When Brands Get Weird or Go Quiet
There’s a lot going on right now and it’s stressing us all out. Wars. Politics. Economy. All of it has quietly become our new normal, often without us realizing the impact it’s having. Sometimes we just need a break from these stressors. A laugh, or at least a little distraction.
So, what are people doing about it, and even more interesting, what are brands doing? The answers might be more entertaining than you might expect.
The Permission to Be Ridiculous
One of the more interesting things happening in brand-land right now is a kind of calculated ridiculousness. Brands are leaning into strangeness, not as a creative accident, but as a deliberate strategy for giving people a moment of levity in an exhausting news cycle.
This is not new. Take Liquid Death, launched in 2019. It's canned water. That's the product. And yet the brand hired a witch doctor to curse plastic bottles, auctioned a casket cooler cobranded with Yeti (love that brand btw) for $68,000, collaborated with e.l.f. Cosmetics on a coffin-shaped makeup kit that sold out in under an hour. The whole enterprise operates as though someone asked, "what if a water company acted like a heavy metal band?" and then committed to the answer without blinking.
And things keep getting stranger. The Picklerita—a mash-up between Sonic and Grillo's Pickles. A summer slush with pickle juice, lime, ice, and boba. Really? And why? Perhaps, it’s why not! Not to everyone’s taste, yet enough people couldn’t get enough of it simply because of its wackiness. It may quench your thirst but that’s not the point. It was designed to provoke curiosity, laughter, and more than a bit of confusion. We’d bet people were not thinking of the news while sipping on this exotic mixture (even if you like pickles).
Another favorite was the odd co-branding between Crocs and Krispy Kreme: a donut-decorated shoe. You can’t help but giggle or at least have your mind skip a beat and wonder again why, or more importantly, who would wear them? No offense to those that might own a beautiful pair of these glazed rubber whatevers as you walk around smelling like a blueberry cobbler since you bathed with the Dunkin’/Native body wash.
What do these all have in common? They all have a way for people to share in a fun experience, have a laugh, and maybe for a moment they realize that we’re all in this together and it’s OK to be silly if it helps.
The Great Logging Off
On the other end of the spectrum, some brands are doing the opposite of demanding attention. They're offering escape from it.
According to the BBC, the biggest 2026 travel trend is quiet over everything—quietcations, also known as hushpitality. The movement centers around comfort, silence, and unplugging.
Hector Hughes, co-founder of Unplugged offers cabins in the UK where guests trade in their smartphones for Polaroid cameras, actual paper maps, and board games. “When we first started Unplugged in 2020, digital detoxing and analogue living was pretty much unheard of,” he says. “Now, over half of our guests cite burnout and screen fatigue as their main motivation for booking.”
Vogue ran a piece declaring being completely unreachable "the ultimate power move." When fashion magazines start treating silence as a luxury status symbol, something cultural has genuinely shifted.
Rage rooms (spaces where you put on protective gear and smash things with a bat) are still going strong. What started in Tokyo is now a projected $314 million global industry. Cities are hosting outdoor scream clubs. Forest retreats are offering sledgehammer sessions in addition to gentler forest-bathing experiences. Different approaches for different folks, but the insight is simple: sometimes people need a physical outlet or shift for feelings that have nowhere else to go, and the brand that provides the room is welcome.
What This Means for Brands
There's a common thread here. Whether a brand is handing you a pickle slush, sledgehammer, or solitude, what they're really offering is the same thing: relief from seriousness. A moment, an hour, or a week away from the onslaught of everything coming at us. It’s kind of a release valve in a world that as hard as we might try, is not easy to brush off or realize the impact it is having on us.
This is not to say that you need to come up with something whacky or position your brand to being Zen-like. Though, you don’t need our permission to do so, and it might be fun even ideating about it. For these brands, it worked. They were attentive and in-tune with the broader world around them, and more importantly, their customers.
If your initial reaction is that this is too scary, weird, or not for my brand, then you are already on the right path. That’s how it should feel. Growth or change of any kind is initially uncomfortable because it’s not what we are used to.
Give us a call and let’s be scared together about the exciting opportunities that just might help your customers giggle, get curious, and never forget that you gave them a bit of respite when they needed it most.