Summary
Global culture has moved from the modern era (certainty) into postmodernism (critique and deconstruction) and now into the metamodern world, which holds both at once. Yet most marketing still behaves like it did in the 1990s, when the primary challenge was capturing attention and the wider context could be safely treated as background noise. The playbook is airtight, but it wasn’t designed for a world in rapid flux. Are we building brands for a world that no longer exists? And, if so, what would it take for the discipline to broaden its brief without losing the hard-won gains of evidence and effectiveness?
Postmodernism entered culture as a release from stiff, single‑story narratives about progress and authority. It exposed power wrapped in “neutral” institutions and made critique a central tool. In marketing, this showed up as remix, irony, and a blurring of high and low forms.
Brands became flexible symbols, with their meanings open to playful reinterpretation. Campaigns winked at the audience, mocked advertising itself, and even experimented with identity as costume rather than commitment. Seeing through the performance became part of the performance.
Then came the rise of evidence‑based marketing—most prominently seen in Byron Sharp’s work. The discipline shifted its attention toward penetration, mental availability, and distinctive assets. And yet the mood remained postmodern.
The empirical lens is very good at separating pattern from wishful thinking and at breaking up some of the more romantic myths about loyalty and “brand love.” It has less to say about what a brand should become or what kind of growth is worth building for. The result is a powerful comfort zone: rigor and skepticism with no obligation to define what lies beyond the metrics.
But there’s another way.
What the Hilltop ad got right
Before you roll your eyes, consider Coca‑Cola’s 1971 “Hilltop” commercial (also known as “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”). A group of young people stand on a hillside, holding Cokes and singing about global harmony. The spot emerged in a decade marked by war and inflation; its creative lead reportedly had the idea after watching stranded travelers soften as they shared food and drinks.
Hanging the imagery of peace on a soft drink is a perfect example of brand overreach—no argument there. But doesn’t its lasting impact suggest that it struck a nerve? The deeply human longing for connection in a scary, displaced world was given a moment, and a theme song.
This is the third way of metamodernism, the “both/and” that marketers keep missing. The ad is simultaneously naive, manipulative, and emotionally true to a widespread desire. It both overreaches and resonates.
What stands out today is less about the promise of global harmony from a soft drink and more that the work lifted its eyes to the world outside its category. Contemporary marketing chatter, on the other hand, remains at the level of funnels and formats as the world around our brands becomes ever more complex.
Worse, much of the discourse has framed the choice as binary: you’re either a “growth-at-all-costs” realist or a “purpose-led” idealist.
Metamodernism is neither. It’s the recognition that coherence is a form of infrastructure.
As a hypothetical example, consider a mid‑sized software founder facing a churn spike. The postmodern playbook offers an immediate fix: a high‑pressure re‑engagement campaign using dark patterns—countdown timers and a cancellation flow designed like a labyrinth. On paper, this works. It captures the revenue.
Metamodernism asks brand leaders to look at the total system cost. Forcing a user to stay through trickery creates a “micro‑betrayal” that doesn’t just sit in the customer’s mind; it sits in the support team’s Slack channel, creating a culture of apology and defensiveness. When a brand’s tactics clash with what it tells itself, the people who sell it feel the split, and it wears on them.
Instead, the founder chooses to make the “Exit” button large and honest. The spreadsheet records a short‑term loss, while the organization records a gain in trust. And within a few months, that easy exit could become their highest‑rated brand attribute in customer reviews, driving a referral engine that outperforms the previous paid spend.
This is what choosing system integrity over the adrenaline of the spike looks like.
Marketing has never operated in a vacuum
Instability isn’t new. The 1970s brought oil shocks, inflation, and Cold War anxiety; the 2000s added terrorism, financial crises, and rapid digitization. What is new is how much of that instability we see, and how much of it lands at once. Multiple feedback loops now interact at higher speed: supply chains, platform algorithms, climate events, and AI developments influence markets in overlapping ways. There’s less slack in the system.
For a regional retailer, for example, this isn’t “polycrisis”—it’s just your run-of-the-mill Tuesday. A supplier goes under, an ad platform changes targeting rules, and a wildfire closes a highway. None of these are new in isolation. What has changed is how often they show up at the same time, and how little buffer there is when they do.
It’s easy to fall back on the old habits: buy attention, treat emotion as a lever that moves a sale, and picture people as segments sliding through funnels. And the tools have certainly improved. But the underlying model was never representative of the whole story; it describes the mechanics inside the bottle, while ignoring the turbulent system in which the bottle now floats.
Three moves that hold under pressure
How do you move beyond that postmodern irony? Through small changes you can test, ones that prioritize both the efficiency of the spreadsheet and the pulse of the human. A few ideas:
Explicit “won’t‑do” rules
Introduce non‑negotiable constraints. No “urgency porn” (fake countdown timers), no “ghost scarcity,” and no creative that makes a customer feel smaller just so the product can look bigger. These are small lines in a brief, but they become large lines in practice when targets loom.
A surface dedicated to orientation
Reserve one prominent touchpoint for showing where the brand sits in real life, instead of making another pitch. One service business used its homepage to explain why its hours changed for staff health and local weather. Customers cited that paragraph in reviews more than the current promotion. This kind of orientation isn’t some grand philosophy; it’s giving people a plausible place to file you in an already overloaded world.
A portfolio for depth
Allocate 10 percent of activity to optimize for depth: customer retention, employee pride, or unsolicited recommendations. Treat it as a deliberate experiment, tracked alongside acquisition and reach. These moves provide concrete behaviors that a team can live with, and they often surface value the standard dashboard isn’t designed to see.
Broadening the brief
Evidence‑based marketing is foundational. We must continue to value reach, distinctiveness, and availability. Throwing out what we’ve learned about how brands grow wouldn’t be innovative; it would be wasteful.
But in a metamodern era—one that knows both the limits of grand narratives and the exhaustion of endless deconstruction—coherence and consequence have become part of what “works.” The shift beyond postmodern comfort will be marked by many small decisions: which tactics are left on the table even when they work, which stories are told about why a brand exists, and where marketing chooses to draw its own lines.
This, then, is what metamodern marketing looks like in practice—keeping the discipline of postmodern effectiveness, while accepting that what we amplify (and refuse to amplify) is part of the job. It’s the moment we realize that building a brand for the world that actually exists requires us to be as honest about the system as we are about the sale.