Tension Branding: How to Capture Our Dominant Mood

And strangely, people are open to it. There’s a growing appetite for radical reinvention of spirituality, identity, belonging, health, work and community. We want novelty, but we also want roots. We want control, but we’re exhausted by optimization. We want to feel something, and the brands that learn to hold this tension will feel like portals.

When a brand can hold two opposing ideas without collapsing, like sex and idealism in American Apparel’s case, they reflect peoples’ inner conflict back to them, and that’s a magnetic energy to project.

For all the talk of coherence in the world of branding, it is tension that is the real engine of meaning.