Here’s a finding from evolutionary biology that should rearrange how you think about brand strategy.
Christine Webb, a primatologist at NYU and author of The Arrogant Ape, spent years studying how chimpanzees manage cooperation and competition simultaneously. Her conclusion: the solo actor — the organism that succeeds through independent strength alone — is a myth. Success is relational, all the way down. Organisms that cooperate more effectively tend to compete more effectively. The two aren’t opposites. They’re entangled.
That’s a primate finding. But it’s also a brand finding.
Most organizations approach their brand as a broadcast system. They build a message, refine it, and transmit it. They measure reach and impressions. They assume that if the message is clear and the production is polished, meaning will transfer intact from sender to receiver. The evolutionary evidence — and a few decades of communication theory — says that’s not how meaning works.
Your brand doesn’t project meaning. It enters a conversation with one.
What You’ll Learn
- Why meaning is structurally relational, not transmitted
- How the “solo actor” model produces fragile brand positions
- What Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding research reveals about audience co-creation
- Why brands with genuine influence over meaning — rather than the illusion of control — build more durable positions
- What designing for relational meaning looks like in practice
Why Evolutionary Biology Reframes Brand Strategy
Christine Webb’s research on primate behavior surfaces something the branding world has mostly missed: relational structure is how complexity gets built, not an optional feature of sophisticated systems.
Webb’s central argument in The Arrogant Ape (Penguin Random House, 2025) is that human exceptionalism — the belief that humans are categorically separate from and superior to other animals — is an ideology built more on cultural assumptions than on biological evidence. She applies this critique specifically to how we think about success: the myth of the exceptional individual, the solo actor who rises through independent strength.
The primate evidence tells a different story. In chimpanzee communities, the most competitive contexts — resource conflicts, status competition — require cooperative strategies to navigate. Consolation behaviors, coalition-building, social bonding: these are how competition gets managed. Primates that cooperate more effectively are the ones that typically compete more effectively. Cooperation and competition aren’t alternatives. They’re how the system works.
Research on the coevolution of cooperation and competition, published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, demonstrates that when these two dynamics evolve simultaneously, they produce qualitatively different outcomes than when only one evolves alone. Competition for resources promotes evolutionary branching in both cooperative and competitive traits, with cooperation levels positively correlated with competition levels. Martin Nowak, whose landmark 2006 paper in Science identified five mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation — kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection — framed it plainly: “Cooperation is needed for evolution to construct new levels of organization.”
He wasn’t describing altruism. He was describing structure. Relational structure is how complexity accumulates.
The brand implication follows directly: organizations that treat their communication as pure transmission — brand to audience, message to market — are operating from the solo actor model. And the solo actor model contradicts the evidence.
Rule of thumb: If your brand strategy assumes you control what your brand means, the strategy is built on a false premise.
What Does It Mean to Say a Brand Co-Creates Meaning?
Brand meaning isn’t transmitted from sender to receiver. It forms at the intersection of what an organization sends and what an audience brings. Audiences interpret signals through existing frameworks — prior knowledge, cultural context, personal experience, competing beliefs — and those frameworks shape what meaning they construct from what they encounter.
This isn’t a philosophical position. It’s how communication works.
Stuart Hall, whose 1973 encoding/decoding framework became foundational in media and communication studies, established that there is no guaranteed correspondence between how a message is encoded and how it is decoded. Audiences don’t receive meaning. They produce it, using your signal as raw material.
Hall identified three typical decoding positions: dominant-hegemonic (the audience accepts the intended meaning), negotiated (partial acceptance, partial reinterpretation), and oppositional (the audience rejects the intended meaning in favor of an alternative). Most audiences, most of the time, occupy the negotiated position. They’re working with your signal — but they’re not receiving it like a package.
The question isn’t whether your audience will interpret your brand. It’s whether you understand the framework they’ll use to do it.
Here’s what this means for brands. The signal you send is real. The meaning your audience constructs from it is also real. But those two things are not the same thing, and you cannot control the gap between them. You can only narrow it — through coherence, through consistency, through genuine alignment with what your audience already cares about.
Original element — Three decoding scenarios:
When your audience interprets your brand signal the way you intended, you’ve built enough shared context that the gap is narrow. Keep compounding. When they interpret it differently than you intended, your signals are ambiguous, or you’re working against assumptions you haven’t addressed. The fix is rarely a clearer message — it’s a better understanding of what your audience already believes. When they reject the signal outright, the gap between what you’re saying and what they know to be true is too wide. No amount of production quality closes that gap. The strategy needs to change.
Why Broadcast Thinking Produces Fragile Brands
The broadcast model — transmission from brand to market — produces brittle brands in practice.
When an organization treats meaning as something it possesses and projects, it optimizes for output: messaging clarity, production quality, reach, frequency. These things matter. But they matter in service of something the organization doesn’t control, which is what the audience makes of them. Organizations that confuse output quality with meaning quality are surprised when a carefully produced campaign lands differently than intended, or when audiences who’ve heard the message still don’t understand what the company does, or when a competitor with less polished content earns more trust.
The solo actor myth, translated to branding, looks like this: we have strong messaging — the market just needs to hear it more. Or: we need to find the right words that make people understand. Or: if we say it clearly enough, precisely enough, often enough, it will land.
This is the arrogant ape model applied to brand strategy. It assumes the organization is the center of the meaning system, and the audience’s job is to receive correctly. The evolutionary evidence says that’s backwards. Success in a relational system — whether that system is a primate community or a market — comes from building relationships where meaning can form, not from transmitting more confidently.
Brands that acknowledge this don’t stop trying to shape meaning. They get smarter about how they do it. They ask what their audience already believes before they write a word. They design signals that work with existing frames rather than against them. They measure whether meaning is landing the way they intend — not just whether the message went out.
Quote-ready line: The most common mistake in brand strategy is confusing the quality of your output with the quality of your audience’s understanding. They’re related, but they’re not the same thing.
How Do You Design for Relational Meaning?
Designing for relational meaning means accepting significant influence over what your brand means while releasing the fantasy of control. That’s not a concession — it’s a more accurate model, and more accurate models produce better decisions.
In practice, this comes down to three things.
Know what your audience already believes. Every signal you send enters a conversation already in progress. Before you can shape meaning effectively, you need to understand the existing frameworks your audience is using. What do they believe about your category? About organizations like yours? About the specific problem you address? Brand strategy that doesn’t start with these questions is navigation without a map.
Design for coherence, not just clarity. Clarity is about a single signal. Coherence is about all your signals pointing in the same direction. A brand with a perfectly clear tagline but inconsistent behavior — between what it says and what it does, between its website and its sales process, between its values and its actions — will construct unstable meaning regardless of message quality. Coherence is the mechanism through which you narrow the interpretation gap over time. Each coherent signal reinforces the meaning your audience is building. Each inconsistent one introduces friction.
Build for return encounters. Meaning doesn’t form on first contact. It accumulates. Each encounter your audience has with your brand is an opportunity to reinforce or disrupt the meaning they’ve been constructing. Brands that think in campaigns — isolated efforts designed to spike — forfeit the compounding effect that relational meaning produces. Brands that think in systems — coherent signals that build on each encounter — earn more durable positions because each encounter does more work than the last.
Quote-ready line: Durable brand positions aren’t built through better messaging. They’re built through coherent systems that hold up in the relationship — across every encounter, every channel, every signal the brand sends.
Conclusion
Christine Webb’s work in evolutionary biology does something useful for brand strategy: it names the myth clearly and shows where it breaks down. The arrogant ape model — the belief that success belongs to the actor strong enough to operate independently — fails in primate communities, in organizations, and in how brands build meaning with audiences.
Your brand influences what it means. It doesn’t own it. The audience co-constructs meaning from every signal you send, filtered through everything they already believe. That’s not a reason to abandon brand strategy. It’s a reason to do it more rigorously — understanding the existing conversation your signals are entering, designing for coherence across every encounter, building systems that hold up in the relationship rather than just in the brief.
The brands that build the most durable positions have figured out that meaning is built together. That’s not a concession to relativism. It’s an accurate description of how meaning works.
