On Quietness as a Brand Strategy

Most brands you encounter today are louder than they were last year. Last year they were louder than the year before. This is true of brands you like, brands you don't, brands you trust, and brands you actively avoid. The volume has been going up for a long time, and there is no version of "the next quarter" in which it goes down on its own.

We talk about this, in the industry, as "noise." Noise is a problem because it makes it harder for any one brand to be heard. The standard response, having identified noise as the problem, is to be louder. This is, on inspection, a terrible response. It is also the only response anyone seems to be funded for.

I want to argue, in the next several paragraphs, that the most disciplined brands solve this differently. Not by being louder. Not even by being smarter about being loud. By being, when it counts, deliberately quiet.

There are three volumes a brand can operate at. Loud, coherent, and quiet. They are not points on a scale; they are categories, and they cost different amounts.

Loud is the default.

Most brands are loud. The reason they are loud is not that loudness works. It is that loudness can be measured. You can count impressions. You can count clicks. You can count the number of people who saw your CMO's LinkedIn post about why this is "an inflection point." You cannot count the people who have come to trust your company because, every time they encountered it, it was the same. The first metric is on a dashboard. The second metric is on a tombstone.

Marketing departments need to justify their existence to the people who control the budget. The people who control the budget like dashboards. The dashboards reward loudness. So everyone is loud. The loudness is, in this sense, not a strategy. It is a side effect of how the bills get paid.

A small brand can sometimes opt out of this, because a small brand is not justifying itself to a CFO. A small brand is justifying itself to its customers. The customers do not need a dashboard. They need the thing to be the thing.

Coherent is the middle category.

Coherence is harder than loudness, because coherence requires that everything you do be, in some legible way, of a piece. The deck and the storefront and the email and the receipt and the man on the phone all have to come from the same place. This is genuinely difficult. Most agencies, ours included, charge a lot of money to help brands become coherent, because coherence requires that someone be, at every point, deciding what fits and what doesn't. Coherence is a series of small refusals. The good logo is the one that didn't get the gradient. The good website is the one that didn't get the hero video. The good campaign is the one that didn't get the second half-page that the sponsor wanted.

Coherence is expensive because every "no" costs something. The thing being said no to was put forward by a person, and the person had a reason, and the reason was not always wrong. Saying no anyway, on the grounds that the thing does not fit, is a kind of judgment that takes years to develop and decades to defend.

Most brands settle for loudness because coherence requires saying no to people inside their own building. That is a different kind of energy.

Quietness is the most expensive thing of all.

Quietness is harder still. Quietness is not the same as silence. Silence is doing nothing, which is free. Quietness is doing the right amount, in the right way, with deliberate restraint, so that what you do say carries the weight of everything you didn't say. Quietness is what you get when coherence has been practiced long enough that the brand can afford to leave space.

A few examples.

Hermès. The catalog arrives twice a year. It is not on Instagram. It is in the mail. The catalog is approximately the size and weight of a hardback novel. Most pages have one item on them, photographed against beige, with a paragraph of text written by someone who appears to be writing for an adult. There is no urgency. There are no countdowns. The implication is that the bag will be available next year too, because Hermès will be available next year too, and if you are not ready this year, that's fine.

Berkshire Hathaway. The annual letter comes out once a year. It is written by an old man on a typewriter or a thing that looks like one. The letter is twenty pages long and contains roughly four jokes. The website is one of the worst I have ever seen, deliberately. The implication is that they have other things to do.

The New York Times daily crossword. The puzzle is published every day, on the same schedule, in the same place, with the same constraints, edited by the same handful of people. It does not advertise itself outside of the Times. It does not tell you it is the best crossword. It is, however, the best crossword, and you know that because the puzzle, every day, is the best crossword.

The pattern is the same in each case. The brand has decided what it is, and it does that thing, and it does not ask for a moment of your attention beyond the moment in which you are using the thing. The brand assumes that the work, performed consistently, over time, is the entire pitch.

There is a related test. When something happens in the world that everyone has an opinion about, watch the brands. The loud ones will issue a statement. The coherent ones will issue a thoughtful statement. The quiet ones will say nothing. The silence is sometimes mistaken for absence. It is, more often, judgment. The quiet brand has decided that this particular event is not its event, that an opinion about it would be performance rather than position, and that the customers who came for the work would prefer the work continue. This is, in the moment, unrewarded. In aggregate, over years, it is among the most credible things a brand can do.

Quietness is hard because it requires patience that compounds. You cannot launch a quiet brand. You can only sustain one, after enough time has passed that customers know the absence of noise is intentional rather than incompetence. The first three years of a quiet brand look identical to the first three years of a brand that doesn't have its act together. There is no way to short-circuit this. You either wait, or you give up and start running ads.

Most companies give up. The CFO comes by the office, the CFO asks why no one knows about us, the CMO produces a campaign with a hashtag, the campaign runs for a quarter, the dashboard fills up, and the company is back to loud. The two months in which they tried to be quiet are not on a tombstone. The two months in which they tried to be quiet are on a slide titled "Lessons Learned," in a deck nobody opens twice.

I am not arguing that every brand should be quiet. The argument is more careful than that. If you are a young company trying to announce yourself, you may need to be loud for a season. If you are a company in the middle of its first real growth, you probably need to be coherent before you try anything more advanced. Quietness is for the brands that have already done the other two and earned the right to stop performing.

What I am arguing is this. Once you are something, the most disciplined thing you can do is to stop announcing it.

This is what almost no brand does. The successful ones, having become successful, hire a CMO, who hires an agency, who runs a campaign, who runs another, and somewhere along the way the brand starts shouting at people who already knew about it. The shouting is interpreted, by people who already knew, as a sign that something has changed. Most of the time, it has. Most of the time, it has gotten worse.

You can usually feel a brand the moment it starts to lose its quiet. The product hasn't moved yet. The website hasn't been redesigned. But the email subject lines have gotten longer. The footer has a new tagline. The CEO is on a podcast you didn't know existed. There is a sense, somewhere on the page, of a brand asking you to please notice it. You notice. And not in the way they wanted.

The footnote.

I should be careful here. Most of the brands I have praised in this piece are old and rich, and quietness, I will admit, is easier to sustain when you are old and rich. A young brand cannot be Hermès. A young brand can, however, decide what kind of older brand it wants to be, and then start practicing now. Quietness can be a posture before it is a position. The discipline is the same either way: do less, mean it, repeat.

Loud is cheap because anyone can do it and everyone is doing it.

Coherent is expensive because it requires judgment.

Quiet is the most expensive of all because it requires both the judgment and the time to wait while the judgment shows.

If you are a brand and you are reading this, the question is not whether you can afford it. The question is whether you can stop doing the things you are currently paying for, so that the things you do instead can be heard.

The brand you trust most is, almost always, the one that has been least eager to remind you it exists.

That is not an accident. That is the entire pitch.