Let’s start with a completely hypothetical sitch.

You’ve built your brand on Instagram. You live there. You breathe there. You’ve optimised your content strategy to within an inch of its algorithmic life. Every post has been lovingly massaged through a seven-stage approval funnel.

Your brand voice? “Quirky but credible.” Your aesthetic? “Minimalist with unexpected whimsy.” Your followers? Enthusiastic, engaged, and occasionally spammy.

Then one day, poof!

Meta announces that Instagram is pivoting into a VR-powered shopping mall for AI-generated avatars. Human users are deprecated. Hashtags are banned. Your account is now managed by a chatbot named Kevin.

And just like that, your brand no longer exists. At least not in the dimension where your customers live.

No heads-up. No contingency. Just aesthetic inertia and cold panic.

Branding, but for when things go sideways.

This is not your typical pastel‑washed, values‑drizzled, vision‑boarded brand theory. This is branding for people who lie awake at 2am wondering what happens if TikTok is banned, your CEO tweets something medieval, or your entire supply chain gets eaten by a glacier.

A catastrophist doesn’t ask: “How do we look cool?”
They ask: “How do we not die?”

Which means rebuilding the brand not for moodboards, but for mayhem. Here’s five for starters, all pressure-tested for when the metaphorical hits the literal.

Start building for the one that’s engulfed in flames.

Most branding efforts begin with delusion and end with disappointment.
“We want to be the Patagonia of fintech.”
“We’re like Airbnb, but for essential oils.”
“Think Apple, but ethical. And also blockchain.”

This isn’t vision. It’s brand cosplay.

The catastrophist laughs in Helvetica.
LOL, Demi Bold.

Because real branding isn’t what you aspire to be. It’s what remains standing when your market implodes and someone’s live-streaming it on Threads. It’s what holds shape under duress, distraction, or a sudden pivot to AI-powered hummus.

We all love a good brand fantasy. But before you get too attached to your aspirational archetype, try this:

Forget personality. Build a panic room.

Your brand should survive a power outage, a platform pivot and a rogue intern with the password to the company Instagram account.

Most brands are built like soufflés, beautiful until touched. A catastrophist brand is more like a Swiss Army Ferret: oddly shaped, highly adaptable, slightly unsettling, but incredibly hard to kill.

Brand identity is more than good taste. Can it survive pixelation, printer ink, or someone misusing your font in Excel? Let’s find out.

Catastrophist branding only works if leadership stops treating branding like a hairstyle and starts treating it like organisational oxygen.

We’re not talking about values you workshop once and then ignore. We’re talking about convictions so clear they’d still be true if your head office burned down and your entire category was replaced by sentient vending machines.

If your exec team can’t summarise your brand without a PDF and a prayer, you don’t have a brand. You have a very expensive guessing game. Here’s how to tell if leadership actually believes what you’ve built.

Stop chasing mission statements. Start planning for meltdowns.

What happens when your brand name translates to “moist regret” in Cantonese? What happens when your biggest channel pivots to AI-generated mukbang content and you’re suddenly irrelevant? What happens when your CEO goes viral for calling oat milk a “global conspiracy” during a wellness podcast?

If your brand collapses the moment things get difficult, was it ever built to last? Write the scenarios. Stress-test the stories.

Don’t just build narratives, build crash mats.

Skip the mission statements. Simulate the weird stuff. These quick drills test whether your brand still holds shape when the context gets chaotic.

Most of the time, your brand is background noise. A whisper in the wind tunnel of capitalism. But when something goes wrong, really wrong, your brand becomes the main character. And not in a good way.

That’s when a catastrophist brand shows its worth.

Not in the font. Not in the tagline.

In the clarity. In the accountability. In the speed of correction.

In the unapologetic ability to know what it is when everything else is going sideways.

Most people aren’t paying attention, until something breaks. These scenarios test what happens when your brand is suddenly in the spotlight… or the comment section.

It’s just something I’ve been thinking about more lately.

Maybe it’s the branding exercises that produce beautiful decks, and broken rollouts. Maybe it’s the speed of tech vs. the pace of design. Maybe I’ve read too many rebrand rationales that sound like astrology with a style guide.

What if, instead of crafting for best-case scenarios, we practised radical pragmatism to build brands that still make sense when things go sideways?

So next time I kick off a branding project, I might not start with vision.
I’ll start with this: “When the proverbial hits the fan, what (if anything) should still feel true?”

Because in the end, a catastrophist brand isn’t pessimistic.
It’s just prepared.

Build weird. Build tough.
Build like it’s the end of the world.

‍Because if you can survive that, you can survive anything.