The Rise of Vibes-Based Marketing

Some brands graduated from attention to identity. These were the logos you wore like badges. Driving a Tesla. Drinking a Negroni sbagliato. Wearing On Running trainers to your VC meeting. Each one a signal — a way to belong to a tribe without saying a word.

But identity is hard to build, and most brands never get there. They hover in the awareness zone, forever optimising CTRs and pushing campaigns without ever becoming something people feel.

Now we’re in a different phase entirely. Something quieter. More ambient. Marketing that isn’t about shouting, or even signalling. Marketing that works like atmosphere.

Let’s call it vibes-based marketing.

And to be clear, this isn’t about using AI to auto-generate aesthetics or “vibe” your product for you. It’s the opposite. It’s about how brands create a background emotional tone — a feeling people can slip into, stay with, and return to. Less persuasion, more presence.

Marketing as Emotional Infrastructure

Vibes-based marketing isn’t about pushing a product or explaining what it does. It’s not even about joining a tribe. It’s about curating a specific internal state. Calm. Playful. Softly productive. Lightly rebellious. Whatever it is, the product matters less than the feeling it helps sustain — or more accurately, the feeling people already want, which the brand helps them stay tuned to.

This is marketing not as megaphone but as moodboard. Brands become emotional companions — helping people self-regulate through their feeds, habits, and routines. It’s less “what does this say about me to the world?” and more “how does this help me feel the way I want to feel today?”

That’s a meaningful shift. Identity was about constructing an external persona. Vibes are about maintaining emotional coherence. Marketing as dopamine drip. Marketing as a weighted blanket.

The Parasocial Engine Behind It All

At the centre of this shift is the parasocial relationship — the one-sided bond you form with someone you follow, who you feel connected to, even though they don’t know you exist.

People don’t just follow creators because they’re interesting. They follow them because they offer something they’re not getting elsewhere: emotional connection without judgment. Attention without demand. A steady stream of micro-rewards — dopamine hits, comfort, familiarity. Maybe even oxytocin, the hormone linked to trust and bonding. The intimacy drug, delivered through a screen.

Over time, these creators become fixtures in your emotional ecosystem. You return to them for consistency, for feeling, for calibration. Not because they tell you who to be, but because they reflect something back — something calm, funny, soft, driven, aesthetic — that helps you stabilise.

When brands show up through these creators, they’re not just buying reach. They’re renting space in your inner world.

What This Means for Brands

The brands that win now aren’t always the cleverest or loudest. They’re the ones that feel like part of your environment. They don’t sell status or slogans. They sell emotional continuity.

And that changes the brief.

It’s no longer “What do we want people to think about us?”
Or even “What do we stand for?”
It’s: What do we help people feel?
And how do we keep showing up in ways that reinforce that feeling, over time, without breaking the spell?

Marketing used to be about storytelling. Then it became signalling. Now it’s more like atmosphere. It’s emotional infrastructure — ambient, affective, and hard to fake.

The best brands today aren’t trying to be the main character. They’re just trying to become part of the background score — consistent, familiar, and exactly what you need, even if you can’t explain why.