by Ber | Jun 6, 2026 | The rebelion
There’s a generation of consumers who watched brands claim to care about social justice, the environment, and mental health — and then watched those same brands do nothing. They grew up fluent in marketing language and deeply suspicious of it. That generation is now your primary growth audience. And they are not impressed.
The Trust Deficit
Gen Z’s relationship with marketing is fundamentally different from any generation before them. They’ve grown up with ad-blockers, algorithmic curation, and the full archive of brand behaviour available at a moment’s notice. They’ve seen the Twitter threads. They know the playbook. What closes the trust deficit is behaviour. Sustained, specific, verifiable behaviour that matches what you say.
What They Actually Respond To
Gen Z responds to brands that are specific, that take positions they’ll actually defend, and that can show receipts. Not “we care about the environment” — but “we switched our entire supply chain to use 40% less packaging, and here’s the data.” Not “diversity matters to us” — but “here’s our team, here’s our pay data, here’s where we still have work to do.” Specificity signals seriousness.
The Shortcut Doesn’t Exist
Trust with any generation — but especially this one — is built through consistency over time. It can’t be hacked with the right creative or bought with the right influencer. The brands that have genuine equity with Gen Z didn’t get there through a campaign. They got there by making decisions — repeatedly, publicly, at some cost — that reflected what they said they believed in.
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by Ber | Jun 6, 2026 | The rebelion
“Authentic” has become the most ironic word in marketing. It appears in brand guidelines and agency briefs everywhere — usually next to words like “genuine” and “transparent”. And almost always on brands that are none of those things. Authenticity has been repurposed from a human quality into a marketing tactic. In doing so, it’s been completely hollowed out.
What Authenticity Is Not
Authenticity is not a raw Instagram feed. It’s not behind-the-scenes content. It’s not founder stories filmed on an iPhone. All of those things can be authentic — and all of them can be deeply performative. The medium doesn’t make it real. Real authenticity is about alignment between what you believe and what you do.
The Consistency Test
The quickest way to test whether a brand is actually authentic is the consistency test: does the brand behave the same way when no one’s watching as when everyone is? Authentic brands don’t have different positions for different audiences. They don’t behave differently in their press releases than they do in their customer service interactions.
The Uncomfortable Part
Genuine authenticity often means saying no to things. No to the partnership that pays well but doesn’t fit the values. No to the growth tactic that works but undermines trust. Most brands can’t do that. Because most brands don’t actually believe in anything strongly enough to turn down money for it. The ones that do? Those are the brands people talk about.
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by Ber | Jun 6, 2026 | The rebelion
Media spend and cultural impact are not the same thing. You can drop seven figures on a campaign and generate zero conversation. And you can do something creative and precise for a fraction of that — and have people talking about it for months. The brands that punch above their weight all understand this. Presence isn’t about volume — it’s about relevance.
Be Specific Instead of Broad
Mass marketing is expensive because it has to be. When you’re talking to everyone, you need to buy your way into enough reach to matter. When you’re talking to a specific, well-defined group of people, you can get there for far less — and land harder when you do. When people feel personally addressed, they share. That sharing is worth more than any media buy.
Make Something Genuinely Worth Talking About
The most shared marketing content in the last decade wasn’t the work with the biggest budgets. It was the work that did or said something surprising. That moment of surprise is achievable on almost any budget. The question isn’t “how do we make this look expensive?” It’s “what’s the single most interesting thing we could say or do right now?”
Consistency Over Reach
One of the biggest mistakes challenger brands make is trying to be everywhere at once. The smarter play is to own one channel first. Build genuine community in one place. Become the brand that everyone in your tribe follows for a particular reason. Depth beats breadth when you’re small.
We put this on a shirt
Meet the Spreadsheet Sloth Tee: for everyone whose creative work happens inside a grid. It has been our most quietly popular design.
by Ber | Jun 6, 2026 | The rebelion
There is a very specific kind of creative paralysis that happens when a client sends over a deck of 47 images pulled from Pinterest. They’re all beautiful. They’re all consistent. And they’re all from someone else’s campaign. Welcome to mood board culture — where the reference has replaced the thought.
When Inspiration Becomes Imitation
A good mood board is a stimulus for creative thinking, not a destination. It says: this is the emotional territory we want to occupy. Somewhere along the way the mood board became a contract instead of a conversation. Clients use them to show exactly what they want. Creatives use them to de-risk their ideas. The result is a market full of brands that look like knockoffs of whatever was interesting two years ago.
The Pinterest Problem
Pinterest and Instagram have done something strange to creative culture. They’ve made it easier than ever to find beautiful references — and in doing so, they’ve made it harder to develop genuine original vision. When everything is just a scroll away, the temptation is to show rather than think.
How to Write a Brief That Actually Inspires
The antidote to mood board laziness isn’t banning images — it’s writing better briefs. Briefs that describe what you want to achieve emotionally and strategically, without prescribing what it looks like visually. A brief that says “we want people to feel like they’re being let in on a secret” opens more creative doors than a mood board of dark backgrounds and serif fonts. Mood boards aren’t the enemy. Mood boards that become the ceiling of creative ambition are.
The shirt version of this article
We printed the sentiment: Fuck The Brief tee, the one that says it out loud.
by Ber | Jun 6, 2026 | The rebelion
Open ten brand websites in your industry. Read only the hero line on each one. Now cover the logos and try to work out which sentence belongs to which company. If you cannot do it — and you almost certainly cannot — you have just run the cheapest brand audit in existence, and your own site probably failed it too.
This is the great brand homogenisation crisis. Not a shortage of budget, or talent, or tools. A shortage of nerve.
The Sameness Test: five questions, ninety seconds
Before you rewrite anything, find out how bad it is. Take your homepage hero copy, your About page opening paragraph, and your most recent LinkedIn post. Score one point for every “yes”.
- Could a direct competitor publish this sentence tomorrow with no edits?
- Does it contain a word you would never say out loud to a friend? (“Leverage”, “solutions”, “seamless”, “bespoke”, “innovative”.)
- Does it describe a feeling rather than a thing? (“Empowering”, “inspiring”, “transforming” — with nothing after the verb you can actually picture.)
- Would anyone in your category publicly disagree with it? If nobody could argue, you have not said anything.
- Was it written to avoid being wrong rather than to be right? You know the answer to this one.
0–1: you have a voice. Protect it from the next round of feedback.
2–3: you have a house style. Not the same thing.
4–5: your copy is a beige template that happens to have your logo on it.
Cause one: the brief is the problem
Bad brand copy almost never starts in the copy. It starts in the brief. When you ask a creative team to “position us as leaders in the space”, you have asked them to write a sentence that ten thousand companies have already written. They will deliver it. It will be on strategy. It will be invisible.
The brief has to start somewhere more uncomfortable: what is the one true thing about our category that everyone knows and nobody says out loud?
The best brands say the thing. The gym that admits training is not fun, it is just worth it. The bank that admits most financial products are confusing on purpose. The software company that admits migration will hurt for six weeks. Say the thing and people lean in, because you have just proved you are a human organisation rather than a content machine. If your briefs never get anywhere near this, the problem is upstream of your writers — see The Death of the Mood Board.
Cause two: every approval round sands off an edge
The second reason everything sounds the same is arithmetic. A line goes to legal, then to the founder, then to the person who “just has one small thought”. None of them are trying to make it worse. Each is optimising for not getting it wrong. Not-getting-it-wrong is a filter that removes specificity first, because specificity is the only part of a sentence that can be challenged.
Run six rounds of that filter and you arrive, inevitably, at “Your trusted partner for growth”. Nobody chose it. It is simply what is left when everything that could be objected to has been removed.
The fix is procedural, not creative: decide before the round who is the decision-maker on voice, and make everyone else an adviser. Feedback that cannot be overruled is not feedback, it is co-authorship by committee.
The discomfort list
Here is the exercise we actually run. Take twenty minutes and write down ten things about your industry that are genuinely annoying, broken, overpriced or quietly dishonest. Not competitor-bashing — structural truths. The things clients complain about to each other in the taxi afterwards.
Then mark each one: can we say this publicly and survive? Usually three or four survive. Those three or four are your differentiation territory. Your brand voice lives exactly at the intersection of what is true about your category and what only you have the nerve to say about it.
Everything above that line is bravado. Everything below it is beige.
Swap table: what to write instead
Our own list of the phrases we see most often, and the question that replaces each one. The replacement is never a better adjective. It is always a fact.
| Instead of this |
Answer this question |
| We help businesses grow |
Grow what, from what, in how long? |
| Your trusted partner |
Trusted by whom, and what happens when it goes wrong? |
| Innovative solutions |
What did you build that did not exist before? |
| Passionate about our craft |
What do you refuse to do, even for money? |
| Bespoke, tailored approach |
What is the first thing you change for every client? |
| End-to-end service |
Where does your work actually start and stop? |
| Data-driven decisions |
Which number do you look at first on a Monday? |
| Award-winning team |
Which piece of work are you still proud of two years later? |
| We put customers first |
Name a time you lost money to keep a promise. |
| Seamless experience |
Which step used to be painful, and what did you remove? |
| Empowering brands to succeed |
What can a client do after working with you that they could not before? |
| Leaders in the industry |
What do you do that the other three would not risk? |
None of the right-hand answers will sound like a competitor, because facts are not interchangeable and adjectives are.
How to know it worked
Three signals, in order of reliability. First: someone internally is slightly nervous about the line. Mild fear is the correct physiological response to a real position. Second: a competitor could not lift it. Third — and this is the one that matters commercially — the wrong prospects start disqualifying themselves earlier, because a voice that says something also says who it is not for.
If your new copy makes everyone comfortable and nobody self-selects out, you have not fixed the problem. You have rewritten it in a nicer font. On which note, our related reading: how to write copy that sounds like a human wrote it, what “authentic” actually means, and why most rebrands fail.
Frequently asked
Is a distinctive voice risky for a B2B brand with a long sales cycle?
Less risky than being unmemorable across a nine-month cycle. In long cycles the buyer meets your copy many times; sameness is what makes those repeat exposures worthless.
Do we need a full rebrand to fix this?
Usually not. Voice is a writing and governance problem far more often than an identity problem. Fix the brief and the approval chain first; if it still sounds like everyone else after that, then look at the wider identity.
What if legal removes everything interesting?
Bring legal the discomfort list before the copy, not after. Objections to a claim are negotiable at the idea stage and non-negotiable once it is a headline in a design.
Can AI writing tools solve this?
They will happily produce fluent category-average copy, which is precisely the disease. A model trained on everything written so far is structurally biased toward the middle. The uncomfortable truth about your category is not in the training data — it is in your discomfort list.
Your brand voice already exists. It sits somewhere between what you actually think about your industry and what you have so far been afraid to publish. The work is not inventing it. The work is not deleting it.
