Toniq

What do you do? That’s a question most of us have been asked a hundred times, usually at a party, a dinner, or in one of those awkward little social moments where strangers are being encouraged to become less strange. Someone turns to you with a drink in one hand and a look of polite expectation on their face and asks, “So, what do you do?”

This movement away from mystery and toward we need to know how it’s done has fed a weird style of advertising. You know the one where a stern and knowledgeable voice says, “Big hardware doesn’t want you to know about this,” and then there’s an ad for a hose or a water cooler. They’re claiming to expose the secret, a secret, some secret that some nameless, faceless group is hiding from the public, and now, late at night on basic cable, the answers are being given.

That’s what makes brand lag tricky. It’s not just about awareness, and it’s not solved by declaring something new. People rarely meet a brand with a blank mind. They come to it carrying whatever they already think they know, whether that came from an old interaction, an outdated impression, a half-remembered story, or a category they placed you in a long time ago and never bothered to revise.

The minute a company has the chance to say something specific, confident, or unmistakably its own, fear walks into the room. Fear of offending someone, of sounding too certain, or of narrowing the audience. Fear of being seen too clearly. So the message gets softened.

They say they want something fresh, sharp, honest, unexpected; they’re tired of safe, and they want work that cuts through. And often, in that moment, they mean it. The energy is real. The appetite feels real. The ambition in the room feels real. Then the idea begins to take shape.

From a pure advertising standpoint, the tube man works. That’s the uncomfortable part. You notice it. Your eye goes to it whether you want it to or not. It’s movement, color, chaos, and low-grade hysteria, all rolled into one tall, flailing package.

A person fears humiliation. A brand fears fallout, and fallout is never polite enough to stay in one place. It doesn’t show up with a neat little card that says, Hello, I’m the consequence of your poorly timed statement.

That’s where brands get into trouble. They confuse the claim with the reality. They mistake the thing they want people to believe for the thing that’s actually true. And those aren’t the same thing.

But the actual exchange had nothing to do with conversion. It was simply two people talking about an idea. And it raises a question marketing rarely asks anymore. What if the most important thing a piece of marketing can do is not close a decision, but begin a conversation?

This isn’t just a fast food thing. It happens in almost every industry you can think of. One company releases something that works, and before long, the rest of the category starts circling the same idea.

So, in my bleary-eyed morning state, I am going to write about National Women’s History Month. Women were given the right to vote in 1919, and the law was ratified in 1920. However, if you look at the history of the suffrage movement, you’ll see that the whole thing started in the 1800s. More than a century later, women could finally go to their local voting place and express their views on who should be running this place.

When did this happen, and why? When did we go from “Do you need some help?” to “This is going viral”? When did we stop showing human decency to fellow humans and choose content instead?

There is something deeply comforting about the phrase “new and improved.” It suggests motion. It implies intelligence. It whispers that someone has been hard at work in a lab coat somewhere, making sure we’re not left behind.

When brands involve surveys and research in their messaging, what are they actually doing, and what do they owe the consumer?

This happens all too often. We get attached to things, and then those things close, vanish, or change. It makes me think about brands and how people get them entangled in their lives, and what they do when the brand goes away.