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Wendy's starting roasting customers back in 2017 was a breach of protocol. A brand that size replying like a person genuinely confused people. That confusion was the value. It took a few years for every fast-food chain, airline, and snack brand to adopt the same register.

Nutter Butter posts distorted, chaotic TikToks with no product logic. Dunkin' builds a flirtatious spider character. Netflix captions its Instagram posts with meme templates any brand could use. Different companies, different categories, identical behaviour. Sprout Social's Q2 2025 Pulse Survey found that only 23% of consumers consider unhinged brands "bold" — while 50% said the boldest brands are simply the most honest ones. Rachel Karten, who consults on brand social strategy, put the problem plainly: go to the comment section of any viral post and all the brands commenting sound exactly the same. Personality became a style guide item, not a strategic position. Even Apple — a company that until recently barely acknowledged social media existed — launched the MacBook Neo with absurdist TikToks so chaotic that commenters asked if the account had been hacked. When the most controlled brand on earth starts posting lemons receiving FaceTime calls, the format has fully standardised.

Ryanair is a case worth separating from the rest. 2.7 million TikTok followers built on self-deprecating humour about the very things customers complain about — cramped seats, hidden fees, the bare minimum. The personality works precisely because it doesn't pretend the product is something it isn't. That's not unhinged branding; it's radical coherence with a low-cost proposition. The difference between Ryanair and Nutter Butter is that Ryanair's tone is tethered to a product truth. When it isn't, personality is just decoration.

The counter-examples sit in a different category entirely. Costco has kept its hot dog combo at $1.50 since 1985, barely advertises, and charges you a membership fee just to shop there — Gen Z and Millennial sales are up 12% year-on-year, and young shoppers are pooling memberships and bulk-buying in groups just to get access. Decathlon is the world's largest sports retailer with no celebrity endorsements and near-zero marketing spend — it sells a hiking backpack with a 10-year warranty for the price of a cocktail, and lets that do the talking. Monzo passed 15 million customers in 2026, with two-thirds of sign-ups coming from word of mouth — no campaign, no character, just instant spending notifications that most high-street banks still can't match. None of these brands have a social media personality worth mentioning. All of them have a product behaviour worth copying — which, as it turns out, is harder.

For decades, consumer confidence was a reasonable proxy for what people would do with their money. When they felt bad, they spent less. That relationship has now broken, and the break looks permanent.

The finding sitting underneath the headline is the sharper one. It isn't just that pessimistic people keep spending — it's that they've developed a new internal arithmetic for doing so. Cross-category trade-downs are becoming standard behaviour: more than one-third of consumers surveyed say they've traded down in one category while planning to splurge in another. The more striking figure is that 19 percent plan to cut back on a non-discretionary category — groceries, utilities, essentials — specifically to fund something more discretionary. The consumer who skips the branded pasta to pay for a weekend away isn't irrational; they've just decided that value lives somewhere else this week, and somewhere different next week.

This has a consequence that the data only hints at. When consumers stop browsing and start executing — buying to a mental list, trading down with surgical precision, splurging on exactly the things that matter to them — the old model of brand loyalty via shelf presence starts to erode. Being widely distributed is no longer enough if you're not already in the consumer's head before they open the app. The competition isn't the brand next to you on the shelf; it's the decision made three categories away.

The Gen Z data adds one more wrinkle. Half of US Gen Z consumers say they couldn't sustain their current lifestyle for more than a month on savings, yet they remain the generation most willing to splurge and take on debt to do it. The financial insecurity isn't moderating the spending; it may be accelerating it. Delayed gratification requires a stable future to delay toward, and that future doesn't feel particularly stable right now.

The slogan has been running for 54 years. The woman who wrote it is only now getting a documentary. That gap is the whole story, and to the film's credit, it doesn't flinch from it. Specht didn't write "Because I'm Worth It" as a brand strategy — she wrote it because she was angry at a roomful of men who thought the ad should show a woman standing near an open window with the curtains blowing. The line was an act of irritation, not inspiration.

But irritation needs a platform. Specht struck a nerve, and L'Oréal's reach is what let it travel — across countries, decades, generations of women who recognised something in four words that most campaigns can't achieve in forty. The line and the brand are not separable. Without L'Oréal, it stays in the room.

"Because I'm Worth It" keeps working not through repetition but through relevance — each new generation finds the line and makes it their own, because the feeling it names remains unresolved. Specht's irritation turned out to have a longer half-life than most strategies. The documentary L'Oréal commissioned to tell that story is, of course, also a campaign — which doesn't make the story less true. It just means the line is still working, fifty-four years later, in formats that didn't exist when Specht wrote it.

The most revealing line comes from the CEO: "There's not really anything incredibly different about our product… it's all just brand differences and packaging differences, and that's why people buy things." A founder who says the quiet part out loud is either very confident or very tired of pretending otherwise.

The actual strategic move was less punk rock than it sounds. Liquid Death found a gap in the aesthetic of the category — premium water occupied by alpine purity etc., with nothing serving the person who finds that kind of aspiration suck. The skull cans aren't a rebellion against the water industry; they're a very deliberate pitch to a demographic that premium brands had left on the shelf. Counterculture, in this case, is a positioning decision.

The distribution play is where it gets less romantic. Getting into Live Nation venues early, targeting bars over retail — these weren't punk instincts, they were placement decisions made precisely because cans would be photographed and shared. The organic virality wasn't accidental; it was engineered to look accidental, which is a perfectly respectable strategy.

At over 100,000 retail locations, selling watches and t-shirts to fans who never needed convincing, Liquid Death has built something most beverage brands never do — a brand people actually want to be associated with. The question is whether the spirit of rebellion scales.

Every generation before millennials treated iced coffee the way they treated rosé — a warm-weather concession, not a lifestyle. Millennials started loosening that logic. Gen Z dropped it entirely. Dunkin' reports cold drinks now represent two-thirds of total beverage sales; at Dutch Bros, it's 90%. Ten degrees outside, snow falling, cold brew in hand. The weather became irrelevant.

Clear plastic cups photograph. Foam can be dyed green. Caramel ribbons and glitter suspensions require a cold, still liquid to exist as designed. The drink didn't just appeal to younger consumers aesthetically — it was engineered, product by product, to perform on a phone screen. Hot coffee poured into a ceramic mug produces a thin curl of steam. Not much to work with. The other drink has a Wicked collaboration.

Iced coffee is, functionally, what happened when America tried to turn coffee into a soft drink. Ready-to-drink cold coffee consumption rose in the U.S. well above the global rate. The parallel with energy drinks isn't incidental. It's the same pitch: caffeine, customisable sweetness, format designed for mobility. Starbucks is no longer competing with Italian espresso culture. It's competing with Mountain Dew.

Europe's slower adoption gets attributed to climate, but the more precise explanation is that Europe already has a coffee identity to protect. So do Turkey and Brazil. None of them are especially eager to swap it for a cup with a dome lid and three pumps of vanilla syrup. America never had that anchor. Its coffee culture was more permissive. So far.