Content has always followed a simple logic: find a problem, solve it, publish it. That logic still holds. But something has changed. The internet is now flooded with competent content, well-structured, grammatically correct, thoroughly optimised, produced at industrial scale. What’s becoming rare, and therefore valuable, is content that sounds like a person actually wrote it, lived it, and means it.
If you’re building a brand online in 2026, you’re not competing on information. You’re competing on voice, perspective, and the trust that comes from showing up consistently as yourself.
The Two Traps Most Brands Fall Into
When people think about brand consistency, they tend to overcorrect in one of two directions. Both are damaging.
Too Rigid
Brand guidelines become a straitjacket. Every post sounds like it was written by a committee. Safe, sanitised, forgettable. People follow brands to hear from humans.
Too Raw
Every thought gets published. Controversial takes, impulsive responses, pile-ons. Short-term engagement spikes. Long-term trust erodes. The internet does not forget.
The sweet spot isn’t the midpoint between these two. It’s something different altogether: a voice that is recognisably yours, deliberately shaped, and rooted in what you actually believe. That distinction matters enormously.
"You can't just follow content trends. Not all content trends are right for every brand. And the company you keep — the content you associate with, the conversations you join — says as much about your brand as anything you create."
Why Social Media Rewards the Wrong Instincts
There’s a well-documented structural problem with social media platforms: they are engineered to maximise engagement, and negative content tends to generate more engagement than positive content. A 2025 study published in PNAS Nexus by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Washington found that engagement-based ranking algorithms amplify emotionally charged, hostile content that users say actually makes them feel worse, and that users don’t even prefer what the algorithm serves them. The engagement numbers go up. Satisfaction goes down.
A Tulane University study adds a sharper edge to this. Researchers found a confrontation effect, where people are more likely to interact with content that challenges their views than content that aligns with them. The outrage is driving engagement specifically from people who disagree with you. Not exactly the audience you’re building a business on.
The numbers on toxic content are stark. Research published in ScienceDirect found that toxic posts received 27.1% higher visibility and 85.7% more retweets than standard content. The algorithm rewards the provocation. It doesn’t care what it costs you.
And it does cost you. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer recorded that the UK experienced some of the greatest drops in trust of any country surveyed that year. UK audiences are already sceptical. Brands playing fast and loose with their voice are doing so into a headwind. A Bazaarvoice survey of UK shoppers found that 51% distrust creator content that feels overly promotional, and the same research found that 57% of UK shoppers cite real customer reviews as the biggest factor in their final purchase decisions. Trust compounds through other people’s voices, not just your own.
Research published in the International Journal of Market Research makes the stakes even clearer: when brands make public missteps, it’s their most committed, loyal customers whose trust and liking drop the furthest. The people most invested in you are the most damaged when the tone slips. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report puts a number on what’s at stake on the positive side: 73% of people say their trust in a brand would increase if it authentically reflected today’s culture, while only 27% say their trust would increase when a brand ignores culture and focuses solely on products.
This is a particularly dangerous trap for small businesses and personal brands, where the face of the business and the content are the same person. When that person starts performing outrage for clicks, the gap between their real values and their content voice becomes a liability. Audiences sense inauthenticity before they can articulate it. They just quietly stop trusting you.
Worth remembering
Negative content can spike your reach. But reach without trust is just noise. The question isn’t “what will people click on?” — it’s “what builds the kind of audience that buys from me, refers me, and comes back?”
Seth Godin's Lens
Finding Your Tribe - And Meaning It
Seth Godin’s concept of the tribe is useful here, but it’s worth being precise about what it actually means. A tribe isn’t just an audience. It’s a group of people who share a worldview, a set of values, a way of seeing the problem you solve. The job of content isn’t to attract everyone. It’s to repeatedly signal to the right people that this is a place for them.
That means some content should actively not appeal to people outside your tribe. That’s not a failure. That’s the mechanism working.
Real World Example
Jonny Balchandani sells plants from a barn in Malvern. He also writes about mental health, calls his followers “tiny phone people,” curses on Instagram, and recently quit a stable job to live his dream. None of that is incidental to the brand. It IS the brand. He’s built a community that buys from him because they trust him as a person, not just a retailer. His book, “You’re Overwatering It,” became a bestseller not because of SEO strategy, but because people actually wanted to hear more from him.
When The Bearded Plantaholic opens a post with a profanity or talks about mental health alongside propagation tips, he’s not trying to convert garden-centre traditionalists. He’s speaking directly to a very specific kind of plant-obsessed, emotionally aware human who finds joy in chaos and growth, and those people feel seen.
Real World Example
A YouTube creator and writer whose appeal is built almost entirely on a distinctive sense of humour and a refusal to be what anyone expects. She doesn’t serve the algorithm; she serves her own creative vision, and people follow her for exactly that. The quirkiness isn’t a style choice layered on top of content. It’s structural to everything.
For an avid reader, the Book Goblin character, with its crafted silliness, strikes a chord about how they feel about reading and their joy and frustrations when immersed in a good book.
The key insight from both of these examples: they didn’t find their tribe by researching their target audience. They found them by being themselves clearly and consistently enough that the right people recognise themselves in the content.
What Big Brands Get Right (That You Can Learn From)
Aldi
Disruptive by Design
Aldi has built what marketing analysts describe as a “lovably disruptive” voice, witty, culturally fluent, and genuinely funny. When M&S sued them over caterpillar cakes, they launched #FreeCuthbert, reaching over 100 million people. The tone is flexible but never inconsistent. They join conversations ranging from Love Island to food policy because they’ve defined who they are and can go almost anywhere. The humour always serves the values: accessible, no-nonsense, on your side. They don’t just chase memes. They choose which cultural moments are theirs to enter.
Lego
Community as Content
Lego’s most important content move wasn’t a campaign. It was creating Lego Ideas, a platform where fans submit set designs, vote on others, and see their creations become real products. The community doesn’t just consume the brand, they are part of making it. Their content strategy invites fans to co-create the story. The result is a brand worth over $8 billion where the most valuable marketing asset isn’t advertising spend. It’s the devotion of a distributed community of builders, adults included, who will defend and evangelise the brand without being asked.
Both Aldi and Lego built their content voices around a clear internal compass, not around trend reports. Aldi knows it’s the underdog with a point of view. Lego knows it’s in the imagination business, not the toy business. Everything else flows from that clarity.
Geoff Ramm's Lens
The Celebrity Service Principle Applied to Content
Geoff Ramm, described by Forbes as “a game changer” in customer experience thinking, built his entire framework around a single question: if a celebrity walked in, would you treat them differently? And if the answer is yes, why aren’t you treating everyone that way?
Apply that lens to content. If you were writing for the one person who would become your most loyal customer, your biggest referrer, your most vocal advocate, what would you say? How would you say it? Would you be brave enough to be specific, personal, human?
Most content is written for search engines, not people. Celebrity Service content is written for the person who is going to feel like it was written specifically for them, because in some important way, it was. Ramm’s framework talks about the power of personalisation and exceeding expectations at every touchpoint. That starts with the content itself.
Six Things to Know Before You Publish Anything
1. What is your compass?
Before you think about content strategy, you need to be clear on your values. Not a list of adjectives on a brand guidelines doc — what you actually believe, what makes you angry, what you find funny, what you stand for. Your content compass is the internal filter everything else passes through.
2. Who are you actually talking to?
Not a demographic. A person. The specific kind of human who would buy from you, refer you, and come back. Write for them. Accept that the people outside that group won’t get it, that’s fine, that’s the point.
3. Which trends are yours to claim?
Not every cultural moment is for your brand. Before jumping on a trend, ask: does this fit my voice? Does it serve my tribe? Would my best customers recognise this as me, or would it feel borrowed? Aldi can do Love Island references. Your accountancy firm probably can’t. Know the difference
4. What's your relationship with the negative?
Controversy and edginess can earn attention. But what’s the long-term cost? Are you building the kind of brand someone would be proud to recommend? The company you keep in content, the conversations you join, the takes you amplify, becomes associated with your name. Choose carefully.
5.Are you solving something real?
The original rule of content still stands: find a genuine problem in your field and say something useful about it. The difference now is that useful isn’t enough, it has to sound like you. AI can generate competent. Only you can generate yours.
6. Are you consistent enough to be recognisable?
Voice builds trust through repetition. If every post sounds like a different person wrote it, people don’t build a relationship with the brand. Pick your lane, not a rigid rulebook, but a clear enough sense of self that people know what to expect from you, and show up for it.
The AI Question
Content in the Age of Artificial Everything
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about AI and content: it is very good at producing content that is fine. Competent, structured, correctly formatted. And that has raised the floor for everyone. The average piece of content on the internet is now much better than it used to be.
That’s precisely why your ceiling, the thing you can produce that AI cannot, has become more valuable. AI cannot replicate your particular history, your specific failures, your genuine taste, your real relationships with your customers. It cannot write the post Jonny wrote when he quit his job at 5am, exhausted, terrified and completely alive. That post converts because it is true.
Use AI to research, to draft, to edit, to handle the logistics of content creation. But don’t use it to replace your voice. Your voice, specific, fallible, unmistakably yours, is now the scarcest thing in digital marketing. Protect it accordingly.
"In a sea of competent content, being genuinely human is the differentiator. Not human-sounding. Actually human."
A Final Word on the Company You Keep
There’s an old saying: you are judged by the company you keep. In content terms, this means something very practical. The creators you associate with, the conversations you add your voice to, the brands you collaborate with, the accounts you amplify, all of these become part of your brand’s story.
Building a tribe isn’t just about what you broadcast. It’s about the ecosystem you inhabit and contribute to. Brands like Lego understand this, the community they’ve cultivated reflects and reinforces who they are. Creators like The Bearded Plantaholic understand this, the values they share in a single Instagram caption, growth, vulnerability, joy, persistence, are the same values that make their product range feel coherent.
Your content isn’t just marketing. It’s the public record of who you are and what you believe. In the age of infinite content, that matters more than ever, not less.
