The wobbly economics of attention, the day marketing became mood design, and what loyalty can reteach us about advertising.
Rain slantwise patters on the window of a grey, moody cityscape. Jazz hums casually in your ear. The dull glow of your phone lets you know that your latte is perking and ready to collect at the counter.
Remove lid, huff, blow the rising steam, line your stomach with caffeine.
The coffeeshop is new but familiar: a minimalist, friendly logo, a shelf of “organic” sounding cooking paraphernalia, totes, mugs tough as Kevlar ready for battle on public transport, and commodity chocolates made from soil. Everything is compostable. Everything has a badge. All around people decamp and work remotely, immersed in what can only be described as a carefully arranged atmosphere, a sense of collective experience, a vibe.
Everything is intentional for the modern brand.
What I’m talking about is advertising in a post-transactional marketplace—let me explain.
Modern consumers don’t just buy.
Consumers, self-conscious of the algorithmic slipstream that controls their feeds, are spending their most precious resource – their attention – on one thing: building lifestyle, experiences, memories, or a sense of identity. More than ever the demand for marketing is to create links between their services and something much bigger, more emotional than conventional product decisions.
This is where branding, I believe, is becoming more essential than ever.
To be clear what I want to get at is that consumers have an increasingly symbiotic relationship with their preferred brands. We’re living through a post-transactional age when products need to fuel the imaginations and identities of the customers they reach. In retail, a wax field jacket is a lifestyle choice as much as it can keep you dry in wetter weathers. In a coffeeshop in Paddington, the customer wants their latte indulged by ambient armchair jazz and the convenience of free Wi-Fi, food-art, and a community. In enterprise technology, we talk in partnerships often because there’s so much more to buying hardware than the thing itself – trust, expertise, availability, and reassurances.
You could even say that the softer commodities of what you’re ‘selling’ – the aspirational lifestyle, the trustworthiness – are achieved through brand recognition nowadays. To inspire emotional purchase, where customers feel their way into a deeper, more resonant connection with your brand, is a noble ambition.
It’s not enough to have a copasetic customer base and an optimised, well-intentioned email campaign—it’s about timeworn relationships that dig through the transactional layers of their decision to strike a richer emotional chord with the journey they’re on.
Specifically, what I’ve noticed as I bumble along the long, billboarded corridors of the London Underground is that brands are vying for attention and a greater share of your time. But what millennial brands are experimenting with now in this space is something different from aesthetics—it’s all about moods and vibes.
I arrive at my destination in Paddington, coffee in-hand, and can’t help but wonder if vibing will set the scene of the next year in advertising. Customers aren’t buying products right now—they’re buying atmosphere.
A (very brief) introduction to vibing.
I heard it first as a cursory reference from an engineer – vibe coding, a trending phenomenon, captures the new utility of artificial intelligence as a kind of coding assistant. You can leverage language models descriptively, in the form of prompt engineering, to minimalise the friction of traditional coding, which has long relied on an alchemy of experience, late nights, a litre of Pepsi, and engineering forums and threads.
Salesforce recently revealed ‘Agentforce Vibes’, which uses vibe coding for productivity wins. Similarly, giants like Anthropic and other CoPilots are all notionally doing the same thing: conversationally, through an interface, you delegate out tasks through AI agents, like bugging or coding.
Notionally, vibing is way to imbue experience and feel your way through a challenge, task or workflow. It speaks to a kind of connective tissue in decision-making where expertise and gut instinct collide. In the everyday use of AI agents, vibing is prophetic.
Right now, however, vibing isn’t just about code. I want to expand its definition into marketing—where it captures the emotional frequency between brands and audiences.
Why products come later.
What I see as the revival of old-world mysticism associated with branding is a return to a near-future where loyalty is the fastest path to winning customer attention. The challenge is that this path isn’t, well, fast.
Rolled up, the new customer journey is a disrupted slipstream of content, influence, and many (many!) experiences. Perhaps it’s even the case that those sturdy, reassuringly industrial, gravity-fed marketing funnels that capture customer cycles are out-of-touch. Time will be the judge.
Put aside traditional thinking about customer buying cycles momentarily. We’re living through a digital moment when content creation, consumption and saturation—ever heard of ‘brain rot’?—precedes sales, it doesn’t just support it. Content can achieve more than product explanation—it can train our nervous systems on how to experience it.
Let’s revisit the coffeeshop in Paddington. In a single swipe, an end user watches a Reel of the shop with the sunrise crawling through the windows. They don’t think: “I should buy a coffee right now.” Instead, their internal voice is reassuring: “I’m the kind of person who enjoys mornings like this.” They save the post, follow the account. They intend to visit.
The last few decades in marketing have been about leveraging data, targeting, attribution and the magic storytelling to bring campaigns to life.
So, what changed?
For a while now, we’ve all become self-conscious of the attention economy. Simply put, your attention is the currency—making it more valuable than a single-time purchase for some brands. But I’d argue, if you really want to create those lasting connections you should look no further than customer loyalty.
Here’s the problem with our attention— you can buy it, borrow it, hack it, momentarily hijack it, but you never keep it for long. Attention is useful and abundant, but it’s also volatile, fleeting, disloyal.
Loyalty, on the other hand, behaves differently. Not only is it scarce but it compounds over time, benefits from self-fulfilling advocacy, means a tolerance toward the imperfect. In my view, loyalty will outperform attention economically—it just needs your patience.
Loyalty as theology.
Traditional customer loyalty was economic. It was accumulative, earned through recurring purchases, accrued as points, perks and discounts. For marketers, the logic was linear: reward repeat behaviour.
That’s not the kind of loyalty I’m advocating for here.
The new loyalty is based on theology. What I mean is that loyalty should look less like a contract and feel more like a belief system. You may have heard about Simon Sinek’s famous concept “Start with Why”, which is now a beloved TED talk. He argues that successful leaders should operate a model in the following way: Why → How → What. People increasingly buy from brands because they believe in their Why, not just their products.
There’s a strong case for the return of brand – of fanfare, loyalty, and trust backed by brands not selling material things but lifestyles and services with substance and meaning.
Marketing as ‘mood design’.
Marketing is a bit of a chameleon. It has its many forms. For the largest part of my career, marketing has been more clinical and data-driven, bound to forecasted, measurable outcomes—even when a campaign doesn’t perform, you can quickly figure out how to mine insight, pivot and optimise. You can categorise it under the heading of performance marketing—the economy of a click, or attention to detail that can be optimised for immediate action. Critically, it’s about capitalising on demand that already exists.
Aspirationally, it is sales adjacent.
In the creative wilderness of branding, however, marketing can start to look very different. Branding creates the emotional and cultural conditions that generates demand (for a product, a new release, a service, et cetera).
Whilst symbiotic—brand and its ability to commercially perform—it’s a tested discipline to find harmony between the two. Branding asks for patience in a system addicted to proof, while performance demands proof in a world built on faith. That existential tension—between belief and proof—is exactly why marketing is becoming mood design: a practice of holding emotional coherence long enough that trust compounds and delivers commercially over time.
The vibe economy.
I first noticed it in the summer of 2025 riding the London Underground, stepping off the platform, and decamping to a nearby coffeeshop for breakfast. The whole thing was about mood, a vibe, a kind of emotional weather.
What happens if you stop chasing a customer’s attention and start, instead, to ask how you could sustain a feeling over time (belonging, possibility, calm…). Mood is the connective tissue between brand and performance. When a brand holds an emotional frequency consistently, every interaction—content, product, space, community—quietly reinforces belief. Performance still happens, but it becomes a consequence of coherence, not pressure. In that sense, mood design isn’t a softer alternative to strategy; it’s the infrastructure that allows belief and proof to finally coexist.
If it could be said that a vibe economy is emerging, how value is created and exchanged will change: customers won’t consume products for what they materially do, but for how they make us feel. Brands that can establish emotional usefulness and presence in the life of a customer will, in time, become more valuable than those competing for our attention.
Afterword.
As I sat down—this time not at a coffeeshop—I started to naturally write about what I was seeing around me: that clever brands want to sustain a feeling with their customers over time. I read, often in abundance, about marketing trends defining the moment. Aesthetic obsession is an angle heavily explored. Look anywhere, and it’s hard to ignore the glib—but often accurate—predictions of overconsumption in our digital age. Consequently, attention is the latest currency, and everyone wants your time—but are they respecting it?
What I started to realise is that brands can build atmosphere (over interruption) and become powerful and impactful in time. Yes, these are aesthetic decisions, but they’re also much more: a kind of invisible instruction that guides how we should feel around your products and services.
What if you could master the grammar of feeling—and craft experiences that resonate with your audience before they even find your products? Afterall, people aren’t just buying products anymore—they inhabit the feeling you create for them.
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