The Vibe Trap

The Vibe Trap

The danger of designing for algorithms instead of emotions

If you don’t know what vibe marketing is, let me explain, but chances are you’ve already been on the receiving end of it.

It’s the style-led, emotionally vague form of content that dominates our digital landscape right now. If you think of lo-fi videos with soft ambient music, introspective voiceovers whispering pseudo-wisdom, clean design language borrowed from brands you can’t quite name, and captions that suggest this emotional depth while actually saying very little at all. Although it’s designed to feel intimate, aesthetic, and lightly profound, which for a moment seems to work. I know personally it's stopped me from scrolling on and even sometimes I've saved the post. But then we move on and it's simply because while it feels like something, it rarely leaves anything behind.

This is marketing built for mood, not memory and has a creative shell geared towards and optimised to perform well on platforms but is structurally hollow underneath. It’s branding that looks emotional without having to be emotionally honest. In other words it's all tone and no truth.

But it didn’t come from nowhere.

Vibe marketing has emerged in response to a very real fatigue. For years, brands relied on data-driven performance marketing, algorithmic targeting, and templated funnels that has stripped out the nuance, emotion, and identity in the name of scale. There's no doubt that the rise of vibe-led content was at first a real rebellion against that and a way to reintroduce feeling, texture, and humanness into brand storytelling.

Yet in trying to feel more human, many brands skipped the hard part: doing the internal work of understanding who they are, what they stand for, and why any of it matters. So as a result, instead of articulating a clear emotional identity and default, they've wrapped themselves in the visual language of connection and called it a brand.

When the vibe becomes the brand, everything starts to blur.

Let me be clear here, the problem isn’t that a brand has a vibe. The problem is when that vibe becomes a substitute for clarity. No brand wants the look to be doing the heavy lifting because the message isn’t clear or have the aesthetic gestures toward connection while the rest of the business can’t follow through.

In retail, this has become especially obvious. Stores are built to be photographed more and more and not felt. Campaigns are getting crafted to blend in with the feed rather than stand out or stay in someone’s mind. Sales teams are now being trained on transactional touchpoints, but not on emotional presence or connection. And behind the soft lighting and branded tote bags, what should feel like a living, breathing brand often ends up feeling strangely sterile, bland and stale, not because it lacks design, but because it lacks truth.

The biggest problem of the illusion of vibe marketing is that it feels like it’s working right?. On the surface, everything performs well. Engagement rates are solid. People comment with their fire emojis and the creatives win praise for being “on-trend.” But behind that performance is a brand system that lacks roots and depth. Customers might interact, but they don’t attach which just turns all these metrics we are using for success into nothing more than “vanity”. The team might deliver, but they don’t live and breathe the brand or embody it. And so what looks like momentum is often just motion without meaning.

That's why the shift in where you begin has to change, not at the surface, but beneath it. It means we don’t start with campaigns or content calendars. We start with the emotional infrastructure that holds a brand together. Not the moodboard and the mood and not the touchpoints and the tone. What we start with is called emotional architecture and is the invisible system that informs how a brand shows up across every layer: its product, people, physical spaces, digital voice, and internal rhythm.

Then when that structure is strong, the “vibe” no longer needs to be engineered. It becomes the natural expression of something much deeper and something people don’t just see but actually sense. A brand with emotional architecture doesn’t have to over-perform to get noticed and that's because its presence speaks volumes and for itself. It doesn’t need to constantly shift tone to stay relevant, because the tone is always rooted in something real. And it doesn’t rely on trends to feel alive, because it already knows how it makes people feel and why.

That kind of clarity isn’t built for clicks. It’s built for coherence.

You begin to notice it in the way customers speak about the brand, not just what they buy from it and in the way staff instinctively know how to act without being handed a script. In the way storytelling aligns across formats without being forced into sameness. Marketing no longer feels like noise because the message is emotionally grounded. The store no longer needs to scream to be noticed, because the energy already pulls people in.

Brands with emotional architecture don’t need to manufacture a vibe. They simply become way more recognisable, not because of a logo or a colour palette, but because of how they consistently make people feel. That’s not branding for vanity. That’s branding as memory and presence. Think of it like a kind of emotional muscle memory the customer may not be able to describe, but certainly won’t forget.

None of this means abandoning technology or tools which we seem to have a huge focus on right now, what it means is you’re anchoring them in something much deeper.

AI, content platforms, automation, aren’t the problem either. But they should only be seen as accelerants. If your emotional foundation is shallow, AI will simply help you publish more surface-level content, more quickly, and at greater scale. If you’ve confused aesthetics for identity, those aesthetics will be repeated back to you by the exact same systems you’ve trained to perform them on.

This is why the rush toward AI-powered marketing is in my opinion so risky for brands that haven’t yet done the internal work. You’re multiplying something, sure, but if that something isn’t built on meaning, you’re just scaling confusion.

The most valuable thing AI can do for a brand isn’t create emotional connection. It supports the clarity you’ve already built. It can help repeat, extend, and even repurpose for you, but it can’t replace emotional intelligence. And it definitely can’t stand in for soul.

So what should brands be building instead?

Not more content. Not more touchpoints. Not more noise disguised as intimacy. But something slower, deeper, and longer lasting. Something that lets the brand become recognisable without being repetitive and relevant without being reactive.

It begins with one single question: how is your brand meant to make people feel? Not just during a campaign or in a store, but everywhere. And more importantly, is that feeling consistent, clear, and repeatable, not by your marketing team, but by your people? 

As brands and retailers we have to learn the difference between perception and perspective and from there you build outwards. You create room for anticipation rather than urgency. You design systems that help our internal teams act in alignment without needing constant supervision and you focus less on being seen and more on being felt.  In a market flooded in which we play and with so much polished aesthetics, it’s the emotional presence of a brand that becomes its true point of difference.

The future of retail will belong to brands with a nervous system, not just a look and we’ve moved into an era where content has become more abundant than ever, but connection is still scarce. It's a time where AI will be able to generate feeling, but not meaning. Where sameness will be the default and resonance will be the advantage.

Brands that last won’t be the most beautiful. They’ll be the most coherent and human and most emotionally grounded. And those aren’t brands that are gonna chase a vibe. They’re brands that will carry one, consistently, quietly, and unmistakably.

Nick Gray

Founder, IGU Global

Helping brands feel human again.