The New Power Move in Branding? Don’t Sell the Product At All
How brands are skipping the hard sell and building worlds you want to live in
What exactly is Rhode selling when it turns a sun-bleached beach club in Mallorca into a lemon-spritzed fever dream for two weeks? It’s not just lip gloss, it’s a very specific idea of summer: Aperol, Y2K bikinis, sticky skin. The $16 tint is almost a side note, your cheapest ticket into the mood.
Meanwhile, The Row has built an empire on almost nothing. Their Instagram is a stream of softened images: stone staircases, gray seafoam, abstract shapes in expensive light, with Spotify playlists to top it off. Rarely a coat or a bag in sight. Their stores function like private salons. If you walk in clueless, you’ll get polite but unmistakable indifference. The less they say, the more it matters.
It goes beyond lifestyle marketing, into a new era of luxury and leisure branding, and the companies who are doing it right are the ones who are going to make a lasting impact.
The decline of obvious selling
This has certainly not always been the case. In the early 2000s, there was nothing subtle about success. Brands wanted you to see their logos from across a bar. LV monograms, Dior saddle bags, Gucci belts. It was a visual racket.
By the 2010s, things flipped. Social media made rawness the most sought-after trait. Brands traded billboards for influencers and pushed relatability instead of prestige. We got close-ups of imperfect skin, carefully staged “off-duty” shots. Everyone tried to look like your friend.
Fast forward to now: we’re “post-relatable”. Consumers are sharper, often jaded, surgically aware of when they’re being sold something. The most culturally astute brands have moved on. They’re no longer marketing products. They’re marketing an atmosphere. If they do it right, the product becomes inevitable.
Why it works (and why it’s smarter than it looks)
Modern buyers rarely buy just for utility. The Row isn’t about outerwear. It’s about signaling insider taste, knowing that minimalism is its own kind of wealth flex. A Patagonia fleece says you care about the planet, or at least that you like to look like you do. A Red Bull in your hand reads fun, impulsive, slightly chaotic.
We don’t shop to fill a functional gap. We shop to tell stories about ourselves. A Row coat, a Rhode gloss, even a battered pair of Vans; these are shorthand. The right brand doesn’t sell you a product. It sells you back to yourself, in a slightly more interesting way.
Brands know this. That’s why Patagonia famously ran a full-page ad urging customers not to buy its jacket, reinforcing its decades-deep environmental mission. Why Airbnb’s entire platform is structured around “belonging anywhere,” selling discovery and intimacy instead of just short-term rentals. Or why Red Bull spent decades funding extreme sports and EDM festivals, making itself synonymous with speed and risk before anyone cared what was inside the can.
The rise of brand worlds
If it feels like every interesting brand right now is staging some kind of immersive fantasy, that’s because they are.
Rhode didn’t just launch a lip tint this summer. It reimagined a Mediterranean beach club as a full-scale brand set. Rhode towels, Rhode manicures, Rhode cocktails. The right influencers posted from lemon-striped loungers, all golden skin and half-melted makeup. By the time the photos hit Instagram, no one was talking about peptides or hydration. They were chasing a hazy European July, one that seemed suspiciously easy to buy with a $16 tube of gloss.
Tarte does it in their own slightly brasher way, flying influencers to Bora Bora for “Trippin with Tarte,” feeding the algorithm a stream of poolside clinks and group selfies that look like a season of reality TV.
Even Nike’s retail isn’t really about selling shoes. The brand’s flagships double as mini sport hubs, with customization bars, run clubs, and mini installations that make buying sneakers feel more like joining a movement.
Meanwhile, The Row plays it from the opposite angle. Their entire approach is restraint. Stores that feel like minimalist art spaces. Social feeds that read more like moodboards than catalogs. A sense that if you have to be convinced, you’re not who they’re here for. The deliberate understatement telegraphs confidence.
The catch: it’s not an easy way out
A brand can’t fake this. Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” ad landed because they’d already spent decades investing in conservation, fixing customers’ old gear, and treating anti-consumption as a genuine ethic. If Shein tried the same, it would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
It’s the same with The Row. That minimalism doesn’t just exist on Instagram, it’s baked into the quality of the clothes, the precise cuts, the careful scarcity. Rhode’s dreamy Euro-summer play works because it aligns perfectly with Hailey Bieber’s existing personal brand: young, bright, slightly retro, always on vacation somewhere you wish you were.
You might remember my pice on Hermés’ ‘Mystery at the Grooms’ — the NYC popup was inauthentic and unaligned to the brand, and therefore fell completely short. It tried to create a fantasy world that existed in the context of their real products, and in doing both, it flopped entirely.
Consumers are sharp. They can smell when a brand is just dressing up to cash in. The best players have a tight hold on what they stand for, then build every pop-up, product, or Instagram carousel around that center of gravity.
Why this is a better long game
There’s a reason everyone’s trying to move this way. When a brand sells a mood or a micro-culture instead of a feature set, it’s protecting itself. Another label can undercut your prices, steal your supplier, copy your formula. It’s a lot harder to duplicate the feeling someone gets when they slip into your orbit.
It’s also just more fun. Buyers want stories. They want atmosphere. They want to be part of a world, even for the length of a swipe or the life of a product. When a brand makes that feel effortless, loyalty follows.
Where this is going
If anything, we’re just getting started. Gen Z is even more skeptical of obvious advertising than millennials were. They expect to discover a brand on their own, to decode it through references, aesthetics, and social signals.
That’s why we’ll see even more pop-ups that look like parties, more drops that feel like insider art shows, more digital campaigns that double as moodboards. The product is still there, but it’s half-hidden, part of a bigger tableau. It’s about seducing, not explaining.
This isn’t the stuff of marketing textbooks. It’s sharper, slipperier, and infinitely more interesting. It’s why a tiny brand can build a cult by getting the mood exactly right, and why a legacy house can still feel fresh.
Could not agree more with your takes.