by real strategic thinking, and executed with total commitment, it’s one of the most powerful moves a business can make.

The power isn’t a cosmeti onec. The power of a successful rebrand is its ability to reframe audiences’ conceptual categorisation of a brand in a way that works in conjunction with the business’ strategic priorities.

It’s strategy and identity moving as one.

There are broadly two types of successful rebrands. The first leans into a new strategic direction. The second reinforces and re-energises what the brand already stands for, with fresh conviction.

Both work. Both require a strategic truth and an identity system built to carry it.

Here are five rebrands that got it right.

Airbnb

Airbnb’s 2014 rebrand is the textbook example of identity and strategy locking into each other.

Airbnb’s pitch when it was founded in 2009 was disruptive. De-centralising the hotel industry into a managed peer-to-peer network of rentals. But the technology to do something like that long predated Airbnb, as did actual platforms putting that tech to use.

The true innovation of Airbnb was not tech, nor its application, but their ability to reframe short term rentals as not an acceptable cheaper substitute to hotels but a qualitatively different product. Not a budget substitute, but a richer way to travel. A way to belong anywhere.

That strategic shift is what unlocked the brand. And the identity made it real. When Airbnb leaned into this, that’s when their brand not only became distinct, but became logical.

This came along with a new logo and font, which reinforced the message, but which would never have done the trick on their own.

The Bélo symbol gave the platform a universal mark that could sit anywhere, from a Tokyo apartment to a Tuscan villa. The soft coral palette replaced cartoonish blue. The custom typeface, Circular, felt human and approachable. The photography stopped looking like real estate and started looking like travel editorial. The UX was rebuilt around hosts and guests as characters in a story as opposed to parties in a transaction.

Result: Revenue grew from $250M to $6B in six years. IPO’d at $47B.

KIA

Kia’s rebrand is interesting because the old logo itself was part of the problem.

The chunky red oval with the italicised “KIA” inside didn’t just look dated, it was an anchor to a specific brand association: cheap, budget, the car you bought when you couldn’t quite afford something else. Strip the old logo, and you’re not just changing a graphic. You’re breaking the link between the wordmark and a decade of “budget car” connotations.

Which is exactly what they did. KIA’s rebrand leaned into a generational shift in the automotive industry, embracing the modernity of the brand.

Recognising that the world of automotive production was transitioning from a traditional standard of internal combustion engines into an EV dominant environment, KIA recognised that the industrial shift also presented a unique branding opportunity.

The strategic pivot was about moving from ‘automotive manufacturer’ to ‘mobility company,’ positioning Kia for an EV-dominant future where heritage mattered less than design and technology.

They changed their positioning from ‘automotive manufacturer’ stripping ‘motors’ from their name. Combined with the renaming, because the old logo was carrying so much of the old positioning, they had to replace it.

Their new wordmark was deliberately unfamiliar and forced a reintroduction. You couldn’t look at a new Kia and slot it into your existing mental model of the brand, because the mark itself broke that model. Add to that a minimalist design language across the vehicles themselves where the new angular wordmark reflected the angular design vocabular of cars like the EV6.

Result: Global sales up 20%+ post-rebrand. EV6 won European Car of the Year 2022.

Juventus Turin

Juventus’s 2017 rebrand is probably the most controversial on this list. Fans hated it. Design Twitter(X) melted down.

The new logo had football fans fuming, but the metrics speak for themselves. A 25% increase in the value of their brand. Because the strategy behind it made sense.

Red Bull had already proven that a football club and a lifestyle brand could live in the same brand world by doing the same in reverse. Juve’s differentiating factor was basing their brand world not around ‘extreme’ culture like Red Bull but around northern Italian prestige.

It’s origins in Turin, Italy’s first capital and a city deeply assosciated with aristocracy, wealth and class, the Agnelli family’s industrial pedigree, and the club’s “quiet luxury” reputation gave them something no other football club had: a credible claim on fashion, design and northern Italian prestige.

They siezed the opportunity that appeared at the confluence of their own history with industry trends in sports and in fashion. The results?

A new logo which turned the J initial into a shield shape and made Juventus look closer to Chanel or Nike than to other football clubs. The kits moved into sage greens and pink pastels that looked more like fashion drops than regular football kits. Juve blurred the line between a matchday kit and a fashion piece. They invited Italian artists to reinterpret the logo in their own artstyles.

Juventus’ rebrand is a showcase of the fact that sometimes expanding a brand world will face pushback from legacy audiences, but that it’s a tradeoff for expanding into new sectors and doesn’t necessarily have to clash with your core principles as a brand.

Whilst this rebrand worked for Juventus due to the strategic landscape in which it was designed, I believe in general most football benefit from their heritage.

Result: Commercial revenue up 12% year on year. Merchandise sales spiked globally. Brand value up an estimated 25%.

Burger King

Burger King, unlike the previous three examples, didn’t use their rebrand to strike out into a new world, but to double-down and reinforce their original selling point.

After years of chasing McDonald’s into modernity to become slicker and more corporate, BK changed course. Their previous logo with a blue ring around it said “we’re a serious global fast food business” emphasis on global, fast and business, not the food.

Then, in 2021 they hard pivoted with a return to their 1969 logo. A flat, confident orange bun containing the words “BURGER KING” in a rounded, chewy custom typeface. Nostalgic, classic and simple.

Global supply chains, real estate and franchise contracts that are bulletproof, these things are surely good for business, but they’re not good foundations for a consumer oriented food brand. The old logo, and the design system it belonged to, had been carrying a message that wasn’t about being a super-modern company, but about making tasty food.

Result: Brand perception scores jumped. Outperformed every major competitor on social engagement post-launch.

Dip

The last one is a rebrand we developed ourselves at Blink Twice.

Dip sell laundry and cleaning products. Laundry detergent strips instead of pods. Safer formulations. A category that has historically been defined by two options: clinical (think Tide, Persil) or greenwashed eco (think Ecover, Method). Both forgettable, neither earns a prominent spot in your home.

The strategic unlock was recognising that the real competitor set wasn’t other cleaning brands. It was wellness and beauty. The codes of the self-care economy allowed Dip to use a whole different set of values and principles to sell their product.

People had been taught by Glossier, The Ordinary and the whole clean living movement to care what ingredients were in their moisturiser. But nobody had connected that instinct to what they put on their clothes and surfaces.

So we built Dip as the first true home wellness brand.

A refreshed logotype built on the act of the “dip” itself, visual and literal at the same time. Sky-inspired product photography that drew on fragrance campaigns instead of cleaning aisle shots used visuals to reposition Dip’s product in a different category by using their design principles and tropes. Calm, confident colour and honest design.

Result: £1m to £5m in 18 months. Sales tripled in the first month post-launch. Now the fastest-growing laundry strips brand in the UK. The full story is here.

Rebranding Is About Strategy, Not Just Logos

What all of these rebrands have in common is that they marry opportunity, strategy and design. The design changes reflect the intention of the strategy shift which in turn is in response to a market opportunity.

Airbnb's Bélo only means "belong anywhere" because the product, photography and tone of voice all back it up. Kia's new wordmark only reads as "design-led mobility brand" because the EV6 arrived to prove it. Juventus's J only reads as "global lifestyle brand" because the kits and collaborations built a world around it. Burger King's 1969 logo only lands as "craveable" because the whole system treats the food as the hero. Dip only unlocks "home wellness" because the category pivot was baked into the strategy.

Every single one of these shows the same thing. When a rebrand is backed by real strategic thinking (and executed with total commitment) it's one of the most powerful moves a business can make.

Editorial Note: This week’s newsletter is a two-parter. This post follows last week’s theory component, and gets into how to operationalise the insights from part one.

The most expensive billboard in the world can’t prove that people care about your brand. It can prove you have money, but that’s not the same thing. A product someone buys, keeps, and tells other people about? That’s proof. It’s earned, not bought. And the only way to get it is to build a brand world worth collecting.

There’s a craft behind elite collectible branding. It’s not a science, because it will always be a creative endeavour, but it’s not just vibes either. There’s a logic behind it, a series of steps which serve both as wireframe to hold your campaign together, and springboard for your creativity to launch off of.

Here’s how.

Start with Story

As with any campaign, a collectible needs to link back to your brand story. Not a product feature, not a brand value. An idea, a philosophy, a principle which people would want a physical artefact of.

The test is simple: if you stripped the logo off, would the collectible still say something about your brand? If yes, you’re working with Story. If no, you’ve made merch.

Merch ends up in the bin. Artefacts end up on the shelf.

When you’re developing concepts, the question to ask is: what is the central idea of our brand, and what would it look like as an object? Innocent Smoothies’ hand-knitted bottle hats work because they’re a physical expression of the brand’s personality. Warmth, handmade simplicity, a little bit quirky. Remove the Innocent branding entirely and the object still tells you something. That’s the difference.

If you can’t answer what the central idea is, that’s the problem to solve first. A collectible can’t carry an idea that hasn’t been clearly articulated yet. Go back to the brand story and make it more distinct before anything else.

Build the System

Story gives the collectible meaning. As such it’s the prerequisite, but it doesn’t make something collectable. Plenty of beautifully made objects with thought behind their design get bought once and forgotten. What separates a collectible from a well-designed piece of merch is the System — the mechanics that make people come back, complete sets, show off, trade, and engage with the object beyond the moment of purchase.

It has three components.

Defining the Set

Completionism only works when people can see what finishing looks like. The urge to complete something only kicks in when they know there’s something to complete. Market as a set, sell as a unit. If there are eight variants, show all eight. If there’s a rare tier, communicate the rarity. If it’s geographically distributed, make the map visible.

The edges of the set are part of the product. McDonald’s CARDS campaign worked because customers could see the full 24-card set from day one. They knew exactly how incomplete their collection was. That tension is the engine.

Building In the Game

Gamification works in two directions. The first is the moment of acquisition: is there an element of chance or discovery in how people get the collectible? The blind box, the unboxing mechanic, the treasure hunt. The second is what happens after: can people trade, flex, complete, or compete with the object itself?

The best systems do both. The acquisition is exciting and the post-acquisition life of the object has its own dynamics built in. Pokémon cards don’t just have the dopamine hit of the booster pack. They have an entire game, a trading economy, and thirty years of community built around what happens after you open it.

Making it Social

A collectible that doesn’t travel doesn’t work. The object needs to function as social currency, something people want to show off, photograph, trade, and talk to others about. Making it something that’s cool or beautiful or interesting is also about making it social.

Would people be as obsessed with Diptyque’s geographically limited edition candles if they didn’t also look amazing on a coffee table? Let’s say the maintained all the other characteristics, you still knew they were geographically limited, they still made you feel wordly, they still reminded you of that trip you took to Miami with their Palm Beach inspired scent. But they didn’t have that same element of clout, by showing off their origin. Would they have the same value? Likely not.

Example - Collaborations as Collectibles

Collabs function exceptionally well for certain brands as collectibles, because they’re typically time-limited, and stand out as conspicuous from the ‘ordinary’ offerings of a brand. They also fulfill the social aspect of collectibles, by cross-pollinating fanbases and audiences, and showing cultural literacy and being ‘in the know’.

But they only work when both brand worlds are clearly defined.

Adidas x Raf Simons (Ozweego/Stan Smith) — The Adidas/Raf collab took a mass-market sneaker and placed it inside the world of high fashion. Making it a seasonal drop meant that each colourway becomes a souvenier of sorts. It signals a moment, like vintage tour merch or Jordans.

Crocs collaborations (Balenciaga, MSCHF, Christopher Kane) — When done well, a brand can reinvent its entire brand world through collaboration. That’s what Crocs did in the late 2010’s, with little scope to compete on product design given the plastic mold design, the shoe was a commodity. Easy to rip off. Branding was really the only thing it had going for it, and the brand was generic, until they started doing partnerships.

Then they started collaborating, with Balenciaga, MSCHF, Post Malone, Christopher Kane. Each collab recontextualised what Crocs was. Not an ugly shoe. An ironic cultural artefact. The collaboration was the blue ocean move that made the brand distinct.

KITH took this further. Ronnie Fieg made collaboration the entire operating model. Each drop is a content moment. Each release reinforces the brand world by making taste and curation wearable. For KITH, the cadence is the System.

The failure mode is when only one brand world is strong. If your story is weak, a collab doesn’t fix it. Crocs didn’y just partner with cool brands, they juxtaposed them with their own lack of cultural cachet. The collision only creates something new when both parties bring something distinct to the table.

Test It Against the Brand World

The Story gives it meaning, the Signal makes it recognisable and the System makes it repeatable. So before you ship anything, two questions.

Does the Story give it meaning beyond the logo? Does the System give people a reason to come back for more?

Then the final one: could a competitor produce this same collectible credibly?

If yes, it’s a product, if no, it’s a collectible. And that’s the difference between something people buy and something people keep.

Editorial Note: This week’s newsletter is a two-parter. We’ll be starting off this week with the theory component, and following up next week with how to operationalise the insights from part one.

University halls with empty bottles of liquor lined up like trophies in the windowsill, your mate’s immaculate collection of half-and-half matchday scarves, or those people who inexplicably have a complete set of old encyclopaedias on a bookshelf that you have a sneaking suspicion nobody has ever opened, much less read.

Collecting is an incredibly common human habit, and one which a lot of people don’t even know they’re engaging in. But once you start thinking about it, you’ll notice that just about everyone is collecting. Billionaires collect fine art, just like kids on the playground collect Pokémon cards, or book lovers collect first editions.

Collecting transcends income brackets, age brackets, genders, languages, cultures and borders. It turns consumers into curators, and brand loyalty into identity.

Precisely for those reasons, brands can have significant success leveraging this innate behavioural pattern to build lasting emotional bonds with their audiences.

And, beyond simply being a marketing tactic, it also acts as a high-signal direct link to consumers. If people want to collect your things, it means you’ve successfully built a brand that people want to engage with beyond the purely transactional. You’ve transcended commodity status and forged a connection that is not strictly based on cost and utility.

These next two newsletters are all about how we can instrumentalise that insight into turning your brand into one people don’t just buy, but hold on to. That’s a fundamentally different relationship.

How Collectibles Fit Into Brand World Building

Let’s discuss where a collectible strategy sits within the broader frameworks of brand building which we’ve established in previous posts. Although collectibles are a potent tool, they don’t constitute a brand strategy in and of themselves, and will therefore need to exist within a broader approach.

One easy way to do this is to use our Three Brand World Building Pillars approach.

Collectibles belong pretty much entirely within the System pillar. They’re the repeatable architecture that gives your community a reason to keep engaging. But these pillars need to be working in tandem. Which means that if collectibles are a System, they need an equivalent Signal and Story. Without a Story, it’s meaningless merch. Without a Signal, it’s invisible.

Your Story should answer the question of what makes your brand something people want an artefact of. Your Signal should answer how someone might recognise a collectible as uniquely yours from across a room without seeing a logo. And the System should answer what the repeatable structure that gives people a reason to come back is.

This leaves one final element: can it be easily copied? If the answer is yes, then you’re not yet in blue ocean territory. If no, then you’re only competing with yourself, which is where you want to be.

The Five Psychological Drivers Of Collectibility

1. Completionism

Humans have an instinctive drive to complete sets. When there’s an incomplete collection it creates a low-level cognitive tension that can only be resolved by acquiring the missing piece. This creates a self-perpetuating loop of engagement when brands present a product as only one piece of a whole set.

McDonald’s has understood this for decades. Their Happy Meal toys pioneered the ‘collect all 8’ approach for a mass market. But the brand just took this thinking much further with the launch of CARDS, a nationwide promotion built around 24 hand-illustrated collectible cards across four categories, distributed through a dedicated CARDS Meal. The set structure shows you the edges of the full collection, subset categories create smaller completion goals within the larger one, and a rare 25th gold Ronald McDonald card adds treasure-hunt stakes. It’s the Happy Meal logic scaled up and made adult.

Lego employs a similar tactic with their minifigure series, marketing the complete set but selling its constituent components separately. The notion of incompleteness is built into the sales format and the promise of that complete set is advertised from the outset.

So is this category just for toys and fast food? Nope. Diptyque is a masterclass in how to market artisanality and craft. There’s nothing ‘childish’ about their brand, but their city candles make use of the same collectibility tactics as Lego and McDonald’s. They further introduce an element of geographic completionism, enmeshing the brand with the class and cosmopolitanism of the cities that get their own special edition candles and serving as proof-of-work for customers who value their worldliness and now associate that with Diptyque as a brand.

Completionism only works when there’s a system people can see the edges of. If your brand world is defined clearly enough that people can picture what the ‘full set’ looks like, you’ve built a system that generates its own demand.

2. Artificial Scarcity

Perceived rarity elevates perceived value. But there’s a meaningful distinction between manufactured hype (limited drops for the sake of it) and scarcity that’s rooted in the brand’s actual world.

Absolut stopped selling heritage and started selling contemporary art. Their limited-edition artist bottles turn minimalist packaging into a canvas for modern artists. They turned the packaging into the collectible. But the quality of these designs, and the fact that they link back to Absolut’s broader brand ambitions and sleek aesthetics, matters.

This works even better when scarcity doesn’t seem artificial. In the winter months, Innocent Smoothies drive sales through the hand-knitted hats placed on their bottles. Each one is hand-crafted, playing into the brand story of purity and simplicity. The hand-made quality is an inherent driver of scarcity. Add the variety and the fact that not every store will carry every knit-pattern and you’re sending customers on a treasure hunt, not just shopping.

Scarcity is a red ocean move when it’s just supply manipulation. It becomes a blue ocean move when the scarcity is tied to something only your brand world could produce.

3. Social Status & Curation

Some collecting is really about identity signalling and communicating social belonging. The collection itself becomes a curated expression of taste. The collector is demonstrating that they ‘get it’.

The prime example here isn’t a particular brand but an entire industry: fashion. People wear vintage Raf Simons, Helmut Lang, or Margiela as identity markers. Consumption becomes a way of articulating one’s identity. The collector is a walking extension of the brand world: tastemakers wear Celine because they’re tastemakers, and Celine is a valuable brand because it is worn by them.

When the signal is strong enough, the collector doesn’t just buy the brand, they perform it.

But collectibility for social status needs substance behind it. Beanie Babies is the cautionary tale. If there is no USP or brand world beneath the act of collection, brands can build hype but they don’t make products people want to keep, only ones they want to cash in for clout. Collectibility without a brand world is speculation. With one, it’s loyalty.

4. The Casino Effect

Randomness creates a dopamine response. The uncertainty of what you’ll get in a blind box or booster pack triggers the same reward pathways as gambling, but in a socially acceptable, community-driven context.

Pokémon cards are arguably the single best example of all three pillars working in lockstep. “Gotta catch ‘em all” literally commands collecting. This idea of collection, inspired by lead designer Satoshi Tajiri’s childhood hobby of bug-gathering, is central to the franchise. Every Pokémon is visually distinctive, instantly recognisable, and systematically categorised. But what sets the cards apart is the experience of opening a booster pack, which is engineered for dopamine. The anticipation of not knowing what you’ll get is part of what customers enjoy, evidenced by the popularity of unwrapping videos across social media.

Story, Signal, System. The ‘Gotta Catch ‘Em All’ ethos, the iconic designs and the booster pack distribution mechanism. All working together.

Gamification is powerful but fragile. Without genuine story and signal underneath, the casino effect burns out. Pokémon endures because the world is deep enough to sustain decades of collecting. Brands that bolt on gamification without building the world first create short-lived hype cycles.

5. Investment & Legacy

This is perhaps the most difficult driver for brands to engineer. It’s very dependent on a secondary market created without their input. But despite its complexity, it’s worth understanding to get a complete picture of why collecting is so engaging.

Hermès Birkin is the ultimate example. The scarcity is real (not manufactured drops), the craftsmanship narrative is airtight. The brand world is so well-built that the collectible appreciates because the world itself keeps appreciating. A Birkin isn’t bought for what it is, it’s bought for what it becomes.

Takeaway

These are far from all the reasons why collectibles seem to be a trait that exists everywhere and long predates modern consumer culture. But what’s safe to say is that these five principles are not only significant contributors to the collection behaviour, but that they are also ones which have been potently distilled by brands to build robust links between product, brand and customer on an emotional level.

So when you’re working on a product, ask whether anyone would collect any of the things you make. Not because of artificial scarcity or hype, but because the thing itself is an artefact of a world they want to be part of. If not, then through the principles outlined above, you have room to turn your brand from a flat surface to a world with depth.

But how do you operationalise these concepts on your own? That’s what part two will be breaking down next week.

Five Brand Traps

The bulk of the branding advice out there tells you what to do. Build a strong identity. Be consistent. Tell a good story. And that's all true. But some of the most costly mistakes brands make aren't about what they should be doing, they’re about what they're actively doing wrong, often without realising it

Over years of working with founders, startups and scaleups at Blink Twice, I’ve identified five patterns that consistenly bleed brand value. These aren’t one-off case studies in ‘what they did wrong’ they’re predictable and consistent patterns that reappear across categories, company sizes and budgets.

The good news is that once you can name them, they’re entirely avoidable.

Trap 1: Not Having a Clear Signal

When it comes to branding, you should be trying to stay in the minds of audiences beyond just their immediate interactions with your ad or your product. It’s all well and good to construct ad experiences or product interactions that are positive in the moment, but if you don’t give audiences a distinctive signifier which they can remember you by, then you’re building from scratch every time.

The most powerful way to solve this is through what I call a signal. A signal is more than just a logo or a wordmark. It’s a visual element so intrinsically tied to your brand story that it communicates your entire identity without a single word. The best signals don’t just tell you who made something. They tell you what that brand stands for.

Diptyque’s approach to this is their oval label, the shape is a portal, the entrance to a brand world where custom typeface and dancing type combine to give each product a unique identity and sense of playfulness. They use type as the paintbrush to reinforce their unique brand story - the artistry of living

Monte’s Red Face uses red to connote how their hair styling product makes you stand out, Rimowa’s use of ridged aluminium, a lightweight modern and sturdy alloy highlighting their connection to early aviation and Tiffany’s blue, the color of royalty and prestige. These brands make use of visual metaphors that reinforce their core brand story. They’re not only recognisable instantly, they are part of the storytelling in and of themselves.

Burberry’s recent transformation is another excellent example, as well as proof that this type of signalling also opens up new avenues for you to communicate with audiences and customers. Rather than simply updating their logo, they committed to owning a specific electric blue across every touchpoint. Particularly for a brand which already has a world renowned visual signal, their tartan pattern, that colour became the signal of an entirely new era. You didn’t need to read a press release to understand something had changed. You just saw the blue.

Identifying and owning your signal is how isolated marketing moments draw on pre-existing context to maximise impact, every single time.

Trap 2: Trying to Fit the Category

Oftentimes, in order to signal legitimacy, brands lean into pre-established norms within their category. Doing this, however, not only means you’re forcing yourself to go toe-to-toe with established giants who already have access to a legacy and audience recognition, you’re also throwing away your inherent advantage as a new competitor, your lack of obligation to pre-existing customers and stakeholders.

But here’s the alternative, Blue Ocean Branding. It is not simply doing the opposite of your category’s norms for the sake of it. The reason it worked for Vacation Inc is not because they made sunscreen look like whipped cream. It’s because that playful, nostalgic visual identity was the expression of a genuine brand insight: that sun protection didn’t have to feel clinical or dutiful.

The design was the vehicle for the story but crucially, the story came first.

Blue Ocean Branding means finding positioning that no competitor can follow you into because it’s rooted in something only you can own. It’s the key product truth. An emotional territory nobody else is credibly occupying.

Trap 3: The Content Treadmill

In a race for virality it can be tempting to throw everything at the wall in order to get exposure and attention, understandably, but if you’re not ready with a consistent message that has a logical interplay with all of your other content, you start from zero every time you hit publish.

When you engage with audiences, do so in a way that crafts a story that continues beyond that interaction.

This is what I call the System, the third pillar of a strong brand alongside Story and Signal. Building a system is the difference between a slogan and a strategy. Every piece of content is actively building the associations you want to own.

Red Bull is the clearest example. They don’t post random visuals. Every single piece of content, every sponsorship, every clip reinforces the same two things: High Energy and Extreme. And by associating their brands with the careers of elite athletes or teams, they also give you a continuous and interconnected world in which the inherent drive to follow a story through, means audiences stay connected.

Each piece draws on every other, and the associations deepen over time.

This is the difference between brand storytelling that compounds exponentially and simple linear exposure.

Trap 4: Wasted Packaging

Packaging is not just a cost of fulfilment. It’s one of the most important branding opportunities you have, and most brands waste it entirely.

The moment a consumer touches your product, it fundamentally alters their perception of its value. Apple understood this. The slowly sliding box, the weighted resistance, the precisely placed materials: every detail builds anticipation. It’s why people can’t bring themselves to throw the box away. The packaging is part of the product.

This moment is also the only time you have your customer’s full and undivided attention. Every other touchpoint competes. This one doesn’t. The smartest brands treat it as free media. Design for reusability and your packaging lives in your customer’s home for years, every reuse a free ad. Design for theatre and your customers film the unboxing for you. Design a unique shape and the form becomes the story, as Haws watering can proved with packaging that highlighted their products unique shape. Make it playful, as Innocent did with their smoothie hats, and people collect it. Make it personal and people share it.

Delivery is the only moment you have 100% of your customer’s focus. Treating it as logistics is throwing that away.

Trap 5: Retention Gap

What keeps your brand present in a customer’s life after the transaction ends? If you don’t have an answer to that, you disappear the moment your product is consumed. If you can repeatedly provide audiences with utility, then you’re building a lasting positive association.

The concept I come back to here is the brand trojan horse. A secondary product or asset, cheap (in comparison to the primary product cost) or free, and of immediate practical use, that infiltrates customer habits and keeps your brand front-of-mind long after the initial purchase.

Examples like the IKEA FRAKTA bag, Red-Bulletin and Rhode Lip case are some of our go-to’s but the Michelin Guide is perhaps the greatest example ever executed. In 1900, a French tyre company started distributing a free guide to the best restaurants in the nation. Following an incredibly elegant logic, they figured that if they wanted to sell more tyres, the best way was to get people to drive more so they’d wear their tyres out. And to get people to drive more, they’d need to give them a destination.

The guide became so trusted it is now the world’s premier restaurant rating system, synonymous with haute cuisine and refined taste. Customer retention, demand and an entire lifestyle their brand wanted to be associated with all built into one product, the perfect trojan horse.

The Takeaway?

The brands that win long-term aren’t just the ones with the best product. They’re the ones who understand that every touchpoint, every piece of content, every interaction is either building something or wasting it. Get them right, and the returns follow.

They say need is the mother of invention, but if that’s true then tinkering is surely at least a cool auntie? The history of iconic products is replete with examples of design innovations born not of intentional R&D but accidental convergence between a demand audiences weren’t aware of themselves, and a product that its producers found lying around in the scrap heap of abortive design ideas.

We’re going to take a quick look at a few examples of times that creative play led to incredibly beloved and innovative products and then make the case for why, and how, you can bake this process of creative play into the structure of your business.

Serendipity can sometimes be an incredible way to innovate but it requires you to have the right prerequisites.

Post-It’s

Post-It is such an iconic brand that it can be grouped in with the likes of Band-Aid, Xerox and Kleenex as companies that achieved such dominance in their category that their brand became synonymous with the product itself.

But the product which is now an office staple (pun intended) was actually invented as a way to make use of another failed invention by its parent company. A scientist named Spencer Silver working for 3M in the US in the 1960’s was working on super strong adhesives, but in his experimentation he instead ended up constructing a type of glue which was only slightly adhesive, reusable and pressure sensitive.

For the intended applications, Silver’s invention was a failure, but when reapplied to the yellow scrap paper laying around the 3M offices by other employees, they realised that it made for a very handy way of passing messages around, since these little scraps of paper could be peeled off a block, applied to another item and then easily removed again and reapplied. After almost a decade of floating around the offices of the American corporate conglomerate, this former ‘failure’ eventually found itself the foundation of a globe-spanning sensation.

Nike Waffle Sole

Around the same time as the Post It was being invented, Bill Bowerman, co-founder of Nike who was at the time still a track and field coach at the University of Oregon, was trying to come up with a new shoe for runners to train in on the newly installed Polyeurethane track at the University. The track, which Bowerman had had installed himself, was proving problematic for runners as flat shoes weren’t getting enough grip, while studded shoes were digging in too deep into the track.

Which explains why, one morning, the idea occurred to him to pour liquid polyeurethane straight onto the surface of his wife’s waffle iron, a wedding gift the couple had received over three decades earlier. Now, not unsurprisingly, applying liquid polyeurethane to a waffle iron did not, in fact, result in a perfect running sole and instead destroyed what seems to have been a very sturdy and reliable kitchen appliance but nevertheless, and if Bowerman had though a bit harder about it he might have also considered the fact that pouring the plastic into the waffle mold would end up with concave indents rather than the rubber studs of the Nike Moon Shoe, but it was the idea that mattered.

After many more attempts and many more waffle irons, Bowerman cracked the technique which ended up giving rise to the iconic Nike waffle sole pattern.

Fed-Ex Logo

When Lindon Leader was hired to redesign the Logo of Federal Express as it was known at the time, not only did he convince the company to let him rebrand it as ‘Fed Ex’ but, as he noticed after over 200 iterations of the logo design, he figured out he could hide a clever nod to the company’s operations in the negative space of the lettering itself.

If you’ve ever noticed the arrow between the E and X in the FedEx logo you know what we’re talking about, it’s one of the most iconic ‘hidden’ messages in a corporate logo.

But the fact that it was an initially unintended result of the shapes of the letters and their narrow spacing shows the value of creative iteration. Giving the creatives leeway to test out 200 versions of the new logo might seem excessive but it paid huge dividends in this case. Sometimes genius takes time.

Make it Part of Your Workflow

These three examples all have something in common. As much as they were accidents, they were accidents which were facilitated by very intentional philosophies at the companies where they happened. By baking experimentation into the culture and processes of their companies, these businesses set up the conditions for creative innovation to lead to new products.

Nike approached shoemaking not as an artisanal craft with best-practices and principles to be followed because of tradition and heritage but as an engineering puzzle.

3M maintained a corporate policy that specifically allowed employees to pursue idividual passion projects on company time. That’s how the invention of one engineer ended up being transformed into a completely different product alost a decade later, the philosophy as well as the structures were in place to promote innovation.

And in the case of FedEx, it was the willingness to embrace iteration, and a gradual and slow movement towards refinement, as opposed to cost-cutting exercises and a race towards the bottom that led to their iconic logo. It took looking at the word ‘FedEx’ 200 times for the designers to notice what was there from the very beginning, that space between the E and X.

So when you’re thinking about creativity, don’t think about it as something tacked on to your company or as a branding buzzword. Baking creative play into the core of your business processes leads to innovations that you can’t necessarily define ahead of time but which can be fundamental.

Rocky Balboa, 2015/16 Leicester City FC, Frodo Baggins etc. etc. Everyone loves an underdog. So it should sound pretty obvious that being a challenger brand in a category dominated by champions can be as much of a branding asset as a business disadvantage.

But how exactly do you leverage that innate desire people have to back the little guy? Well let us be the Mickey Goldmill to your Rocky, the Ranieri to your Leicester. Because we’ve got five key strategies for turning your challenger status into a cheat code and if not unseating the reigning champs, at least making them sweat up on their perch.

It’s the classic tale of David vs. Goliath. A story paradigm that dates back across ages and cultures and encapsulates that affinity we share for the underdog.

Here are five strategies for leveraging branding to exploit the fact that your brand is the underdog, and some companies that executed these strategies successfully to steal market share.

1. Reframe What the Category Is For

Giants get trapped by their own positioning. They’ve invested so much in a singular story that changing it would mean losing the audience they’ve spent decades building. Challengers don’t have that problem. Their only loyalty is to finding a better story.

If the vodka industry is dominated by brands leaning on Russian heritage, aristocratic crests, and claims of purity, how do you compete? Those are inherently non-fungible brand assets, right? That’s why Absolut went about it differently. They put premium Swedish vodka in a distinctive bottle inspired by 19th century medicine bottles and handed it to Andy Warhol. The bottle became pop art. In one branding move, they had moved vodka away from its old associations and turned it into a badge of modern creative culture.

Oatly took the same approach in the alternative milk industry. No pictures of cows in green pastures, no competing on nutritional credentials. They treated their carton as a canvas for irreverent copy, embracing sarcasm, absurdity, and comedy. Instead of trying to out-milk milk, they leaned into what a deeply traditional industry wouldn’t think to do.

Liquid Death took it furthest of all. Water in tallboy aluminium cans with heavy metal branding. The juxtaposition isn’t just appealing to consumers, it makes the product stand out on shelves. The Goliath was Big Water’s marketing of snow-capped mountains and soft purity. The slingshot was turning plain water bottles into an edgy statement piece for the sober-curious.

2. Weaponise the Object

Sometimes the slingshot isn’t the story. It’s the product itself.

In prestige categories it’s common to imitate the trappings of luxury and quality in order to lay claim to legitimacy. Graza doesn’t use old-world iconography or glass bottles to signal quality. Instead its humble squeeze bottles suggest a different way to engage with the product entirely. Change in form leads to a change in use. Olive oil becomes a fun garnish to be experimented with rather than a serious Old World ingredient you’re afraid to actually use.

Whip Vacation applied the same logic to whipped cream. Selling 80s Miami nostalgia, Whip engineered its bottle to spray like mousse. The nozzle isn’t just distinctive on shelf, it’s an integral part of how the product is experienced.

3. Make the Mundane Aspirational

Challengers often take a product category that markets itself on manipulation (you ought to use this product) and reframe it as an inspiring one (you want to use this product).

Big Laundry speaks to beleaguered parents and stained sports kits. Enter Dip, which reframed this purely utilitarian product by embracing laundry not as a chore but as a part of self-care. Dip’s laundry sheets come in packaging that looks like it belongs on the bathroom shelf alongside Aesop or The Ordinary. Sterile plastic hidden away under the sink became aspirational, design-forward branding that reframed laundry as part of a home wellness ritual.

Fishwife did the same for canned fish. Boring pantry tuna, the definition of commodity survival food, became a viral status symbol through bright, story-driven illustrations and a gift box sleeve that gave a standard tin room to tell a story.

4. Cut the Friction

Sometimes the most powerful David move isn’t a better product. It’s identifying the thing that makes the dominant experience quietly miserable and removing it entirely.

Incumbents build their models around assumptions about how their category works. Over time those assumptions become invisible to them, obligatory for consumers, but obvious to anyone looking in from the outside.

Blockbuster’s model depended on late fees, a friction element which made them money but baked punishment into the customer experience. Netflix, as an outsider, understood that building a business around negative customer experience was a recipe for disruption. Kill the friction, introduce a subscription model, remove the late fees, and suddenly customers no longer felt like they were being scolded by the place they went for entertainment. The cinematic branding helped too.

The same logic applied to banking. Branches, confusing fees, clunky corporate apps. Monzo’s slingshot was a hot coral card and instant, emoji-filled spending notifications. Financial transparency stopped feeling formal and anxiety-inducing and started feeling warm, social, and oddly fun. Casper did it for mattresses. One perfect product in a box with a 100-night trial turned buying a mattress into an aesthetic, viral unboxing event.

Just because audiences put up with incumbents, that doesn’t mean they won’t flock to a challenger who offers them an alternative.

5. Out-Human the Giant

Mid Day Squares encapsulates our fifth strategy. Brand activations that emphasise the fact that they’re not limited by the slow-moving machinations of corporate snack brands. A founder reality show? Sure, why not. Polished ads were replaced by real human content that put real humans forward.

Gymshark is the multiplier effect of this approach taken to its logical conclusion. Think about what goes into making Nike and Adidas work. It’s not just the mental market share built off decades of advertising, it’s the logistical machine. Tonnes of merchandise in premium retail fronts on prime real estate the world over. The counter move for a startup is to lean into the fact that you’re not a global mega-corp. Sponsor relatable fitness YouTubers. Sell online, because that’s where real people shop. Build a massive, agile digital community grounded in gym-floor authenticity. You know what it feels like to swipe in after a long day at work in a way that ad execs on multi six-figure salaries with vested stock in legacy sports brands can’t necessarily relate to.

The Wheel Keeps Turning

Here’s one more thing to consider. Many of today’s Goliaths started out as Davids.

Airbnb and Netflix, once your prototypical California tech startups, are now established billion-dollar public companies. The same innovations that position a challenger brand can become established standards ready to be subverted by the next wave.

So keep thinking within this framework even as your company grows. Because there will always be new angles opening up for challenger brands to approach their incumbents.

When working on anything from product design to advertising, one of the most important lessons to keep in mind is that none of it exists in a vacuum.

Regardless of how disruptive or innovative you’re being, you will always be, intentionally or not, operating within a network of artistic and cultural references.

It doesn’t even necessarily have to be about where you draw your references from. The associations formed by your work in the minds of audiences are just as, if not more, important.

A tactic that has paid incredible dividends in creative direction is building a deep repository of cultural knowledge. It lets you understand how your work might trigger associations for audiences and gives you a library to draw on.

This isn’t about copying. It’s about internalising the insights of other creatives and translating them through your own unique approach.

So let’s look at how drawing on deep, sometimes obscure, references has produced some of the most iconic pieces of creative work ever made.

Draw on Fine Art and Literature - Guinness and Moby Dick / Apple and 1984

Guinness’ 1999 ‘Surfer’ ad not only won more awards than any other piece of advertising that year it was also crowned the ‘best ad of all time’ by the Times the following year. No mean feat. So what made it so successful?

They didn’t start from scratch. The white horses rising from the waves drew on the 1873 painting “Neptune’s Horses” by Walter Crane, which itself referenced ancient Greek art. Then the voiceover invokes Ahab, drawing directly from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, layering in the mythology of obsession, the sea and the pursuit of something greater than yourself. Guinness played off 2,000 years of art history and symbolism to make something that felt epic in the truest sense of the word.

Apple did something similar with their iconic ‘1984’ TV ad, released during the Super Bowl in January of that year. The ad depicts a dystopian society of drone-like automatons, positioning IBM as Big Brother and Apple as the force breaking through conformity. They drew directly from George Orwell’s novel of the same name, a work so embedded in our culture that everyone understands its stakes, whether or not they’ve ever read it.

Draw on Legacy Ads - IKEA and Stella Artois / Apple and Volkswagen

IKEA’s Brighton-specific ad, featuring their furniture covered in seagull s***, was an iconically local moment for residents of the seaside city. But it was also a direct homage to a vintage Stella Artois ad in which luxury objects doubled as bottle openers. Both global brands understood that a successful campaign should feel specific, iconic and somehow familiar all at once.

Then there’s Apple’s ‘Think Different’ campaign. Separate from the ‘1984’ Super Bowl ad, this was a poster series featuring iconic figures like Albert Einstein, Muhammad Ali and Amelia Earhart alongside the simple strapline: Think Different. That campaign drew directly from Volkswagen’s legendary ‘Think Small’ ads of the 1960s, widely regarded as one of the greatest advertising campaigns ever made. Apple didn’t just borrow the spirit. They consciously echoed the copy itself.

Draw on Pop Culture - Stranger Things and Stephen King

Pop culture represents a deep well to draw from, particularly because of the emotional connections audiences already have with it.

If you can identify a design element from a piece of popular culture and use it as shorthand, you can piggyback on the emotional resonance it carries without a single line of explanation.

This is exactly what Stranger Things did with their title sequence typography.

The Stranger Things logo is a direct nod to the mass market Stephen King paperbacks of the 1980s that made him a household name. Those paperbacks are less of a staple today but are so beloved they’ve become collectibles, and for an entire generation of readers they were ubiquitous.

When Stranger Things used the same enlarged first and last letters, red font and bold serif typeface, they were priming an entire generation for a supernatural mystery before a single frame of footage ran. The reference inspired the work and communicated meaning directly to the audience.

Draw on History - Burberry and Tartan

While pop culture is instantly legible to contemporary audiences, history provides a richer, if more occasionally obscure, reference point. Historical references carry a sense of heritage and status that cannot be manufactured any other way.

Burberry has made their chequered pattern so inseparable from their brand identity that you don’t need a logo to recognise one of their pieces.

When the brand first introduced the pattern in the 1920s, it was already a throwback. Inspired by highland tartan, it harkened to the highland revival, the romantic depictions of Scottish Highlanders that defined the mid-to-late 19th century. And that highland revival was itself a reference to centuries of Scottish Highland culture. Three layers of history folded into a single fabric.

Draw on Modern Art - Nike Air Max 1 and the Centre Pompidou / Supreme and Barbara Kruger

Modern art is often associated with deconstruction, subversion and protest. For brands aligned with street culture, it’s a natural fit. If you want to signal that you’re at once rebellious and forward thinking, but also cultured and aesthetically informed, reaching to modern art and architecture sends exactly that message.

When Tinker Hatfield designed the Air Max 1, he took direct inspiration from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the building famous for wearing its mechanical infrastructure on the outside. He applied the same logic to the shoe, making the internal air unit visible. It set the template for an entire category of sneaker design.

Supreme, likewise, looked to Barbara Kruger for their iconic red box logo. Kruger made work that explicitly critiqued consumerism and capitalism. She may not have been aligned with Supreme’s values, but her design vocabulary was exactly what they were after.

Draw on Historical Product Design - Apple and Braun/Bauhaus

You don’t even have to leave the domain of product design to find your references. Apple’s minimalist design language, developed by legendary designer Jony Ive, drew heavily from the Bauhaus school in Germany and, in particular, from products by electronics manufacturer Braun. Braun had internalised Bauhaus principles: combining artistic licence with functionality into a distinctly futuristic type of industrial design.

By the late 20th century, that aesthetic carried both heritage and forward-thinking energy simultaneously. Apple’s designers recognised it and built a product line on the back of it.

That’s the truth about creative direction. It is not about reinventing the wheel from scratch time after time. Curation is part of the job. Every great idea is built on another.

The genius isn’t in copying. It’s in how deep your references go, and how you’re able to connect those invisible dots.

So whether you’re building a brand, product or campaign: expand your references. Dig into history. Design archives. Old campaigns. Culture outside your bubble. If you get the hang of Are.na, it is a goldmine for this.

We mentioned Apple three times in this post but you’d never accuse them of being unoriginal.

So when Apple said Think Different... what they really meant was: connect the dots differently.

In Scandinavia, a common saying you’ll hear when temperatures hover near the freezing mark and rain comes down at a 45-degree angle is “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.” In Danish: Der findes ikke dårligt vejr, kun dårlig påklædning.

When you consider that Denmark gets 171 days of rain a year, that attitude starts making a lot of sense. Hiding from the elements doesn’t really work unless you want to spend half the year indoors.

Maybe that’s why Danish apparel company Rains, founded in Århus in 2012, decided to make leaning into bad weather the core of their branding strategy. It’s a brand committed to elevating a part of the wardrobe often relegated to pure functionality, with little concern for style. That ethos, of living in the bad weather rather than hiding from it, is the essence of their approach: outdoor apparel that is functional, fashionable, and forward-thinking.

This is Rains’ brand story, and it makes up the first of three pillars at the foundation of their success. Along with a distinctive signal and a cohesive system, their story is what makes them one of on

Pillar 1 - Story

Rains is a textbook example of how inspirational motivation beats manipulative motivation, a principle from Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. Sinek applies this distinction between inspiration and manipulation to leadership, but the dynamic functions just as well in marketing. Manipulative motivation relies on discounts, fear, or social pressure. Inspirational motivation gives people something to believe in.

Rains gives people a worldview. Rather than viewing rain as an obstacle, they treat it as a backdrop, as home. That reframe is simple, but it’s powerful enough to build an entire brand around, and that’s exactly what they’ve done.

The blueprint they’re working from isn’t unique to them though. This three-part system of story, signal and strategy can be the structural foundation of almost any brand. So let’s break down the other two elements.

Pillar 2 - Signal

You’ve heard the old saying: show, don’t tell. That’s what the signal is for. It’s one thing to tell people what you’re about, you also need a simple, obvious way of showing them. The signal is a standout product, piece of packaging, or brand asset that entirely encapsulates your story without needing any explanation.

Rains’ appeal goes beyond the idea of being at home in the rain. That same principle, of taking what others view as a limitation and making it the lynchpin of your identity, extends to their choice of fabric. The textiles that make for good rainproof coats, rubber and stiff modern synthetics, are not typically associated with runway fashion. But that doesn’t mean the two are incompatible.

Where many brands would be paddling for shore, Rains simply floats. Their signature PU and rubber textiles are conspicuous and function as well as any logo, but unlike a logo, the use of signature fabrics is integral rather than superficial. It doesn’t just tell you who made this. It tells you what this is, making the brand inseparable from its value proposition.

Their core product choices follow the same logic. The duffel bag is an item of pure practicality: formless, built to carry as much as possible while remaining easy to store. But that same formlessness can be reread as minimalist, clean, and crisp, the precise qualities that define the neo-Scandinavian aesthetic Rains is known for.

The raincoat needs to be loose and capable of layering over an existing outfit. But that also gives designers licence to play. Flared sleeves, untapered pants, geometric outlines. All of it works because the functionality is never sacrificed. The signal and the substance are the same thing.

Pillar 3 - System

Rains’ story tells audiences why they do what they do. The signal tells people what they do. The system tells both audiences and their team how they do it. Building a system is the difference between a slogan and a strategy. It dictates architecture, packaging, campaigns, and social media.

Rains’ commitment to the aesthetic of rain goes far beyond apparel. Scented candles designed to smell like environments after rainfall. Fisheye-lens videography that mimics water droplets on a camera lens. Typography that reads like looking through glass in a storm. Timelapse videos of new products emerging from melting ice. Ad campaigns built around the feeling of playing football in cold rain, looping their brand narrative into that of sports giant Umbro. Retail stores built with zero hard angles, designed to mimic the flow of water.

Rains spreads their content strategy wide because they keep their design principles tightly bound to a single concept. Architecture, decor, web design, collaborations, copy: every element of their branding is motivated by the same central aesthetic. Water. Full stop.

This cohesion draws people in and marks Rains out from their competition. But it only works because it’s in lock-step with their brand story. A consistent aesthetic will get attention. Being able to explain why that aesthetic matters is what builds a lasting connection.

From a production perspective, all creative decisions are streamlined by a unified framework. From a reception perspective, audiences come to associate the brand with one powerful message rather than a series of disconnected slogans. That consistency builds trust. Customers know that this central idea is at the root of everything the company does.

Story, signal and system. Why, what and how. Together, they turn a series of individual branding decisions into interconnected parts of a machine, all working in tandem to produce something greater than any single piece could on its own.

What’s The Relationship Between Technology and Craft?

In 1935, Walter Benjamin wrote his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Much like the present moment, the 1930s was a time of geopolitical and technological upheaval, and people were questioning the value of craft in an era when machines were entering the world of the arts. Benjamin’s key insight was that new inventions didn’t imply the decline of art, they simply changed how society perceives value.

In the 70s, this debate resurfaced with the rise of digital technology and computer-aided design. Whether designers using software could be considered creatives in the same way as traditional art department workers was a live-wire issue, one that seems almost absurd now that digital design is everywhere.

As we engage in the current debate about AI’s role in creativity, it’s worth noting this isn’t the first time these questions have been asked. The battle over authenticity, originality, and what Benjamin called ‘aura’ has raged for nearly a hundred years. And one fact has remained constant: there is no substitute for process.

How Has AI Affected Our Aesthetics?

In a recent post on my account @jackofbrands, I shared some insights into the value of craft and the creative process as a branding element in the age of AI. My contention was that as LLMs and generative AI become widespread, their inclination towards the mean of the data on which they’re trained will lead to a proliferation of dominant branding aesthetics, what you might call ‘copycat branding’.

Right now, that AI copycat aesthetic involves simplicity, scaled-back design, and clean digital graphics. As a reaction, we can anticipate the rise of branding that signals genuine human involvement in its creation. Brands that once embraced digital aesthetics to signal how modern they were might now turn toward the analogue. Handwritten fonts, textured graphics, skeuomorphism and hand-drawn logos are becoming more prevalent, signalling a pendulum swing back toward tradition, originality and authenticity.

The response to my post was significant. But commenters raised a fair challenge: if you can feed an AI a sample of your handwritten work and have it imitate that style, what does it matter whether brands embrace handmade aesthetics?

It’s a fair question, but it misses the point. The return to handmade branding isn’t about asserting the superiority of the analogue over the digital, it’s about showing proof-of-work. Audiences value knowing that humans had a hand in what they’re engaging with. You could use AI to imitate these signifiers, but audiences won’t be fooled forever. If there’s no humanity behind the aesthetic, imitating it is simply obfuscation.

That leads to a powerful conclusion. The simplest way to communicate value to consumers who want a human-made product is to open up the process and show them the craft. By showing humans at work, you give audiences proof that your product is genuine.

Proof of Concept: Tailors vs. Designers

This dialectic, where a new technology threatens to upend a craft only for the craftsman’s role to change form rather than disappear, has played out repeatedly throughout history. And the result, perhaps counterintuitively, is often that the value of the craftsman actually skyrockets.

Today, fashion houses like LVMH and Hermès are among the world’s most valuable companies, and brands like Loewe and YSL, which have made the process of craft integral to their messaging, have become some of the most recognisable in the world. But this wasn’t a foregone conclusion. The rise of mass-produced clothing during the 19th century might have spelled the end of traditional tailoring. Instead, what happened was the explosion of a new form of fashion that revolutionised the profession from craftsmanship to design. Now that basic clothing was easily attainable, what people valued was no longer a tailor’s ability to sew, but their aesthetic judgement, creativity and discernment. Couturiers became artists, and clothing became an art form. The source of value shifted from production in a base sense to the intellectual practice of invention, storytelling and creativity.

People Value Process

Maybe AI is different from the assembly line, point taken. But we can still point to almost identical processes happening right now, where emerging technology challenges the value of the artist, and in turn, the artist reaffirms the value of craft.

When Coca-Cola used AI video generation for their 2025 Christmas ad, they faced significant backlash. It wasn’t the use of AI per se that people were reacting to, but the inconsistencies in the final output suggested a lack of care that a handmade product wouldn’t have. The process of artistic creation is one of care. People value the things they build and want them to be as good as possible.

Companies opting out of this process in favour of AI signal to their audiences that they don’t share this sense of the value of creative labour.

Contrast this with Porsche’s recent animated short, Coded Love Letter, which generated significant praise. Not only did it win over audiences with its aesthetics and dedication to conventional animation techniques, Porsche paired its release with a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the ad. This highlighted the role of humans in their design process and associated the brand with conscious, thoughtful creative choices. The difference in public reception between these two campaigns speaks volumes about the value people still place in human design thinking.

Still unconvinced? Consider that Anthropic and OpenAI, two of the leading global AI companies, chose to use deliberately retro and human-coded elements in their recent ad campaigns. OpenAI shot their campaign on 35mm film. Anthropic used a Madvillain soundtrack, an artist duo known for their 90s aesthetics and their dedication to artistry. Even the companies building AI understand the enduring power of human craft signals.

Brand Mythos: Process Breeds Narrative

And then there’s the other thing AI can’t replicate: narrative.

People want a story they can identify with or aspire to. Brands have long understood how valuable storytelling is to identity, consider the recent wave of corporate origin stories in Hollywood: The Founder, The Social Network, AIR. The story behind the product is often born out of the innately human creative process. False starts, imperfections, the progress from idea to finished product, these aren’t steps to skip, they’re integral.

Think of the enduring power of Jordan being fined for wearing his black and red Jordan I’s, earning both him and the shoe reputations as rebellious, defiant, and iconic. Choosing to flout convention to make a statement, placing values above short-term profit incentives, these are powerfully human impulses. Sometimes seemingly irrational, but that’s precisely where their significance lies.

These stories cannot be replicated by AI. They are myth-making for corporations, and audiences form emotional attachments to them that no generated content can match. The brands that understand this, and lean into the human processes behind their products, are the ones that will build lasting, uncontested value.

Trust the process. It’s the one thing that can’t be faked.

Iteration can be a useful tool. Sometimes what you need to do is refine, polish, and make your brand feel more premium than competitors. That has been the traditional approach of branding agencies. But what if that’s not enough? What if you’re chasing a qualitative leap, a way to fundamentally change the rules of competition? That’s the essence of Blue Ocean Branding, a concept which guides the work we do at Blink Twice.

The idea behind Blue Ocean Branding is to reframe a brand, not as one competitor amongst many, but as the only choice in its own category. A completely sui generis thing for which there isn’t a substitute. We want to make a brand stand on its own in uncharted territory, not simply stand out in a crowd.

How Blue Ocean Branding Works

The Blue Ocean Branding approach is about seeing your brand from a different angle. The crux of the process is identifying positioning that no competitor can follow you into because it’s rooted in something only you can own. What is the aspect of your product or brand which is unique, and how do we make that indispensable. This could be your origins and the emotional resonance of that story, or a key aspect of the product.

Absolut Vodka did this to incredible effect. The belief that high-value spirits required gold foil, royal crests, and old-world prestige dominated the market. An unknown Swedish brand entering a US market dominated by Russian giants needed something radical. Inspired by 18th-century medicine bottles, they stripped the paper label and printed text directly on clear glass. They stopped selling Heritage and started selling Contemporary Art. They made every other bottle look cluttered and dated.

Vacuums were boring domestic appliances that should be cheap, plastic, and opaque. After 5,127 prototypes, Dyson positioned themselves as an engineering innovation brand rather than just another vacuum manufacturer. They rebranded the vacuum as a high-end engineering product, showing the dust, the cyclones, and the engine through transparent casing. They turned a chore-based tool into a technical status symbol. They moved the vacuum from a hidden utility to a piece of engineering pride.

But consumer products aren’t the only product category where this tactic excels. AirBnb successfully used Blue Ocean Branding to build a tech-services empire. Hotels offered the same beige room and service in every city. Convincing people to sleep in a stranger’s house required a narrative stronger than ‘it is cheaper than a hotel’. They branded the inconsistency of a spare room as the gateway to living like a local. They made standardized hotels feel soulless and touristy. Rather than selling accommodation, they reframed their product as a sense of home. Sometimes the red ocean is an entire product category consumers undervalue.

Then there’s perhaps the most audacious category inversion, one which proves the power of this type of branding by taking it to its logical extreme. Water branded as pure, soft, and gentle, using snow-capped mountains and blue/green plastic was the industry playbook. How do you sell a free commodity? You stop selling water and start selling a rebellious identity.

Liquid Death took the visual cliches of a vice, heavy metal, skull graphics, and beer-like cans, and applied them to the healthiest product on earth. They created a social badge for the sober-curious. It allows drinking water at a party to feel at home in a beer can aesthetic while murdering the boring cliches of the wellness industry.

Why This Matters for Growth

This is exemplified in our work with Dip. A laundry sheets brand swimming in a red ocean dominated by Big Laundry. They could’ve competed on being more eco or more affordable. But this would still mean they were simply a good choice amongst many. Instead, we charted blue ocean territory by making the health of the home desirable. We branded Dip as the antithesis to home products which felt clinical and joyless. Dip became a brand which leaned into non-toxic cleaning that feels warm, modern, and elevated. We positioned them as the first true home wellness brand.

From clinical sterile packaging under the sink to aspirational, design-led Dip branding. By borrowing codes from beauty and lifestyle rather than traditional cleaning, we created a brand system that let them show up distinctively. Sharp positioning made every conversation easier.

Dip grew from £1m to £5m in revenue within 18 months, with sales tripling in the first month after launch. When your brand charts its own blue ocean territory, it doesn’t just look different. It compounds growth.

When your brand is only competing with itself by charting new waters, the money invested in marketing and branding nets a substantially higher return.

Content doesn’t have to jostle for position and every customer conversation becomes easier, you’re not trying to explain why you’re a better choice compared to a deluge of similar brands, you’re simply offering a value proposition.

And while it works for established brands, this is particularly essential for smaller brands. We’ve worked with a number of startups and scaleups and we know that it takes something special to leapfrog competition with more resources. When your competition can outspend you, and has a legacy, you win by creating blue ocean space.

What is a Brand Trojan Horse?

A brand trojan horse is a secondary product which serves as a vehicle for your brand to stay front-of-mind long after the initial purchase or primary interaction.

A successful trojan horse is cheap or free, and of immediate practical use. This low threshold of acquisition lets it infiltrate consumer habits and become ubiquitous.

The goal is to become part of your customer’s daily life. It’s an item they depend on or derive regular use from, subtly reinforcing your brand’s ethos and values.

This marks out the trojan horse from simple swag. It’s not just a deck of cards or a branded mousepad. The point is not to slap a logo on an unrelated product for exposure. The trojan horse should match your primary product in a way that reminds customers of your brand values. Unlike that corporate tote from a conference years ago, the trojan horse is not anonymous and not interchangeable. It’s bespoke.

Examples of Successful Trojan Horses

The Michelin Guide: Creating the Market You Want to Serve

The Michelin guide began as a promotional product by the tire company to encourage people to drive around France visiting the nation’s best restaurants. It helped roadtrippers filter the good from the average when stopping to eat.

The guide became so trusted it’s now the premier restaurant rating system in the world, shorthand for haute-cuisine and top tier dining.

But here’s what makes it one of the greatest trojan horses ever: Michelin originally printed more than 10x as many guides as there were cars on the road in France. The guide wasn’t only advertising tires, it was creating the market they intended to serve. Michelin guides made travel by car desirable.

Their idea was simple: the more people drove, the more they wore out tires, the more tires they’d buy.

What Michelin understood was that their product was more than tires. They built their brand on the lifestyle they wanted to associate it with. Michelin could have positioned their tires as the choice of elite speed demons or stalwart quality for long-haul truckers. But they made Michelin synonymous with travel, experiences and refinement. Drivers who used the guide came to associate the tire brand with the pleasure of experiencing good food in distant places, as well as with sound judgement and refined taste.

How often do you think about the brand of tires on your car? The fact that Michelin became a household name associated with premium is testament to the guide’s success.

The IKEA FRAKTA: Strategy Disguised as Utility

The FRAKTA (Swedish for ‘freight’) sells 600,000 units every week. Its rumoured discontinuation caused a rush to buy up existing units. It’s so beloved it has become a fashion accessory. It’s IKEA’s instantly recognisable blue carrier bag that lets you conveniently get from checkout to your car with the dozens of small items you didn’t intend to buy.

That’s why IKEA invented the FRAKTA. Noticing customers were reluctant to buy additional items near checkout due to the inconvenience of carrying them, IKEA designed the sturdy, reusable FRAKTA to supercharge impulse buying. But the secondary effect was even greater.

Thanks to its versatility, utility and durability, it became a staple for all sorts of tasks. Doing laundry? Moving house? Cluttered car boot? Gardening? The FRAKTA handles it all.

The low price point combined with quality design made it inescapable. This is where the branding genius emerges. A truly successful trojan horse reifies your brand ethos.

The FRAKTA is a perfect embodied example of IKEA’s ideals. It’s convenient, multi-purpose, reusable, cheap. The iconic blue serves as a constant subliminal reminder, but it also solidifies the entanglement of these concepts with IKEA itself.

The Red Bulletin: Brand as Lifestyle

It’s only fitting to include Red Bull's lifestyle magazine the Red Bulletin on our list of trojan horse branding, given that the Austrian energy drink brand have been one of the most successful branding stories of the past half century century.

Red Bull’s success lays in the fact that from a initial core product offering of just energy drinks, they’ve expanded the brand to encompass an entire lifestyle.

From their football teams in Leipzig, Salzburg, New York and beyond to their Formula 1 racing team, Red Bull have mastered the art of breaking into industries that have existing audiences and leveraging those industries to get the Red Bull brand infront of more people.

All of Red Bull’s many endeavours from their aforementioned sports plays to sponsoring Felix Baumgartner’s famous jump from space, take on physical form as the trojan horse of the Red Bulletin.

Red Bull is vertically integrating by making a trojan horse product which capitalizes on the interest they have already generated via their other marketing endeavours. If you want the inside track on Red Bull Racing, Red Bull Leipzig’s Bundesliga efforts or anything else going on in the extended Red Bull universe? That’s where the Red Bulletin comes in. But beyond being simply an advertising leaflet with extra steps, the Red Bulletin provides value in and of itself by prioritising high level reporting and writing by professional journalists, not just copywriters as well as incorporating stories and coverage outside of the Red Bull system.

The Blueprint: How to Create Your Own Trojan Horse

1. Strategic Alignment: Make It Bespoke to Your Brand.

Before making a brand trojan horse, you need a clear understanding of the concepts you want to associate with your brand.

Consider maybe the most current example: Spotify’s annual wrapped campaign. How many brands have tried to copy this concept and had it fall flat? So much so that the idea of every brand having a ‘wrapped’ was recently parodied on SNL.

Wrapped succeeds for Spotify because it matches their values. It leverages data analytics to showcase that Spotify represents a tech-forward and modern way to interact with recorded music, and it leverages virality because music is deeply tied to identity and sharing among peers.

2. Visual Dominance: Make It Conspicuous.

Make the trojan horse impossible to ignore. The IKEA bag is bright primary blue. Wrapped is inherently viral and shareable. The rhode phone case is designed to be on your person and in photos. These items are highly visible beyond just the immediate user, multiplying exposure for your brand.

3. Low-Friction Utility: Make Its Value Obvious.

Do I need this? Is it worth the money? These are questions you don’t want people asking about your trojan horse. The point is to lower the threshold of acquisition and use, so your brand can piggyback off it. Your product needs an immediate value proposition. It shouldn’t require much selling on its own.

In order to make it stick you want it to be not only cheap (this can be in comparison to your primary offers) but immediately practical, communicating its own value in a way that needs no explanation.

Think about the examples: carrier bags, phone cases and, before navigation apps, a drivers map. If you can identify a product category which is cheap, common and used frequently, and if you can make a distinctive version of it, you’re halfway there.

Until next week,

Jack