Every trip and every conversation always leaves me with one thing: new ideas.
This is exactly what happened while I was in Barcelona at the beginning of the year, thinking about brands, the studio, and our collaborators. If I could, I would love to take the talent of everyone who works at Love&Fear to every corner of the planet. It’s a big challenge, I know, so for the moment, I created ReImagined Brands.
Learning has been a central part of who I am and how I designed Love&Fear’s model from day one. I didn’t just want to deliver creative services for brands; I wanted to spread a design mindset among friends and clients. Teaching and empowering teams beyond our deliverables is both a personal goal and how I believe we can truly demonstrate the value behind design processes and design teams. For me, design is not an empty word; design has always helped me find the right ingredients for true meaning, essence, and value.
So, a month later, in Lisboa, with Erica at Future Days, on our way to grab a delicious breakfast, I told her about this idea I had to create an intimate online space for special brands, where we could talk about our vision and the new paradigm in our approach to brand building. A vision that puts trends, magic formulas, and buzzwords aside to focus on the true value of designing brands for the long term, brands designed for human connection. Later, on another continent, we brought to life four brand masterclasses, where we shared the importance of emotional brands, what people are looking for today, and how to build stories people will remember and share with their network.
Here are the four main lessons I believe every brand should consider today (especially if you are in the experience business or have a positive-impact product/service):
1. Do you have a Brand Universe?
When most people think of “brand” or “branding,” they think of visuals. However, today’s landscape is multifaceted, flexible, high in complexity, and in a state of continuous change. So, thinking only in visual terms is not enough anymore (and it has been this way for several years).
After the rush of the performance marketing era, we were told that we needed to feed our funnels with content like never before. Content, content, content; post, post, post; no matter what, no matter how. This has led to hyper-fatigued audiences, irrelevant content, and oversaturated platforms where it keeps getting more expensive to reach the right audience. The current context is run by a general feeling of mistrust towards brands and an urge for ideas and actions that bring us back to what it feels like to be a real person (not just a credit card number).
You might have heard that the famous marketing funnel is broken. That sentiment isn’t wrong.
A purchase decision is not a straight line anymore. Just because someone sees your ad doesn’t mean they will buy directly or immediately. People want to find value first and create a connection. They will jump from a friend’s recommendation to your social media feed, to your website, to a Google or ChatGPT search. Days or weeks later, they might be reminded by an ad, and that night they might just go back to your website and purchase that product. Leads and conversion points are moving, coexisting, and changing all the time.
This is where a Brand Universe becomes key. You need to take your identity and brand strategy and build a visual system that connects human emotions to your business. Then, you translate all those values, narratives, and visuals into a positioning strategy that allows you to create a marketing plan and implementation that is consistent, aligned, and most of all, filled with meaning and valuable content for people.
Brand Universes contain the main ingredients for all your brand touchpoints. Because today, conversion doesn’t just come from ads or a specific campaign; it comes from recommendations, collaborations, the sense of belonging to the narrative you are inviting people into, empathic experiences, and high emotional value – all cross-platform (digital and IRL).
2. Measure the Right KPIs
It’s no news that today’s world is obsessed with metrics, but are brands really measuring what truly matters? In the era of data, we have learned to measure it all, down to the minimum detail. However, most brands are putting their energy on the final phase of funnels, focusing only on conversion rates. But people are exhausted by transactional strategies.
Brand perception and awareness don’t always fit into an Excel algorithm, but that’s no reason not to track it and, most importantly, to invest properly in it. In an oversaturated context, how people get to know you and how they perceive your brand is what will make it stand out. Just ask New Balance how they’re doing after changing their budget priorities and betting on brand awareness over product and discount ads. People don’t want or need more things; they want to connect and belong. There is a need for a human priority.
So how about we measure the quality of the relationship with your customers, community, and general audience? When was the last time you measured trust? Do people trust your brand?
3. Designed for Human Connection: The True Power of Storytelling
Storytelling is an old friend by now when we talk about brand building. Surrounded by confusion, we got to a point where everyone talked about it and used it as a bargaining chip to justify creative budgets. The art of telling stories is as ancient as human existence; however, the intention behind it has evolved.
For the last decade, storytelling has often been mistaken for a manipulation tool instead of a connection tool. Good storytelling is not about deceiving people or tricking them into actions they weren’t interested in in the first place. Good stories are created from a place of empathy, where people can see themselves reflected, stories that embrace human vulnerability for good, not to take advantage of people’s pain.
People want to feel understood and listened to. A good storyteller knows how to read the present moment and create narratives that have a positive impact on people’s lives. In a chaotic world, inspiring hope, truly listening, and slowing down will attract people into your brand universe. When everyone is yelling for likes and leads, whispering makes people get closer and get involved. Maybe it’s time to change our mindset and stop fighting for people’s attention. Maybe it’s time for brands to start building connections.
4. Powerful Brands are Building to Stay in the Game
The culture of immediacy has left us in a place of shallowness. Seas of noisy content are everywhere, chasing people’s wallets and instant results, which has created a permanent feeling of mistrust between people and brands. Human relationships aren’t born in a second; the significant ones require time and work. It is the same for brands.
The only way to build a strong relationship with customers is to design strategies with a long-term vision. Community is not built overnight or with only a couple of touchpoints. The brands that are here to stay are building trust and credibility through time and emotional connections. They are looking beyond the 30-day metrics.
Building the Future, One Brand at a Time
The brands that will thrive in the coming years won’t be the loudest or the fastest. They’ll be the most human. They’ll understand that behind every click, purchase, and share is a person seeking connection, meaning, and authenticity.
ReImagined Brands 2025 was and will continue to be our invitation to join this movement. Whether you’re a startup finding your voice or an established brand ready to reconnect with your purpose, the time for shallow, transactional relationships is over. The future belongs to brands that dare to be vulnerable, patient, and genuinely human.
Because in a world full of noise, the brands that whisper truth will be the ones people lean in to hear.
Ready to reimagine your brand for deeper human connection?
Let’s start the conversation.
