This season of The White Lotus is a fever dream of power, pills, and moral collapse, and right in the middle of it, one of the most powerful brands in sports and education—Duke University—made an uninvited cameo.
Duke’s reactionary complaint unfolded across headlines, begging an existential question in marketing: Can you control how your brand manifests in culture, or do you have to choose between control and relevance? And depending on your answer, how do you protect yourself?
It’s adjacent to many of the brand safety conversations being had elsewhere, seemingly at the same time, demonstrating the inherent friction between brand control and cultural relevance. Because brands don’t just live in controlled environments like websites, ads, shelves, and strip malls—they live in stories on the internet; they live as ‘“extras” in the backdrop of public scandals; they live amid the chaos of culture, which moves at pace and shifts while it takes shape.
The Duke drama has brought to the fore something marketers have grappled with since internet-native consumers came into their power: striving for brands to reach “escape velocity” in culture, then struggling to navigate the dynamics when they do. Brands that manage this become synonymous with the zeitgeist of the moment. And while these change over time—and some have greater longevity than others—the frequency and fervor with which marketers cite and celebrate them is ever strong.
What they don’t always tell you is that not all brands, teams, and businesses are ready, built, or fit for escape velocity. Unfortunately, Duke wasn’t.
The closest comparison I can think of to a brand’s viral moment is a grease fire. As a brand, you have three options:
- Let instinct take over and throw water on it—public condemnation, lawyers, etc.
- Leave it to the professionals—PR, brand, and ad agencies, all of which have a different set of gear for this designed for management, participation, and value creation.
- Do nothing—starve it of the oxygen it needs to spread.
The only strategic choices are two and three. Duke chose option one, and when you throw water on a grease fire, it can blow up in your face.
For the subset of brands fortunate enough to reach escape velocity, it’s a matter of seizing the moment and mastering that elusive equation to maintain and grow cultural relevance. It’s about management, not control—nudging, not pushing.