Yasmin Saira thinks your brand is failing because it is trying too hard to be liked

Most branding advice is a decorating problem: pick a palette, tighten the logo, write a tagline with the word elevate in it. Yasmin Saira's argument is that this is exactly why nobody cares about your product. Her studio is called Theory of Khaos, her content series is called Cult Brand Psychology, and her titles are not subtle: why your marketing sucks, why people aren't buying, people don't fall in love with safe brands.

The credential underneath is the interesting part. She has a psychology degree and six years in branding, and she uses the first to explain the second. Cult brands are not an aesthetic outcome, they are a psychological one: obsession comes from meaning, belonging, and the willingness to be disliked by the right people. Most founders skip all three and go straight to the colour palette.

Strategically flawed

Her sharpest line is that if you want a cult brand, you should not be perfect, you should be strategically flawed. Cult brands include on purpose and exclude on purpose. Trying to be acceptable to everyone produces something nobody would defend at a party, which is the definition of a brand with no cult. Safe, in other words, is the risk.

The part that makes this a business rather than a content account is what she does with it afterward. Theory of Khaos ships a Cult Brand OS: the strategy converted into simple guardrails and rules a team can follow without her in the room. That is the step most strategists never take, because a beautiful deck is easier to deliver than a system someone else can run. Brand work only compounds when it survives the handoff.

The content practices what it argues, too. The set is lime green and maximalist, the covers are loud, the takes are confrontational. A brand strategist with a timid feed would be a walking contradiction, and she clearly knows it.

The neighbouring obsession

File her next to Carson Scott, also on this site, who works the same nerve from the other side: he explains how to make people obsessed with boring products, she explains how to stop being boring in the first place. Between them you have most of a curriculum.

If your product is good and nobody talks about it, the problem is probably not the logo. Start with the Cult Brand Psychology series and prepare to be told, cheerfully, that you have been playing it too safe.

If you want a cult brand, don't be perfect. Be strategically flawed.

Yasmin, on why your brand is forgettable