Most of the brands in your life barely register. You buy whatever you buy, it does its job, and that’s the end of it. Nothing memorable. Nothing worth thinking about. And then, once in a while, something lands differently. You come across a book or a logo or a voice at some random moment and, for whatever reason, it sticks with you.
Hunter S. Thompson’s voice hit me at my core and made me say, That’s what I want to do. He was irreverent, unique, full of courage and anger, and his vocabulary made me feel like he had rebuilt the English language from scratch. It was the only language I wanted to speak.
I first read Thompson in my late twenties. For a guy living in a small New England town, he felt like someone from outer space. His rapid-fire delivery, his twisted view of the world, I thought, was extraordinary, and the way he could drop me into laughter or insight without warning. Hunter was the voice I connected with instantly. Every other writer I tried to read after that felt forced. His was the one I craved.
To seal my membership in the unofficial Thompson cult, I had his logo tattooed on my leg. I filled my closet with T-shirts stamped with that double-thumb fist, the poppy, the blade, the whole strange emblem of whatever he represented. My favorite shirt said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Hunter S. Thompson was, and still is, a brand I am loyal to.
A few weeks ago, I walked into a small coffee shop I’d never visited before. Not a chain. A little Pacific Northwest spot in a seaside town, the kind with clinking cups and low conversations that drift through the room like weather. The vibe was relaxed. Welcoming.
I ordered a coffee, sat down, and took off my coat. I happened to be wearing one of my Thompson shirts. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t choose it as a statement. I just reached into my closet and pulled out whatever T-shirt my hand landed on. With the number of Hunter shirts I own, the odds were tilted.
I didn’t expect any trouble. I definitely didn’t expect someone to walk straight over to my table, plant her hands on it, lean in close, and hiss that my shirt was an abomination. Thompson, she said, was a misogynist, a drug addict, and a loser who killed himself.
All I wanted was my coffee, my toasted bagel, and a few minutes to watch the seals drifting in the surf. I did not plan on defending my T-shirt or my love for Hunter S. Thompson’s writing. But that is where the morning went.
I didn’t argue much. I’ve learned that when someone comes at you with a full tank of anger and a personal grudge, you’re not going to talk them out of it. I didn’t apologize either. She ended the conversation by telling me I should think before dressing in the morning and walked off. A guy passing by my table muttered, “I love Fear and Loathing. The movie, I mean. Never read the book,” and slipped out.
And as usual, this whole scene got me thinking about brands. How far do people go to defend or attack the brands they attach themselves to? And at what point does a brand become something you can no longer defend at all?
When a Brand Becomes Part of Your Identity
Most of the brands in your life barely register. You buy whatever you buy, it does its job, and that’s the end of it. Nothing memorable. Nothing worth thinking about. And then, once in a while, something lands differently. You come across a book or a logo or a voice at some random moment and, for whatever reason, it sticks with you. You don’t plan it. You just realize later that it dug in.
That’s how Hunter S. Thompson was for me. His writing didn’t feel like something I was supposed to analyze or admire from a distance. It felt like someone had cracked open a window in my head and let in air I didn’t know I needed. I wasn’t trying to become a fan. It happened on its own. His voice just plugged into something already there.
When that happens, the brand or artist or idea stops being a surface-level interest. It becomes a reference point. A marker. Something you quietly fold into the story you tell about yourself. You start to recognize pieces of your own thinking shaped by that influence. It becomes part of your personal geography.
And that’s when criticism gets complicated. If someone shrugs at a brand you barely care about, you shrug back. But if someone goes after something that helped shape who you are, the reaction inside you is different. You might not show it on your face, but you feel it. They aren’t just calling out a writer or a logo. They’re poking at a piece of your history.
That’s what happened in the coffee shop. The woman who confronted me wasn’t talking about cotton and ink. She was coming at a part of my identity. Her anger wasn’t about a shirt. It was about what the symbol on it meant to her, and what it meant to me.
Not many brands or creators reach that level, and honestly, that’s probably for the best. But the ones that do end up living in the same category as bands, movements, authors, and entire subcultures. They become something people feel connected to, not just something they buy.
And once you’re in that territory, the real question isn’t why people defend those brands. The real question is how they know when it’s time to stop.
The Power and Danger of Polarizing Brands
Some brands slide through the world without stirring anything. People buy them, people forget them, and nobody feels much one way or the other. Then there are brands like Hunter S. Thompson. The moment his name shows up on a shirt or a book cover, someone in the room lights up, and someone else clenches their jaw. You don’t get that kind of reaction with mild brands. You only get it with the ones that carry sharp edges.
The strange part is that the same qualities that make a brand magnetic are usually the ones that make it divisive. Thompson’s writing was chaotic and raw and unfiltered, and that’s exactly why some people loved him. But those same qualities are also the things that make other people recoil. You don’t get one without the other. The whole package either speaks to you, or it doesn’t, and most people decide fast.
That’s the thing about polarizing brands. They give people something to plant a flag on. They become shorthand for a whole worldview. If you connect with it, you feel seen. If you don’t, you feel pushed away. There isn’t much in the middle.
And once a brand becomes that kind of symbol, it starts living a second life beyond whatever the original creator intended. It becomes a stand-in for rebellion or arrogance or honesty or excess or whatever someone projects onto it. People respond less to the thing itself and more to what they think it represents. Sometimes those interpretations drift far from reality, but that doesn’t matter. Symbols have their own momentum.
That’s why wearing a Thompson shirt in a quiet coffee shop can turn into a confrontation. She wasn’t reacting to you. She wasn’t even reacting to Thompson, not really. She was reacting to the version of him she carries around. And she needed to say something about it out loud.
Polarizing brands invite that kind of energy. They attract the devoted and the furious in equal measure. And whether you like it or not, being caught in the middle of that has a cost.
The Art Versus the Artist Problem in Branding
The minute a brand gets tied to a real person, the whole thing gets complicated. People don’t really split the work from the human, even if they claim they can. They pick up a book or watch a movie or listen to something, and the person behind it shows up in their head, too. Not just the good parts. All the mistakes, the rumors, the rough edges, whatever stories they’ve heard. It all gets mixed together, whether it belongs together or not.
That’s what happens with someone like Hunter S. Thompson. His writing is one experience, but the image people carry of him is something else entirely. Some folks see the brilliance, the dark humor, the way he cut through polite nonsense. Others see only the chaos. The drugs. The wreckage. And once someone has decided which version is “real,” that’s the version they react to, even if they’ve never read a single page.
This isn’t just an author problem. Musicians, actors, founders, anyone whose name becomes part of the thing they make ends up in this same mess. A brand tied to a person doesn’t stay frozen. It gets pulled through time, through shifting cultural rules, through new conversations about what’s acceptable and what isn’t. What made someone a daring figure in the seventies might make them a red flag in the present day. The story keeps changing.
There’s also the personal side. Everyone draws their own line around the art-versus-artist debate. Some people can appreciate the work even if they can’t stand the person. Some can’t make that separation at all. Most people land somewhere in between, trying to hold onto what the work meant to them without ignoring the parts that make them uneasy. It’s not a clean process.
And that’s why the scene in the coffee shop turned into what it did. You weren’t wearing a controversial T-shirt in your mind. You were wearing a piece of your past, something that mattered to you. But to her, it wasn’t a symbol of writing or voice or influence. It was a symbol of everything she believed was wrong with him. Two completely different stories sitting on the same piece of fabric.
This is the hard truth about brands tied to people. You can love the work all you want, but you can’t control the meaning it takes on once it leaves your hands. The audience rewrites it. The culture rewrites it. Time rewrites it. And sometimes, the version other people carry looks nothing like the one you hold close.
When Defending a Brand Turns Into Something Else
There’s a point where defending a brand stops being about the thing itself and starts being about you. Most of us don’t notice when we cross that line. You hear someone take a swing at a writer or a musician or a company you’ve carried around for years, and something kicks up inside you. It feels personal even when you know it shouldn’t. You’re trying to protect the part of your life that brand is connected to.
People do this all the time with bands they loved in high school, with authors who shaped their college years, with companies that felt like they understood them better than the rest of the world did. The brand becomes shorthand for a memory or an old version of yourself, so stepping in to defend it feels like hanging on to that memory.
But there’s a moment where this can tip into something a little heavier. You stop looking at whether the brand actually deserves defending. You start focusing only on the loyalty you’ve built around it. You’re no longer reacting to what’s true. You’re reacting to the possibility that you might have to rethink something that once meant the world to you.
There’s also the social pressure piece. People hate the feeling of being on the “wrong side” of an argument, especially when the argument moves into moral territory. So instead of taking a breath and thinking, Yeah, that part is complicated, they dig in. They double down. They protect the brand as if protecting it will protect them from having to reassess anything. That’s how admiration turns into blind loyalty, sometimes without anyone realizing it.
This is why you didn’t bother arguing in the coffee shop. The woman wasn’t inviting a conversation. She was delivering a verdict. And once someone decides a brand represents everything they hate, you can’t talk them out of it. They’re not debating. They’re defending a position they believe says something about who they are.
The truth is, most people aren’t arguing about the brand at all. They’re arguing about what the brand means to them. And meanings don’t move easily. They harden.
Which raises the harder question. If we’re willing to defend certain brands out of habit or identity or nostalgia, how do we know when we’ve crossed into defending something we shouldn’t?
When a Brand Becomes Indefensible
There are times when you catch yourself sticking up for a brand and something inside you goes quiet. You realize you’re not sure you believe what you’re saying anymore. It isn’t dramatic. More of a small internal wince. You feel yourself pulling away even as you try to hold the old loyalty in place.
Sometimes this happens because the brand actually did harm. Not rumors, not online noise, but real damage people can point to. Once that comes into view, it gets harder to pretend the logo still represents what it used to. You can love the memories tied to it, but the weight of what the brand did sits in the corner of your mind, and you feel it every time the name comes up.
Other times it’s slower. You watch the brand drift into something you barely recognize. The tone changes. The choices feel hollow. The people behind it start acting in a way that doesn’t line up with what drew you in. You don’t get angry. You just feel tired. It’s like seeing an old friend take a path you can’t follow.
Then there’s the cultural layer. The world shifts, and the stories we once accepted get reexamined. A joke that once landed now feels sharp in the wrong way. A behavior once treated as eccentric now reads as cruel or careless. You might still appreciate what the brand meant to you years ago, but the present version doesn’t sit right anymore.
And hypocrisy can cut even faster. When a brand claims to stand for one thing and keeps doing the opposite, people pick up on it immediately. You can’t talk your way around that. It leaves a bitter taste, and once you feel it, the trust is gone. No amount of nostalgia fixes that.
The line where a brand becomes indefensible isn’t the same for everyone. Some people walk the moment something feels off. Others hold on out of habit or hope. But everyone has a point where the connection snaps. You stop wearing the merch. You stop mentioning the brand in conversations. You stop feeling proud of the association. It just fades.
And once that happens, once you let a brand go for good reasons, it’s rare for that relationship to come back to life.
Why Some Brands Survive Controversy, and Others Collapse
Just watch how brands behave when things go sideways. Some look like they’ve hit a wall they can’t climb. Others stumble, take a breath, and keep going. And it isn’t always tied to how big the mistake was. A lot of it comes down to what the brand was actually built on long before anything went wrong.
Some brands have spent years showing people who they are, not through slogans, but through small choices that add up. You might not agree with everything they do, but you have a sense of their center. So when they mess up, people don’t vanish instantly. They pause. They want to see if the brand understands what happened and if it’s willing to deal with it honestly. It’s not a free pass. It’s a willingness to see what comes next.
Then there are brands that have never really said anything true about themselves. They chase whatever is trending, switch personalities every season, and talk in whatever tone seems safest that week. When trouble hits them, there’s nothing for the audience to hold onto. No history. No spine. The whole thing collapses because it never had any weight behind it.
Consistency plays a role, too. When a brand has behaved roughly the same way for a long time, people know what to expect. A screwup lands differently because it’s one moment in a bigger pattern. But if a brand keeps reinventing itself without any real purpose, nobody knows what it stands for. And when something finally breaks, there’s no reason for anyone to stick around.
Some brands also handle criticism without panicking. They talk like actual people. They take responsibility without hiding behind legal language. They don’t pretend the mistake didn’t happen. That kind of response doesn’t erase the problem, but it keeps the audience from feeling shut out. It creates a sense that the brand isn’t running from its own shadow.
And then there are brands that fail because the controversy exposes something that was already shaky. It shines a light on the stuff people ignored for a long time, and once it’s in the open, it’s impossible to look away. At that point, no fix or apology can rebuild the trust. It’s gone.
The thread that runs through all of this is meaning. If a brand has built real meaning with people — not hype, not noise, actual meaning — it has a chance to survive a bad moment. If it hasn’t, the first big wave usually takes it out.
What This Means for Modern Brand Builders
Sometimes you forget, when you’re busy shaping a brand, how little control you actually have once it leaves your hands. People don’t just buy the thing you’re making. They fold it into their own lives. Whatever meaning you hoped to build is just the first layer. Everything after that comes from them — their history, their opinions, whatever mood they’re in when they meet your brand for the first time.
So if you’re building a brand today, you have to be clear with yourself about what you’re putting out there. If you’re leaning on a personality you don’t really believe in, or claiming values you don’t practice, it will crack the minute someone pushes on it. People can tell when a brand is faking it. They may not call it out directly, but they feel it, and once they feel it, it’s hard to get that trust back.
You also can’t expect the brand to stay frozen. Culture shifts constantly. The audience shifts, too. Something that felt bold ten years ago might feel tired now. Something you thought was harmless might carry weight you didn’t see coming. If the brand doesn’t move with the world around it, people will rewrite the story for you, and not always in a direction you want.
And you have to accept that the audience will interpret your work in ways you never planned. Some will find things in it that surprise you. Others will see things you wish they didn’t. You can guide meaning, but you can’t lock it down. Once the brand is out in the wild, it develops a life of its own.
The uncomfortable part is this: if you want a brand people genuinely care about, you can’t build it to avoid tension. Safe brands disappear. They don’t attract loyalty. They don’t spark debate. They don’t get carried around for decades. The brands that matter usually come with sharp edges. Not because they’re trying to be provocative, but because they actually stand for something.
For anyone building a brand now, the goal isn’t perfection. It isn’t universal approval. It’s building something with enough truth in it that it can survive being examined, questioned, misinterpreted, and argued about. Something that doesn’t fall apart when someone looks at it closely.
Because once your brand leaves your hands, people will make it their own. You can either give them something real to work with, or you can watch the story drift into a shape you don’t recognize.
The takeaway
That morning in the coffee shop wasn’t really about a T-shirt. It was about meaning. Hers, mine, and whatever Hunter S. Thompson has turned into for people who never read a word he wrote. That’s how brands work when they’ve been around long enough or loud enough. They stop being objects and start becoming mirrors. Some people see something they connect with. Others see something they can’t stand.
When you build a brand, you’re stepping into that same territory. You can shape the voice and the values and the look, but once the brand goes out into the world, people will decide what it means. They’ll argue about it. They’ll protect it. They’ll misinterpret it. They’ll attach their own stories to it. And sometimes you’ll hear something about your own brand that makes you think, How did we end up there.
You don’t get to control the whole story. You only get to control the part you make. The rest belongs to the audience.
At ThoughtLab, this is the part we pay the most attention to. Not just how a brand looks on its best day, but how it holds up once people start pulling it in different directions. A brand has to be sturdy enough, honest enough, and flexible enough to survive that kind of tension. Otherwise, the world will reshape it into something you never intended.
If the brand has something real at its core, it can take the weight. If it doesn’t, it won’t last long enough to matter.
