In this op-ed, David Coupland, co-founder and strategy director of Born Agency, argued that brands no longer reflect culture but shape it by defining what feels normal through repetition and scale. He suggested this gives brands real responsibility, as their stories and behaviours quietly train how people think, act, and understand the world.
Brands like to think of themselves as guests in culture: responsive, adaptive, downstream from any ‘real’ social forces. But that belief is increasingly outdated. Particularly in the scary world we are currently living in. In a world where institutions continue to fragment and authority dissolves, brands have inherited something far more consequential than visibility.
Through repetition, scale, and presence, they now play a major role in determining what feels normal. And once you shape normality, you shape culture. There is no escaping it.
We no longer just buy from brands anymore. We absorb them. We learn, often without noticing, what success looks like, what we should value, what progress feels like, and what kind of lives are worth aspiring to. These signals accumulate quietly. What is repeated becomes familiar. What feels familiar becomes normal. What becomes normal starts to feel inevitable.
This is no longer brand participation in culture: it’s authorship.
In large part, the industry still clings to the comforting myth that brands merely ‘reflect culture’ rather than shape it. This is a premise misunderstanding: ‘creativity is downstream, and advertising only responds’. But culture today doesn’t move through neat cause and effect. It moves through reinforcement, and through what is surfaced again and again. In the past, something felt “true” or “important” because an expert, a teacher, or a news anchor said it. Today, we decide what is important based on what we see everywhere. In our algorithmic world, amplification equals legitimacy, and brands control an extraordinary amount of amplification.
Simply put: if we see it everywhere, we believe it’s true. Because brands have the biggest microphones, they get to decide what we believe. And that’s a really big deal.
Because brands have this power to “make things feel normal,” the smartest ones have stopped acting like loud salespeople. This is why some of the most resonant brand work of recent years doesn’t feel like advertising at all. Uncommon’s Periodic Fable for The Ordinary didn’t sell products or simplify science into slogans. It offered a worldview; one where curiosity was valued, complexity was respected, and knowledge was something to be explored rather than commodified. It didn’t just communicate a brand idea; it modelled a way of seeing the world. They started architecting a new normal standard.
And this doesn’t mean brands need to moralise or pretend to be institutions. The responsibility here is not purpose (we are living in a post purpose brand world now); it’s brand self awareness. It is an awareness of where influence actually lands, what behaviour is being trained, and the stories being told simply by showing up in a certain way, again and again.
In short: You are training your audience how to act every time you post. The question is, what are you training them to do?
At its core, this isn’t a branding problem; it’s a human one. Humans don’t make sense of the world primarily through data. We do it through stories, through patterns of meaning that help us understand where we belong. Psychologists have long argued that we judge truth not only by accuracy, but by coherence—whether a story hangs together—and fidelity—whether it feels true to lived experience.
This is why brand building, in our algorithm era, cannot be reduced to aesthetics or individual campaigns. It requires a system of meaning that holds together across time. It requires an acknowledgement that what a brand says, does, and rewards should tell the same story. Think of Patagonia: they don’t just “talk” about the planet in ads; their repair services, legal activism, and internal hiring all repeat the same narrative until “environmentalism” and “Patagonia” become the same thought.
Crucially, this doesn’t mean a brand must become some somber moral arbiter. The world is heavy enough. Sometimes the most powerful story a brand can tell is one that is “fun,” light, or intentionally absurd. A brand’s narrative power can be used to make play feel normal, to make rest feel productive, or to make joy feel like a radical act. Responsible, considered awareness is the goal, not a loss of personality.
At Born, we view this not as a poetic ideal, but a practical necessity. We start with story not because it’s decorative, but because narrative is the only structure that makes meaning legible. It allows brands to act with intention rather than by accident—to understand the cultural weight of repetition and the responsibility that comes with it. A campaign ‘reflecting culture’ is a moment; a system of storytelling is gravity.
The most important question for brands in 2026 is no longer “What do we stand for?” It’s more confronting than that: “What kind of world does our presence make feel normal?” Because brands no longer just borrow culture. They inherit it. And whether they like it or not, they are the authors of the stories people end up living inside. The story of what’s normal.
