Brand as a mosaic

I’ve been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn lately and have noticed a trend: everyone’s looking for storytellers. Sounds cool, but in reality, that title hides a role that combines a marketing manager, an social media manager, and an analyst all in one.

These posts all say that storytelling is now the key to building a modern brand. And that it’s well-crafted, complex narratives that make brands popular.

But I’m not so sure about that. We are not living in the TV era, when you could release a great 90-second ad and build a whole arc for a brand. We live in a TikTok world, where a 10-second clip featuring Sydney Sweeney sits right next to a landslide in Bangladesh, which sits next to an anime compilation, which sits next to a cringe reel from some old classmate.

In conditions like these, a brand has no time to build a story. The goal is more about creating a vibe association. Cozy home = IKEA, fast car = Porsche, design and productivity = Apple.

Building a brand as a story right now means building a linear narrative for a non-linear environment. Not very productive.

In my view, it’s far more important to think of a brand as a mosaic, where every fragmented element has to work on its own, be immediately clear to someone seeing it for the first time — and still add up to one coherent whole.