Most of what passes for “content” these days is disposable. Made fast, optimized for whatever invisible math decides what people see today, and forgotten about five minutes later.
That never interested me much.
I’m Kennyatta, a photographer, writer, and strategist. What I care about are the stories that stick. The ones rooted in culture, in places, in the messy, contradictory reality of how people actually live, work, and make things.
So this is where I put those stories.
What You’ll Find Here
The Workshop — Interviews, Adventures, Observations.
Curiosity: What if how we’re taught to be an effective brand strategist makes us blind to what may be good business for a brand?
Category: Essay
“Always take a good look at what is happening, and map the motive behind it.” - Marcus Aurelius
I’m running into a nuanced challenge as I hone my skills. What I’m learning to make me better at branding is coming into direct conflict with what I’m learning to become a better strategist. It’s strange because most of what we need to be great at our job today, especially as a brand strategist, involves mastering this chimera of the two disciplines.
I’ve thought about this a lot after watching Calvin Klein’s recent campaign featuring Tate McRae. My immediate reaction was visceral. I sent it to my girlfriend, spoke at length about the disconnect I saw between Tate McRae and Calvin, how the dancing felt strange for the brand, and how it felt far more GAP than Calvin Klein. Especially thinking back to the YouTube age-restricted Dakota Johnson campaign that released earlier in the year, which seemed to contain everything we’ve been trained to recognize as quintessentially Calvin: restraint, sexuality, provocation, confidence, performance through existence and not performance itself.
My default setting was to diagnose the creative. And while that’s reasonable, it’s also ignoring the entire other half of the discipline of being a brand strategist.
What if my framework for examining this isn’t complete?
I’m not too proud to admit when I’m wrong. And I was wrong in assuming that just because I was right, I was right.
Yes, Tate McRae does read as a GAP girl. She’s approachable, wholesome-sexy, all-American-adjacent even though she’s Canadian, and she naturally embodies that old dancing-in-khakis GAP register they’ve been drilling back into for the past few years. The problem, however, is assuming these attributes BELONG to GAP, just because GAP continues to leverage them. All of those qualities aren’t inherently GAP as much as they’re very 90s-coded. And Calvin Klein was there in the 90s. GAP anchored itself to the wholesome end of this spectrum; Calvin anchored itself to the more provocative end, but they drank from the same well. Dare I say, recency bias has us missing the forest for the trees, and the commercial for the casting.
I didn’t even stop to consider what PVH may be trying to accomplish with this partnership or what Calvin Klein could be optimizing for right now. What if they’re looking to do a brand turnaround and focusing on different celebrity chapters in a playbook focused on attention was the point? The Bad Bunny reveal was monumental for the brand, generating more than $8 million in earned media. CEO Stefan Larsson told investors fall needed “cut-through full funnel campaigns with a strong lineup of globally relevant talent,” on the earnings call in 2025, which makes the McRae move look far more sane.
It also looks more sane if we consider the “full funnel” to mean a roster of different celebrity talent hitting different audiences and speaking to different sub-cultures. The Jung Kook campaign did more than $13 million in earned media within two days, and the 2024 Jeremy Allen White campaign did over $74 million. Wouldn’t it be pragmatic for the company to continue running the same play if they’re scoring every time?
And there lies the dissonance that comes with being a brand strategist today. We’re simultaneously expected to protect the meaning of “brand” and understand the machinery of businesses; those two things don’t always want the same outcome. Years of pattern recognition come from studying what a brand should sound like, look like, and never do; studying positioning, culture, and distinction in the market. Do it long enough, and we can smell something being “off-brand” before we can even tell you why. And once that instinct is sharpened, it can create a blind spot because sometimes, what looks like an incoherent brand could be a perfectly coherent business.
What if a Good Campaign is a Short-Lived One?
It didn’t make sense to me that the Dakota Johnson campaign didn’t see more follow-up from Calvin Klein. It was a prime response to the viral Sydney Sweeney, American Eagle denim moment. It made a clear separation of sexy. Calvin Klein positioned itself as the grown-up, sophisticated, seductive, brand-equity-rich answer to a controversy another brand was getting rightfully kicked in the back for. But taking a step back, what if it did exactly what it was supposed to do and had no reason to continue? It was a reactive, opportunistic strike timed PERFECTLY to a window that was open for a few months. It earned a ton of media value. Job done. Thank you, everyone. Let’s move on. My default response is to compound on the victory. But what if there’s nothing else to compound? Or what if there are more plays to run and this was just a good play drawn up, and there’s still a lot of game left?
It’s taken a while, but I’m learning disposability doesn’t necessarily mean bad brand building. Calvin Klein isn’t making a mistake by jumping from one celebrity to another inherently, especially if, in this PVH turnaround era, Calvin Klein is positioning itself as a repository of whichever captivating celebrity talent can speak to whichever audience, and whichever specific product funnel job. Dakota Johnson was a sniper shot at a cultural moment. Bad Bunny was a bomb that went off in the market. And Tate McRae is a recruitment officer for a broad, participatory, product-selling denim line aimed at Gen Z.
Brands and Their Different Economies
A brand exists within multiple economies: an economy of meaning and an economy of attention.
An economy of meaning only understands long-term equity. You need consistency. You need memory, language, structure. You need rules of engagement.
An economy of attention is more ephemeral. It’s all talent, action, relevance, participation, and timing.
It’s not that one is more valid than the other, but the conditioning of the strategist today, whether brand, creative, or growth, drives you so far into one of the two that it creates blind spots to the activity and value of the other. Everything in me speaks to franchises, platforms, consistency, and the long game. So when someone does something just to go viral, it looks like a fumbled play to me, instinctively. Again, back to this idea of things being designed to be disposable. That feels like it violates a sacred law. But the ability to see a viral moment as a completed transaction rather than a squandered brand opportunity is par for the course if you were a growth strategist or a media buyer.
As a brand or creative strategist today, you have to walk this tightrope. Stray too far to the side of attention and the brand becomes a desperate whore. Go too far toward coherence and meaning, and you can build an extraordinary brand that nobody gives a shit about. Neither is useful. But it feels like that’s what we’re conditioned for today, maxxing in one direction or the other. LinkedIn is filled with the people who outrage over the incoherence of brands. So many of us are feasting on low-hanging or fallen fruit.
Instead of just running with the initial thought that something is “wrong,” after looking at a campaign, maybe we should treat it like the beginning of an investigation instead of the conclusion of one. I’m working on building this reflex. To take a step back and ask, “What is this for?” and take a minute to dig into that before flying off with an emotional response- which is good on them for triggering it.
I don’t think I missed the mark on the campaign because I analyzed it poorly, but because I was trying to understand it from the wrong vantage point. The answers aren’t always in the social posts, the fashion magazines, the takes from other “brand marketers” and strategists, or the press releases. Sometimes it's in the boring documents, on the earnings calls, in the interviews from three years ago, in the pages of the money documents.
Wherever it is, the first step has to be to seek it out to better understand.