The new folklore
In June 2026, the CMO of one of the world’s largest advertisers, Unilever, delivered a keynote at Cannes and said his company had “stopped asking what our brands want to say” and started asking “who would care enough to carry it.”
That one sentence sums up where the marketing world finds itself today as well as anything I’ve read. “A brand is what people say when you’re not in the room,” the old saying goes. It’s always been true. This is folklore. A story passed from mouth to mouth, changed a little by each teller, and (importantly) owned by no one. Cinderella, for example, has countless variations across time and cultures, but we all recognize it when we hear it. Brands work the same way.
Historically, brands would heavily contribute to their own folklore by authoring stories and sending them into the world. But now, the balance has tipped. We don’t control our brand’s stories anywhere near as much as others do. Today, a brand is far less what it says about itself, and far more about what a wide ecosystem of third parties, both human and non-human, can find, trust, rank, recommend, and sell.
Lots of people are already talking about this issue, not only Unilever. Almost all of the conversation, though, has been about identifying and naming the problem. It goes something like this: A brand is a shortcut for meaning in our minds, but how do we keep that meaning coherent and effective when we aren’t the ones making it any more?