How will brands thrive over the next decade

19 Feb 2026

How will brands thrive over the next decade? This long-read explores the thinking, tools and systems of navigating the age of instability. It takes inspiration from the hitmakers... from musicians and art collectives to production houses and luxury.

This isn’t a 10-step process. A one-size-fits-all approach. It is to make you think. It is to make you look closer. It is to spark new models, codes and principles.

It is to help form the brands of the future.

What we cover

• The new suite of brand tools
• How we're living in the age of hitmakers
• Why the new production model looks a lot like MSCHF
• Decoding hitmaking & Charli XCX
• The new 'prolific never precious' production model

01. The new suite of brand tools

Brands, they’re all around us.

Identity marks helping us make quick decisions, take shortcuts to know if something is worth it or not. The value we depart with, do we get value back + more?

When we think about brands, our thinking hasn’t moved on much from the Mad Men days.

A tool to communicate a brand's identity and values top down. Using the tried and tested levers of influence: TV, OOH and Print to Events, Ambassadors and Celebrities. Mapped out across moments in time when a brand wants to say something, how they want to say it and when they want to say it.

Brands are living, breathing things. They all have a rhythm. If you look closely enough, you can see it from the packaging, the shop floor to the humdrum of the office and the language used. It’s ever-changing, adapting and evolving.

Slices of perception layered on top of one another. Melting, distorting and remade by constant and consistent exposure. Over time, turning the unknown, unfamiliar and untested into the familiar, safe and something worth paying for… again, again and again.

Brands are lots of tiny bits of information. Our lives have been shattered into thousands of little pieces of information overload. Piling on more and more. Lost in a sea of fog not knowing what to take on, what to engage with and what to ignore. We’re in the age of content pollution. The plastic of the digital world. Polluting our pixelated sea, skies and shores.

GenAI, the plastic synthetic content machine of our digital world, will run through everything. It will be cheap, accessible and create mountains of digital waste… buried, shipped off and the majority forgotten about.

So how do brands navigate this? How do brands move from polluters to rewilders? How do brands enrich, educate and entertain? How do brands add to people's lives, rather than take away?

The acceleration of content happened when Instagram killed the chronological feed. It’s when content went global.

Brands pumping out more and more through the perception of gaining ‘free reach’ and getting in front of large amounts of people with little to no cost. Getting hooked on more and more by an ever growing number of touchpoints, placements and platforms. Digital, spreading like wildfire through everything we do.

For brands, it’s been hard to keep up. It’s hard to know where to focus and hard to show success. Brands have been fermented. They’ve been broken down… forming a new type of energy.

A new set of tools, a new suite of influence and a new way of seeing.

“The ways things move through the internet is the secret everyone is trying to uncover” Sean Monahan

There is no perfect science, hack or formula that can be cracked. Even though no one likes to admit it.

Some just understand the new set of tools better than others.

02. How we're living in the age of hitmakers

MSCHF, the art collective not-so-art collective, is a hit factory. They create one hit after the next. They create products that sell in a couple of minutes through an ever-expanding global and highly loyal fan base. They weave and edge through communities and subcultures using and manipulating the mainstream… selling it back to the masses. They manage to be big yet small at the same time.

Ana Andjelic, a global brand executive and founder of The Sociology of Business newsletter, brands, too, are Hitmakers. Driven by a ‘prolific never precious’ model similar to the studio A24. High-output, considered bets, with a ‘test > learn > iterate’ approach. Laying to rest the duds and living off the profits of the best. Shifting between making blockbusters and ones just for the super fans. The same teams and the same directors just served in different contexts.

“The idea of a careful, considered, deliberate practice isn’t viable in a world in which technology has made the rules by which everything works ever more opaque” Sean Monahan

03. Why the new production model looks a lot like MSCHF

Many brands are stuck in the mindset of ‘build it and they will come’ blindly hoping the internet gods will give them favour with an unprecedented amount of ‘free’ reach to supplement the declining, ever fragmenting and yearly raided media budgets.

Under a structure that is rigid, full of counterproductive rules and systems/partners that are more focused on admin rather than creating. Speaking at their audience, rather than listening. Interrupting rather than enriching. Swindling rather than giving.

MSCHF reference points:

- If you don’t have an antagonist, do you have a point?

- Concepts that slap in one sentence and slap harder in three.

- Your brand is what you do, not what you tell yourself.

- People remember the first thing they saw, the best thing and the most recent thing.

- Don’t invent constraints for yourself, when you don’t need to.

Hits are made by setting out a specific, sharp and singular vision. Connecting the dots of why and how you’re going to get there. It’s setting the ship's course, knowing there is an exciting but long and arduous journey ahead.

It’s about sticking to it consistently. Day in and day out for months, years and decades. This is what the best brands do. The problem is… people get bored. Leaders change and want to stamp their authority. Dislodging departments… merging, migrating and restructuring.

Agencies get fired, tech stacks get muddled and the best move on. What the most powerful brands do is engrain that vision into the DNA of that company. Acting like oxygen breathing life into every department, team and structure. It empowers people, raises them up and lets them fly. No matter the change, the singular vision doesn’t. The power is with the people.

A collective force, multiplied by consistency… is a potent one

We’re as scared of success as we are of failure. It’s why so much work aims for the middle. We write big lofty ambitions but our day-to-day differs.

The test > learn > iterate model works through focus and speed, coupled with relentless resourcefulness. The model doesn’t wait for inspiration, a single stroke of genius or one single beautifully crafted insight. Doing hard things well consistently is what this model is all about.

It’s working towards your own hit factory.

As MSCHF reminds us, “people remember the first thing they saw, the best thing they have seen, and the most recent thing they saw. Best and last both benefit from volume”.

“Be firm in your destination but flexible in your path” Erik Qualman

04. Decoding hitmaking & Charli XCX

From the outside, overnight successes seem like strokes of luck. The reality is… the smarter you work, the more focused you are, the luckier you get.

Grace Gordon, former Senior Director of Brand Marketing at CashApp and former Global Brand Creative Director at Netflix, decodes how Charli XCX’ Brat took over the world. Building from the super fans out, working its way all the way to our politicians. Weaving from IRL to URL and back again.

Blending the URL and IRL over 4+ months, fuelled by considered momentum. Constantly being picked up, remixed, reworked and rethought… under the same platform. The same vision.

MSCHF’s work ‘Key4All’ brought a 2004 wood-paneled Chrysler PT Cruiser and made five thousand keys that unlocked the car. If someone with a key found the vehicle, they could turn it on and drive it. If the car was left unattended, it could be discovered and driven by another keyholder.

The MSCHF fan base, over 9 months, kept the car going. Creating a communal treasure constantly in the hands of a new owner, putting their new spin and passing it along.

The work went far beyond the five thousand keyholders. No big video to launch or big stunts. Yet ‘Key4All’ has tens of millions of views on TikTok. Made up of lots of mini documentary-style videos that comprise a surprisingly comprehensive record of the car’s expedition.

Today, brands aren’t just molded by the people paid to do so. Fandoms are one of the most prolific, potent and purposeful creators of our times.

And too many brands decide to ignore them.

05. The new ‘prolific never precious’ production model

VP of Creative at Liquid Death, Andy Pearson, described the brand as:

“Really just an amalgamation of all things that we find interesting - heavy metal, satire, art, absurdist humour, health, and environmental issues, sketch comedy - all thrown in a bag and shaken up”.

The agency model of ‘bill as many hours possible’ isn’t fit for purpose. It never was. As Michael Farmer has been rallying for decades, agencies need to move to a value-led outcome-based model.

Agencies, in the process, have slipped further and further downstream. It’s why in-housing is growing year-on-year. It’s faster, more efficient and becoming more effective. It brings a greater shift of power back to the brand.

In the age of instability, for brands to thrive, they need flexibility. From political polarisation and platform bans to trade tariffs and tech bros… the model needs to be able to adapt to the speed of culture, to weave through the shaky economy and to be able to create without constraint.

It is centered around creating as many hits as possible.

Having a mix of in-house capabilities and a larger roster of specialised agencies, underpinned by a connected tech stack. Documented processes, lean teams of top-tier talent all driven by a shared purpose and fair financial rewards.

Everyone briefed and onboarded on the vision, strategy and commercials connected to the goals of the brand. Brands historically keep a lot of this information internal. Fueling the transactional relationships that plague our industry. This is why work produced feels disconnected, disillusioned and ends up being left on the cutting room floor.

The model is focused on forming an ecosystem made of partnerships for everyone to thrive in. It’s about all working together closely, from meetings to eating, allowing partners to see behind the curtain.

It’s exposing them to the joy, pain and day-to-day of a living, breathing brand. Only then can they truly support, help and enrich.

Getting the whole ecosystem as close to the product as possible. Regularly working on the factory and shop floors, walking the hallways and understanding the language and rhythm of it all. It’s using the connected power of the ecosystem to build a bridge between teams to product, finance and sales… and beyond.

It’s bringing these people together to have conversations that hit hard in the boardroom. To create hits, it’s as much of an internal process as it is external.

This is hard but it creates the strongest work.

This takes time but compounds success.

This is boring but builds brands.

In the age of instability, like the plot of the 2004 film ‘Layer Cake’, layers are the things businesses go through to rise to the top. In a world around it where the rules are ever changing, codes are disregarded and respect is fleeting. Brands need to create their own ecosystems, processes and principles to unlock fresh growth.

Each brief or moment is under the vision and strategy with the corresponding goals, as specific as possible. All are drawn up together in collaboration with the partnership ecosystem.

This isn’t about creating 100-page complicated docs, it’s a simple and easy-to-understand suite of agreements that the brand and ecosystem have together, with the right amount of capital to make it happen. If we succeed together, work together, how are we all financially rewarded together? This is a critical part of the shared purpose.

The layer cake is centered around the act of creating at high volume and at high quality. There is no room for the act of busyness. Unnecessarily complicated system. Inflated admin. It’s about bringing out and shining a light on creativity in an organisation, fuelling the fires of the act of creation.

A far cry from strategy upon strategy upon strategy, workshop upon workshop with hot air billed as hours upon hours.

Driven forward by smart account and project management. The ‘get shit done’ enablers, the diplomats, the connectors and pusher-alongers. These are the people who make business happen. These are the people who bring the best, bravest and boldest work to light. These people create an environment for others to succeed in.

It’s combining experience and focus with speed and resourcefulness. Guts and singularity. The best work is never made by committees or the highest scoring in pre-testing. It’s on the edge, the unexpected, unusual and never before seen.

Once the work is set free, running alone out in the wild. See success? Build, build and build some more. Build it into something much larger than the sum of its parts. Make it not just a hit but number one. Then move on to the next.

This is the ‘never precious’ part. This isn’t about undoing all the equity gained and business impact achieved. It’s about freshness. It’s about where the next hit will come from. It’s about doing the same but in new and unexpected ways. It’s still consistent, continues wear in and fights against the algorithm-inducing content-polluting notion of more, more, more.

It’s considered production at speed. It’s our wabi-sabi. It’s about active listening.

Pairing the word on the street with the data you’re getting back. It’s mixing what people say they do with what they actually do. From real people, your customers. Not the feedback loop of the marketing world, awards and recognition from the press.

This model only works when everyone has been brought in. A model that can scale up and down depending on the needed bandwidth. It creates a competitive, thoughtful and considered environment. It’s using pools of force that are properly prepared. It’s paying for outcomes, not rate cards and egos.

This is the model that moves brands from begging, borrowing and stealing people's time. One centered around considered creation, understanding how information passes through channels and maximises growth through multifaceted value.

It takes a long and short view. It’s not about the cheap, dirty and quick. Being prolific isn’t that. Some of the finest work might take months if not years but it’s having multiple projects on with a model that enables quick turns, take-ups and movement vs brand out schedules and eggs all in one basket tentpole moments.

Brands aren’t linear; they never have been. It’s time our models, ecosystems and partnerships reflected that.

What we do at DACRE

DACRE guides brands through moments of change. We revive forgotten companies and scale new ones by building brands that people want to buy from.

We deliver change across three services.

We deliver change across three services. Positioning brands in what customers value, creating distinctive identities & campaigns that enrich.

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You can read more of our thinking on our blog and in our brand reports.