3 types of brand gravity

Find things that can't be copied

Contrary to popular belief of many a marketing folk, brands that shape culture the most aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. We have seen, time and again, that in the David vs Goliath game, Davids win as often as Goliaths. That’s because they have a strong gravitational pull on culture. (Most recently, the movie Obsession, made for a 750K, made $230M as of June 16 2026.)

I have written about brand gravity last year, and went in depth about the topic in my course and client advisory work, but it’s one of the topics that becomes more relevant with time.

In physics, gravity is a force that one body exerts to attract others. Every world formed by gravity has its own logic: its rules, its series of what-ifs that determines what belongs inside its orbit and what doesn’t. (That’s what a brand world actually is, not aesthetic, but logic). This logic is the pull of a world’s gravity. Every force a gravity has a center, a reference point around which everything else orbits (Lego has a brick, Disney has characters, Prada has modern femininity, ALD has urban prep, A24 modern auteurship, Erewhon California lifestyle).

There are three types of brand gravity, each with a different center.

Pay to read the best part: the three centers of gravity that all brands have and how to capitalize on them in practice