The 90s: when brands stopped giving a shit
In this live episode of You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl rewinds to the 90s, when brands stopped selling wholesome aspiration and started selling skepticism. He traces how the shift from modernism to postmodernism, along with a generation’s fear of selling out, gave rise to cynical, ironic anti-hero brands like OK Soda, Red Dog, No Fear, Diesel, and Jones Soda—plus Marzocchi, the mountain bike brand Parliament later helped update. Calvin then follows the cycle as mainstream corporations co-opted the counterculture until cynicism itself became the norm. His takeaway: reacting against dominant culture can create real distinction, but only when the stance runs deeper than a trend, because counterculture can’t be copied.
Outline
Summary
In this live episode of You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl takes a nostalgic but critical look at 90s branding—the era when brands got cynical, ironic, aggressive, and self-aware. Parliament is a brand transformation agency in Portland, Oregon, that helps companies facing big changes through strategy, identity, and positioning. After quick studio news (fall and winter work for Capital One and a new project kickoff with Prometheus Group), Calvin makes the case for why the 90s are worth revisiting now: the nostalgia cycle has brought the era fully back, and rose-tinted glasses tend to strip away the cultural forces that created it.
Calvin roots the story in the 80s. Reagan-era optimism, the growth of corporate power and Wall Street influence, and sincere, aspirational consumerism promised that buying the right things would make you successful, and a generation grew skeptical of that promise. Culturally, high modernism, with its faith in progress, universality, and one pure truth, gave way to postmodernism, where meaning depends on context, identity can be constructed, high and low culture flatten together, and remixing becomes the dominant creative mode. As globalization widened everyone’s view of the world, the idea of a single monoculture stopped holding, and the fear of selling out became the defining anxiety of alternative kids.
Corporations responded by building alternative, edgy sub-brands to reach consumers who didn’t trust them. Calvin walks through his favorites: Coca-Cola’s OK Soda, created with Wieden+Kennedy, with manifesto-like copy and Daniel Clowes art that sold being “just okay” in a complicated world; Miller’s Red Dog, a grumpy bulldog of a beer from the “Plank Road Brewery”; No Fear, which sold pure attitude to extreme-sports athletes and has since relaunched with a look that strips out its spirit; Diesel, which turned luxury’s visual language against itself; and Jones Soda, which let customers become the label. He also revisits Marzocchi, the mountain bike fork brand and Parliament client, whose late-90s excess Parliament reworked into a cleaner brand built around stoke and the feel of epic rides. Adbusters, the anti-consumerist magazine whose pages sparked Occupy Wall Street, rounds out the cultural backdrop.
Then the cycle turns. Mainstream brands like Taco Bell and Doritos adopted the same cynical, aggressive tone, and anti-branding became the standard. Calvin lays out the pattern: counterculture rejects the mainstream, its aesthetics become desirable, corporations take them, they go mainstream, and a new counterculture forms. Because sarcasm and aggression are emotionally exhausting, the backlash arrived as the new sincerity of 2000s hipster and millennial branding.
Calvin closes with lessons and a challenge. Reacting against dominant culture creates distinction, but it can have a time limit unless it targets something timeless, the way Harley-Davidson stands against the nine-to-five and the status quo. Audiences understand advertising, contradictions create interesting identities, attitude can be a differentiator, and counterculture can’t be copied. Prompted by chat, he also touches on private equity consolidation in beer, tech, and games, noting that Parliament’s work with Just Food For Dogs and West Marine went well because the investors cared about each brand’s heritage and spirit. The open question for today’s designers and strategists: what should the alternative brands of today be rejecting?
Highlights
The 90s nostalgia cycle is back, but rose-tinted glasses strip away the countercultural forces that shaped the era.
80s consumerism sold sincere, wholesome aspiration; Gen X grew skeptical, and the fear of selling out became a defining anxiety.
The shift from modernism to postmodernism made meaning contextual, identity constructible, and remixing the dominant creative mode.
Corporations built edgy sub-brands to win over skeptics, including OK Soda and Red Dog, while No Fear, Diesel, and Jones Soda sold attitude over product.
Parliament’s Marzocchi rebrand kept the brand’s rowdy spirit while trading late-90s excess for stoke and the feel of epic rides.
Once Taco Bell and Doritos went edgy, cynicism became the standard, and the backlash became the new sincerity of millennial branding.
Reacting against dominant culture works best when the stance is timeless, as with Harley-Davidson, because counterculture can’t be copied.
Key insights
Nostalgia without context is just aesthetics
Calvin argues that when an era’s look returns, designers and strategists need to remember the cultural movement that made it. 90s branding didn’t happen in a vacuum; it was a response to corporate power, consumerism, and a monoculture that no longer reflected people’s lives. Borrow the look without understanding the reason, and you get surface without substance.
Postmodernism made meaning depend on context
The move from modernism’s single truth to postmodern pluralism matters for branding because meaning stopped being fixed. What a brand means now depends on what the culture and the viewer bring to it. That opened the door to remixing high and low culture, to constructed identities, and to brands that could talk about themselves with a wink.
Anti-hero brands gave consumers permission
From Bart Simpson and Beavis and Butt-Head to Red Dog and No Fear, 90s anti-heroes let people express the messier parts of themselves—aggressive, annoying, complicated—that polished 80s consumerism had no room for. In Calvin’s view, brands that embraced flaws and attitude gave their audiences permission to be less than perfect.
Attitude can be the product
No Fear sold T-shirts, but what it really sold was attitude. Its recent relaunch, which strips out the character that defined it, shows how quickly a brand loses its only real asset when it gets nervous about standing out. Jones Soda learned a similar lesson when growth pushed it to trade away some of its spirit.
Co-opted counterculture becomes the mainstream
Once Doritos and Taco Bell adopted 90s edge, the counterculture lost its meaning. Calvin describes the endless cycle: counterculture creates aesthetics, corporations take them, they become mainstream, and a new counterculture rejects them. Cynicism and sarcasm are also exhausting to live with, which is why the next swing was toward sincerity.
Stand against something timeless
Reacting against a dominant cultural moment can create sharp distinction, but moments end. Harley-Davidson has stayed consistent because it stands against things that never go out of fashion: the nine-to-five and the status quo. Calvin’s view is that rebellious brands need roots deeper than the trend of the moment, and that real conviction can’t be faked by a corporation spinning up a sub-brand.
Detailed analysis
Calvin’s argument works because it treats design movements as symptoms of bigger cultural shifts. The jump from the clean optimism of the 80s to the grit of the 90s wasn’t just a change in style; it reflected a generation realizing that corporations had sold them a universal story that didn’t fit. The brands that understood this, from OK Soda’s self-aware copy to Diesel’s meta-commentary on luxury advertising, met skepticism head-on by adopting it.
The episode is also a cautionary tale. Many of the era’s most memorable brands were sub-brands created by large corporations, and that’s exactly what limited them. Rebellion needs belief behind it, and audiences eventually notice when the angst is owned by a giant. Pepsi, raised in chat, is the counterexample of a brand that has spent decades defining itself only as not-Coke, which ends up promoting the brand it’s fighting. Some of the era’s edge, like Diesel’s ads mocking wealthy people’s weight, also reads as punching down today.
The private equity thread brings the lesson into the present. Calvin points to recurring consolidation cycles in beer, tech, and games, where ownership focused purely on returns can drain the soul from a brand. Parliament’s experience with Just Food For Dogs and West Marine suggests the difference lies in whether investors care about heritage and spirit, a reminder that genuine brand conviction and commercial pressure have to be balanced deliberately.
Conclusion
The 90s showed that brands could do more than create new identities and products; they could fully adopt their audience’s skepticism and speak with absurdity, cynicism, and sarcasm. That gave brands new ways to communicate, but it also hardened into its own monoculture, and the cycle carried on into the new sincerity of the 2000s.
For today’s designers and brand strategists, Calvin’s takeaway is to go one step deeper whenever nostalgia resurfaces: find what originally drove the countercultural movement, and root any rebellious brand in something more lasting than a trend. The question he leaves open is what today’s alternative brands should be rejecting, an answer that may only become clear a decade from now.
Transcript
Intro and studio news
Hey everybody, welcome to You’re Not the Audience. This is a live show where I break down brands, products, and subcultures that stand out by not appealing to everyone. I’m Calvin, creative director at Parliament. Parliament is a brand transformation agency in good old Portland, Oregon, and we help brands when they’re facing big changes. We do that with strategy, identity, positioning, all that good stuff.
Today we are going to talk about branding of the ’90s and how those brands kind of stopped giving a shit and became cynical and ironic, and eventually maybe led themselves to a new, more sincere version of themselves after that. So it’s going to be fun. I like all those ’90s brands that we think about. You had extreme sports, really extreme graphics, everything got aggressive, really cynical. I think it’s going to be a fun chat. I’m a sucker for that whole era of brand design.
Normal structure of the episode today: we’ll go over some recent news with Parliament. Not a ton going on—very chill right now, we’re just working away on projects. We’ll have a little bit of news, then we’ll jump into talking about the ’90s for 45 minutes, an hour, talk about some things we can learn from that era of design, and how we can maybe apply some of that thinking to the future, or how we shouldn’t.
So how’s everyone doing today? Everyone ready to get their ’90s nostalgia mood in? I hope there’s a young designer that joins the stream where this is just absolutely crazy to them, talking about ’90s branding. But unfortunately some of us were alive in the ’90s. We’ve had some junior designers at Parliament where they tell you they were born in like 2000, and I’m just like, “How is this possible? How is anyone that young?”
As far as news for Parliament, not a ton. We’re heads down working on a bunch of projects. We’re working on some fall and winter stuff for good old Capital One, one of our fave clients. And we also kicked off a new project with Prometheus Apartments, a client we’ve worked with for a long time. They’re essentially a luxury apartment property developer in the Bay, Portland, and Seattle. Really thoughtful, really smart, really artfully minded people working there. I love working with them. We’ve done a lot of buildings with them, and they really see branding and design as an integral part of creating spaces, interiors, exteriors—thinking about how people act, react, and interact with spaces. I think they’re a super unique company, so I’m excited to kick off work with them.
Otherwise, in Portland we’re in the waning time of summer, so we’re all sneaking in our last trips. I just planned a trip to Nashville, so I’m going to be gone for a week in a couple weeks. We’re all trying to hit the river, get that last glimpse of sun before the gray and rain comes.
Why the ’90s are worth revisiting
All right, let’s start talking about the ’90s. I think the real question is why is it even worth thinking about the ’90s right now? One big reason is there’s been this huge surge of interest—the classic nostalgia cycle where the ’90s and early 2000s are fully back now.
(Oh, just one second. I’m getting an error in my YouTube showing that I’ve been signed out. Let me make sure I’m still streaming here. If anyone’s in chat, let me know if you’re seeing this. Okay, I think we’re still going. For some reason I just got logged out of my YouTube completely—no idea what happened there, so I couldn’t see chat or anything.)
All right, let’s jump into it. Why do I think the ’90s are worth thinking about? We’re in that nostalgic cycle loop where the ’90s and 2000s are fully back. And the one problem is, when these cycles start happening, we really start viewing them through rose-tinted glasses, and it removes a lot of the cultural reasons those movements and moments were created. So I think it’s really important for us to remember, especially as designers, branders, and brand strategists, the countercultural movement that made all these eras happen. Because they didn’t happen in a vacuum.
The other reason I want to talk about this is I love a rebel outlaw brand, and I love creating brands that actively stand against something. And this is an era where almost every brand was trying to do that. It became the main mode of communicating in the ’90s and early 2000s.
So what happened in the ’90s? Why did all these brands start getting weird? Why did so many brands get cynical, ironic, super aggressive, ugly? They got really self-aware and meta. You had brands like Diesel Jeans—I’ll run us through a bunch of examples in a minute—which was a luxury alternative brand. We had OK Soda, which was Coke’s answer to the alternative countercultural movement. We had No Fear, that clothing brand that was all about aggression and selling an attitude beyond just products. You had Jones Soda, which completely changed how we look at soda and packaging design. And one of my faves, we had Marzocchi, a client of ours, who was doing crazy stuff in the mountain biking world.
Part of the reason I like all of these is that it went beyond just aesthetics. It really reflected a generation that became suspicious of corporations, of consumerism, and of the idea of a mass monoculture that was created especially in the ’80s and the decades leading up to it.
From the ’80s to postmodernism
In order to understand the ’90s, we have to know where the ’80s were at. A lot of that cynicism was really born from what the ’80s were trying to promise us. We had that Reagan-era optimism. (Normally everyone would be like, “Fuck Reagan, worst president ever,” but I don’t know, maybe he’s being outdone right now.) We had massive growth in corporate power, in consumerism, and in Wall Street influence. We had blatant consumerism, and brands were really sincere about selling a kind of wholesome aspiration and a better life—the idea that if you buy this, you will become successful.
We became really skeptical of that, and the whole world started reacting to it culturally. You see this in some really fun, simple examples. In music, you had the polish of hair metal and glam rock, and that led to the outsider drugs and dirtbaggery of the grunge movement. You had polished pop and new wave, and that led to gangster rap, which took over pop music.
But my specific area of interest is throughout all of culture and art. The ’80s symbolized the end of high modernism in art and culture, which led to postmodernism. For anyone who’s nerdy enough about this stuff, think Donald Judd’s minimalist, pure cube sculptures versus the messy, identity-filled paintings of Basquiat. That’s the kind of cultural movement we’re talking about.
So let’s talk about what that dramatic change from modernism to postmodernism did, because these things feel really amorphous. They’re really just movements that describe the invisible forces guiding our culture as a whole. It feels like something you should only learn about in art school, but these are larger cultural movements.
Modernism, which peaked mid-century and carried through the ’70s and ’80s, believed in the power of progress. The idea of universality—that we are all one, that everything can be universal. It believed in rational and logical systems and the idea of one pure truth, that there was only one good solution, one good answer.
Postmodernism was a reaction that really called bullshit on this. As the world became more globalized, we learned about other cultures. We realized there is no one truth. We realized everything is relative, and pluralism and relativism became the norm because we gained more knowledge about the world. For branding and art, what’s really important to realize is that meaning really depends on context. It’s about what the culture brings to it, what the viewer brings to it. It can’t just be a thing existing in a silo by itself. That’s what a lot of minimalist artists from the modernist era were saying: you have a cube, it’s in a room, it exists only as it exists.
So we had this realization that we are not one global monoculture. Individual identity could be highlighted instead of generalized, and identity could even be constructed. And this was a time when there was a flattening of high and low culture. You had luxury mixing with low-culture things, and the idea that those things could exist together. That led to what we now think of as the start of remixing—the aesthetic and ideological culture of remixing disparate art forms, ideas, perspectives, and products. That’s the creation of postmodernism: the idea that all of these things could mix together, and based on context, we had different perspectives on them.
So that’s the big, heady reason for the transition to the ’90s, where all of a sudden everything became more complex, more nuanced, more cynical, more edgy. Because we realized we had been sold this universal story that didn’t apply to all of us anymore. The world was more complex and nuanced than we ever thought, because now the world was more connected than ever. Globalization was happening, and we got a bigger context for the rest of the world.
Selling out and the rise of anti-hero brands
We started realizing that corporations were kind of selling a lie—that there was this one truth that led to happiness. And that generated an idea that was so rife during the ’90s: the idea of selling out. If you were an alternative kid in the ’90s or early 2000s, selling out was your greatest fear. There was this fear of buying into what the corporations were selling, and we were all suspicious of selling out. That became a major anxiety of that time—giving in to the corporations.
I think Gen X became really distrustful of brands because they saw the world around them and realized that corporations were no longer reflecting the authentic view of their world. That’s what really created the distrust in that moment. Big changes in the world, and corporations hadn’t caught up. (Second, I’ve got to adjust my mic here a little bit. Getting a little hot today. I must be excited—I’m talking a lot.)
So that begs the question: at a time when consumers are becoming really distrustful of brands and corporations, what does a corporation do to start targeting people who don’t trust them and are skeptical of selling out and conforming? They create alternative, cynical, edgy brands. Tons of big corporations at this time—Coca-Cola, Miller Beer, all of those—created sub-brands meant to capture that countercultural movement.
And this really led to the rise of anti-hero brands. I love anti-hero brands. We loved anti-heroes in the ’90s. MTV relied on this wholly; even Nickelodeon had it. When you think of big cultural entertainment, we had Bart Simpson, we had Beavis and Butt-Head, we had The Ren & Stimpy Show. Fox in those days—that was their whole brand of entertainment on TV. It was this realization that idealism was gone and our heroes could be flawed, cynical, obnoxious, disaffected people.
I think that allowed brands to exude parts of ourselves that we were all afraid to express. It gave us, as consumers and as fans of products and brands, permission to be a little bit messy, a little more complicated, a little bit annoying, a little bit aggressive—all the things we were told weren’t part of the perfect, sophisticated, beautiful, high-end version of consumerism we were sold in the ’80s.
If anybody has favorite brands from the ’90s that they think align with this, toss them in the chat. I feel like there are always new ones to discover, or ones I’ve forgotten about. So the things we were afraid to express were often captured by large corporations creating these sub-brands to tap into the countercultural movement. Some did it well, some not so well. Some met with success and some just wore out their welcome. But I’m going to run us through some. They’re really fun.
OK Soda, Red Dog, No Fear, Diesel, and Jones Soda
I’m going to start with my personal favorite from this era. Coca-Cola started realizing they weren’t quite aligning with the zeitgeist, so they went and created a soda called OK Soda. Not a huge success. Notoriously didn’t taste great. But incredible branding, very much of the era, very self-aware. They did the opposite of what Coke does. Coke sells happiness, refreshment, togetherness, optimism. So they created OK Soda, which is really self-aware. It’s not amazing. It’s just okay. It’s about just being okay in a complicated world.
It developed this really anti-advertising attitude, and it became really manifesto-like. You’ve got fun lines on the lip of the can that say things like, you drank OK brand soda, something okay happened to you, grab the phone and call us. You could actually call them on the phone. “There’s no real secret to feeling okay.” Tons of great writing. Awesome art by Daniel Clowes. The cans look so great. I love it. But the problem is it didn’t taste great.
Even their ads from this time were deliberately unpolished—black and white, gritty. They’re really calling it out deliberately: “Don’t seek cynicism. It will come to you naturally.” That’s one of their ads. They got it. It’s great. They had manifestos, and manifestos were a big thing for rebel and outlaw brands, so you’d see a lot of that. This is the portfolio of Charlotte Moore, who was the creative director on this. It was done by Wieden+Kennedy in Portland in the ’90s. Legendary work. OK Soda—I love it.
Then we had other big brands like Miller—oh, no, that’s Jones Soda; I’ll jump back to Jones in a second. Miller created Red Dog Beer. At this time, American lagers had become these wholesome symbols of craft and American values and individualism, all that good wholesome stuff. Red Dog’s attitude was that it was for a guy who was ready to get into a fist fight in the bar. It wasn’t happy. It had this grumpy bulldog on the label. Even their tagline, “Uncommonly smooth,” is inherently setting up a stance against something. “Premium beer from the Plank Road Brewery”—that’s a classic trick large-scale domestic brewers use. It’s not from Miller, it’s from their Plank Road Brewery. Red Dog was actually pretty successful, and I love the look of it. Very much of that era.
One that I feel like everyone remembers and has kind of forgotten is No Fear. All the other clothing brands in this era were focusing on performance or fashion, some kind of sophistication—the Tommy Hilfigers of the world. No Fear came at it like, this is aggressive clothing for extreme people doing extreme sports. Boxers, skateboarders, motocross racers—all those people started repping the brand, and it was all about selling attitude. They were just T-shirts, but they sold attitude.
And this is such a great example, and maybe it’ll become more relevant later in this conversation: they’re still around. No Fear relaunched earlier this year, and this is their new look, No Fear Sport. The headline here is literally “No Fear’s new logo proves brands are terrified to stand out.” That was absolutely my thought when I saw this. Where did the character go? Where did the attitude go? That was the only thing they had. They removed the whole spirit of the brand with this update. Unbelievable. Terrible decision.
Another one that was absolutely legendary was Diesel. We all know Diesel. They were a luxury brand, but coming out of the ’80s, luxury was all posh, elegant, sophisticated, that clean upper-crust feel. Diesel came in, adopted the visual language of all those brands, turned it on its head, and attacked traditional advertising aesthetics. It created this really awesome meta-narrative within all of their work and made them super successful. Like this ad here, which is definitely one you would never see now. It set up a clear us versus them: here are the fat cats who don’t get it, and we’re the cool kids quietly judging them. [laughter] Maybe not great for today’s market, but they really just went for it.
Everything became a really dark joke to them. All the typical luxury fans, they set them up as pompous blowhards. And I think the most interesting part is it often wasn’t about showing an elegant, beautiful world. They weren’t trying to sell you the idea that you were going to look beautiful at the party. They were selling you the morning after, when you’ve got a hangover but you’re kind of reveling in the moment you had. That’s what they were focusing on. Super good, real fun. I don’t know where Diesel is these days—we’ll talk about the limited-time effect of some of these choices—but they were really good at showing how the real world really worked. They made luxury clothes for those who get it, and nothing for those who don’t.
(Apparently my YouTube and stream are just having troubles today. We’ll keep going. Sorry if you’re seeing some stuttering and slowdown on your end.)
Okay, a couple more just for fun. We all remember Jones Soda. This was another great stance against old ’80s corporate consumerism and consistency. All soda brands were super consistent. They were kind of inhuman. They were polished. And Jones came in with this whole idea that you become the label. You submit photos to them, and you have a chance of it showing up on one of their labels. It became this constantly rotating label of art and photography, and no one was doing anything like that. It blew up. They kind of screwed themselves when they tried going too big and started killing off some of their spirit—they switched over to plastic bottles, and a lot happened where they threw away some of their equity. They still exist, though. But such an awesome decision back then: you become the label. It’s great.
Marzocchi and Adbusters
One that’s particularly close to Parliament’s heart is Marzocchi. Marzocchi makes forks for mountain bikes. They’ve been around since the ’90s, maybe the ’80s—I can’t remember the exact year. I should know this. Marzocchi was a client of ours. We updated their brand a few years ago after they got picked up by a new owner.
Back in the ’90s they had some cool aesthetics. This was still the early era of extreme sports, and Marzocchi wanted to come into it and make a mark. A lot of other brands were still focusing on extreme performance and tinkering and making you super badass. Marzocchi leaned into celebrating epic moments, the excitement of feel over just technical shit. And I think some of it they went a little too insane on. This is a great Pinkbike breakdown of their brand, and it just had this whole aesthetic, which is great.
But where they really hit their stride (and also maybe where you started going, “What are you guys doing?”) was in the late ’90s and early 2000s. They started doing full-on, basically, porn-star sex-sells stuff, which certainly stood out at that time among mountain bikers. But when you look back on it now, you’re kind of like, what does any of that do? Some of this aesthetic is great, though. Very fun.
So they came to us some years ago asking how to update their brand while keeping some of that idea. We focused on this whole idea of stoke with them. This is our case study for them, which was great. It’s all about “get rowdy on the regular,” all about the feeling of riding. We updated their mark (I love where that turned out) and gave them some directions for packaging. We pushed them to say it really is about feel and epic moments. We removed the cheesy porn-star aesthetic, cleaned it up, and made it this alternative, aggressive idea of bombers: bombing down big hills, doing big jumps. It was a real fun change.
Aaron in chat, “Marzy”—I guess this is a fine time to talk about it. Years ago we shot a whole series of commercials for Marzocchi that were absolutely absurd, and I don’t know if they ended up using any of them, because they got real wacky and I think they were a little nervous about going that far. So sometimes we do push people too far. It featured a mascot that was a stick of butter, to communicate that all of your epic rides were going to be completely buttery smooth. That was a real stretch.
Okay, any other favorite ’90s brands I’m not thinking of? Also on my list I have Big Dogs—if anybody remembers Big Dogs T-shirts. There are so many different brands. But one thing I do want to call out, because it was super influential in design and culture during this time, is a magazine called Adbusters. You can get most of their archive on archive.org, and they also have a ton of it on their website.
Adbusters was an anti-capitalist, anti-consumer, nonprofit magazine that used the aesthetics of corporations to communicate its ideological stance. It was super influential in the ’90s and even in the 2000s. It’s actually what led to the Occupy Wall Street movement—that started in the pages of Adbusters. You can see from this cover they were certainly trying to be provocative. The magazine was really about communicating all the things about the globalist capitalist world that we weren’t paying attention to. This specific issue was called “Is the American Dream Negotiable?” and it talked about what we’re sacrificing in a globalized economy by getting all the things we want—what damage we’re causing across the planet. And this was in the ’90s. That stuff is still relevant. It never became irrelevant, that’s for sure.
Very cool magazine. They had this Design Anarchy issue. This was an era when magazines were just wild. I loved it. These ones are actually from the 2000s; I think they started in the mid-to-late ’90s. Adbusters is maybe a whole other talk someday.
How mainstream brands co-opted the counterculture
Okay, so that’s a bunch of the brands and what they did. It was always about looking at culture at large and creating a really harsh distinction against the larger monoculture that was being sold to us. But at some point a problem starts happening. There’s this huge countercultural movement, and then mainstream brands start adopting it. You had Taco Bell with their absurd Chihuahua ads. You had Doritos, which became all about extreme, aggressive flavor and attitude. All of those brands started adopting it, and that’s when mainstream corporations kind of ruined it all. They were just like, you know what, we’re going to go hard—we’ve got to mimic what the counterculture is doing.
We all know how this pattern goes. A big countercultural movement happens. The counterculture rejects the mainstream and creates its own aesthetics. Those aesthetics become desirable. Brands and big corporations steal those aesthetics. Those aesthetics become mainstream. Then a whole new countercultural movement develops and rejects that new aesthetic. That is the cycle we live in forever.
But that was especially true during this time. This movement in the ’90s of brands pushing toward an aggressive, cynical take was so widespread that it led into what’s often referred to as the new sincerity moment—the hipster movement and all of millennial branding, where everything got so soft and feely and sincere and caring about everything. That was a direct response to all these mainstream brands pulling together their own countercultural brands. It undercut everything that countercultural movement stood for and created the new sincerity movement of the 2000s. Maybe we’ll talk about that next week—hipster brands and millennial branding.
So then ’90s anti-branding became the standard for branding, which is just a funny idea, but this is how these cycles go. Cynicism and irony became the standard ways for brands to communicate. Meta-narratives became super common. I mean, at the point where Doritos are doing it—come on.
The problem is that sarcasm, aggression, all of those emotions and communication tools become really exhausting. We’re experiencing some of that now in our current world, where all media is designed to enrage us. These are emotions that become very exhausting. They create very taxing emotional states, and we eventually get tired of them. That’s why during the 2000s there was this turn to brands hitting on genuine conviction and really caring about others. At that moment, that became the distinction, and that’s what led to the new sincerity movement.
So that’s why we can’t have nice things. At some point mainstream brands gather up all their money, spin off sub-brands, and ruin the whole movement. Dang it.
Any other brands from that era that anyone in chat can think of that we can learn something from? We had the whole era of the X Games—does anyone know what year the X Games started? That had to have been somewhere around there. I think that was a really major influence at that time. Skateboarding culture. I didn’t talk about Thrasher magazine. Thrasher became such a big influence during this time; it was definitely a cultural moment. Oh, Aaron says ’95 for the X Games. Dang. It’s wild to me that means the X Games are, what, 31 years old? [clears throat] We’re all old.
Lessons from ’90s branding
Okay, so what lessons can designers and brand strategists learn from this uprising of countercultural branding and then the fall of it? One thing is that it’s a viable option to react against the dominant culture. Reacting against the dominant culture can create a really powerful moment of distinction, but there can be a time limit on that. When you’re setting yourself up against a dominant cultural moment, that moment’s probably going to end at some point.
One thing to think about is a brand like Harley-Davidson, maybe the most consistent rebel outlaw brand to ever exist. They’re always against something, and the type of culture they stand against is something that basically crosses all time. They’re against the nine-to-five. They’re against the status quo. That’s why they’ve been able to be so consistent in reacting against a dominant culture. So if you’re acting against a dominant culture, you have to really ask whether it’s a trend-focused thing. That’s something to be really mindful of.
The other thing we can learn from this is to always remember that your audience understands advertising and branding. They’ll get the joke. They’re smart. You can be blatant about selling something—that’s fine. They get it. They know what advertising is, especially anymore.
Oh, Ryan—Fuel in the Tank—what’s good? Got stuck in meetings today? That’s the worst. Don’t you know it’s lunchtime on Thursday? No meetings at lunchtime on Thursday. Ryan, I feel like you have some thoughts on good ’90s edgy brands. If any come to mind, drop them in the chat. [clears throat]
Another thing I think we can learn from the ’90s, and I think this remains true forever, is that contradictions always will create interesting identities. When you’re opposing dominant culture, what you’re really doing is setting up a contradiction between yourself and them and putting it on display. That’ll just never go out of fashion.
Ryan says, “Well, I work on The Sims, and that revival has been great from a nostalgia standpoint.” Oh man, The Sims. Yeah, that’s interesting. I actually haven’t talked about any games yet today. There are so many games from that era. We talked about the X Games—when you think about Tony Hawk, what Tony Hawk meant to people. Tony Hawk was a lot of people’s first introduction to punk. That’s wild to think, but that was a lot of people’s first introduction to an anti-capitalist punk, anti-consumerist mindset, and it was all through Tony Hawk. Then people went back and discovered Thrasher magazine and all of those things.
In previous episodes we also talked about Wipeout. Wipeout was absolutely part of this ’90s movement—contrasting UK rave culture with Japanese futurist aesthetics, all to comment on overconsumption. All this sub-branding, or subvertising, where you create fake brands to put eyes on the problems of capitalism and consumerism. Wipeout was absolutely part of that. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, go back and watch the Wipeout episode. It was great.
Someone says a lot of it bled into the 2000s, but game advertising as a whole did not give a shit back then. Oh, yeah. All advertising in general was just like: take a stance, go absurd, maybe too extreme. And Fuel in the Tank says some of it hasn’t aged well, but the way companies were trying to actually be edgy was certainly a time. Yeah—you would have missed it earlier, but I threw up the Diesel Jeans ads where they’re very obviously making fat jokes about people who are rich. The edgelordiness of that time was certainly its own unique, specific moment. Things that today you’re like, okay, that’s just punching down. [cough]
Some other things I think we learned from ’90s and early 2000s brands: attitude itself can become a differentiator when the product is done right. We had No Fear, the explosion of that brand—it was all attitude. It was just a clothing brand that slapped slogans and manifestos on things.
But maybe the most important thing to learn, which was eventually the downfall of all this, is that counterculture just can’t be copied. You have to actually be rebellious and truly believe in what you’re standing for. That was the downfall of a lot of these brands: they were created by larger corporations, and at some point they couldn’t keep that angst going. They can’t keep that rebellion going, because people start realizing it’s a giant corporation that owns it, or it’s just hard to keep that momentum going in general as culture changes so quickly now.
Pepsi, private equity, and today’s dominant culture
Oh, Nick says, “Not ’90s, but Pepsi and Kendall Jenner was a major face-plant.” Oh yeah. [laughter] Oh god, Pepsi. Pepsi has just never been able to define who they are. They’ve tried so many times to be the anti-Coke, where they blatantly communicate that they’re not like Coke. But all that ever does is sell the brand you’re trying to fight against. And Pepsi’s done that forever.
Aaron says, “The Canada of Coke.” Yeah, that’s what Pepsi is. Please, someone tell me what Pepsi stands for. It’s probably not even number two anymore—it’s probably Mountain Dew or something. But the fact that for so long Pepsi was number two in the soda market is just insane. They’ve been the most soulless company and have never been consistent. I do not get it. They had a great mark, their old classic Pepsi logo. Fantastic. And then they even screwed that up for a while with the weird winking ribbon, which looked just like Coke’s ribbon. So many bad decisions happening there.
But okay, so that’s some stuff we can learn. Reacting against dominant culture can create distinction. Your audience understands advertising. Contradictions will always be powerful. Attitude can become a differentiator. And counterculture can’t be copied. Those are some big things to think about.
Final thoughts time on the ’90s and when brands stopped giving a shit. The transition from the ’80s to the ’90s, and the ’90s as a whole, became a pluralist, culture-wide rebellion against corporatism and monoculture. And the funny thing is that even becomes ironic in itself, because that then became the dominant monoculture to some extent.
But the part that’s most interesting to me about that time is that the solution for brands wasn’t just to create new identities and new products. They fully adopted their audience’s skepticism. Brands have always been in conversation with whatever is going on in the world, but it’s really unique that they all focused on skepticism—the fear of selling out, the fear of being bought. That’s a really unique moment in the advertising and brand world. It created completely new ways for brands to communicate, with that level of absurdity, cynicism, and sarcasm. That was a little bit new at that moment, so it gave us some new ways to view and communicate with the world.
This is all nostalgia; this is looking back. What can we learn from it? The big question for us now as designers and brand strategists is: if the ’90s were reacting against dominant cultures, what do the alternative brands of today need to be rejecting? What are they reacting against? The problem is we won’t know that until about 10 years from now, when we have a better vantage point. We’ve got a lot of really big cultural events happening. We have absolutely dominant tech companies. We have a rise in far-right fascism and far-right ideologies, to the point where it’s influencing governments and the corporations we interact with daily.
Yeah, Fuel in the Tank says, “Private equity is the new big corporate brand that sucks the soul out of small, fun brands.” I’ve been curious about this. You see it a lot in very specific niche industries, where there’s this cycle where private equity or massive corporations come in and consolidate. You had this in the history of beer. For the longest time, the whole beer industry was microbreweries, every single one. Then from the mid-century era to the ’70s there was massive consolidation—Budweiser and all of those folks bought up every small brewery and converted them over to Bud. That’s why you got these monoliths of Budweiser, Coors, all of that. They just took it all over.
Then there was the next cycle, the era of craft breweries, which popped up in response as its own form of counterculture, where it became about craft again and caring about quality. And we started that cycle again a little bit: AB InBev, the owners of Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch, started buying up a lot of craft breweries. That consolidation cycle kind of petered out because we got exhausted by craft. We’ve talked about this a lot on this show—the exhaustion of craft and how it ends up being kind of a meaningless brand promise, because everyone could claim craft.
So you have this cycle where everyone starts buying out, and we definitely hit a big time of that in tech. We’ve got these tech giants now who bought out all the little guys, killing any competition. We talk about games a lot on here because I love them, and you see it in games a lot, where massive corporations and private equity firms buy up all the game companies and roll them under one house. Now we’re seeing the repercussions of that: mass layoffs in the video game industry in an attempt to maximize profit, where everyone’s aiming for giant blockbuster hits instead of cranking out nice, small projects that make a little bit of money. So yeah, private equity is tough.
The funny thing is, at Parliament we love working with some private equity folks. (Sorry, it’s very hot in my office now. It got muggy in here.) There are a couple we’ve really loved working with, like when we did our work for Just Food For Dogs. Great brand—someday that case study will be up. They do natural dog food, and I love them. We’ve worked with them a couple times. And when we did work for West Marine, it was really about a lot of people who care a lot coming in and investing in these brands, and they have to turn things around. I’ll say we were lucky that the firm we were working with on those really cared about the actual heritage and actual spirit of the brand. That’s a big difference. But they all want to make their money, so it’s really difficult to find that balance of how you create a genuine brand with conviction when there’s a larger corporation that just wants investor capital out of it. That’s something we always need to be mindful of.
Fuel in the Tank, you said you’re working on The Sims. The Sims is massive, and it’s owned by EA, if I remember right—EA and Maxis. EA makes incredible games, but they also became a villain at some point. And they’re kind of the only company that can do what they do. So there’s this complicated mess of understanding how all these things work. Oh, EA just went private? Oh man, I’ve got to do some Googling. I’m out of touch with the EA drama.
Final thoughts
Anyway, those are some things to start thinking about. I think this is a challenge to myself: I want to think about how brands can be pushed to stand against some dominant culture, but the real challenge is that it can’t be a dominant cultural trend. That’s the hard part. I already mentioned how Harley was really smart and chose a dominant cultural idea that’s kind of timeless—the nine-to-five job, the status quo. That will never go out of fashion. So when you have a brand rooted in something more countercultural and rebellious, make sure it’s truly rooted in something deeper than whatever the trend of the moment is.
[laughter] Fuel in the Tank: “Not something I can talk about on the interwebs. I have some thoughts.” All right, let’s grab a beer sometime and talk about games.
Sweet. I think that’s probably it for the week. That was a fun dive into some old ’90s stuff. Anytime there’s this cycle of nostalgia, take time to remember that all these moments usually come from some kind of countercultural movement, or at least in response to some deeper thing happening in culture. That’s worth remembering as these bits of nostalgia pop back up. If you’re ever challenged to follow along with the fashion or trend of these things, go that little step deeper. Find out what originally drove that countercultural movement, and you might be able to unlock something special.
Since we talked about the ’90s, maybe next week we’ll finally talk about the transition from the cynicism and irony of the ’90s and early 2000s to the 2000s and 2010s hipster and millennial branding movements. That was a huge shift—a hard swing against cynicism into this deeply sincere, deeply caring focus on authenticity, where authenticity became about caring instead of about being cynical and sarcastic. There are definitely things to learn from the millennial branding era too. It lasted a long time, 20 or 25 years probably, which is a long time for a design movement to last.
All right, everybody, thanks for joining. This was the ’90s on You’re Not the Audience. See you all same time next week. Thanks, everyone in chat—this was great. Yeah, no lunch meetings allowed next week. Ever. It’s illegal to have lunch meetings. When I am monarch, I will make a law that lunch meetings are illegal. All right, have a good week, everyone.