Quantum Brands

How the Physics of The Experience Economy Are Reshaping The Calculus of Brand Value Creation

Paramount Pictures

Recently, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the concept of “intelligent brands”—brands that create value for customers by being more functionally, emotionally, ethically and communally intelligent in their interactions.

You might have seen the piece I wrote about the Rise of Intelligent Brands. Anyway, while this helped get most of what I was thinking out of my head, I kept pondering where the idea of brands as intelligent agents could go. Could we push it further and have some real fun with it?

What emerged from these musings is a four-part series on a new way to think about brands and how they create value for customers and stakeholders: an unapologetically nerdy thought experiment that I'm calling "Quantum Brands."

Quantum Brands is a modern brand-building framework based on my observation that many of today's most innovative brands have begun to abandon static brand management models in favor of more dynamic, entangled systems.

Over four installments, I look at where and why traditional brand management approaches are failing, reveal two rarely discussed dimensions of brand salience, and suggest the Three Laws of Entanglement that are changing how brands can create more meaningful value in today's experience economy.

I realize this sounds like a lot. But come along and geek out with me. It’ll be character building for both of us.

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Part 1

The Death of Static Brands: Why Traditional Brand Models Are Failing In A Quantum World

What if everything we believed about building powerful brands is becoming obsolete?

I've spent the last two years immersed in a mystery that's been haunting me: Why are so many once-invincible brands now struggling to maintain their relevance despite record marketing budgets? The answer, it turns out, reveals a fundamental shift in how value is created in modern markets—one that many brand leaders don’t seem all that keen to confront.

I’m putting it out there: Most brands today are still running DOS in an age of quantum computing.

This isn't hyperbole. After studying the declining trajectories of dozens of iconic brands, I’ve come to an uncomfortable realization: the operating system on which we build and maintain our brands has become fundamentally incompatible with how customers experience them and value them in today's world.

This isn't just another "brands need to digitally transform" think piece. I'm talking about something more profound—the end of what I call "single-state brands," brands built on fixed, rigid ideas that can only mean one thing or help customers in one primary way. What I see emerging in their place are dynamic brands built on intelligent and responsive systems designed to thrive in today's experience economy.

I'm calling these "quantum brands" not just because it sounds cool (though I think it does), but because quantum physics provides a surprisingly apt metaphor for what's happening to brands in a post-digital world.

The Crisis No One In Marketing Is Talking About (Yet)

Imagine you're trying to heat a house with all the windows open. You technically can do it, but it requires an unsustainable amount of energy. This is exactly what's happening in brand management departments today. Companies are pouring ever-increasing resources into maintaining salience through traditional means while ignoring the fact that salience itself has fundamentally changed.

What we're facing isn't a crisis of execution—it's a crisis of conception. And this crisis manifests in three interconnected ways that are tearing apart traditional brand models:

1. The Relevance Paradox: "How do you do, fellow kids?"

Remember that classic "30 Rock" scene where Steve Buscemi's character tries to infiltrate a high school? Dressed in a backwards cap and carrying a skateboard, he approaches teenagers with the painfully awkward line, "How do you do, fellow kids?" The humor isn't just in his appearance—it's in the transparent inauthenticity of his effort. The harder he tries to appear relevant to teen culture, the more glaringly out of place he becomes.

Ali Goldstein/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

This is precisely what's happening to brands caught in what I call The Relevance Paradox: the harder brands try to be relevant through traditional means, the less relevant they become. It's like showing up to a climate protest with a focus-grouped slogan—the very act of trying to be relevant through manufactured messaging makes your brand culturally tone-deaf.

Consider Gillette's attempt to boost relevance by joining the conversation about toxic masculinity back in the mid-teens. Despite meticulous planning and a significant investment in media, their "The Best Men Can Be" campaign struck many as inauthentic corporate virtue signaling. Research at that time showed that many consumers perceived it as a cheap attempt to demonstrate cultural savviness rather than a genuine commitment to social change.

Contrast this with fashion house MiuMiu, whose cultural projects transcend fashion. Their Women's Tales short film initiative features work from directors like Miranda July and Joanna Hogg, while their literary club and Summer Reads event (giving away feminist books for free at global newsstands) create authentic cultural currency. The difference? Culture-making isn't just on MiuMiu's marketing calendar—it's embedded in their operational DNA.

2. The Reality Gap: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

Remember that pivotal scene in "The Wizard of Oz"? Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal that the intimidating "Great and Powerful Oz" was merely a nervous old man operating an elaborate façade. His desperate plea—"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"—comes too late. Once revealed, the illusion is irrevocably shattered.

Warner Bros.

This scene perfectly illustrates what I call the "Potemkin Village" model of brand management—elaborate façades constructed to make products appear more impressive than they actually are. In an age of radical transparency and interconnected experience, these façades aren't just ineffective; they actively destroy trust. And yet wizards remain in charge of too many marketing departments.

Volkswagen's infamous emissions scandal dramatically exposed this gap between brand projection and reality. When the truth about their dodgy emissions technology broke, their carefully cultivated "green car" positioning collapsed overnight, destroying billions in brand equity. Meanwhile, Patagonia's Worn Wear program created a system where customers actively participate in extending product lifecycles rather than merely consuming corporate sustainability messaging.

3. The Resource Trap: "You're Going To Need a Bigger Boat"

In the defining moment from "Jaws," Chief Brody finally glimpses the true size of the shark they're hunting and realizes their current resources are wholly inadequate, uttering the iconic line: "You're gonna need a bigger boat." It's a moment of clarity about the futility of tackling an enormous challenge with insufficient resources.

Universal Pictures.

This perfectly captures The Resource Trap: maintaining increasingly ineffective brand models is becoming exponentially more expensive each year. As attention fragments and authenticity becomes the new currency, the cost of bought awareness is approaching infinity. Like Amity Island's stubborn officials, marketers keep pouring resources into strategies that can’t possibly succeed against the challenges they face.

Recent World Federation of Advertisers data reveals that maintaining traditional brand awareness cost 42% more in 2021 than in 2019, despite diminishing returns. Yet the most valuable brands today aren't those with the biggest ad budgets—they’re the ones with engaged communities. Discord built a $15 billion brand with minimal traditional advertising by creating infrastructure for genuine community formation rather than just broadcasting messages.

This disconnection runs throughout our industry. WFA’s research found that only 43% of marketers believe top-funnel awareness activities have improved over the last five years, compared to 72% who think performance marketing has gotten better. Yet we continue funneling billions into awareness campaigns, widening this resource gap with every passing year.

As one of my clients put it with painful honesty, most Fortune 1000 CMOs would rather bleed out slowly than admit that their current brand model is irreparably broken.

Value creation in today’s experience economy fundamentally contradicts our traditional brand operating systems.

What We Covered So Far

Single-state brands are on the verge of disintegrating, revealing a far more intriguing future. I can’t help thinking that the future belongs to quantum brands—dynamic systems that can adapt and co-create meaning across contexts.

In the next installment I'll explore "Three-Dimensional Salience"—a new framework that treats brands not as fixed points of value but as probability fields of potential meaning. Just as quantum particles exist in multiple states simultaneously until observed, tomorrow's most valuable brands must develop the capacity to exist in superposition, collapsing into different states of relevance depending on who's interacting with them, when, and why.

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About the Author

Adrian Barrow is the founder and principal strategist of Catalyst Strategy, a boutique studio for brand innovation based in Los Angeles. Catalyst brings together business expertise, cultural insights, and experience design to help businesses develop new ways for their brands to create customer value.

About Catalyst Strategy

Catalyst was founded to help CMOs and CXOs leverage the power of brand innovation to pivot from player to leader during periods of profound industry transition. Our goal is to help our clients move beyond worn-out value propositions, creating entirely new dimensions of value that resonate with customers' changing needs and aspirations. In sum, we're here to help brands create value for customers, not simply promise it to them.