By Layla Zulfa 
Global culture has shifted beneath our feet, moving from the steady certainties of the modern era through the critical deconstruction of postmodernism, and finally settling into the complex, "both/and" reality of the metamodern world. Yet, despite this radical cultural evolution, corporate marketing and brand strategy largely remain trapped in the 1990s playbook.
In this outdated paradigm, the primary challenge of commerce is merely capturing shifting consumer attention, treating the broader socio-economic and cultural context as harmless background noise. While this operational playbook is airtight in theory, it was fundamentally never designed for a world caught in hyper-acceleration and polycrisis.
As brand leaders navigate an era defined by overlapping volatility—from algorithmic shifts and supply chain fractures to climate events—a critical question arises: 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 discarding the hard-won gains of empirical evidence and effectiveness?
The Chronology of Brand Culture: From Certainty to Deconstruction
To understand how modern marketing lost its footing, it is necessary to trace how cultural eras have dictated the relationship between commerce and consumer psychology over the past century.
The Modern Era: The Age of Grand Narratives
During the modern era, which extended through the mid-20th century, culture was built on stable pillars of authority, institutional trust, and linear progress. Brands operated as monolithic entities delivering clear, functional promises. Advertising during this period was earnest, didactic, and deeply optimistic about industrial advancement and societal improvement.
The Postmodern Pivot: Irony, Remix, and Critique
As the 20th century drew to a close, postmodernism entered mainstream culture as an antidote to stiff, single-story narratives. It exposed institutional power structures wrapped in "neutral" language and made critical deconstruction a central tool of cultural engagement.
In marketing, this transition manifested as irony, pastiche, self-awareness, and the blurring of high and low forms of art and commerce. Brands transformed into flexible symbols whose meanings were deliberately left open to playful, subversive reinterpretation. Campaigns began to wink at audiences, mock the very conventions of advertising, and experiment with consumer identity as a transient costume rather than a permanent commitment. In this ecosystem, seeing through the performance of marketing became part of the consumer’s performance itself.
The Empirical Correction
At the height of postmodern cynicism, the discipline experienced a severe scientific correction: the rise of evidence-based marketing, anchored heavily by the empirical frameworks of researchers like Byron Sharp. Marketing shifted its attention sharply toward penetration, mental availability, and distinctive physical assets.
Yet, paradoxically, the cultural mood of the industry remained resolutely postmodern. While this empirical lens proved exceptionally adept at separating measurable patterns from wishful thinking—and dismantling romanticized myths regarding "brand love" and irrational loyalty—it offered little philosophical guidance on what a brand should become or what kind of long-term growth is actually worth building for.
This created a powerful comfort zone for corporate leaders: rigorous skepticism coupled with zero institutional obligation to define what lies beyond immediate quarterly metrics.
Main Facts: The Metamodern Reality and the "Both/And" Imperative
The core challenge facing contemporary brand architects is the emergence of metamodernism—a cultural structure of feeling that oscillates between a postmodern doubt and a modern longing for truth and connection. Metamodernism holds both realities at once: it is deeply aware of the artifice, yet it sincerely desires meaning.
What the 1971 "Hilltop" Ad Got Right
To grasp this "both/and" dynamic, industry observers often point to Coca-Cola’s iconic 1971 "Hilltop" commercial ("I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing"). Released during a decade battered by the Vietnam War, civil unrest, and severe economic inflation, the spot featured young people from around the globe standing on a hillside holding Cokes and singing about harmony.
Critics have long cited the ad as the ultimate example of corporate overreach—hitching the deeply human desire for global peace to a sugary carbonated beverage. Yet, its enduring cultural resonance suggests it struck a nerve far deeper than cynical manipulation. It gave voice and a theme song to a genuine human longing for connection in an increasingly displaced world.
The commercial is simultaneously naive, manipulative, and emotionally true to a widespread psychological need. It both overreaches and resonates. Today, the true lesson of "Hilltop" is not that soft drinks can broker world peace, but that the creative vision dared to lift its eyes to the actual world outside its narrow product category. Modern marketing chatter, conversely, remains trapped in the tactical weeds of funnels, attribution windows, and platform-specific formats.
The False Binary: Growth vs. Purpose
Much of the contemporary discourse within corporate boardrooms has framed brand strategy as a polarized binary choice:
- The "Growth-at-All-Costs" Realist: Focused purely on short-term conversion, aggressive acquisition tactics, and immediate revenue spikes, often at the expense of customer goodwill.
- The "Purpose-Led" Idealist: Focused on grand societal missions that frequently disconnect from core commercial realities and product utility.
Metamodernism rejects this false dichotomy entirely. It recognizes that coherence is a form of infrastructure.
Supporting Data and Case Analysis: System Integrity vs. Short-Term Spikes
The cost of ignoring metamodern coherence in favor of pure postmodern efficiency can be observed in everyday digital commerce.
Consider the hypothetical dilemma of a mid-sized software-as-a-service (SaaS) founder facing an unexpected churn spike.
- The Postmodern Playbook: Offers an immediate, aggressive fix—a high-pressure re-engagement campaign utilizing dark patterns, misleading countdown timers, and a cancellation flow designed like a labyrinth to trap the user. On paper, this works. The spreadsheet records saved revenue, and the short-term metric is met.
- The Metamodern Approach: Asks brand leaders to calculate the total system cost. Forcing a user to stay through deceptive friction creates a "micro-betrayal" that does not merely vanish into the ether; it echoes through the internal support team’s Slack channels, cultivating a corporate culture of apology, defensiveness, and internal cynicism. When tactical execution violently clashes with brand values, internal talent feels the split, leading to employee burnout and attrition.
When the founder instead chooses to make the "Exit" button large, transparent, and frictionless, the immediate spreadsheet records a short-term revenue loss. However, the organization registers an exponential gain in structural trust. Within months, that easy, respectful exit process frequently becomes the brand’s highest-rated attribute in customer review forums, driving an organic referral engine that systematically outperforms prior paid acquisition spend.
This is what choosing system integrity over the fleeting adrenaline of a metric spike looks like in practice.
Implications: Operating in the "Polycene" Era
Instability is not historically unprecedented. The 1970s brought oil shocks, stagflation, and Cold War anxiety; the 2000s introduced geopolitical terrorism, financial meltdowns, and rapid digital disruption.
What defines the modern operating environment is the sheer velocity and concurrence of these compounding forces. Multiple feedback loops now interact simultaneously at unprecedented speeds: fragile global supply chains, opaque platform algorithms, severe climate events, and generative AI advancements all converge to influence markets concurrently. There is virtually no slack left in the commercial system.
For regional retailers, local service providers, and global enterprises alike, this is no longer a theoretical "polycrisis"—it is simply Tuesday. A primary supplier collapses, an ad platform alters its targeting rules overnight, and a regional wildfire closes a critical transport highway. None of these shocks are entirely new in isolation; what has fundamentally changed is their relentless frequency and the absence of buffer zones.
Falling back on old marketing habits—buying attention, treating human emotion purely as a conversion lever, and visualizing customers as passive segments sliding down a predictable funnel—is no longer sufficient. These tools describe the mechanics inside the bottle, while completely ignoring the turbulent, boiling ocean in which the bottle now floats.
Official Recommendations: Three Moves That Hold Under Pressure
How can brand leaders move beyond postmodern irony and operational cynicism? The transition requires actionable, testable adjustments that prioritize both the numerical efficiency of the spreadsheet and the psychological pulse of the human being on the receiving end.
1. Establish Explicit "Won’t-Do" Rules
Organizations must introduce non-negotiable ethical constraints into their creative briefs. This means eliminating "urgency porn" (fake countdown timers), ghost scarcity tactics, and creative work that intentionally makes a customer feel smaller or inadequate so that the product appears superior. While these appear as minor lines in a brief, they act as massive guardrails when quarterly revenue targets loom under pressure.
2. Dedicate Touchpoints to Radical Orientation
Brands must reserve at least one prominent, high-visibility touchpoint to show where the brand actually sits in real-world reality, rather than merely pitching products. For instance, a professional services firm used its primary homepage banner to transparently explain why its operating hours were temporarily reduced to protect staff mental health and navigate severe local weather events. Customers cited that specific, honest paragraph in independent reviews more often than any commercial promotion. This orientation provides people with a plausible, grounded place to file the brand in an already cognitively overloaded world.
3. Build a Portfolio for Depth
Corporate leadership should allocate a deliberate 10 percent of marketing activity and budget to optimize explicitly for depth: customer retention, internal employee pride, and unsolicited organic recommendations. This must be tracked as a formal corporate experiment alongside standard acquisition and reach metrics. These investments provide concrete behaviors that internal teams can genuinely believe in, often surfacing long-term enterprise value that standard marketing dashboards are blind to.
Conclusion: Broadening the Brief for the World That Exists
Evidence-based marketing remains foundational to commercial survival. Marketers must continue to fiercely protect and value reach, distinctiveness, mental availability, and physical distribution. Discarding decades of hard-earned empirical wisdom regarding how brands grow is not innovative; it is fundamentally wasteful.
However, in a metamodern era—one that recognizes both the absolute limits of grand corporate narratives and the crushing exhaustion of endless postmodern deconstruction—coherence and consequence have become core components of what "works."
The shift beyond postmodern comfort will not be marked by a single revolutionary campaign, but by a accumulation of small, deliberate decisions: which deceptive tactics are left on the table even when they guarantee short-term returns; which authentic stories are told about why an organization exists; and where marketing chooses to draw its own immutable lines.
Building a brand for the world that actually exists requires leaders to be as rigorously honest about the broader systemic environment as they are about the final sale.
Ali Ikhwan 
Dwi Wanna 
Sagoh 