Brand
Substance needs sacrifice.
Alex Glasneck
Sometimes, reality is more absurd than you could ever imagine. But we are witnessing a lesson about communication and brand building right now that I never expected.
Iran is flooding the feeds with AI-generated war propaganda in Lego aesthetics that collects millions of views. A geopolitical conflict packaged as something that looks like a meme and hits like a campaign. Philipp Thurmann just wrote about it: it feels like a joke. It isn’t.
Iran is doing what strategists have been telling brands for years: go all-in on entertainment. Create content that stands out in the feed, taps into culture, evokes emotion, and transports your message subtly.
Sure, it was naive to think it couldn’t be used for propaganda. But who would have thought that a country would hijack the power of a brand that isn’t theirs - and use it in a way like this?
Lego’s visual equity does the work. Trusted. Frictionless. Universally readable. Just for someone else than Lego.
And there is a lesson for all of us: No brand controls how its equity gets used.
But brands with substance survive the misuse — and brands without it may get permanently redefined by it.
I grew up in East Germany. New Balance was a Nazi brand. Not by intention, but in practice — on the streets, in the schoolyard, the association was impossible to ignore. It took years of deliberate work, real positioning decisions, new cultural context to shift it. They did the work. It cost them. And it started with deciding the brand had to stand for something specific enough to fight back.
Patagonia has the opposite problem and the same answer. Their gear is a Silicon Valley uniform — worn freely by the people financing the industries they exist to fight. Darkly ironic. But not a crisis. Because Patagonia spent years making decisions that actually cost something: suing the government, turning down corporate orders, eventually giving the company away. That track record builds substance and a community with a genuine stake in the brand’s meaning. The misuse becomes the punchline. Not the brand.
What separates them from the brands that crumble?
Conviction that cost something.
Values written in brand guidelines no one reads protect nothing. Values you live daily and have actually bled for are almost impossible to steal. An identity so specific, so inhabited, that hijacking it just looks absurd.
That’s what brand really is. Not a campaign layer. A northstar with substance that makes every business decision — what to say yes to, what to refuse, who you’re actually for — faster, cheaper, and more coherent.
Right now the pressure is to move fast, stay reactive, skip the expensive long-game work. The economy is unpredictable. AI is rewriting every playbook. Understandable. But that’s how you end up with a brand anyone can borrow for any purpose.
The brands worth leading — and working with — are the ones still doing the slow, expensive, often thankless work of meaning something. Even now.
Especially now.
First published on LinkedIn, 23.04.2026.
