New Modern Brand Growth: From Service to Platform, From Culture to Community

Brand growth is changing. Visual identity still matters, but the biggest shifts are happening one layer deeper: in how brands structure their value, how they create belonging, and how they embed themselves into culture. Over the past week, two global headlines captured exactly where branding has headed in 2025.

DoorDash became the fastest-growing brand of 2025. McDonald’s turned K‑pop fandom into a mass‑market cultural engine. At first glance, these stories feel unrelated. Look closer and you’ll see a shared pattern: brands evolving from a product mindset to a platform mindset, and from communication to community.

This is the new competitive space—especially for tech companies in Europe and the US that want to scale with a long-term brand foundation.

1. The Rise of Platform‑Identity: DoorDash’s Transformation

Morning Consult’s latest report crowned DoorDash as the fastest-growing brand of 2025, driven by a sharp rise in purchase consideration. But this wasn’t simply due to better advertising. DoorDash has quietly redefined itself. What used to be a food‑delivery app is now repositioned as the infrastructure for local commerce.

This shift matters. It’s a move from “we bring food” to “we connect your city.” A service becomes an ecosystem. Features become a platform. And once a brand becomes an ecosystem, its value compounds.

Three lessons stand out:

• Growth comes from expanding meaning, not just features.
• When a brand owns the interface of a category, it becomes the category.
• Platform-thinking creates natural defensibility—something every SaaS, fintech or martech brand needs.

For tech companies, this is the signal: brand is no longer only about visuals or tone. Brand is the architecture of how you scale.

2. The Culture Layer: McDonald’s and the Power of Fandom

McDonald’s latest collaboration with BTS characters (TinyTAN) has nothing to do with burgers and everything to do with belonging. They engineered an experience—Magic Meet-Up—that blends fandom culture with physical spaces, turning a global fast‑food chain into a cultural touchpoint.

This is not superficial hype. It’s a deliberate brand strategy: culture is a distribution channel.

Why it matters:

• Fans amplify faster than ads.
• Emotional meaning outperforms product meaning.
• Community moments create stickiness that no coupon ever will.

Even B2B brands can use this logic. Fandom in tech looks like loyal advocates, expert communities, micro‑tribes, and shared identity. It’s not about hype. It’s about designing people’s desire to be associated with a mission.

3. What This Means for Modern Tech Brands

A technology company in 2025 competes in three arenas at once:

• Product performance
• Platform value
• Cultural relevance

Visual identity, verbal identity and brand strategy must sit across all three. Most companies invest only in the first. The ones that scale invest in the other two.

Teams evaluating a rebrand today—fintech, edutech, martech, B2B SaaS—should ask:

• Are we still presenting ourselves as a tool instead of a system?
• What part of our category’s culture do we lead, not follow?
• What community naturally forms around what we do—and how do we design for it?

This is where brand becomes a growth engine rather than a cosmetic exercise.

4. The New Brand Playbook (2025)

From this week’s headlines, a simple framework emerges:

• Your brand must behave like a platform.
• Your message must behave like culture.
• Your audience must feel like a community.

When these three layers align, a brand stops being a company and becomes a place people choose.

Closing

DoorDash shows how to extend meaning. McDonald’s shows how to activate belonging. Together, they point to the new direction of brand growth—one where strategy, identity and community form a single system.

For companies preparing for a rebrand in 2026, this is the frontier. The brands that win won’t be the most polished, but the ones that understand: growth is no longer built on what you sell, but on what you connect, shape and bring together.