The era of the brand is over 👑
Long live distribution
The internet’s golden age of branding is dead. In a world of platform “enshittification,” algorithmic paywalls, and bottomless digital noise, it’s no longer enough to polish your logo or chase the perfect tagline.
The only things that matter now? A product people want and the ability to actually get it in front of them, again and again.
I’ve seen this change firsthand: what used to be a battle of brands is now a war for distribution. When organic reach is dead and you have to pay for visibility, brand alone won’t save you. And your brand is just a story until you can break through the digital chokehold to actually sell.
Three founders, Scott Galloway, Thibault Louis-Lucas, and Liam White, have all hit on the same point, from wildly different worlds.
The old playbook is gone. Brand alone doesn’t cut it. Distribution is the moat, and your product has to deliver, not just promise.
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The Don Draper era is over
Scott Galloway’s verdict
Scott Galloway, in his trademark brash style, summed it up on the Uncensored CMO podcast: the era of classic branding is finished. “From 1945 to the introduction of Google, the way you created shareholder value was you took a mediocre car, shoe, salty snack, consumer product, and you wrapped it in these amazing brand codes…and you could sell a shitty peanut butter that cost 20 cents for two bucks.”
The trick, Galloway says, was cheap broadcast media and an audience willing to believe the myth. Those days are gone. “Mediocre products with great brands no longer work,” he says. “It’s much more difficult now to maintain that unearned margin with mediocre products with great branding… The era of traditional branding is in fact over.”
The value has now shifted from intangible stories to real innovation and distribution. “Product is the new bomb again and your brand is a function of innovation,” Galloway declared.
That old obsession with the ad man, Galloway says, is dead: “I haven’t seen an adwoman or an adman in a board meeting in 15 years. No one gives a shit what they think… And then when Google came out, I thought all of a sudden there’s going to be an unlock around products focused on digital innovation and brand is no longer going to be as important. It’s just how we think of brand.”
AI killed the branding star
Thibault Louis-Lucas on the shift to distribution
If brand is losing its power, what’s taking its place? For Millennial Master Thibault (Tibo) Louis-Lucas, builder of SaaS products like Tweet Hunter and Taplio, the future belongs to those who control distribution and audience, not just those with shiny brand assets.
He’s blunt about what’s changed: “It basically created a shift that’s so big that the old products were just simply not good enough anymore. The shift it created made the new products with a proper implementation of AI good enough to compete with the old super well integrated product that existed before… They did it while creating this trend that building costs are slowly going to zero. And this creates a change that we truly do not understand enough right now.”
In Tibo’s world, code and infrastructure are no longer the barrier. Distribution is. “Imagine if anyone can create a Slack competitor tomorrow with just a few prompts…Imagine if you do not need developers at all to create products. So, where is the value then if it’s not in the product itself?
“What many people see is that the value will be in distribution, in your capability to distribute an existing product and to create a nice storytelling about it and to educate people on how to use the product properly. That’s a huge shift and I have no idea how big this will be, but I’m preparing myself for that.”
But even distribution is fragile if you don’t own it. After having his own LinkedIn account suspended, Tibo’s now wary of platform dependency: “It’s still suspended, which is an amazing reminder that you do not own your followers. You do not own your accounts. You can just get suspended at any time. What you truly own is a newsletter subscriber base, or I guess a podcast audience.”
You can have a great story, but if you don’t control the pipes, you don’t have a business. The audience, not the brand, is the moat.
Product is everything, but only if you can sell it
Liam White’s reality check
For Millennial Master Liam White, cofounder of Dr Will’s, obsessing over product is table stakes, but without distribution, it’s just a wasted effort. “For us, what was really important for us is that we make the best possible product. And we realised… if we’re to do this in a lean way, if we find a manufacturer, we can then focus on sales, marketing, and product and make sure those three things are fantastic. And those for me are the key things to scaling a food business.”
He’s open about the grind: “We found a great manufacturer early on and what that meant is they are experts at making a product consistently.” But product alone won’t save you: “Your product has to be fantastic and I think most small food and drink businesses are obsessed over it.
“We’re always trying to find how can we make our product 1% better. Can we improve the nutritional profile? Can we improve the packaging? Can we improve the standout on shelf with some of the call outs we’re making, or the boxes that it sits in? Constantly iterate those things because your product sits under everything and how well your distribution, sales and your marketing work is a function of your product. So product is number one.”
Liam said “sales and marketing are equally important because you can have the best product in the world if you don’t have any distribution for it, whether that’s D2C online, or more like us which is working with the retailers, then you’re limited because you might have a great product, but if nobody can buy it, then that’s a waste of time. So you need to have sales, you need to have distribution, and then marketing is communication.”
The punchline: you can’t “brand” your way to success if people can’t actually buy what you’re selling. Distribution (retail, digital, email, whatever) trumps a clever story every time.
What founders need to do next
The era of sweat-the-logo and wait-for-virality is over. If your product isn’t remarkable, you’re dead. If you can’t reach your buyers, you’re toast.
Build a product people rave about. No more hiding mediocrity behind a slick campaign; consumers see through it, and the platforms won’t help you.
Own your distribution. Don’t trust Meta, TikTok, or Twitter with your future. Build an email list, create communities, go direct wherever you can.
See brand as the byproduct, not the engine. “Product is the new bomb again and your brand is a function of innovation.” — Scott Galloway
Focus on sales, marketing, and product in equal measure. As Liam White puts it, “Sales, marketing and product are the key ingredients… and the product underpins all of them.”
Distribution is the new moat. The brands that win are the ones you can actually find and actually buy.
The era of the brand is over. Long live distribution.
More unmissable Millennial Masters insights:
Enshittification 💩 Why the internet stinks now
From platform to parasite: How big tech turned against its users
