Success does strange things to a brand. People start paying attention, then they start lining up. The press calls. Collaborations appear. Your founder gets invited onto podcasts. Someone in business development discovers a total addressable market the size of Brazil.

Then comes the question: What else can we sell them? It is one of the most seductive questions in business because, for a while, the answer appears to be, well, almost anything.

For most of modern consumer history, companies built products and then spent enormous amounts of money trying to assemble an audience around them. Then, creators reversed that order. They built the audience first.

From a business perspective, that’s catnip. Ten million followers. A built-in distribution channel. Intimate knowledge of the customer. Organic reach that would make a CMO weep. It’s the kind of cultural relevance most legacy brands spend millions trying to engineer.

Your brand can do almost anything — and that’s the problem | Marketing Dive