Anthropic made anti-positioning work in New York. Could it work in your market?

Why bold brand moves don't always translate, and what to do instead.

A shorter version of this appeared in the April 2026 edition of Weglot’s monthly international marketing newsletter.

When Anthropic launched its “Keep Thinking” campaign in late 2025, it took a risk most AI companies wouldn’t: it positioned itself against its own industry. While competitors pushed automation, speed, and efficiency, Anthropic went full speed ahead in the other direction: think more, go deeper. Enhance humans, don’t replace them (cough, OpenAI).

The campaign included a popup coffee shop in Manhattan, a hat that said “thinking” (a play on “put your thinking cap on” and Claude’s waiting system indicator), and billboard copy that celebrated having problems rather than solving them fast. People stood in line for two hours. The hat became a tribal symbol, exactly what Anthropic wanted: wearing it signaled that you valued deep work over quick output, that you were anti-slop.

Against the odds, it worked. Setting up a popup coffee shop in a city where there are more cafés than street corners was a bold move. Distributing caps with a single embroidered word was gutsy; one poorly timed cultural moment and it goes from tribal badge to being the main character on X/Twitter (and no one ever wants to be that).

But it worked in New York, a city with its own brand identity. Where contrarianism is a requirement for earning the right to call yourself a New Yorker, and signaling intellectual values is as routine as, well, ordering your daily overpriced coffee – so another point for Anthropic.

But can this kind of identity-driven marketing travel? Like most things, the answer is: it depends. Mostly on where you’re going.

The safe messaging trap gets worse at the border

Most brands default to conservative, consensus-driven messaging when they enter a new market. The logic is understandable: you don’t know the culture well enough to take risks, you don’t have an infinite budget, so you play it safe.

The problem is that safe messaging is invisible messaging. Tom Orbach, who cleverly broke down the Anthropic playbook in detail, doesn’t mince words: your marketing sucks because you’re selling features, and features are boring. That’s true in your home market, and true in every market you expand into. Arguably more so, because you’re competing for attention against brands that already have local trust and know which jokes land and which buttons not to press.

Playing it safe in the early stages of international expansion can be a significant waste of time, especially if you could have onboarded a local expert or found a way to get that market insight early on. This is exactly the distinction Robyn Pettitt, who heads localization at Canva, made when she explained why Canva eventually handed paid marketing ownership entirely to local growth teams in priority markets. And she meant everything: not just execution, but the brief, the budget, and the channel strategy. The insight has to come from the market, so the mandate has to come from the market too.

Anti-positioning doesn’t travel in a straight line

Anthropic’s “Keep Thinking” campaign fits right at home in a market that already celebrates intellectual independence and curiosity. But that’s a culturally specific value. In markets where clear class divides create prejudice against people who can visibly afford an education, the “I’m a thinker” tribe becomes alienating rather than aspirational. And it creates a negative, elitist perception no one would want for their non-luxury brand.

Conservative markets like Japan and Singapore present a different challenge. Japan’s communication norms lean toward indirectness; direct comparison advertising is considered rude. Samsung learned a version of this in Singapore when it pulled an ad that affirmed support for the LGBTQ+ community, recognizing that what reads as bold in one market reads as divisive here – particularly when the country had not yet instituted legal protections for LGBTQ+ individuals, though this was changed only a few months later.

And then there’s the question of how to adapt the anti-positioning framework without losing its power. Oatly is one of the few brands that’s done this deliberately. In Europe and the US, they built a tribal identity as the provocative anti-dairy challenger: the “F*ck Oatly” website, the lawsuits they turned into ad copy, the guerrilla campaigns. But when they entered China, they dropped the challenger stance entirely. Instead of positioning against dairy, they positioned themselves alongside it, launching through café culture in Shanghai and Beijing and leveraging the positive cultural perception of milk rather than fighting it. They kept their brand values intact, but made sure it traveled by having a completely different tribal entry point.

Now that is local insight at work.

The tribal question your market needs to answer

Orbach’s framework ends with a useful prompt: finish the sentence “People who use [your product] are the kind of people who ___.” If you can’t fill in the blank, you don’t have positioning yet.

There’s a second question underneath that one for those wanting to go international: does this identity mean the same thing in the market you’re entering? The tribe Anthropic carefully constructed – thinkers, not automators – works because it taps into a specific cultural tension in the US tech scene. In a different market, the tension might be different, which means the tribe has to be different, too.

But this isn’t an argument against tribal marketing internationally. It’s advocating for doing it with local insight rather than exported assumptions. Cultures with strong collective identity may actually be more receptive to tribe-building than individualist markets – but the tribe has to be built around values that resonate locally. Family, craft, community, pride in local tradition.

The mechanism is the same. The values that fuel it aren’t, and are the keys to your success.

Why it matters for international teams:

• Anti-positioning is a powerful strategy, but the “anti” has to be calibrated to what each market is actually tired of hearing. What’s bold in New York might be irrelevant in São Paulo and offensive in Tokyo.

• The instinct to play it safe in new markets is understandable but expensive. If the insight isn’t coming from the market, neither is the resonance – and you’re burning money on invisible messaging.

• Tribal marketing can work across cultures, but the tribe’s identity has to be locally grounded. Oatly’s shift from anti-dairy rebel to café culture ally in China is a shining example in adapting a tribal strategy without losing the brand. (We, too, are taking notes.)

• Physical, identity-driven activations (popups, merch, events) are powerful tribe-builders, but only if the identity being signaled carries the right meaning locally. A “thinking” hat works in Manhattan. In a different market, the badge might need to signal something else entirely.

International markets don’t care how well your campaign did at home. The brands that break through know this, so they don’t apply one strategy to all (e.g., don’t play it safe everywhere or go bold everywhere). They know which markets reward which approach and, most importantly, have the local insight to tell the difference.