por Ber | Jun 5, 2026 | The rebelion
Cada año, alguien declara que el contenido ha muerto. Cada año, los que producen buen contenido siguen creciendo. La contradicción es aparente: lo que ha muerto es el contenido malo producido en cantidad industrial. El contenido que tiene algo que decir sigue siendo la inversión de marketing con mejor retorno a largo plazo.
Pero “produce buen contenido” es un consejo tan útil como “gana más dinero.” Vamos a ser más específicos.
Lo Que Ya No Funciona
El artículo de 2.000 palabras optimizado para SEO sobre un tema genérico. “10 estrategias de marketing digital para 2025.” “Cómo mejorar tu tasa de apertura de email.” Estos contenidos existían para rankear en Google y capturar tráfico de búsqueda genérico. Con la llegada del SGE (Search Generative Experience) de Google, ese tráfico está desapareciendo. Si tu estrategia de contenidos dependía de este tipo de piezas, tienes un problema estructural que resolver en 2025.
El newsletter que es básicamente un resumen de noticias del sector. ¿Para qué suscribirse a tu versión cuando LinkedIn ya hace eso gratis? Los newsletters que crecen en 2025 tienen perspectiva editorial, no solo curación.
El contenido de video corto sin punto de vista propio. Copiar el formato de tendencia sin tener nada propio que decir produce contenido que el algoritmo puede distribuir pero que nadie recuerda.
Lo Que Sigue Funcionando
El análisis profundo que nadie más en tu sector ha hecho. Datos propios, opinión experta, perspectiva contraintuitiva. Esto es difícil de producir, lo que significa que hay menos competencia y más valor percibido.
El contenido que documenta en lugar de declarar. “Así construimos este proyecto” es más interesante que “así deberías construir este tipo de proyecto.” La primera persona y la especificidad son escasas. Úsalas.
Las opiniones que incomodan un poco. No la provocación fabricada, sino la perspectiva genuinamente distinta a lo que dice el consenso del sector. La gente comparte cosas con las que está de acuerdo y cosas con las que está en desacuerdo. Lo que no comparten es lo que les resulta indiferente.
Lo Que Nunca Funcionó (Y Todavía Se Hace)
El contenido producido para demostrar que estás produciendo contenido. El informe anual del sector que nadie lee. El caso de éxito que parece un comunicado de prensa. El whitepaper de 40 páginas diseñado para parecer intelectualmente riguroso.
Este tipo de contenido existe para justificar presupuestos y para tener algo que mostrar en los informes trimestrales. No existe para los lectores. Y los lectores lo saben.
La Pregunta Correcta
Antes de producir cualquier pieza de contenido, la pregunta no es “¿qué va a rankear bien?” ni “¿qué formato está funcionando ahora mismo?”
La pregunta es: ¿por qué alguien que tiene opciones infinitas de qué leer va a elegir leer esto?
Si tienes una respuesta clara, tienes una pieza de contenido. Si no la tienes, tienes ruido con presupuesto.
por Ber | Jun 5, 2026 | The rebelion
Hay una prueba sencilla para saber si tu marca tiene una voz real o simplemente un manual de estilo con fuentes bonitas: cubre el logo y lee el copy. ¿Podrías saber de qué marca es? ¿O podría ser cualquier empresa del sector?
Si dudaste, tienes un problema. Y no es un problema de diseño.
El Problema No Es el Briefing, Es la Cobardía
La mayoría de las marcas suenan igual no porque tengan equipos de marketing mediocres, sino porque tienen miedo. Miedo a polarizar. Miedo a no gustarle a alguien. Miedo a que el director general llame a las diez de la noche para preguntar qué fue eso que publicaron.
Ese miedo produce lo que podríamos llamar comunicación de seguridad: mensajes diseñados para no ofender a nadie, que como resultado no inspiran a nadie.
La ironía es que jugar sobre seguro es, de hecho, la estrategia más arriesgada disponible. Las marcas que no dicen nada memorable no son recordadas. Y las marcas que no son recordadas no son elegidas.
Una Voz de Marca No Es un Tono, Es una Perspectiva
Los libros de estilo de marca confunden constantemente tono con voz. “Cercano pero profesional. Claro pero aspiracional. Moderno pero atemporal.” Eso no es una voz. Es una lista de adjetivos que ningún ser humano usa al hablar.
Una voz real emerge de tener una perspectiva específica sobre algo. ¿Qué crees sobre cómo debería funcionar tu industria? ¿Qué te parece mal de cómo se hacen las cosas normalmente? ¿Qué defiendes con suficiente convicción como para decirlo en público aunque algún competidor se enfade?
Esas respuestas son el origen de una voz de marca. Todo lo demás es formato.
El Ejercicio de la Provocación Controlada
Cuando trabajamos con una marca nueva, hacemos un ejercicio que llamamos la provocación controlada. Pedimos al equipo fundador que complete esta frase: “En este sector, todo el mundo dice que [X], pero nosotros creemos que [Y].”
No tiene que ser controversial. Tiene que ser verdad y tiene que ser específico. “En el sector financiero, todo el mundo dice que invertir es complicado, pero nosotros creemos que la complicación es un producto que venden quienes cobran por simplificarla.”
Eso es una voz. Eso es algo que recordarías. Y eso es algo que alguien en tu mercado objetivo va a querer compartir.
La Diferencia Entre Provocar y Molestar
Una marca con voz propia no necesita ser ruidosa. No necesita polémicas fabricadas ni controversias de Twitter que duran 48 horas y luego requieren un comunicado de disculpa.
Lo que necesita es coherencia radical. Decir lo que piensa en cada punto de contacto, con la misma convicción, sin suavizarlo cada vez que entra en sala a un cliente corporativo grande.
Las marcas que respetamos no son necesariamente las más atrevidas. Son las más consistentes en ser exactamente lo que dicen ser.
La pregunta no es si tu marca se atreve a tener opiniones. La pregunta es si las tienes. Si la respuesta es sí, empieza a decirlas en voz alta. Si la respuesta es no, tenemos trabajo que hacer.
por Ber | Jun 5, 2026 | The rebelion
The brands winning on social in 2025 are not the ones posting most consistently. They’re not the ones with the best production values. They’re not even the ones with the biggest budgets.
They’re the ones that have something to say.
This sounds obvious. It’s actually quite radical, because most social media strategies — including most of the ones we’ve been asked to audit over the past year — are built around content rather than communication.
Content vs. Communication
Content is what you produce to fill a calendar. Communication is what you put into the world because you have something worth saying.
Most brands are excellent at content. Three posts a week, mix of formats, engagement hooks in the first line, call to action in every caption. The content strategy is solid. The analytics dashboard is green. The engagement rate is… technically fine.
But nobody is sharing it. Nobody is quoting it. Nobody is coming back specifically to see what you’ll say next. Because content without a point of view is just noise with a logo on it.
What a Point of View Actually Looks Like
A point of view is not “we believe in quality.” It’s not “our customers are at the heart of everything we do.” Those are placeholders for a point of view.
A real point of view is specific, arguable, and occasionally makes your PR team uncomfortable.
Patagonia’s point of view: the outdoor industry is complicit in destroying the environment it profits from, and we’re going to say so publicly. Arguable? Absolutely. Effective? Their brand value grew through every controversy.
Liquid Death’s point of view: health brands are unbearably smug, and water doesn’t have to be yoga-adjacent. Specific? Very. It built a $700M brand selling water in cans.
The Algorithm Is Not Your Problem
We hear this constantly: “Our reach is down because of the algorithm.” Sometimes that’s true. But more often, reach is down because the content isn’t compelling enough to make people stop scrolling.
The algorithm rewards content that gets shared, saved, and commented on. Content gets shared when it makes people feel something — seen, vindicated, challenged, amused. Content gets saved when it’s genuinely useful or insightful. Content gets commented on when it says something worth responding to.
All of those things require having a point of view.
How We Build Social Strategy at No Briefs Club
We start by finding three to five things the brand actually believes that are specific, a little provocative, and not said by anyone else in the category. Not manufactured beliefs. Real ones.
Then we build a content system that expresses those beliefs in different formats, at different levels of intensity, across a consistent cadence. Some posts are long-form arguments. Some are observations. Some are direct provocations. Some are just funny.
The throughline is always the same: this is what we think, said clearly, without apology.
That’s the strategy. Everything else — the formats, the cadence, the production quality — is just delivery.
If your social media feels like it’s getting louder but reaching further, stop posting more content. Start having more opinions.
por Ber | Jun 5, 2026 | The rebelion
Most challenger brand strategies are built on one of two mistakes: either they try to out-shout the category leader with a bigger budget they don’t have, or they shrink into a niche so narrow that growth becomes structurally impossible.
There’s a third way. It’s less comfortable, more opinionated, and considerably more effective.
What a Challenger Brand Actually Is
The term gets misused constantly. Challenger brand doesn’t mean startup. It doesn’t mean scrappy. It doesn’t mean David vs Goliath marketing with an underdog narrative bolted on.
A challenger brand is a brand that has decided to compete on a different plane than the category leader. Not on budget, not on distribution, not on product feature parity. On meaning.
Oatly didn’t challenge dairy by making better milk. They challenged dairy by making dairy companies look absurd. Dollar Shave Club didn’t challenge Gillette on blade technology. They challenged Gillette on the way men relate to grooming rituals.
The challenger move is always a reframe. Change what the category is about, and you change who wins.
The Opinionated Brand Advantage
Category leaders have a structural disadvantage that challengers almost never exploit: they can’t afford to alienate anyone. When you have 60% market share, every strong opinion costs you customers.
Challengers have no such constraint. You can be specific. You can be weird. You can say things that half the market disagrees with, because the half that agrees with you will love you for it.
Strong opinions about how things should be done — said out loud, in public, in the work — are the most underutilised asset in marketing. Not provocative for provocation’s sake. But genuinely specific about what you believe and why.
The Execution Gap
Most challenger brands die in the execution gap. The brand platform is right. The strategy deck is brilliant. The creative brief is the best brief anyone has ever written. And then the campaign comes out looking like everyone else’s campaign.
Why? Because challenger thinking requires challenger making. You need creative that is willing to be uncomfortable. That treats the audience as intelligent adults. That earns attention rather than buying it.
This is harder than it sounds when you’re in a client meeting and someone says “let’s just play it a bit safer this round.”
Three Rules We Follow
1. Say the thing nobody in the category will say. Every category has uncomfortable truths that the incumbents can’t acknowledge. Find them. Say them. Clearly.
2. Make the brand behave like it believes its own positioning. If your brand says it’s different, every touchpoint has to be different. The email. The packaging. The 404 page. Consistency is not about logos. It’s about character.
3. Measure what matters, not what’s easy. Challenger brands win by building genuine preference over time. That’s harder to measure than click-through rates, and a lot more valuable.
The market always has room for a brand with real conviction. The question is whether you’re actually willing to have one.
por Ber | Jun 5, 2026 | The rebelion
There’s a specific kind of frustration that creative directors don’t talk about enough. It’s the moment you look at a campaign deck — technically impeccable, strategically sound, beautifully designed — and feel absolutely nothing.
You’ve nailed the brief. You’ve hit every platform spec. The CTA is in the right place. The brand guidelines are respected. The client approved it in round two, which is basically a miracle.
And yet. It’s hollow.
The Brief Is Not the Problem
Most brands have been trained to believe that the brief is the beginning of the creative process. Write a good brief, get good work. It’s a logical assumption. It’s also backwards.
The brief is a compression of business objectives into a creative mandate. But business objectives — increase awareness among millennials 25-34, drive 15% uplift in consideration, maintain brand consistency across all touchpoints — are not human things. Nobody has ever felt moved by a consideration metric.
Real creative work starts with a much harder question: What do we actually believe?
Not what do we want to sell. Not what problem does this product solve. What do we — as a brand, as people behind that brand — actually believe about the world?
The Optimization Trap
The last decade of performance marketing has done something subtle and devastating to brand creativity. It’s made optimization the default mode.
We A/B test headlines until we find the one that gets 3% more clicks. We shorten videos because retention data says 15 seconds outperforms 30. We run creative refresh cycles timed to audience fatigue curves. We get very, very good at making things that perform — and we gradually forget how to make things that matter.
Performance is not the enemy of creativity. But optimization without direction is. When you’re constantly optimizing toward the metric, you lose sight of the thing the metric was supposed to measure.
What Actually Moves People
Nobody shares an ad because it was well-targeted. Nobody remembers a campaign because the production values were high. Nobody becomes a brand advocate because the CTA was clear.
People share things that make them feel seen. They remember brands that stand for something specific. They become advocates when a brand says something they were already thinking but hadn’t found words for yet.
That’s the job. Not to optimize. To articulate.
The No Brief Club Way
When we start a new client engagement, we deliberately ignore the brief for the first week. Not because we’re contrarian — although that helps — but because we need to find the truth before we find the strategy.
What are the founders actually angry about in their industry? What do their best customers say when they’re not being polite? Where does the brand behave like itself when nobody is watching?
That’s where the work starts. Everything else is just execution.
If your brand is producing technically perfect content that nobody gives a damn about, the problem isn’t your team. It’s that you’ve been asking the wrong question all along.
por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | The rebelion
Crisis communications is perhaps the only discipline in marketing where the correct action most of the time is to communicate less, not more, and where the instincts that make someone good at promotional communication tend to make them terrible at damage control. The brand manager who is excellent at crafting engaging content, building audience, and projecting confidence and momentum is working with a toolkit that is, in a crisis, often actively counterproductive. The skills are not just different — they’re sometimes opposed. And the organizations that don’t understand this distinction tend to discover it at the worst possible moment, in public, while everyone is watching.
A crisis, for communication purposes, is any situation where the gap between what the organization is saying and what its audiences know or believe is large enough to be damaging. This gap can be created by a genuine organizational failure — a product defect, a data breach, a leadership behavior, an operational error — or by external circumstances that associate the brand with something negative regardless of its actual responsibility. The communication challenge is the same in both cases: close the gap, or at minimum stop making it wider, as quickly as possible, while preserving whatever trust hasn’t yet been destroyed.
The First Rule: Stop Digging
The most common crisis communication failure is the response that makes the crisis worse. This happens in predictable ways. The defensive statement that reads as corporate and cold when the situation calls for human acknowledgment. The legal-cleared language that says nothing when the audience needs to hear something specific. The aggressive counter-messaging that treats legitimate criticism as an attack, which tends to generate exactly the kind of attention that crisis communications is supposed to defuse.
The principle at work is simple but difficult to execute under pressure: in a crisis, the audience’s emotional state matters more than the factual content of your communication. People in a crisis situation — whether they’re affected customers, concerned employees, or attentive journalists — need to feel that someone is taking the situation seriously and that something is being done about it. A response that is factually accurate but emotionally tone-deaf fails the most important test, regardless of how carefully it was lawyered. The audience doesn’t grade on factual accuracy in those first critical hours. They grade on whether they feel heard.
Speed vs. Accuracy: The False Choice
One of the persistent debates in crisis communications practice is between the imperative to respond quickly and the imperative to respond accurately. The “respond fast” school argues that the first hours of a crisis are decisive and that silence reads as guilt. The “respond accurately” school argues that premature statements based on incomplete information create secondary crises when the facts turn out to be different from the initial communication.
This debate presents a false choice. The answer is to respond quickly with what you actually know — including acknowledging the limits of what you know — rather than waiting to respond until you know everything. “We are aware of the situation and are investigating” is not a non-response if it’s delivered quickly and followed by regular updates. It’s the honest starting point for a communication process that will evolve as facts become available. The statement that makes the situation worse is the one that claims certainty about things that aren’t certain yet, not the one that acknowledges uncertainty honestly.
What Social Media Does to Crisis (And Vice Versa)
The social media environment has changed crisis communications in two fundamental ways. First, it has dramatically compressed the timeline between an incident occurring and public awareness of it. Events that would previously have had hours or days before media coverage are now visible in real time, often at scale, before the organization’s internal crisis protocols have even been activated. The organization that responds in two hours may already be responding to a conversation that has been running for six.
Second, social media has created a permanent record of organizational behavior that makes inconsistency catastrophically visible. The brand that claimed to value customer safety in its purpose campaign and is now being shown to have known about a safety issue and concealed it — that gap exists in screenshot form, available to anyone with a search function. As we argued in our piece on brand purpose, the gap between stated values and actual behavior doesn’t disappear; it accumulates. In a crisis, that accumulated gap becomes explosive.
The Apology That Isn’t
One of the most studied phenomena in crisis communication is the non-apology apology: the statement that uses the language of accountability while deflecting actual responsibility. “We’re sorry you feel that way.” “We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.” “We apologize if our communication wasn’t as clear as it should have been.” These statements are now so recognizable as corporate evasion that they often make crisis situations worse than silence would have. The audience knows an apology when they see one, and they know a non-apology when they see that too.
A real apology acknowledges the specific harm done, takes responsibility without qualification, and describes what will be done differently. It doesn’t need to be long. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. It needs to be specific, honest, and followed by action. The organizations that have emerged from serious crises with their reputations intact have almost universally done so by saying something real rather than something safe — and then backing it up with organizational change that the crisis revealed was necessary.
The brands that model genuine crisis recovery share a characteristic with the briefs and client relationships we’ve analyzed throughout this journal: they do the honest work before communicating rather than using communication to substitute for the work. Just as a good brief reflects genuine strategic thinking and a good creative review reflects genuine feedback rather than institutional politics, a good crisis response reflects a genuine organizational reckoning. The communication is the expression, not the solution.
Working on a crisis response and not sure whether it’s making things better or worse? That hesitation is data. Our shop is for the people in the room who are still thinking clearly. Trust that instinct.
