The brands that will survive the great commoditisation aren't the ones trawling the deep end. They're the ones wise enough to offer shelter.
By Kunal Ghosh, General Manager – Strategy, Cheil South West Asia
There is a German word, Weltschmerz, that translates roughly as “world-pain”: the ache you feel when reality refuses to match the life you were quietly promised. We are, at present, living inside that ache. Markets lurch. Jobs dissolve into algorithmic mist. Conflicts that once felt geographically distant are suddenly local. There’s a persistent feeling of dread and anguish that the Danish film Another Round captured hauntingly, “I have not been okay for a long time.”
In response to this, brands have done largely nothing. Most are still selling. They have continued to retarget shamelessly across vulnerabilities, to feed recommendation engines rather than human memory, to build factories churning scroll-stopping creative and influencer pipelines. The marketplace is louder, faster, and more technically impressive than it has ever been. It is also less trusted than it has ever been. Brands gained precision and lost humanity. I call it a warmth crisis.
As an industry we have become extraordinarily good at reaching people yet remarkably ineffective at reassuring them. We are confusing signal strength with emotional presence, obsessing over number of contacts while it is the quality of contact that should matter. Ipsos’ recent global research mentions Empathy as a driver of brand success, quoting “people feel close to a brand is likely driven by the empathy projected by the brand.” People feel close to brands that project care, the ones with harbour lights on.
The way forward through the way back
When the ground shifts, people don't go shopping. They recoil. They return to places, moments, and people that once felt recognisable because it is known.
Like watching reruns of The Office and Seinfeld while there are new titles released on Netflix each week. Like anti-trend fashion with vintage clothes or personal choices getting preferred over the latest “core” on Instagram. Like adults investing in toys or comics as a ‘permission slip’ to be unproductive and agenda-less. Like choosing record over the stream, the paper notebook over an app, the handwritten note over the email. Rather than stepping backward, we are going inward. It’s a structural shift toward legibility.
Svetlana Boym writes in her book The Future of Nostalgia about its two forms: the restorative kind (nostos), which tries to reconstruct the past such as the old logo revival, or the relaunch of a discontinued heritage product. The reflective kind (algea), which dwells in the longing and the feeling of the past. The brands worth mentioning are doing the latter by carrying its emotional register forward.
In simpler words, they bring alive a feeling of “the simpler times”.
The many manifestations of the simpler times
At the level of brands, I have seen this idea taking four distinct forms:
Social simplicity is the promise of fewer, deeper connections over aimless networking. It’s the antidote to the set expectations of our times. Heineken’s “social networking since 1873” is one of the best examples of a brand going against the current and restoring the magic of meeting strangers in a bar over a beer. In a category that considers ‘occasions’ as the ultimate success metric, they are betting on depth over frequency which is rare for a brand of that statute.
Emotional simplicity is the warmth, kindness and predictability at a time of volatility. IKEA, as a brand or as a store, doesn't sell furniture so much as it encapsulates the feeling of being looked after. Whether it’s about helping through new parenthood or comforting a baby monkey in a zoo, anything that IKEA does feel like something a family member would; like an embodiment of the spirit of Hygge. In a distant category, another brand does this in a completely different manner. Heinz sells certainty that a table will have a known taste anywhere you go. The emotional contract is the predictability of the experience, and the reassurance that some things will still be what they were.
Cognitive simplicity is the gift of fewer choices. It brings clarity in a world full of overwhelming options. “Weniger aber besser” (less but better) as the legendary designer Dieter Rams had prophesized all those decades ago. Muji's founding philosophy mujirushi ryohin, ‘no-brand quality goods’ was a revolt against consumer excess since the 1980s. To this day they are living up to that promise of bare essentials and nothing more. The Ordinary did a reset on the beauty industry’s fixation with mystification when they stripped the category down to the essentials with products named after active ingredients and percentages like Hyaluronic Acid 2% + B5. The transparency and reduction of overload was the brand’s disruption.
Temporal simplicity is perhaps the most subversive of all: the invitation to stop. The permission to slow down in a culture obsessed with speed. While KitKat's seventy-year-old positioning "Breaks are good for you" is the first thing that comes to mind, the most unique case I can think of is Guinness. They made the two-minute pour, the wait for the “Good Things” a part of the brand ritual. Can’t help but praise the famous 1999 ad “Surfer” which showed how waiting for the right wave and the right pint are both justified. At a time of rush, they held the line. The gratification became more when it was not instant, patience itself became a form of pleasure.
No such thing as nostalgia marketing
The cultural theorist Mark Fisher offered a term: hauntology, a critical view that our culture is haunted by futures that never arrived: that we're living in a present which borrowed its aesthetics from a remixed version of the past.
It is a fair challenge to the argument of ‘the simpler times.’ Brands that are trying to create a sense of the past will risk trapping themselves in a cycle of old ideas, which ultimately blinds them to new horizons and promotes a culture of cocooning.
The answer lies in the distinction. What Hauntology points at is the cynical approach: the brands that sell nostalgia as spectacle. The ones that borrow the aesthetics of the past as a shortcut to run its next marketing campaign. The ones recreating that retro look or a grainy filter or a creative brief that says "make it feel like the nineties but target Gen Alpha anyway." We have witnessed enough brands jumping onto this “nostalgia marketing” bandwagon with cheap tricks like the old logo revamp or referencing a cultural moment they have no connection with. That is not shelter, that is set dressing.
The brands I am arguing for are doing something more fundamental. They are finding the emotional truth underneath memory such as belonging, clarity, the feeling of being protected and cared. They revisit the assurance that simpler times were possible and therefore still are.
The clear choice: commodity or sanctuary
The Edelman Trust Barometer has, for years now, tracked the steady erosion of institutional trust. Kantar's 2026 marketing trends paper identifies trust as the primary currency of brand growth. Ultimately, trust comes from presence.
As consumers increasingly delegate decisions to large language models, brands will invest more in algorithmic visibility such as sponsored citations, paid recommendations, and machine-readable content real estate. They will increasingly find themselves reduced to a line on a list. In a spreadsheet, you have a transaction with the cheapest option that clears the minimum criteria instead of a relationship.
While many brands will continue optimising for attention, efficiency, and conversions at cost of becoming a commodity, a few will offer emotional sanctuary. They will be disproportionately valued because they were there. While the rest were busy selling, they sold the feeling of being held.
They turn out like a memory. A ritual. A feeling. A known face. A timeless place. Less interruption, more intimacy. Less persuasion, more presence. Less spreadsheets, more spreading hope.
Though this Weltschmerz in reverse, as one might call it, is perhaps something even quieter, it is the recognition that the world still contains pockets of warmth, and that some of it arrives in the shape of a shareable chocolate bar, a cold beer with strangers, a car that takes you home on the holidays, a store door that opens into somewhere familiar, a playlist that sounds too personal to have been curated for anyone else.
These brands, however rare they are, feel like refuge at time when the whole world is feeling displaced. They leave the door open. They invite, saying, “Come in. It’s a perfect day. There's coffee brewing. Music playing. You are at home here. In some way that matters, you always have been.”