Toniq

In the early days of social media, simply being present online set a brand apart. A founder who shared their thinking openly felt authentic. A company that gave customers a glimpse behind the curtain felt refreshingly transparent. The practices we now take for granted were once genuine differentiators.

Brands swear that they will save you time, give you time, put time back in your pocket, like time is marbles or sand brains or coins. But are we really saving any time, and what are we doing with that time? Where does it go, and how do brands help us make better use of our time?

For most of the last decade, the dominant story about customer experience has been a story about friction. Friction was the enemy. Long hold times, repetitive forms, sluggish processes, and the indignity of being passed from one department to another. The promise of automation, and then AI, was that friction could be engineered out of the system.

Everyone comes into contact with a brand. There are 500,000+ major consumer brands and tens of millions of registered trademarks worldwide; we all interact with brands at some point. There are few things more ubiquitous than a brand. With all that presence and power, what are brands doing in this time of fear?

The kind move and the strategic move are not the same move, and most of the time, they’re opposites. The kind move tells a brand what it wants to hear in the room, but the strategic move tells a brand the thing it has been hiding from.

Somewhere along the way, marketing teams started doing the same thing. They confused cultural participation with strategic positioning. The confusion is understandable. The dashboards reward it. A trend post outperforms a brand post most weeks of the year, and the team that posts the trend looks responsive, current, and alive. The team that doesn’t look like it missed something.

The idea that every brand carries an inclusion debt, an obligation to make every person feel seen, accommodated, represented, has hardened over the last decade into something that looks like a moral framework and functions like a marketing one. It treats commerce like citizenship.

So this is the question I keep coming back to. The people who have pushed AI onto the scene, built it, shipped it, marketed it, and now profit from it. Do they have a responsibility for what happens when a fourteen-year-old falls in love with their product? Or is this just bourbon all over again?

The cartoon version of the Luddites is the one most people carry around: men with hammers, smashing machines, terrified of the future, doomed to be a punchline two centuries later. Don’t be such a Luddite. The real Luddites were more interesting than that.

You can be the underdog for a long time. You can be the underdog for fifteen years. You can be the underdog right up until the moment you’ve covered the whole country in pink dots, and your subscriber count is shoulder-to-shoulder with the giants you spent your life fighting. And then, very quietly, the underdog story stops working.

I’m not arguing the game shouldn’t exist. I’m noticing what it tells us about the moment this title landed. That a marketing team workshopped it and won. The world is in a mess. Everyone who is paying attention agrees on that much, even when they agree on nothing else. And in that mess, the products that travel are often the products that name the mess as the feature.

So, my friend’s comment about my muse being out of focus was interesting, and it started me thinking about muses, what is a muse, why is a muse, and, as is always the case, how it connects to my work with ThoughtLab. And this brought up the question: if you’re a brand, do you have a muse?

There was a time when brand impact was easier to see, or at least easier to understand. That doesn’t mean it was pure. It doesn’t mean every company has a golden heart beating underneath the sales report.

The five-legged goat works because it wasn't hidden, apologized for, or quietly corrected. It was allowed to remain visible. That's the part I can't stop thinking about, because Disney isn't some scrappy little brand still figuring out who it is. Disney is Disney. It's one of the most controlled, polished, operationally obsessed brands on earth.

Not because clocks are holy. Or that every office needs to be run like a Victorian orphanage. And certainly not because everyone should spend their life terrified of the second hand. Because being late is almost never just about the person who is late.