Thoughts on modern marketing, brand partnerships, community building, and creating authentic connections in today's digital landscape
Great creator marketing isn’t about obvious matches—it's strategic alignment. Brands like Glossier, New Balance, Sweetgreen, Aime Leon Dore, and Our Place succeeded by partnering with creators who naturally overlapped with trusted adjacent brands. The result? Authentic campaigns that felt more like culture than ads.
Influencer marketing isn’t about demographics or follower counts anymore—it's about cultural alignment. To build campaigns that genuinely resonate, brands need to choose creators based on real-world overlap: shared values, trusted brand partnerships, and existing communities. That's where the brand adjacency graph comes in. By mapping which creators consistently partner with brands your audience already loves, you move beyond surface-level targeting to forge partnerships that feel authentic, credible, and compelling.
Gen Z isn't just changing influencer marketing—they're reinventing it entirely. Gone are the days of transactional, follower-focused campaigns. Today, success hinges on cultural alignment and brand adjacency—showing up alongside creators and brands your audience already trusts. By tapping into brand-creator graphs, smart brands are strategically aligning with ecosystems that reflect Gen Z’s tastes, values, and lifestyle. It's no longer about who’s the loudest or biggest; it’s about fitting seamlessly into the right cultural conversation.
Gen Z doesn't care about influencer follower counts or flashy one-off campaigns—they care about authenticity, consistency, and cultural alignment. To truly connect, brands need to understand creators not as isolated individuals, but as nodes within interconnected brand ecosystems. By mapping who creators partner with—what we call the brand-creator graph—brands can identify not just relevant creators, but truly aligned ambassadors. For Gen Z, the company your brand keeps speaks louder than any ad ever could.
Gen Z isn't buying what you sell; they're buying what you stand for. Traditional marketing and influencer campaigns fall flat with a generation raised in digital saturation and authenticity fatigue. Instead, Gen Z chooses brands aligned with their identities, beliefs, and communities. They value genuine connections, meaningful action on social issues, and authentic creator-driven messaging. To thrive, brands must trade superficial engagement for deep alignment—prioritizing brand adjacency, cultural ecosystems, and partnerships built on shared values. The future belongs to brands who don't just tell Gen Z what matters, but consistently show them.
The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing—it feels like belonging. Persona-based campaigns go beyond demographics, leveraging brand adjacency data to align with the products, aesthetics, and cultural signals customers already trust. That’s how Ssense curates effortless brand pairings, Glossier integrates seamlessly into influencer content, and CB2 builds aspirational lifestyle setups. Learn how to use brand adjacency data to craft marketing that resonates, feels natural, and drives real connection.
The best brands don’t just sell products—they fit seamlessly into their customers’ worlds. Persona-based marketing goes beyond demographics to align with the brands, products, and aesthetics customers already love. That’s why Ssense curates perfect brand groupings, Glossier appears alongside trusted favorites, and Aime Leon Dore tells authentic cultural stories. Learn how to use persona-driven marketing to make your brand feel effortless, natural, and deeply connected to your audience.
Ever feel like a brand just gets you? That’s not luck—it’s persona marketing at its finest. Brands like Ssense, Glossier, and Aime Leon Dore don’t just sell products; they curate entire lifestyles by aligning with the brands their customers already love. From perfectly paired fashion collections to seamless brand adjacencies, these companies create authentic connections that feel effortless. Dive into how persona marketing works, why it’s changing the game, and how you can use it to build deeper customer loyalty.
Discover why partnering with high-follower influencers often fails to build local credibility, and how brand adjacency data can help identify more authentic local partnerships that truly resonate with community audiences.
Learn how leveraging brand adjacency data can help brands entering new markets gain immediate local credibility, foster authentic community connections, and achieve better ROI than traditional influencer partnerships.
Discover why chasing engagement metrics can lead to short-term thinking and inauthentic partnerships, and how focusing on brand adjacency and alignment creates more meaningful, trust-based relationships with your audience.
Discover why follower counts have become irrelevant in influencer marketing and how authentic creator alignment creates deeper trust, higher credibility, and more sustainable brand relationships than mere reach metrics.
Discover why true brand success lies beyond traditional engagement metrics and how building genuine communities and fostering long-term loyalty creates more sustainable growth and authentic connections with audiences.