Brand identity is culture work

The first thing people experience about a brand is usually visual. Before they experience a product or service, they’ve already made a judgment. And often, that judgment sticks. It’s the instinctive impression people form when they come across your brand for the first time, or the hundredth. At its best, brand identity acts like a cultural shorthand. It tells people what kind of brand this is and what world it belongs in. And maybe more importantly, what world it doesn’t.

A lot of brands are experiencing an internal tension, a kind of low-grade dissonance they can’t quite put their finger on. Perhaps it’s the way they’re showing up in the market no longer reflects what’s actually going on inside the business, and while they might not have the exact words for it, they can feel the drag on momentum. 

We often meet companies sitting in a form of brand purgatory. The business has matured, maybe the product’s sharper, the team’s more experienced, the ambition’s grown bolder; but the identity still feels like an artifact from an earlier stage. A little of what they used to be, a little of what they hope to become,and a whole lot of guessing in between. The branding might be costing opportunity, reputation or pricing power. 

But it’s not always about a disconnect between the brand and the business. Sometimes, it’s about vitality. The brand is just … dull. Brands lose energy when they aren’t nurtured, when they’re left to sit in a kind of strategic stasis. And vitality — the thing that makes a brand feel culturally awake — needs to be maintained. It doesn’t need constant reinvention every year, but it does need thoughtful stewardship. Neglect it, and it starts to wilt.

The two jobs of brand identity

A brand identity has two critical jobs: create distinction, and signal meaning.

Distinction is about carving out a space only your brand can occupy. Distinction is about becoming cognitively and emotionally entrenched in your audience’s memory. Distinctive brands reject category clichés and instead make conscious design choices that reinforce their position.

Signalling is about how people size you up, and how a brand telegraphs its value, intent, and credibility. Signals are how we orient ourselves in a crowded market, and how others orient around us. 

It’s whether they trust you, rate you, or aspire to be associated with you. Brands that aren’t landing, whether that be on on pricing, on recruitment, on conversion, often have a signalling problem. 

Brand identity as a mirror

People want to align with brands that reflect their own values, aspirations, and identity. If you understand what your customer values, your job as the brand is to reflect that back. And then to keep doing that, consistently, over time.

That reflection is what builds brand affinity.

We often use this frame:

• The customer’s identity aligns with your purpose.
• Their goals connect with your onlyness.
• Their sense of belonging mirrors your values.

Taste, culture and creative direction

Most people aren’t wired to make interesting creative decisions, at no fault of their own. They’re running companies, not critiquing art direction. So it’s easy to default to what’s familiar, to copy what the category is doing.

You can spot the companies that value taste. And taste, in this context, is shorthand for cultural awareness. It’s a mix of intuition, timing, aesthetic literacy, and a willingness to make decisions that don’t need to be focus-grouped to death.

But when you look closely at the brands people admire, almost always, there’s a spine of cultural relevance. From observing what’s happening in the world — art, design, film, fashion, music, language — and finding the thread that connects those cultural signals to the brand’s point of view. These brands are tuned into the world. They borrow, remix it, and contribute back. 

Identity isn’t your styleguide. Those are tools. What matters is how you use them.

Supreme vs. Uniqlo: Same tools, different worlds

Too often, identity gets reduced to a set of parts: a colour palette, a font system, a logo lockup. But identity isn’t your style guide – not really. Those are tools. What matters is how you use them. That’s where creative direction lives: in brand expression, tone, vibe, and energy. Identity is the personality and soul of the brand. 

Supreme and Uniqlo are great examples of what I mean. They use similar raw materials: red and white, and a nod to “minimalism”. However their take on minimalism diverges completely, shaped by radically different cultural codes and brand intentions.

Supreme flirts with minimalism through its refusal to explain itself. You can see this in its website, which offers almost nothing: no story, no context, just a silent grid of products. Its visual identity is built from bare-bones ingredients: Futura in a red box and a lot of blank space around it. But look beyond that, and the brand’s creative expression is absolutely maximalist: chaotic, layered, and wired with cultural signals.

Supreme’s DNA is rooted in street culture, skateboarding, and lives on scarcity and disruption. Supreme has built its identity not through traditional marketing, but through subcultural capital and a refusal to explain itself. It offers no welcome mat, and that’s part of its allure. Their creative is dense with subcultural signifiers: archival graphics, provocative imagery, oddball type treatments. And everything Supreme puts into the world feels like it belongs to a visual underground.

Campaigns are often fragmented, filled with clashing references that would feel out of place anywhere else, which is exactly the point. There’s no instructional tone, no explanatory narrative. The photography feels lo-fi on purpose, casting off the polish of commercial fashion in favour of rawness. The brand thrives on being a riddle, cultivating a sense of insider status. Supreme’s aesthetic twists “minimalism” and ambiguity into tension and exclusivity (before hitting you with a maximalist punch).

Uniqlo operates on an entirely different frequency. Uniqlo, by contrast, uses minimalism to achieve calm and quiet consistency. Where Supreme is exclusionary, Uniqlo is egalitarian. Its creative direction has a reverence for simplicity in everything it puts out. The art direction feels less like fashion marketing and more like a manual for living well. You’re not being told to change your life, you’re being shown how these clothes fit into the one you already have. 

There’s a humility in the visual language, and that humility is what gives Uniqlo its own space in the fashion world. Campaigns are rarely aspirational in the traditional sense. They don’t sell fantasy, but they do value simplicity, versatility and comfort.

Both brands pull from the same base ingredients (similar colours and san serif fonts), but what they create with them is wildly different. Uniqlo’s minimalism is a gesture of restraint, an invitation to democratise access to good design. Supreme’s is a gesture of authority, daring the audience to decode it, to earn it.

Is it time to rethink your identity?

Not every identity needs reinvention. But most deserve interrogation.

These are the prompts we return to:

• If the logo disappeared, would anyone still recognise you by your look, tone and vibe?
• Does the brand have gravity? Does it attract the kind of customers, collaborators, and talent you want?
• Is the identity accelerating growth or holding it back?
• Does the brand have a cultural posture? Do people feel like they’re stepping into a world?

About Mude
We are a strategic brand and creative agency.

We help organisations distil who they are, why they matter, and how they show up in the world. From positioning to identity, we clarify your story and carve out the space only you can own, help brands win the positioning game, outmanoeuvre competitors, and find your ‘onlyness’.

If your brand identity isn’t keeping pace with who you are—or who you’re becoming—it might be time for a recalibration. Explore our branding services to see how we help organisations sharpen their presence, signal meaning, and show up with purpose.