Are We Still Buying Identity?
You spent a decade building an identity for customers to commit to. Now they have claimed four identities before lunch.
The same person who spent £9.20 on a smoothie at Joe & The Juice on Tuesday also spent £3 at Aldi on Saturday and felt good about both.
Patagonia jacket in the cupboard, SHEIN haul on the doorstep.
Paid subscriptions to the most thought-provoking of Substack newsletters, but also spends three hours on TikTok every night.
Maybe it’s deeply inauthentic. Or maybe it’s not contradictory at all. This is what buying has become when every brand has spent a decade creating a niche, ownable identity that customers were expected to commit to.
Open any marketing book from twenty years ago, and it will tell you: don’t sell the product, sell the identity.
Don’t say “athletic shoes,” say “athletes.” Make the customer feel something about themselves when they hold the box.
It worked when identities stuck. The person who bought Nike in 2005 was a Nike person, this was when lifetime value was built on the consistency of the self. That’s not the customer anymore.
The customer in 2026 is claiming four identities before lunch. A wellness influencer for the smoothie. A fashionista for the haul. An intellectual for the Substack, and a doomscroller for the algorithm. They can all live in the same person without ever resolving into one like before.
What’s actually being bought
It’s not actually about the smoothie or the coat, or buying into the brand tribe. They’re buying a fifteen-minute version of a self, someone who has time for that smoothie, that morning routine. With postable proof that they did it. By late afternoon, they want to be different. They’ll buy a different proof.
Identity adapted from a one-time membership to an ongoing performance, which only requires a prop that lasts as long as the act.
When we looked at how brands connect with Gen Z, the insight was aspiration over relatability. The best brands aren’t telling customers what to do. Erewhon isn’t telling anyone who they are. Aesop isn’t either. What they have is a very specific look, smell, gesture that the customer can use in whatever they’re performing that day.
The customer is now the director. You’re in the prop cupboard. So you need to be findable.
The B2B version
B2B brands have been discovering identity-driven marketing. “For builders.” “For the curious.” “For people who give a damn.” Every other SaaS landing page is selling a personality type instead of a product.
It doesn’t work the same way. Nobody can see your CRM. The buyer can’t wear your software.
What B2B buyers actually buy is competence-identity. Not “I’m a builder.” More like “I’m the person who knew about this tool first. I’m the person who picked the thing that didn’t break.” The audience is small: peers, the team, and the person interviewing them in two years. The prop is the knowing, rather than the using.
B2B has been selling the costume when it should be selling the credit. The thing the buyer gets to say they knew about. The thing that makes them look right in a Slack DM. That’s what software is actually selling.
What this changes
You can’t keep thinking the old way, about who our customers are and what we mean to them.
The question you need to be asking now is what version of themselves are they trying to be, and is our product a useful prop for that performance?
It means building a brand by being specific, recognisable, and useful for self-performance, and letting customers pick you up and put you down as they shift.
Most customers are buying your brand for a specific situation, alongside three others you’d never put in the same sentence. In this case, loyalty now means being reached for at the right moment.
The uncomfortable bit
It might sound like a downgrade, thoughtful brand work turning into a temporary costume. But there’s still work to be done in understanding the specific situation the customer is trying to perform their way through, and being the most recognisable, reachable, and aesthetically resolved option in that situation.
The traditional model flattered customers by telling them they had a stable self that brands could speak to. The new one is accepting that they are juggling, improvising, and reaching for whatever helps them be the version of themselves they need to be that day.
Identity used to be something you sold to a customer. Now it’s something they assemble themselves. With or without you.
Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.