Fake UGC, identity-led content, and why brands are finally learning to sell the feeling
Annabelle Cole
The Problem With Most Brand Content.
Most brands compete in the information market. Features. Tips. Proof points. Educational carousels. And none of that is wrong, but it's not what makes someone really WANT something.
The second content comes from a brand account, the audience's guard can go up. They know they're being sold to.
Content that looks user-generated- a Pinterest board, a day-in-the-life, an opinion, consistently gets more trust and more engagement because it feels more genuine. Gen Alpha and Gen Z especially are very motivated by what real people say about brands on social media- it's how they form their impression basically.
People don't buy products. They buy the version of themselves they want to become.
It's the feeling they want to have. The life they want to be living.
So the question isn't 'what does our product do?' It's 'what does life look like after our product? What does our customer get to become?'
That's what you show up with. The transformation. The future self. The feeling.
What This Means for Your Content.
Ask: what does our customer's desired future look like, and can we make content about that?
The brand enters the conversation through that sense of lifestyle, not through a product feature. It's a more honest understanding of how people actually make decisions.
Interest-led content doesn't mean one brand account with a growing follower count. It could now mean multiple entry points, each speaking to a different identity, a different aspiration, a different mood.
The closer your content sits to what people already consume, the lower the resistance.
You've probably scrolled past it without thinking twice.
A TikTok page full of summer content- Ibiza trips, coconut drinks, girls on holiday. The kind of content that makes you want to book a flight.
It was an ad. Not for a holiday brand or a fashion label. For a Calvin Harris song.
His team built a faceless account that looked like a lifestyle moodboard, attached the song to the aesthetic people already wanted, and let the algorithm do the rest. Nobody was being sold to. Or at least, it didn't feel that way.