Quantum Brands
How the Physics of The Experience Economy Are Reshaping The Calculus of Customer Value Creation (Part 2)
Three-Dimensional Salience: Building Brands With The Flexibility to Adapt and Evolve
In Part 1, we explored how traditional "single-state" brands are struggling to maintain relevance in an increasingly chaotic marketplace. The crystalline perfection that brand managers have pursued for decades is proving too brittle for today's world.
This week, we'll discover what comes next—brands that function less like perfect crystals and more like living cells that are able to adapt and evolve to thrive in new environments.
From Static Artifacts to Living Systems
I recently found myself rewatching a fascinating video about Neri Oxman, a polymath biologist/designer/material engineer who’s now pretty famous for her pioneering work on “Material Ecology.” In the video, Ms. Oxman was explaining the ways in which natural cellular structures—such as bone, butterfly wings, and plant tissues—achieve strength, flexibility, and adaptability.
A while afterwards, I realized she’d perfectly articulated the evolution happening in the world of brand building today.
Traditional brand management has been obsessed with crystalline perfection—consistent messages, controlled experiences, and careful curation. As an industry, we’ve devoted ourselves to meticulously crafting brand guidelines, scrutinizing every pixel and punctuation mark as if a single misplaced comma could bring down the entire brand.
Could it be that our focus on perfection is not only unnecessary but also hindering our brands from thriving in chaotic environments? More importantly, if we adopted M. Oxman's approach, could we design brands that are capable of adapting, responding, and even expanding over time?
The Three Dimensions of Brand Salience
As I dug deeper into the brands that are succeeding in today's turbulent markets, a pattern emerged. The most valuable and resilient brands weren't just present in customers' minds—they were present in three distinct yet interconnected dimensions:
1. Cultural Salience: Embedding Brands (Authentically) in the Zeitgeist
Remember when the "Wakanda Forever" salute transcended the Black Panther film to become a cultural phenomenon? That's cultural salience at work. The crossed-arms gesture wasn't just a movie prop—it became embedded in cultural conversations about representation, identity, and power.
Cultural salience is your brand becoming part of how people express what they care about collectively, not just what they need individually. It's about connecting authentically with cultural movements and moments.
Consider what LUSH Cosmetics did in 2021 with their "Be Somewhere Else" campaign. They deleted their social media accounts—not as a temporary stunt, but as a genuine response to growing concerns about digital well-being and social media's harmful effects. The move wasn't a marketing tactic grafted onto their brand; it was a natural expression of their existing values around ethics and mindfulness.
The move generated significant press, but more importantly, it positioned LUSH within a growing cultural conversation about digital detox and tech accountability. Their anti-digital stance paradoxically deepened their cultural relevance by aligning with emerging values around mindfulness and authentic connection.
2. Situational Salience: Dynamic Relevance in a Moment of Need
Remember that scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise walks through a shopping mall, and the digital billboards scan his retinas, instantly displaying personalized ads? "John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right now!" “Get away, John Anderton. Forget your troubles.” The ads don't just know who he is—they know exactly what he needs in that precise moment.
While billboard retinal scanning might (thankfully) still be science fiction, the principle of situational salience is very real. It's earned when your brand appears at precisely the right time in people's lives, offering precisely the right solution.
Spotify is one brand that’s absolutely mastered situational salience with their daily mixes and seasonal wrapped features. It doesn't just deliver music; it adapts the entire experience based on time of day, activity patterns, seasonal changes, and emotional contexts. The brand exists in a state of continuous adaptation to user behavior rather than presenting a single, consistent interface.
When my Spotify suggests the perfect workout playlist just as I'm entering the gym or serves up nostalgic tracks on the anniversary of significant life events, it's not just being helpful—it's becoming entangled with my daily rhythms and routines.
3. Experiential Salience: Creating Memorable Interactions
If you've ever seen Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, you'll remember the moment when the children enter the Chocolate Room. The edible landscape, the chocolate waterfall, and the immersive candy environment that engages every sense exemplify experiential salience in its most literal form.
Experiential salience is earned when your brand creates experiences so immersive and memorable that they become part of customers' personal narratives—the stories people tell themselves and others about who they are and what they value.
Few brands embody this principle better than Trader Joe's, the US grocer. Its products don't just have labels; they have stories, personalities, and cultural contexts. Their Fearless Flyer isn't mere marketing material but a quirky cultural artifact that customers collect and discuss. The Hawaiian shirts, the hand-drawn signage, the hidden stuffed animals for children to find—these aren't just branding elements but experiential threads in a rich tapestry of discovery.
By embedding their store experience with countless micro-narratives, Trader Joe's hasn't just created a place to buy groceries—they've created a continuously unfolding story world that customers navigate both physically and imaginatively.
The New Mathematics of Brand Value
As brands strengthen their salience across these three dimensions, something big happens—the way in which they create value fundamentally changes.
Traditional brand valuation relies on a relatively straightforward formula. This linear equation assumes a predictable world where value is something brands create and then distribute to passive consumers.
Brand Value = Σ(Awareness x Availability x Trust)
But in a quantum brandiverse, this equation transforms into something more dynamic:
Brand Value = Σ(Brand Salience × Probability of Customer Entanglement)
This new equation suggests that a brand's value exists in a state of superposition until it collapses into specific "value moments" through customer interaction. The brand isn't a fixed asset but a probability field of potential experiences waiting to be activated through engagement.
Beyond Salience to Entanglement: The Leading Edge of Brand Building
The world's most innovative brands are pushing beyond even this three-dimensional salience to what we might term "brand entanglement"—a state in which the boundaries between brand and customer collapse entirely.
Quantum physics says that entangled particles are no longer separate entities; the state of one particle instantly changes the state of the other particle, no matter how far apart they are. Entangled brands are not only important to customers; they become deeply linked, with each shaping the other's reality (and sometimes identity).
Consider Mschf, the provocative art collective/brand whose limited "drops"—from "Jesus Shoes" with holy water to "Satan Shoes" with human blood—create instant cultural rifts that force consumers to take positions. Mschf doesn't simply participate in culture; it creates quantum superpositions where the brand simultaneously exists as provocateur, commentator, and commodity, collapsing into different states depending on who's observing it.
Discord is another great example of brand entanglement at play. What began as a gaming chat platform evolved into essential infrastructure for countless communities—not just connecting users but evolving symbiotically with them. Discord developed features shaped by emergent user behaviors while users adapted their social structures to Discord's capabilities. The platform and its community became so entangled that it's impossible to say where one ends and the other begins.
What Have We Learned?
The most valuable brands today have figured out how to exist in three distinct yet interconnected dimensions:
Cultural Salience: Embedding brands authentically in the zeitgeist.
Situational Salience: Dynamic relevance in the moment.
Experiential Salience: Creating memorable interactions.
As a result, a new calculus of brand value is emerging, with brand value becoming a function of Salience × Probability of Entanglement. This has profound implications for how we manage and build brands in today’s chaotic experience economy.
Next Time
In Part 3, we'll codify the three fundamental laws that govern how quantum brands operate and provide a practical roadmap for CMOs and marketing leaders ready to evolve beyond the limitations of static brand management.
The brands that will succeed in the experience economy will be those that are built to create change, not just adapt to it.
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.