When the world is full of massive conglomerates that weave their way into practically every aspect of our lives, it’s stupid to not admire those companies that just decide nope on the current state of affairs. As everybody conforms to the rather strict guidelines laid down by giants of industries, there are some visionaries who prefer to blaze a trail, and in doing so offer options that make us wonder why weren’t we doing things this way all along.
It needs a fair appliance of the mind to engage oneself in mainstream brands – that’s as stirring as watching paint dry most often. Instead, they risk nothing, write to the trends and create products that people will buy as opposed to those they will love. But today we are focusing on rebels, dreamers, and innovators that make us, in fact, remember what being are creative truly is.
The Art of Brand Rebellion
Do you recall how all the clothing brands came up with shapeless, neutral-dye loungewear at the start of the pandemic? Yeah, me too. Painfully boring. However, while the mainstream trend was going to the left, other brands like House of Sunny were going to the right with their effects-filled, pattern-rich pieces that would later go viral on Instagram.
Frankly, rebellion gives and it is very good for business only when it is heartfelt. Telfar did not wake up one day to battle with the luxury fashion; all they sought was to understand why luxury cannot be inclusive. They unknowingly turned into anti-heroes of the status quo and the combat against the luxury amoral nonsense when they came up with the Bushwick Birkin shopping bag saying “Not for you — for everyone.”
It is not just that these rebels are different, and the perception of their unusual ideas and approaches, but rather that those ideas they espouse are truly different. As much as rebellion is scary, consumers are not rebelling blindly, but are tapping into the culture just to make something people want in the world exist.
Digital Disruptors Doing It Differently
While Meta, Google and Amazon muse over their hoards like dragons over gold, smaller tech brands are putting more plausible propositions saying: “hold up, that is kind of messed up.”
Consider Proton, its initial product being the ProtonMail email service Company extended its service offering into a range of privacy centric services. While Google uses your emails to provide you the most appropriate advertisements (uh, what?), Proton guessed that maybe your correspondences should remain, let me guess, personal? Revolutionary concept, I know.
Or take Neeva search engine that challenged the audience with a rather compelling question: “What if the organic search results were free from the companies that paid the highest amount of money?” Yes, they were acquired by Snowflake but proved that not only cryptocurrencies but also other models can work in the technological industry.
What these digital rebels get is that the fastest growing mainstream tech companies’ “move fast and break things” slogan left broken – trust, privacy, mental health, as well as democratic institutions. This is not the rebellion of style but of reasons and principles.
Food & Beverage: Taste Rebellion
Look at the grocery stores; there are five huge brands that have infiltrated the market and masquerade as a hundred and forty-two different brands instead of five. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola must own practically all of the liquid you drink, as for Nestlé, I would not even begin to describe it.
But then there is the beverage, known as Liquid Death, a water scheduled to be sold in tallboy cans with Black Metal designs. Their initial goal? Ensure water is made cool to a stage where children would prefer drinking it than a sugary substance such as soda. They are nonsensical when it comes to their marketing campaign featuring phrases such as ‘’murder your thirst” and raunchy memorable commercials of extreme flavoured sports drinks. However, they do this all while still providing the customers with a great deal of fun behind some of their branding messages that are indeed quite health-conscious at the core.
Social media is full of companies such as adding blemish detrimental ‘nectar’ to utilise Sparkling water with peculiar flavours or hideous cans such as Ugly Drinks. Their general attitude is, ‘We don’t care if this looks pleasant to the eyes – what we want is for the results to be beneficial.’
Whether these food and beverage rebels know it or not they know what has become obvious: flavor alone is no longer enough. Going hand in hand with aesthetics, people want stories, ethics, and yes, entertainment with their feed. And if it means making water seem as metal or making a soda as ugly then so be it.
The Dark Side of Brand Rebellion
Here’s the cold hard truth I want to spill , not all rebellion is the same. However, for every subversive icon there are many imitators who adopt nonconformist imagery while keeping all the regressive policies in place.
Do you recall when Pepsi intended to associating its product with the struggle for social justice? That Kendall Jenner commercial was the corporate assimilation of your dad attempting to be hip – awkward and tremendously forced.
Or fast fashion brands that copy designs of independent design creators and say that they were inspired by street fashion? Yes, SHEIN, Fashion Nova, and a lot of other companies from the clothing niche.
As troubling as it may be to see them being impersonated by these fake rebels, it is a lot worse to see the very meaning of rebellion being blurred. As the word ‘disruptive’ and ‘revolutionary’ have become almost omnipresent in the vocabulary, nothing is disruptive or revolutionary anymore. And that causes the cheaters to thrive and the real products to fade into obscurity As we have seen, that makes it hard for the bonafide articles to sell.
Why We Need Creative Rebels
Perhaps, you would be wondering now, “It is just business”. By far the most common attitude to the dullness of brands is: It is just as well that brands are boring as long as they deliver results. Yes, and to be honest, there is something in that to an extent. But here is what they failed to realize – when brands choose not to ruffle the feathers of their consumers, culture suffers.
The mainstream is an ongoing filtrate of rehashed concepts that occur in even greater degrees of watered down. Instead, we get monotonous music productions, monotonous movie productions, and those productions from products that do not originate from creativity but rather from computation.
Creative rebels break these cycles. They restore novelty and individuality to the markets that are characterized by homogeneity. And in doing so, they remind even the giants that creativity is valuable.
See what happened after Oatly overtook the other players in the niche of soy, almond, and oat milk product packaging with their psychedelic, excessively wordy labels and surreal commercials. All of a sudden, each non-dairy product – and there were only five – had to develop character. It is exceptionally difficult to follow the crude and needy tone of such giants and here, some of them were overly cheesy at least the overall market became way less boring.
Finding Your Own Rebellious Brands
But if you want to identify such creative mavericks, it is not always easy Indeed, if you are bored with the pack, They do not get Super Bowl advertising revenue or favourable slots in stores. And they are there, or at least many of them and try to look for it as part of the challenge.
If you want to identify such brands, then you should look for brands that appear to be too obscure to be test marketed. The packaging is somewhat generic but given some specific packaging, those are the ones that will make people scratch their head and ask “what?” which brings them very close to being sued for libel or for some other form of advertisement. Visit websites for crowdfunding where individuals come up with projects that would not attract funding from conventional venture capitalist.
The Future of Creative Rebellion
With the help of algorithms which decides what we see, listen or consume it becomes refreshing and necessary to rebel creatively. And we desperately require heightened brand identification with oddballs rather than creatures of perfectly rational interaction.
Brands that stand out from the others while still doing things right are the brands of the future. It is a well-known idea that rebelliousness without the purpose is pointless. But revolution based upon clear vision of what is right? That transforms markets and occasionally – the world.
This is for the outsiders, the black sheep, the rebels – not only the brands themselves, but the people who dreamt of what they conceived, who saw the standard practice and thought, There has to be a better way. As such, there are not enough words to express all the things we would be deprived of them, we would probably just be regurgitating different flavours of the same basic staples over and over again.
And where’s the fun in that?
