IKEA made a bed for your phone. Whole Foods turned a grocery list into a cultural forecast. Volkswagen’s top-selling product isn’t a car—it’s sausage.

This week on BRANDED Weekly, Ben Kaplan (Founder + CEO, Top Agency) breaks down how brands stopped reacting to culture and started writing it. From IKEA’s behavioral design experiments to Whole Foods’ 2026 trend report and Volkswagen’s nostalgia-driven empire, today’s most powerful brands aren’t selling products—they’re engineering habits, identity, and emotion.

We unpack:
IKEA’s Phone Bed — gamifying guilt and designing digital discipline.

Whole Foods’ Trend Report — transforming food into status and self-expression.

Volkswagen’s Currywurst — turning nostalgia into profit.

The Death of Millennial Brands — why aesthetic polish stopped working.

Because branding in 2025 isn’t about storytelling anymore—it’s about habit formation, desire curation, and emotional anchoring.

Cheetos sold the mess. Domino’s engineered a sound.

The Ordinary called beauty a scam while selling it. This week on BRANDED, Ben Kaplan (Founder + CEO, Top Agency) breaks down how brands turned irony into influence and self-awareness into strategy.

He breaks down how emotion, irony, and algorithmic storytelling are reshaping the attention economy. From absurd stunts to sensory branding, these campaigns prove that authenticity now means admitting the performance.

We unpack:
Cheetos & Vogel’s — turning snacks and bread into fashion statements.

Ramp — B2B marketing that made pain a spectacle (literally).

Domino’s — rebranding taste through sound design.

The Ordinary — exposing beauty’s biggest lie while cashing in on it.

OpenAI — redefining category ownership as ChatGPT becomes shorthand for AI.

Plus, a deep dive into how nostalgia, dopamine, and self-awareness became the ultimate growth hacks in 2025’s marketing landscape.

In 2025, emotion is the business model.
From Ferrari’s Apple-designed EV to Doritos’ cheese-pull spectacle — Ben Kaplan breaks down how outrage, nostalgia, and virality became strategy.