Paul Graham’s recent essay, The Brand Age, is one of the sharper critiques of branding I’ve read in a while. Using Swiss watchmaking as his case study, he traces how an industry once driven by engineering progress ran into the limits of product differentiation. The surviving brands choose to no longer rely on specs alone. They turned instead to identity, perception, scarcity, and status.
There is a lot in that critique worth taking seriously, especially now. In the age of B2B SaaS and AI, companies are racing to build better products, but that same acceleration is also creating a kind of category fog. The more every company is claiming faster speed, higher intelligence intelligence, or more automation; the harder it becomes for audiences to grasp what actually makes one meaningfully different from another.
That is where I think Graham is right to warn us, but not where we should land in our understanding of brand.
The most useful takeaway from his essay is this: brand becomes corrosive when it detaches from truth. Distinctive is not the same thing as good, and when brand stops expressing substance and starts replacing it, the result is often a shallow version of itself.
But that is not a problem with brand itself. It is a problem of brand drifting away from the truth it is meant to express.
In B2B especially, this matters. Buyers are rarely in active evaluation mode. In fact, as little as 5% of a given market is “in market” at a given time. 95% of your market is not actively evaluating products, not parsing functional differences, and not looking for a spec sheet. Long before that moment, brand is shaping how people remember you and whether they will trust you enough to choose you when the time comes.
That is why I do not see substance and signaling as opposites. The strongest signals should come from substance. Brand is meant to help customers understand what a company stands for and what kind of value they should expect long before they ever consider a purchase or request a product demo.
And product quality still matters too. It may no longer be the only thing carrying the sale, but it still has to hold up. The product should deliver on what the brand implies. If it does not, the whole thing starts to fall apart.
That is also why brand-led businesses can become fragile when they drift too far from the truth. Marketing hype can generate attention and scarcity can manufacture desire, but neither can carry a company forward if the underlying experience does not hold up. When brand and product do align, each strengthens the other and the customer gets what the brand promised.
For those of us who work in brand strategy, the job is not to defend branding at all costs. The goal is to practice brand more honestly and more rigorously: as an expression of substance, not a substitute for it. This is the way to help companies communicate real value in markets where functional differences can be difficult to see until much later in the buying process.
Graham ends by encouraging people to follow interesting problems. I think that advice is exactly right. But I do not think it means avoiding brand. It means refusing to treat brand as the end in itself. If we are in a brand age, then the work is not to reject brand altogether. It is to build better ones. Brands grounded in substance and honest enough to say something real.
— Strahinja Spasojević