Why functional brands shouldn’t ignore reactive content opportunities

With Essi Nurminen

There’s an unwritten rule in marketing that reactive content is a territory reserved for FMCG, retail and travel brands. On the flip side, energy suppliers, insurers, broadband providers, or more functional brands, are supposed to stay in their lane on social. Their role: to inform, reassure, often educate. It’s a reasonable instinct but is it a missed opportunity?

The hesitation
Reactive content can feel risky for functional brands for legitimate reasons. The relevance to culture isn’t always obvious when your core product is a boiler service or a quarterly bill. Legal teams get nervous about tone. And unlike an FMCG brand that can shrug off a misfire, a utility brand already fighting a perception problem can’t really afford to make people cringe. So the default position is caution and sticking to what you know. The problem with that logic is that it assumes functional brands have nothing to say about culture. But is that true?

The brands that get it wrong are solving the wrong problem
When reactive content fails, it’s almost never because the brand was ‘too functional’ to pull it off. It fails because the brand inserted itself into a moment without a clear point of view. Content that exists purely to say “look at us, we’re relevant too”, with no genuine connection to what the brand actually does or stands for. The brands that do reactive content well, the Skyscanners, the Compare The Markets, they’re not just jumping on whatever’s trending. They’re finding the genuine intersection between the cultural moment and something they can credibly own. It lands because it makes sense coming from them specifically.

Functional brands power everyday life
Some functional brands don’t know what they’re missing. Energy powers the first cup of coffee in the morning, the Sunday roast, the match on a cold Tuesday night. Broadband powers the social relationships, the late night rabbit holes, the group chats. Insurance powers the moment you feel safe enough to take a risk. These brands are already in the room but are sometimes too scared to say anything. When a cultural moment touches on the everyday, and most of the best ones do, functional brands have a genuine right to play.

The earned reach case
Reactive content, when it works, does something that planned campaigns struggle to do. It builds familiarity in low-stakes moments. For brands that currently only enter people’s heads when something goes wrong, priming customers (and potential customers) outside of this moment is a strategic opportunity.

So, should they play in reactive moments? Yes, with one condition
Functional brands should absolutely be making reactive content. The category shouldn’t be seen as a barrier. The condition is this: the content has to feel like it could only come from that brand. Not just any brand that happens to be in the conversation, but that specific brand, with that specific point of view, in that specific moment. Generic reactive content is noise. Specific, well-placed reactive content is brand building. The bar isn’t “is this brand cool enough to talk about culture?”, the bar is “do we have something genuinely interesting to say here, and does it connect back to who we are?” If the answer is yes, the category you’re in is irrelevant. The brands that figure that out first will have a significant head start on the ones still waiting for cultural permission.