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.” Here’s his talk.

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?

We used to be able to control a lot of the brand’s ecosystem. We could pay for a thirty-second spot, better shelf placement, and a mention in a top-tier magazine. We staged the launch and approved all the outputs. We held that control-everything stance even as production got cheaper and sped up. The discipline for putting guardrails on all of those brand touchpoints was called comms planning, or engagement planning.

Now that world has changed and we cannot control the great majority of our brand’s meaning-making. A reviewer writes a pointed post on Reddit or Substack. An AI agent turns it into three sentences a shopper reads instead of your site. A creator turns your brand into a routine, or a joke, or just the latest “can’t miss” hook. A fleet of them spams those hooks at their followers, racing each other to the best ROI. A retailer turns the brand into shelf position or sponsored search. A marketplace turns it into a thumbnail, a review count, and a rank.

This is a real problem and I’m here for it. But the more interesting question is what we do next.

The reflex is to make more stuff. More is more. Something will hit and we’ll just amplify that. If done well, that’s not wrong, but there is fallout. Meanings multiply and contradict. The brand turns to mush.

“Because we do mass volume, there’s no way this can’t work.”
— some dude in a sponsored post on my FYP, selling access to a TikTok creator pool, July 2026

How do we build brands to be better equipped for this environment? A well-equipped brand, when it is “carried” (to use Unilever’s word), or “retold” (to use mine), gets stronger through retelling. And it does so in a consistent way, with lots of people, over time.

I think the answer lies in better upstream conditions or incentive design.

The old way is executional control, where we carefully shape every output, one at a time. But we cannot possibly approve every Reddit thread, every comparison article, every creator riff, every AI answer. Tighter guidelines just can’t scale across all of that. That lever is disappearing.

Instead, imagine a discipline that lives upstream of the go-to-market plan. This discipline is responsible for designing the conditions and incentives that make good outputs more likely: The codes, claims, participation hooks, incentives, and feedback loops that let a myriad of outside actors, both human and non-human, produce something recognizable without approving every single thing. This discipline probably shouldn’t even be called comms planning any more.

We are still after the same end goal, namely a strong brand that is able to build those consistent memory structures that drive buying decisions. But we are building the conditions for it, not building the touchpoints themselves.

Letting go of control of the brand is difficult. It means letting others play around with the brand in their own way, for their own reasons, and using their own words.

What’s more, it’s difficult to design the conditions and incentives to make good outcomes more likely, because the thinking has to happen up front. Get the inputs wrong and the ecosystem compounds the error at a scale that the brand police cannot possibly catch up to.

Brand meaning will be made whether the brand participates or not. If it doesn’t participate, the brand doesn’t fade to nothing. It just slow-drifts until it means something else entirely.

I have theories about how to do it, and have started using them for my clients. But no one has the exact right answer yet. We all need to explore and experiment more. My first public experiment is the Retellability Test. It tries to measure whether a given brand is built to be retold (Brand Readiness), and whether others are actually retelling it accurately and favorably (Brand Rendering).

The Unilever CMO says brands should be fires, and creators are the people who carry them. It’s a good metaphor, but not a new one. Folklore has always worked this way. The best stories have always survived because they got retold, not because anyone owned them.

So the part I care about, and the part not enough people are talking about, is how you build a fire worth retelling in the first place. What’s that fire made of? Why do some fires catch but most go out? Which brands are doing it well already?

We should be able to build brands strong enough to stay themselves, no matter who’s telling their story. And I believe, if we build them well, the retelling will make them stronger.