The quiet power of brand: why shouting doesn’t work anymore
Something’s shifted lately. You can feel it I’m sure, even if you’re not exactly sure when it started. Everywhere you look, it’s more. More ads, more content, more videos, more “thought leadership,” more branded everything. And thanks to AI, the cost of making it all has dropped through the floor. Now it’s not just the big players flooding the zone. It’s everyone, everywhere, all at once. A never-ending feed of logos and slogans and sponsored posts, all elbowing for attention.
For a while, that kind of hustle made sense. The brands that defined the last decade: Away, Koala, Who Gives a Crap, July all those early DTC darlings won by being everywhere. They built these beautiful, shiny worlds you wanted to step into. And we did. We bought the stylish suitcases, ordered the try-at-home glasses. And the rest of the market took notes. Suddenly every company, from scrappy startups to 40-year-old software firms, decided they needed to act like a lifestyle brand too. Full-scale branding, perfectly staged photo shoots, big emotional copy. Founder origin stories like mini-Hollywood scripts.
It worked, until it didn’t.
Because somewhere along the way, we got tired. Not just of the noise but of the blur, the mimicry, the surface shine. Tired of brands that looked great but felt hollow. Tired of being marketed to every minute of every day by companies we barely knew, let alone trusted.
And now? Now we’re seeing it crack. The rise of raw, unfiltered content. The shift to UGC, lo-fi videos, messy conversations that actually feel real. The brands gaining ground today aren’t the ones shouting the loudest, they’re the ones speaking like they know who they are. Calmly and clearly, without the panic of needing to be the centre of attention all the time.
I don’t mean that quiet branding means playing small. It’s about standing so firmly in what you offer that you don’t need to dress it up. It’s about trusting that the right people will find you, not because you chased them down, but because you built something worth finding. And if you ask me, for brands and for the people behind them that sounds a lot more sustainable than sprinting after the next big thing until we all burn out.
To get why this shift matters and why it feels so different we need to trace how we landed here.
Why louder used to work (and why it doesn’t anymore)
There was a time when being louder really did make the most sense. Attention was scarce, and the brands that could afford to grab it through shelf space, prime-time TV ads, and full-page newspaper spreads held all the cards. Marketing was a volume game: whoever shouted the loudest, for the longest, usually won. It wasn’t always elegant, but it worked, because customers didn’t have endless choices at their fingertips and distractions pulling at the end of their literal sleeve from every direction.
Then the internet rewrote the rules. Suddenly, visibility wasn’t reserved for the biggest budgets, it was available to anyone fast and creative enough to seize it. The early wave of DTC brands recognised it first: a sharp idea, a memorable story, and a few well-placed campaigns could build a national presence in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it used to take.
But as digital platforms exploded and as brands of every size rushed to replicate the playbook, the economics of attention shifted again. It wasn’t just a few clever brands crafting brilliant stories anymore. It was everyone, all the time. More channels. More urgency. And for marketers, more exhaustion.
And when everything starts to look polished, positioned, and personal, nothing feels particularly meaningful. The noise isn’t fresh. It’s just noise.
The danger of confusing noise for value
Somewhere along the way, the lines got blurred. Brands started to believe that the more places they showed up, the more posts they published, the more channels they activated, the more valuable they must be. If you were everywhere, the thinking went, surely you were winning. Surely you were becoming indispensable. Surely the audience would notice, trust, and eventually choose you. But that's not what happened.
Instead, what we’ve seen is a slow erosion of trust. When every brand tugs the same emotional levers, it stops feeling personal. It starts to feel manufactured. When visibility becomes indistinguishable from value, customers stop investing emotionally. They skim, they scroll…they forget.
And in the process, brands spend more and more energy trying to recapture an attention span that isn’t being lost because of competition. It’s being lost because of fatigue. Being louder doesn’t build loyalty anymore. It doesn’t even guarantee awareness. At best, it creates a brief flicker of recognition. At worst, it pushes potential customers further away, filing your brand alongside all the others shouting for attention without offering anything real to hold onto. In the end, it’s not presence that matters. It’s resonance. And that’s something noise alone can never deliver.
What quiet brands actually do differently
The brands that are thriving now aren’t necessarily the ones making the most noise. They’re the ones making the clearest promises, and keeping them.
Instead of trying to be everywhere, all the time, they’re choosing their moments carefully. They’re not frantically filling every channel with content just to be seen; they’re showing up where it matters, in ways that feel deliberate, confident, and human. It’s not about constant visibility anymore. It’s about the strength of the signal you send when you do step forward.
These brands understand that trust isn’t won through frequency. It’s built through consistency, not just in how often they appear, but in how reliably they act. When you look at a company like Vanguard, you don’t see a brand scrambling to stay top of mind with a thousand TikTok videos and relatable memes. You see a steady, deliberate voice that has been saying the same essential thing for decades: low-cost investing, long-term thinking, no drama. That clarity builds something louder than noise: it builds belief.
Quiet brands also listen more than they broadcast. They don’t just publish a polished manifesto and move on; they stay tuned in to what their customers actually need and value. Patagonia didn’t become a cult brand by simply telling the world how sustainable they were. They lived it, quietly and consistently, long before environmental responsibility became a marketing trend. Closer to home, Bank Australia built trust through community ownership and impact-first decision-making. Gorman has stayed culturally distinctive not by out-shouting competitors, but by being unmistakably itself.
There’s a humility to quiet brands that customers find disarming. It suggests a company more interested in solving real problems than in chasing vanity metrics. A company that respects attention, rather than assuming it can be bought.
And perhaps most importantly, this kind of brand strategy shows a kind of patience that's become almost radical. They trust that if they are clear, consistent, and genuinely valuable, the right people will find them. Not because they flooded every inbox and social feed, but because they earned a place in people’s lives.
Notion is a perfect example. They didn’t spend the first five years blitzing the market with splashy ad campaigns. They built a product people loved, trusted their community to share it, and let reputation compound quietly until the brand became unavoidable without ever needing to yell.
In a world that rewards the loud and the fast, choosing to be calm, clear, and consistent isn’t a weakness. It’s a strategy. And a surprisingly powerful one at that.
The opportunity for brands that choose clarity and calm
In a market that rewards speed, volume, and endless visibility, choosing to be quieter, clearer, and more deliberate can feel almost counterintuitive. But that’s exactly why it works.
When everyone else is scrambling to be seen, the brands that stay grounded stand out. When others chase trends and channels, the brands that listen, refine, and patiently build real relationships earn something far more valuable than fleeting attention. They earn trust. They earn loyalty. They earn time, that rarest of commodities in a world fizzing with pings, posts, and push notifications.
Quiet branding doesn’t mean hiding. It means showing up with purpose, not panic. It means trusting that clarity cuts deeper than volume, and that consistency, over time, creates far more powerful growth than any short-lived surge of clicks.
For brands willing to slow down, to think more deeply about what they stand for and how they show up, the future isn’t about being everywhere. It’s about being unmistakable, even when you’re speaking softly.
And if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that in the end, customers don’t remember who shouted the loudest. They remember who made them feel something worth listening to.
