The brand has traditionally been a monolithic thing. Its roots are straightforward—brands were literally just a permanent sear, or brand mark, impressed onto livestock. The marks weren’t just decoration—they meant something, an implicit statement about ownership. “This is my cow.” In other words, these marks became a concept that carried meaning. For a brand, “meaning” has become a very powerful thing. And with time, the meaning a brand can take on has become far more complex, more nuanced, and infinitely varied. Over centuries we’ve moved from brand as an inherent mark of ownership to brand as a complex concept that can shape our very understanding of the the world.

Many people feel like they’re living in an always-evolving state of in-between-ness—like the ground itself feels a bit wobbly. In fact, we are living in a period of persistent reorientation with the world brought on by constant change and cultural acceleration. What’s behind this quickening? The internet. Digital-everything. A collapse of distances. An ability to see new ways to live and be always scrolling past on the screen in front of you. It may be hard to understand and follow, but it’s easy to feel.

This cultural soup has created an immense desire for change and newness—an aspiration to continually live in a new way, and explore what it means to be human. And with that has arrived a desire to not be pinned down as one thing or another. As people, we acknowledge there could always be something better out there.

Today, we value a breadth of life’s experiences—picking and choosing the elements that we find attractive and exploring their depths, occupying many thoughts and traits at once—rather than selecting from a set of pre-determined and tidily shaped identity packs that we can buy into.

Whereas once we may have aspired to own a brand because it captured who we were, today we know that the way we construct ourselves is more nuanced and self-determined. Today, a static brand can actually feel like a stiflingly limiting thing—something you might avoid because it defines you too narrowly or inaccurately. Flaunting a brand still says a lot about you, for better or worse. There are brands with rich meaning and varied expressions that match the way that we think about ourselves. And there are brands that are stuck in a rigid and outmoded place—brands that try too hard to capture who they think you want to be.

Fluidity has become the defining trait of our time.

A new generation is native to this pace—people who are more sensitive and savvy to the meanings behind the things that they choose to let into their lives. We’ve entered an age where the value of constant newness is far more important than the idea of consistency.

Fluidity has become the defining trait of our time. But what does fluidity actually mean? And what does a fluid brand look like? We know Gen Z hates brands, despises advertising, and sees through anything that’s trying to influence them. Traditional brand loyalty is a bore. Inertia is best avoided. And brands, by their very historical definition, have been built upon rigid, fixed notions of themselves: upon being recognizable as a static mark of ownership.

So we asked ourselves: in this era of always-faster, always-more, always-new, what’s fixed about a brand? And what’s fluid? And how do you best create a brand identity in an era of identity nomads?

First, a note for anyone who doesn’t know us: we don’t see brand identity as a tidy exterior wrapping. A brand is made up of everything you believe, everything you do, and every action you take. That means branding is a holistic exercise, one where every decision you make is a creative decision that reinforces or expands your meaning. Your product, services and aesthetics are a manifestation of your values and beliefs.

In order to thrive and serve, brands must evolve and invent at a pace faster than culture. And consistently show people a new and better way to live.

How do you create brand identity in an era of identity nomads?

Convictions at the Core

If brands have to evolve faster than ever, and more fluidly, what about it is fixed, keeping its axis in place and locked from spinning out of control? We believe the center of a brand is a conviction. A conviction begins with a question a brand is asking:

• Nike: What are humans physically capable of?
• Apple: How creative can people be?
• Facebook: How connected can we be?
• Tesla: How can we better power humanity?

These questions beg for a quest, if you like—an exploration. They’re inherently rooted in cultural or social issues. They take a broad approach, with their focus on the betterment of people.

We believe the center of a brand is a conviction.

Convictions ensure a brand is always in pursuit of something. That you’re on a mission to create a better version of yourself, day after day. And if you’re not improving and experimenting against your conviction, you’re waning. This is why creativity is so essentially a part of the center of a brand—not just an aspect of its external aesthetic expression. It’s the very lifeblood of ongoing existence and expansion.

When you start with a big question, you can arrive at any number of different big answers—a plethora of possibilities to help people pursue a life that’s markedly new, and hopefully better.

We’re also seeing the inverse—brand marks becoming simplified to serve as a platform for continued aesthetic shifting. Look at the evolution in high-end lifestyle brand marks over the past year—they are knowingly using their mark as a staple element, a consistent, efficient and pared-back stamp on a product or brand expression that is inherently more cohesive. This pared-back minimalism has occasionally caused some controversy, but it’s in the name of ultimately being more flexible and fluid. The thinking is that the mark itself can’t carry too many of its own visual connotations when the rest of the brand expression is constantly changing.

There are also brands or entities that are dropping aesthetic consistency altogether—mostly now in the art and music spaces—and instead depending on the savviness of their fans to connect the dots for themselves. An artist doesn’t need a consistent visual brand when it’s creativity their audience is seeking. Variation is a gift to their fans—it represents the exploration of new ideas in the style only the artist can achieve. And if we think about brands in this context, as part of the expanding cultural soup we find ourselves in—they feel stodgy and fixed.

We think we’re only seeing the beginning of aesthetic variation. In the future, too many rigid elements may carry negative side effects. We’re only beginning to see the ways we can represent new ideas visually.

Fluid Futures and You

If fluidity in culture means a constant demand for material and aesthetic newness—what does it mean for your brand? We’ve been working with some of the world’s most pioneering companies on this very question. We think there are two core considerations that come out of this shift—how do you structure a company to incentivize and operationalize variation?

And how do you size up and understand an audience that’s always shape-shifting?

In this first issue of Athena, we explore both. And much more.