Chaos is a Ladder. Brands With A Story Climb.

For years, brands have treated the fragmentation of digital platforms, the volatility of the feed, and the churn of new formats as threats to be managed. The instinct was to try to contain the mess, to find stability, to build new structures of control.

But that thinking belongs to another era.

Today, the chaos is the market. It is the landscape every brand must navigate. It is not a temporary storm to wait out. It is the permanent weather system of the digital economy.

Platforms will continue to fragment. Walled gardens will tighten. Algorithms will shift overnight. New channels will appear out of nowhere. And in many cases, brands will not even know exactly where or next to what their content appears. The idea of control is a fantasy. Stability is an illusion. What remains is the ability to adapt, and to matter.

In a fragmented, volatile, and increasingly opaque environment, simply showing up will not be enough.

The brands that matter will be the ones with a point of view. A story. A sense of self. Not because it is nice to have, but because it is necessary to survive.

That is the dividing line now: businesses react. Brands create. Businesses chase the feed. Brands shape it.

Brands that survive will not be the ones trying to impose order. They will be the ones that build within the system as it evolves. They will move with it. They will master it.

As Eric Seufert put it in a recent Stratechery interview,

If you think about the open web by that definition, it’s on life support, there’s nothing there. We’re talking about recipe websites, we’re talking about listicles, we’re talking about click-through-to-the-next-celebrity, you’ll never believe who we saw. This stuff is dead. All the engagement now is in apps, and it’s in walled gardens.

Much to my sadness as someone who has been online since the 80's, the open web is no longer the frontier. The action, the momentum, the energy...it is all inside the walls now. That is not something to resist. It is the new starting point.

Every cycle of disruption reshapes what it means to build a brand. A century ago, it was about consistency. Ten years ago, it was about omnipresence. Today, it is about adaptability. It is about knowing where the momentum is, not where it used to be.

The best brands are already shifting their posture. They are no longer trying to solve fragmentation. They are leveraging it. They are using the new rules of the feed, the shifts in format, the churn of culture, and even the uncertainty of black-box placements as a force multiplier for their story, not a risk factor against it.

The ones clinging to old models, waiting for the dust to settle or for the next “standard” to emerge, will not find solid ground. They will find themselves wondering where the action went.

It did not leave. It just moved faster than they could see.

In a world that will only become more chaotic, the future belongs to those who can meet volatility with meaning and master it.