And then, silence. Not quiet, because in quiet, you still hear things; the wind, birds chirping, the highway miles away. You hear things in the quiet. The quiet makes you hyper-focused on sounds. In silence, there are no sounds. Nothing.

“Silence was deafening” is a phrase I’ve heard before, and it’s one that my years in the theater have taught me to recognize. There is nothing like a deafening silence, especially when you’re doing comedy. That’s what makes creating a comedy so difficult.

I recall a time when I was doing the play “Is He Dead?” and the other actors and I were trying to work out a bit. Now, a bit, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a self-contained unit of material centered on a single funny premise, theme, or story. It typically includes a setup, multiple punchlines, and related “tags” (additional quick punchlines), functioning as a building block for a longer routine. The bit we were working on involved an empty casket that supposedly contained a dear friend, but was actually just part of a trick we were playing on another character. Now, when you start a bit, you start with nothing. Perhaps you know the props you’re working with, but really, all you have is a piece of dialogue and the feeling that something has to happen here. So there we were, five actors, a casket, and nothing else. We came up with ideas, and those ideas evolved over rehearsal. By the time we got to final dress, we were tired, and we hated every single thing we did. Lucky for us, we had a very smart director, Chuck Morey, who didn’t let us get despondent. The problem? We had been playing this bit to empty rooms and people who had seen it over and over. Because of that, it was easy to lose confidence in the work we’d done and turn to changing everything. Again, a wise director kept us in check.

We knew in our hearts the bit was funny. It was mathematical, and we were all good comedic actors, so we understood the need for precision, energy, and playing the bit moment to moment. We knew it intellectually, but a good bit isn’t intellectual; it’s physical. The action is physical, and the response, when done right, is as well. The audience gets hit with the bit. The bit lands on them. And if it lands right, the response is laughter. A special kind of laughter where the audience is taken by surprise, and their laughter floods out of them in great waves that we, the actors, feel almost physically hitting us. There are very few feelings as good as doing a bit well and having the audience just explode. It is wonderful, and yet, it is terrifying. Wonderful because there is nothing that heals like laughter. During that particular show, no matter how I was feeling before curtain, when I stepped on stage with that cast, the joy of performing was ignited, and we all cruised through the show. Wonderful.

Terrifying? Yes. Imagine working hard in a rehearsal hall, constructing a great bit, working and sweating to hit the precision, the timing, and physical needs all down to math, everyone doing their part to the very best of their abilities, and then, you put it in front of an audience and … silence. That deafening silence we mentioned at the top of this piece. That happens. And there is nothing so gut-wrenching as getting it wrong. Being off by a fraction and the laugh just slipping by, out the window, and you’re left on stage with four minutes of bit left to do, and you can already feel the audience has checked out. There is not much to be done. You stay the course, do the work you rehearsed, and hope it’s just a sleepy audience who just had a big dinner and a bottle of wine and they’re just not with you this time. Okay, that’s one night, but if it happens again, then you have to drag the bit back into the room and rework it. Find what went wrong, why the laughs weren’t coming, and how to make it work. That’s what previews are for: to rework and fix what the audience told us wasn’t working. Okay, it’s a drag and a bummer and a bit deflating, but you need the show to be as good as possible, so back into the room to rebuild. That’s just part of the job, and we’ve all experienced it. Usually, you come up with something that works, and when you drop it on the audience and they laugh, the relief is indescribable. After the audience laughs, you can set and settle into the bit, add things, remove things, and hear the audience catch something; that becomes part of the bit for the run. It all works out, but it’s not as easy as it seems.

I was thinking about this today as I got an email with a photo from that show, and I recalled the work we put in to make not just the show, but that bit in particular, work. Thankfully, it landed perfectly, and we didn’t have to go back into the rehearsal room and make it work. We were able to do this because we had faith in what we were doing and because we had a solid comedic director who didn’t allow us to doubt ourselves and who trusted the work we had done. Still, there is that moment before there is an audience when you wonder, is any of this funny? Will any of this work? Are we all going to be standing onstage with omelet stations on our faces? In situations like that one, you have to have trust. Trust in the work you’ve done, in the serving of the play, and in the director who won’t allow you to doubt and question every single step of the way. But, most of all, you trust history. We’d all been there before, creating a bit out of nowhere, trusting that we knew what we were doing and allowing the bit to have its breadth. Trust your history, commit to the bit, and then you have to allow the risk of putting it out there to be worth it; you have to trust the past and not throw away everything because the empty room is no longer laughing.

“We just want a website,” I recall a client saying in a meeting. He was responding to the amount of depth ThoughtLab puts into a website before we even start on design. They had heard of us and knew we were top of the field in web design, but they didn’t want all the “bells and whistles,” as they called all the time and research that goes into creating a website that converts. They wanted it quick and cheap. At one point, someone on their team said, “You know, with AI we can knock this out in less than a day.” At which point we said, yes, yes, you can. And that client went on its way. Later, we looked at the website AI had knocked out in a day, and you know what, it looked good. It did. It looked like a website. But it didn’t do anything. I mean, aside from lacking animation or good storytelling, the site didn’t do anything. It didn’t solve the problems people might be coming to the site to get answers about. It certainly didn’t hold our attention, and it did nothing to convert. It looked like a website, as almost every single website looks when it’s slapped together. It looks fine, but looks are only a sliver of the overall spectrum when we’re talking about websites.

It isn’t really about websites. It’s about anything you’re building before you know if it’ll work: a campaign, a launch, a pitch, a first draft of a new offer. There’s always a version of it you could get fast, and it will look like the thing you meant to make. The question is never whether the fast version looks fine. It’s whether you’ll know what to do the moment it goes quiet.

I think about that client sometimes, and I think about that silent room.

When a bit died in previews, it was never a mystery for long. We knew our blocking, we knew our timing, we’d sweated over every beat of it, so when it didn’t land, we had somewhere to look. That’s also how we knew the difference between a bad night and a real problem: one quiet room might just be a quiet room, but we’d know our own choices well enough to see it if the same beat kept dying twice. That’s when we went back into the room, took the bit apart, found the half-second we were late on the turn, and rebuilt it. That’s not failure. That’s the job. The room exists so you have somewhere to go once you actually know something’s wrong.

The AI website never had a room. It had a prompt. It looked like a website the way a stand-in looks like an actor until you ask it to do something under pressure, and when it didn’t convert, there was nothing to rework, because nothing had been decided on purpose in the first place. You can’t drag a website back into rehearsal if it was never in rehearsal. You can only start over, and starting over from a prompt gets you exactly what you got the first time.

That’s what “trust the process” actually means, and it’s not a slogan. It means doing the work by hand long enough that you’d recognize your own choices if they failed, so that when the room goes quiet, you have something to go back to. A shortcut doesn’t just risk a worse result. It risks a result you couldn’t explain if someone asked you why it didn’t work. And in this business, someone always asks.

We still stepped on that stage every night, not knowing for certain the bit would land. That never goes away, and it shouldn’t. The day you’re certain is the day you’ve stopped listening to the room. But we walked out there with history behind us: reps, choices, a director who wouldn’t let us panic and rebuild from scratch just because one house was cold. That history is the only thing that makes the risk worth taking.

You can commission a website in a day. You can’t commission that.

Takeaway

The worry never fully goes away, and it isn’t supposed to. Every time you build something new, a campaign, a launch, a pitch, a first draft,  there’s a version of that silent house waiting for you, the one where you don’t know yet if it’ll land. That’s not a sign that something’s wrong. That’s just the room before the audience gets there.

What decides how that moment goes isn’t whether you’re nervous. It’s whether you know the thing you built well enough to fix it if it doesn’t land, or whether all you have is a result you can’t explain. One of those gives you somewhere to go. The other leaves you standing on stage with four minutes left and nothing but hope.

Trust the process. But build one worth trusting.

There’s a brand I’ve been watching for the past two years that has never once tried to explain itself to me.

No founder diary. No behind-the-scenes content. No manifesto pinned to the top of its social channels. It launches products, shares only what it needs to share, and then largely gets out of the way. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, people talk about the brand constantly. I notice it because it’s become unusual.

Most brands have spent the last decade moving in the opposite direction. They’ve embraced radical transparency, documented every stage of their process, and turned founders into full-time content creators. The assumption behind this approach is straightforward: the more people see of a brand, the more connected they’ll feel to it.

For a long time, that assumption made sense. Today, it deserves another look.

The Bargain Brands Made With the Internet

The internet offered brands a remarkably attractive deal. Show up consistently, publish constantly, and participate in every conversation. In return, you’ll earn reach, attention, and relevance. Visibility became the objective because visibility delivered results. And for a while, it worked exactly as promised.

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. But differentiation has a habit of becoming expectation.

As more brands adopted the same tactics, visibility stopped being distinctive. What once felt novel gradually became standard, and what became standard eventually faded into the background.

Today, consumers encounter a constant stream of content from companies competing for the same finite pool of attention. Brands explain their decisions, document their processes, react to cultural moments, and communicate at a frequency that would have seemed unimaginable fifteen years ago.

The problem isn’t that any of those activities is inherently wrong. The problem is that when everyone follows the same playbook, visibility alone no longer creates interest. Something else becomes valuable.

Specifically, the space between what consumers know about a brand and what they’d still like to know.

That’s where anticipation lives. It’s where curiosity begins. And it’s a space many brands have spent years eliminating without realizing its value.

Why Mystery Still Matters

Human beings are naturally drawn toward incomplete information. It’s why cliffhangers work, why people speculate about upcoming product launches, and why a novel becomes difficult to put down once an unanswered question takes hold. We enjoy discovering things for ourselves.

That instinct doesn’t disappear when people interact with brands. If anything, it becomes even more important in categories where products are easy to copy, and attention is increasingly difficult to earn.

A brand becomes interesting when it leaves room for exploration. Consumers don’t need every detail immediately. In many cases, they become more engaged when some of the story remains unresolved.

Consider anticipation. Its appeal comes almost entirely from uncertainty. Before a launch, people imagine possibilities. They discuss potential outcomes. They fill in the blanks themselves. The period before something arrives often generates more emotional energy than the arrival itself.

When every feature, decision, and product detail is revealed months in advance, that dynamic changes. Consumers aren’t discovering anything. They’re simply receiving information they’ve already been given.

Luxury brands understood this long before social media. They built desire through selective visibility rather than constant exposure. Their communications revealed enough to generate interest, but rarely so much that the audience felt there was nothing left to uncover. The lesson wasn’t that brands should be secretive. It was that intrigue has value. And intrigue requires restraint.

The Content Trap

Ironically, some of the brands that have lost the most intrigue are the ones that invested the most heavily in connection.

The pattern is easy to recognize. A company launches with a distinctive product, a fresh point of view, or a founder who sees the market differently. Early customers respond because the brand feels genuinely interesting. Growth follows. Then comes the understandable decision to accelerate that growth through content.

A strategy is built. A publishing cadence is established. The founder begins sharing more frequently. Product development becomes a series of updates. Internal conversations become public stories. Every decision becomes an opportunity to educate the audience.

None of this is inherently bad. In fact, many of these tactics work. They generate engagement, increase reach, and create the appearance of momentum.

What often goes unnoticed is the cumulative effect.

The more thoroughly a brand explains itself, the less opportunity consumers have to form their own relationship with it. The audience stops discovering and starts observing. They aren’t piecing together meaning for themselves because the brand has already done the work on their behalf.

Information is valuable. Transparency is valuable. But neither should be mistaken for fascination.

A brand can tell people everything and still leave them feeling very little.

That’s because curiosity depends on there being something left to uncover. Once every decision, belief, and process has been documented, the experience becomes complete. Consumers may know more about the brand than ever before, but knowing more doesn’t always translate into caring more.

In some cases, it has the opposite effect.

The challenge isn’t deciding whether to share. It’s deciding what not to share.

Restraint as a Competitive Position

The brands gaining cultural relevance today aren’t necessarily quieter than their competitors. They aren’t disappearing from public view or refusing to engage with their audiences.

What sets many of them apart is a more disciplined approach to visibility.

Consider Bottega Veneta. In 2021, the luxury fashion house deleted its social media accounts at a time when most brands were investing heavily in platform growth. The decision generated headlines because it appeared to challenge one of modern marketing’s most deeply held assumptions: that constant presence is required to remain relevant.

Yet the brand didn’t vanish from public consciousness. People continued encountering it through fashion coverage, cultural conversations, celebrity influence, and word of mouth. Its relationship with attention changed, but its ability to attract attention didn’t.

The takeaway isn’t that brands should abandon social media. Most shouldn’t.

What’s more interesting is the distinction between visibility and relevance. They’re related, but they’re not the same thing.

Many marketers treat attention as something that can only be earned through frequency. The assumption is that if a brand stops talking, people will stop listening.

That assumption becomes less convincing when every competitor is following the same strategy.

In a world where everyone is constantly explaining themselves, selective restraint can become a form of differentiation. When every brand participates in every conversation, the brand that speaks with greater intention often carries more weight.

This doesn’t require secrecy. It doesn’t require artificial scarcity. It simply requires a willingness to leave some things unsaid.

Consumers don’t need access to every decision, every discussion, or every piece of thinking that happens inside an organization. In many cases, sharing less creates more room for engagement because people are invited to interpret, explore, and draw conclusions on their own.

That’s a very different experience from being told exactly what to think.

The Paradox of Modern Marketing

The difficulty, of course, is that modern marketing systems aren’t designed to reward restraint.

Most teams are measured on activity. Content calendars need to be filled. Channels need to be maintained. Dashboards reward consistency, frequency, and engagement. When those are the metrics being tracked, producing less content can feel irresponsible.

From an operational perspective, the pressure is understandable.

The problem is that platforms and brands aren’t always optimizing for the same outcome.

Platforms benefit when attention remains inside the system. Brands are trying to build something more durable. They want recognition, preference, loyalty, and cultural relevance. Those goals often overlap, but they aren’t identical.

A piece of content can perform extremely well while contributing very little to the long-term strength of a brand. Conversely, a decision that strengthens a brand’s identity may not generate an immediate spike in engagement.

That’s what makes restraint so difficult.

Its value rarely appears in a dashboard. It shows up later, in the form of anticipation, interest, and a sense that the brand occupies a unique place in people’s minds.

Those qualities are harder to measure than impressions or clicks, but they’re often far more valuable.

Bringing It Back

None of this suggests that brands should stop communicating.

The challenge isn’t visibility itself. The challenge is the assumption that more visibility is always better.

The strongest brands understand that every communication decision affects not only what people know, but also what they still want to know. That second consideration is often overlooked.

A few principles are worth keeping in mind.

Build anticipation instead of constantly previewing what’s coming next. The excitement surrounding a launch often depends on leaving room for speculation.

Share selectively. Not every internal discussion, product decision, or strategic insight needs to become content. Audiences rarely miss information they never expected to receive.

Create opportunities for discovery. People tend to value things they feel they’ve found for themselves. The experience of uncovering something is often more powerful than having it explained.

Resist the urge to participate in every conversation. Brands that comment on everything rarely have much to say. A more selective voice tends to carry greater credibility.

Most importantly, leave room for interpretation. Consumers don’t need every aspect of a brand fully explained. In many cases, their own conclusions are more meaningful than any narrative the brand could provide.

The goal isn’t silence.

It’s discipline.

The Value of Being Partially Unknown

For much of the internet era, the central challenge facing brands was visibility. Media channels were fragmented, competition was increasing, and attention was becoming harder to earn. Under those conditions, being seen felt like the primary objective.

That logic made sense.

What it couldn’t anticipate was a world in which nearly every brand would become equally visible.

We’re now living in that world.

The question is no longer how to be seen. Most brands can achieve visibility if they’re willing to invest enough time, money, and effort into producing content.

The more important question is what happens after people see you.

Do they become interested?

Do they remember you?

Do they feel compelled to learn more?

The brands answering those questions most effectively aren’t relying on a radically new strategy. If anything, they’re returning to an older understanding of how attention works.

People are drawn not only to what they can see, but also to what remains just beyond view.

A brand doesn’t become compelling because it reveals everything. It becomes compelling because it gives people a reason to keep looking.

The Takeaway

For years, marketers operated under the assumption that greater visibility would naturally create stronger connections. In many cases, it did. But as every brand adopted the same approach, visibility became easier to achieve and less meaningful as a source of differentiation.

Today’s consumers are surrounded by content. They have unprecedented access to brands, founders, products, and processes. Yet access alone doesn’t create interest. In some cases, it can diminish it by eliminating the uncertainty that makes people curious in the first place.

The opportunity isn’t to disappear. It’s to become more deliberate about what gets shared and what doesn’t.

ThoughtLab’s research often points to the same conclusion: when capabilities become commonplace, differentiation becomes more valuable. In branding, that may mean resisting the assumption that every story needs to be told and every process needs to be documented. Sometimes the advantage comes from leaving room for discovery. 

The brands that stand out in an age of overexposure understand that curiosity, anticipation, and engagement all depend on there being something left to discover. They recognize that not every question needs an immediate answer and not every decision requires an explanation.

In a marketplace obsessed with saying more, restraint has become surprisingly powerful.

Not because consumers want less information.

Because they still want the experience of finding something worth knowing.

And in a culture organized around constant exposure, that may be one of the few advantages that can’t be easily copied. Not secrecy. Restraint.

I have nine minutes before a meeting. I’m prepared, ready, willing, and perhaps, depending on how you define it, able. I have coffee, notes, a list of things I’ve accomplished during the week, and I’m ready. Problem is, I have nine minutes and nothing to fill that time with. AI has helped me save time in my work, but now I have this extra time, which isn’t enough to make breakfast or drive over to FogTown coffee for a cuppa joe and a breakfast sammich with sriracha mayo, good sausage, and the kind of morning that makes you briefly reconsider your entire routine.  I don’t have time to watch a movie or a YouTube video, as my time is now down to six minutes.

There will be plenty of time post-meeting to do work, and there is work to be done; it’s just the interim period, four minutes with nothing to do because there’s not enough time to start anything. AI has helped me save so much time that I now have a brief moment in time where I have a surplus of time but not enough time to do anything meaningful, so I guess I didn’t save enough time this time. Two minutes.

Meeting.

But I’m still wondering about time-saving. What are we saving all this time for? Seriously, can I get a jar to sit on my desk that I can drop time into and pull out when I need it? Time to read, or pontificate on an otherworldly cheeseburger. I mean, everything we get sold promises to be a time saver. No more wasting time. Brands have built empires on the idea of time-saving. But are we saving time? And if so, how come most of us are putting that time directly back into working?

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, not just promise to save us time when we all know time cannot be saved, nor can it be hoarded like acorns in a tree. Once you do something that is now taking up your time, does using a specific brand actually stop time so you can use that time for more appealing tasks? 

Does a brand telling us it will save time actually lie to us?

The Time Didn’t Go Anywhere. It’s Right There. Waiting.

Here’s the thing about saved time. It doesn’t disappear into some kind of cosmic savings account where it earns interest and pays out when you need an extra hour on a Tuesday. Time isn’t a 401k. You can’t defer it, roll it over, or cash it out when the market looks good. When a brand saves you time, that time goes exactly one place: somewhere else in your day, looking for trouble. Like a gang member from the Jets or the Sharks. They have time to rumble in toe shoes, with jazz hands. That’s time well spent.

Wouldn’t it be something if we had time purses? Little cosmic clip-top purses we all carried around, dropping our saved minutes in throughout the day. Then, when you’re running late, or sitting across from a friend over a sandwich, or just enjoying a quiet moment with your own reflection, you could reach in, pull out a dollop of time, and apply it directly to your circumstances. We don’t have that. We have a calendar app and the vague sense that we should be further along by now.

Think about what actually happens. AI writes your first draft in four minutes instead of forty. Congratulations. You now have thirty-six minutes. What do you do with thirty-six minutes? If you’re like most people, you use them to do more work, answer more emails, take a meeting you’d previously had a reasonable excuse to decline, or stare at your screen, wondering why you feel busy when you just saved 36 minutes. The time didn’t get saved. It got reassigned. There’s a difference, and brands have been remarkably quiet about it.

This isn’t new, by the way. The dishwasher was supposed to liberate households from the tyranny of hand washing dishes. And it did. It also quietly introduced the expectation that the kitchen would now be cleaner more often, dinner parties could be larger, and somehow the time saved by not scrubbing a pot was immediately absorbed by everything the dishwasher made newly possible. Same with the washing machine, the microwave, the calendar app, and the project management software that was going to make everything more efficient, but instead gave everyone a new place to have meetings about meetings.

Brands don’t save time. They relocate it. And they’ve been getting away with this for decades because we’re very busy people who don’t have time to notice.

Saving Time Since, Actually, Never 

Brands have been selling time like they own it. Save time. Reclaim your day. Get back to what matters. It’s the oldest pitch in the book, and it works because we want it to be true so badly that we’ll pay almost anything to believe it for another quarter. There’s an entire economy built on the promise of time returned, and if you look closely at the fine print, which nobody does because who has time, you’ll notice the promise is always future tense. You will save time. Your mornings will be easier. You’ll finally have room to breathe.

They never say when.

Every generation gets its own version of the pitch. The microwave was going to save dinner. The laptop was going to save the office. The smartphone was apparently going to save everything, but instead it just moved the office into your pocket and followed you to the beach, the dinner table and the bathroom. AI is the current champion of the time-saving promise, and it’s genuinely impressive technology, but let’s be honest about what’s actually happening. We’re not saving time. We’re getting faster at filling it back up again. We’re efficiency machines running on a treadmill that keeps pace with however efficient we become.

The brands aren’t lying exactly. That’s what makes it so good. The time does move. Something does get faster. The pitch is technically defensible. It’s just that nobody mentions that the time you saved on that task is going directly into three new tasks that the saved time made possible. You didn’t get your afternoon back. You got a more ambitious to-do list.

And somehow, every time, we’re surprised. Like local news anchors who marvel when a new month starts, “Can you believe it’s June???” Yes, yes, I can because it happens every single freakin’ year.

Nobody Saved You Time. They Just Moved Your Furniture.

Here’s the question nobody in the time-saving business wants to answer: saved for what, exactly? Because if the answer is “to do more work,” we’ve built an entire industrial complex of efficiency tools that have successfully helped us become more productive at being busy. That’s not salvation. That’s a faster hamster wheel with better branding.

We don’t have a time-saving problem. We have a time-purpose problem. The time was always there. It didn’t need saving. What it needed was a reason, and nobody’s selling that because reasons are personal and personal doesn’t scale, and scaling is what built the empires we’re talking about.

Think about the last time you genuinely had time to yourself. Not time between things. Not time you were supposed to be doing something else. Actual time, with no agenda and no guilt attached. Can you remember it? Because most people can’t, and that’s not because they haven’t saved enough time. It’s because every tool designed to give them time back came with an implicit instruction manual that said, “Now do more.”

The furniture got moved around beautifully. The room looks different. But you’re still living in the same house, working the same hours, wondering why the kitchen always feels cluttered.

What Would You Do With a Free Tuesday?

Seriously. Think about it. Not a holiday Tuesday, when errands and obligations are dressed up as leisure. A real Tuesday. No meetings, no deliverables, no inbox quietly filling up like a bathtub with a slow leak. Just a Tuesday that belongs entirely to you. What would you do with it?

Most people, when asked this question, go blank. Not because they’re incapable of imagination, but because the question feels vaguely dangerous. Like admitting you’d like a free Tuesday is admitting you’re not committed enough, not hungry enough, not sufficiently devoted to the grind that everyone around you seems very publicly devoted to. We’ve spent so long optimizing our time that we’ve forgotten to have any opinions about what it’s actually for.

On the old Mickey Mouse Club, Tuesday was Anything Can Happen Day. Which, as a concept, is genuinely radical when you think about it. A whole day with no predetermined outcome. No agenda. No optimized workflow. Just Tuesday, wide open, ready for whatever showed up. We were fine with that once. We thought it sounded fun.

And here’s where it gets interesting. The brands selling you time savings have absolutely no interest in you having a free Tuesday. A free Tuesday is a problem for their business model. What they want is for you to save time on the thing they’re selling so you can spend that time on the next thing someone else is selling. The economy of time savings only works if the saved time is reinvested immediately. A person sitting quietly on a porch on a Tuesday afternoon, doing nothing in particular, eating a sandwich, maybe a good one with sriracha mayo and proper sausage, is not a growth market.

The time purse is a beautiful idea. The problem is nobody wants you to fill it. They want you to spend it before you even know you have it.

Busy Is a Choice. So Is the Sandwich. 

We’ve made busyness a personality. Not just a condition, a full identity with its own aesthetic, its own vocabulary, its own LinkedIn posts about grinding and hustle and sleeping when you’re dead. Busy means important. Busy means wanted. Busy means you matter in a way that a person sitting on a porch on a Tuesday afternoon apparently does not.

But here’s the thing about busyness. It’s the perfect hiding place. If you’re busy enough, you never have to answer the question of what you’d actually do with your time if you had it. You never have to find out whether you’d like the answer. The saved time never accumulates because you won’t let it. Every efficiency tool, every AI assistant, every app promising to give you your mornings back becomes a shovel you use to dig a bigger pile of things to do. Not because you have to. Because the alternative is a Tuesday with nothing in it, and that is apparently terrifying.

This isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an identity problem. We’ve confused the schedule with the self for so long that clearing the schedule feels like losing something. The brands know this, by the way. They’ve always known it. Busy people are the best customers. They’ll buy anything that promises relief without requiring them to actually stop.

So the next time a brand tells you it’s going to save you time, ask yourself what you’re planning to do with it. Not what you’ll probably do with it. What you actually want to do with it. There’s a difference, and that difference is where your actual life is hiding.

The Takeaway

At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time thinking about what brands promise versus what brands deliver. Not because we enjoy being difficult, although we do, but because the gap between those two things is usually where the most interesting work lives. And the time-saving promise is one of the oldest, most successful, most quietly dishonest gaps in the business.

Nobody is going to give you your time back. Not the app, not the AI, not the project management software with the friendly interface and the aggressive onboarding email sequence. What they can do, what the good ones actually do, is help you spend your time on things that matter instead of things that merely accumulate. That’s a different promise. It’s a harder promise to make and a harder one to keep, but it’s the one worth making.

Because here’s the question we’d leave you with. Not what tool is going to save you time, but what would you do if you actually had some? What’s the thing you keep not doing because you’re waiting for a window that never quite opens? What’s your Tuesday?

The time purse is yours. It’s always been yours. The question was never how to fill it. The question is whether you’re brave enough to spend it on something that doesn’t show up on a quarterly review.

FogTown opens at six. The sriracha mayo isn’t going to eat itself.

There is a moment most people have had in the last year that no one talks about in strategy meetings. You’re trying to resolve something with a company. A canceled flight, a denied claim, a charge you don’t recognize. You open the chat window. The bot greets you by name and asks how it can help. You type. It misreads you. You rephrase. It misreads you again. You type the word agent and it offers you a help article. You type it again, and it asks if you’d like to start over. By the time a person finally appears, you’re not a customer anymore. You’re an opponent.

This’s the part that the dashboards don’t capture, because the dashboards were built to capture something else.

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. Faster resolution. Lower cost to serve. Better experience, in theory, for everyone. The story wasn’t wrong. It was just incomplete.

Because as the operational friction came down, something else came up in its place. Something the metrics weren’t designed to see. Customers started reporting that the experience felt worse even when it was, by every measurable definition, faster. The interaction was more efficient and somehow more humiliating. The system worked, and yet people walked away feeling worked over. The category had solved one problem and unintentionally created another, and the new one’s harder to fix because it doesn’t show up in the same dashboard. The new problem isn’t friction. It’s conflict.

Friction Was Operational. Conflict Is Emotional.

The traditional definition of friction is logistical. It’s the time, the steps, and the effort it takes to get something done. Friction in that sense is annoying but impersonal. You wait, you repeat yourself, you fill out the form again, and eventually the thing happens. The cost is measured in minutes and patience.

What’s happening now is different in kind, not just in degree. Customers aren’t just frustrated by how long it takes to reach a resolution. They’re frustrated by the sense that no one inside the system is willing to recognize them. The chatbot doesn’t understand the nuance of their situation, and there’s no clear path to someone who will. The denial letter arrives without explanation, and the appeal form leads to another denial letter. The interface is fast, and the experience is cold. The faster it goes, the more it can feel like the company has decided the customer isn’t worth a human moment.

That shift, from operational annoyance to emotional injury, is what turns friction into conflict.

People will tolerate a great deal of inconvenience if they feel seen inside it. They’ll tolerate remarkably little efficiency if they feel dismissed by it. This isn’t a soft observation. It’s the underlying physics of why two interactions with the same resolution time can produce wildly different reviews, complaints, and churn outcomes. The metric is identical. The relationship isn’t.

And the more an organization automates the front line of its customer experience, the more often it ends up on the wrong side of this equation without realizing it.

pic

The Efficiency Trap

The reason this is hard to catch from the inside is that organizations measure what they can measure, and the things that are easy to measure are the things that have already been optimized.

Call deflection rates. Average handle time. Self-service completion. Cost per ticket. Headcount per thousand customers. These are the numbers that move when AI and automation are introduced, and they almost always move in the right direction. The deck looks good. The board is pleased. The savings are real.

What doesn’t show up on the same deck is the emotional outcome of the interaction. Whether the customer felt respected. Whether they felt the company took their situation seriously. Whether they believed the process was fair. Whether they’d choose the same company again if a competitor offered the same product with a slightly better experience.

These are harder to measure, so they tend to get inferred from proxies. CSAT scores, which are often gamed or unreturned. NPS, which captures intent without much texture. Sentiment analysis on transcripts, which can flag tone but can’t read the long-term consequence of feeling unheard.

So a company can post a quarter of falling support costs and rising deflection rates while simultaneously eroding the thing that brought customers in the first place. The operational metrics improve, and the relationship metrics quietly decay, and the gap between the two doesn’t surface until a competitor lands or a public incident exposes it.

There’s a sentence worth pinning to the wall in any executive room where this conversation happens: customers can tell the difference between convenience and avoidance. They know when a company has built systems to help them faster, and they know when a company has built systems to avoid them. The interface looks the same. The intent doesn’t, and people read intent more accurately than most strategy teams give them credit for.

When Systems Feel Faceless, Conflict Escalates Faster

The other thing that’s changed is how quickly emotional friction now travels.

Inside a faceless system, accountability disappears by design. There’s no one specific to talk to, no one specific to be upset with, no one whose name the customer can hold onto. This is sometimes presented as a feature because it protects employees from the worst of customer frustration. But what it actually does is concentrate the frustration somewhere else. If no one inside the company seems accountable, the customer starts looking for accountability outside the company. The complaint moves from the call center to LinkedIn, from the help ticket to X, from the private moment of frustration to a public post that may reach more people than the company’s marketing did that week.

This is the part where minor friction becomes reputational risk. A single denied claim is a customer service issue. A denied claim accompanied by three rounds of automated responses and no path to a human becomes a story, and the story travels.

It happens most visibly in industries where the stakes are personal. Airlines, where a disruption sits on top of a missed funeral or a wrecked vacation. Banks, where a frozen account sits on top of a payroll deadline. Insurance, where a denial sits on top of a diagnosis. Healthcare, where a billing error sits on top of a treatment that was already terrifying. Retail, where a return becomes the thing that decides whether someone ever buys from the brand again.

In all of these cases, the original event is the friction. The automated handling of it is where the conflict begins. The customer isn’t asking for a faster system. They’re asking for the system to recognize that the moment they’re in isn’t a transaction.

When a company answers a moment of human stake with a workflow, the workflow becomes the story.

Pic

What The Companies Getting It Right Are Actually Doing

It’d be easy to read all of this as an argument against automation. It isn’t. The companies handling this best aren’t the ones that resisted AI. They’re the ones who thought harder about where AI belongs. The pattern that keeps appearing in organizations that are getting it right looks like this.

Automation handles the volume of work. AI handles the pattern recognition, the prep, the routing, and the drafting. And then a human shows up at the exact point where the stakes get personal, with full context already in hand, ready to do the thing that only a person can do, which is to take the situation seriously.

The work the AI does in the background is invisible to the customer. The work the person does in the foreground is the experience the customer remembers. The two together produce something neither could produce alone. The AI lets humans spend their time on the things that require judgment instead of triage. The human gives the AI’s efficiency a face that the customer can actually trust.

This isn’t a softer use of AI. It’s a more strategic one. It treats the technology as a force multiplier for the things humans are uniquely good at, rather than a substitute for them. The cost savings are still there. They’re just being earned without paying the relationship tax that pure-automation strategies quietly accept.

The companies that understand this are also designing escalation paths on purpose, not as a fallback. They make the path to a human visible, not buried. They give their human agents context, authority, and discretion, so that when a customer finally reaches one, the conversation moves forward instead of starting over. They build their automation to know what it doesn’t know, and to hand off cleanly when it reaches the edge of its competence.

It looks, from the outside, like the kind of customer experience that doesn’t need to advertise.

The customers do that for them.

The Real Frontier

Most categories spent the last several years optimizing for frictionless. The next several years are going to belong to the companies that figure out what to optimize for instead.

Frictionless isn’t the goal it sounded like. It’s a useful objective when it’s in the service of something larger, and a misleading one when it’s treated as the destination. A frictionless system that leaves the customer feeling like a number is a system that has won on the wrong scoreboard.

The goal worth designing for isn’t the absence of friction. It’s the presence of judgment. The system should be efficient, where efficiency is what the customer wants, and human, where humanity is what the customer needs, and the company should be able to tell the difference.

That’s harder to build than a faster chatbot. It requires honest internal conversations about which moments in the customer journey carry emotional weight, and which don’t. It requires a willingness to staff the high-stakes moments more generously than the cost dashboard would prefer. It requires leadership that can hold the line when the savings argument shows up, because the savings argument will always show up, and it’ll always be persuasive on its own terms.

But the companies that do this are building something that compounds. Every time a customer reaches the human moment and feels recognized inside it, the brand earns a piece of trust that no marketing budget can buy. Every time a competitor automates that same moment away, the gap widens.

At ThoughtLab, this is the frame we keep returning to with leaders rethinking their customer experience: the question isn’t how much of the journey can be automated, but which moments of it deserve to remain human. The answer is rarely obvious from the org chart, and almost never visible from the savings dashboard. It surfaces in the gap between what the company is optimizing for and what the customer is actually experiencing.

pic

The Takeaway

AI and automation are reshaping customer experience at a speed most organizations are still catching up to. But efficiency on its own doesn’t create loyalty, and it’s never created trust. The companies that confuse the two are going to spend the next several years discovering the difference the hard way, one public incident and one quiet churn cohort at a time.

The organizations that’ll lead in the next era of customer experience won’t be the ones that automated the most processes. They’ll be the ones that understood where human interaction still matters, where empathy can’t be outsourced, and where trust is built through responsiveness, accountability, and the willingness to be present in a moment that asks for presence.

In the age of AI, the most valuable experiences won’t be the ones that feel the fastest. They’ll be the ones that still feel like someone, somewhere, was actually paying attention.

That’s the experience worth building toward. Not frictionless. Faceful.

Here is what I just did.

I was holding my Plaud in one hand and talking into it. On the desk beside me, my phone was open to the Plaud app, and I was watching the words appear on the screen as I said them a half-second behind my mouth, like someone with a delay translating me back to myself.

When I finished, the file moved from the device to the app to a transcription service, which I will paste into a writing tool, which I will then run through an AI to clean up. By the time these sentences arrive at you, my one small observation will have passed through four pieces of technology.

The observation, for the record, was this:

I am using four pieces of technology to capture one thought.

That was it. That was the whole thing. I could have written it on a napkin. I caught myself, mid-sentence, watching the words travel from my mouth to the phone screen, and I thought: crazy, man, just crazy. Not the deep kind of crazy. The middle-aged kind. The kind that arrives when you notice you have been doing something elaborate for a long time, and you cannot remember when it started.

A Few Years Ago, I Wrote About the Luddites

A few years ago — December of 2022, to be exact — I wrote a piece about the Luddites.

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.

They weren’t anti-technology. They were skilled textile workers who liked the new machines. What they were against was the way the machines were being used to circumvent fair labor practices, to push out trained workers, and to flood the market with shoddy products that the machines made possible and the manufacturers found convenient.

They didn’t want the looms put down. They wanted the looms in the hands of people who had earned the right to run them, paid honestly, making something worth making. The Luddites, in other words, were not asking the question should we have this technology. They were asking what is this technology doing to us, and who is it serving while it does it.

In the 2022 piece, I had a cat named Ned Ludd. The cat didn’t exist; I made him up because I needed someone to argue with in the kitchen.

The line I gave him was that we don’t need to put the machines down. We need to know what they’re doing to us while we use them. I wrote that four years ago and then mostly forgot about it.

Then I picked up a Plaud.

pic

What Earned Its Place

Here is what I want to be honest about, because I’m writing this piece on the very stack I’m about to question, and a piece that doesn’t admit that is a piece that has already lost.

The Plaud is useful. The app is useful. The transcription is useful. The AI cleanup is useful. Each individual link in the chain solves a real problem. I can capture an idea while I’m walking. I can find it later. I can turn the captured idea into a usable draft. I am not going to throw the Plaud in a fire. I’m going to keep using it. I’m probably going to recommend it to people. That isn’t the question.

The question is whether the whole stack earned its place, or whether I assembled it because each piece arrived separately and made sense on its own, and now I am running an elaborate four-step apparatus for thoughts that used to fit on a Post-it. That is a Luddite question in the real sense of the word. Not should this exist. But what is this doing to me while I use it, and have I noticed?

When I look honestly at my Plaud-and-phone-and-laptop-and-AI workflow, here is what I find: Some thoughts genuinely needed it. A long conversation I want to remember. A meeting where I want to be present rather than taking notes. A walk where an idea arrived, and I knew I would lose it if I tried to hold it in my head until I got back to a keyboard.

For those, the stack pays for itself.

Other thoughts didn’t need any of it. I’m using four pieces of technology to capture one thought, which is a thought I could have caught with a pencil. I used the stack because it was there. The marginal cost of using it felt like zero. It’s not zero. It’s the time I spent watching the words appear on the second screen, the time I spent transferring the file, the time I spent in the AI cleanup, the small mental tax of being inside a workflow when I could have been inside an idea.

None of those costs is big. All of them are real. Add them up across a year, and they are not nothing. This is what the Luddites were trying to get us to notice. Not the machines. The drift.

The Tax Hiding in the Toolkit

I think this is the version of the Luddite question that the AI era will make harder, not easier.

In the old industrial Luddite story, the cost of the machine was visible. You could see who lost the job. You could see the shoddy product. You could see the cottage industry dying. The harm had a shape.

In our version, the cost is paid in small, invisible currency: a second of attention here, a second of friction there, a habit of reaching for a tool because the tool exists, a slow rewiring of how a thought even arrives. We’re not losing our jobs to the machines. We’re losing the part of ourselves that used to be able to think without immediately handing our thoughts to a piece of software for processing.

That is a much sneakier kind of harm. It doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. It shows up as the slightly diminished quality of your own thinking, which you cannot benchmark, because you no longer remember what your thinking was like before.

I’m not arguing against any of these tools. I am arguing for the discipline the original Luddites were trying to teach us: use the machine. But know what it’s doing to you while you use it.

And every once in a while, ask whether this particular thought needed this particular tool or whether you reached for it because reaching for it is now what you do.

pic

Some Thoughts Deserve a Stack

I will keep using the Plaud.

I will also, more often than I have been, put it in a drawer. Some thoughts deserve a stack. Some thoughts deserve a pencil. The mistake is using the stack for everything, because the stack is fast, and the stack is easy, and the stack is here.

The Luddites weren’t asking us to give up the loom. They were asking us to know who it was serving and at what cost. Two hundred years later, in my office, with four pieces of technology spread across my desk to capture a single sentence I could have written on a napkin, I think the question still stands.

Ned Ludd doesn’t exist, except when I need him. He’s standing in the doorway right now, looking at the Plaud, the phone, the laptop, and the AI window I have open in the corner.

He’s not telling me to throw any of it out. He’s asking me, in the same dry tone he used in 2022: Did all of that earn its place this time, or did you just reach for it because it was there?

I’m going to think about that for a minute before I answer. Then I’m going to put the Plaud in the drawer and finish this piece by hand.

pic

The Takeaway

The danger of modern technology is rarely the tool itself.

More often than not, it’s the unnoticed behavioral drift that comes with constant convenience.

At ThoughtLab, we know that the most powerful tools earn their place individually. The problem begins when an entire stack forms around us, piece by piece, until we are spending more energy servicing workflows than engaging directly with the thought, conversation, or problem the workflow was supposed to support.

The original Luddites understood something we are relearning in the AI era: the important question is not whether a technology works. It is whether we remain conscious of what the technology is quietly training us to become while we use it.

Late night and I was pasta-filled, eyes drooping, barely staying awake in front of the TV, trying to muster the energy to get off the couch and resume being supine in my bed. The T-Mobile ad flashed by quickly, the way ads do now. A map of the United States, filled in with pink dots. Pink dots in the cities, pink dots in the plains, pink dots reaching into the kind of country where you assume the signal dies and the bears take over. The voiceover said something about super broadband. I didn’t catch most of it. What I caught was the visual. Every inch of the country, pink. Conquered. Owned. Done.

I don’t know if the map is literally accurate. Coverage maps rarely are. T-Mobile’s signal has gaps, as every carrier’s does, and “covered” means a lot of different things depending on whether you’re standing in a parking lot or trying to download a movie in your basement next to the furnace. But that wasn’t the point of the ad. The point of the ad was the flag. The pink dots were planting a flag. They were saying, “We already won; you just haven’t caught up yet.”

And that’s what stopped me. Well, that and a fart that rocked the house. Because once you plant that flag, once you say we already won, you’ve got a new problem. A bigger one than the problem you spent fifteen years solving. Because somewhere along the way, the underdog became the dinosaur. 

What happens to a brand when it wins the category?

Stay with me, because this is where it gets interesting. T-Mobile didn’t get where it is by being good. I mean, sure, the network got better. But that’s not the story. The story is that T-Mobile spent the last fifteen years being the Un-carrier. The whole personality of the brand. The magenta. The swagger. The John Legere t-shirts. The relentless trolling of AT&T and Verizon. All of it was built in opposition. They had a villain. The villain was the two big carriers and their customer-hostile contracts, their bait-and-switch pricing, and their cheerful corporate condescension. T-Mobile got famous for pointing at the villain and saying, “Those guys are the problem, and we’re the answer.”

It worked because the villain was real. Anyone who’d spent twenty minutes on the phone with AT&T trying to figure out why their bill went up forty dollars knew the villain. The villain was lived experience. T-Mobile didn’t have to invent the bad guy. They just had to be sharper, faster, and louder about pointing at him.

But here’s the thing about villain stories. They don’t survive their own success.

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. Not because you’ve changed. Because the position has changed. You can’t be the scrappy alternative to the dinosaurs when you are a dinosaur. You can wear the magenta t-shirt all you want, but you’re standing on the same hill as the people you used to throw rocks at. Worse, you’re now the thing somebody else is throwing rocks at, and you haven’t noticed yet because you’re still admiring your own t-shirt.

This is the trap. And it’s not just T-Mobile’s trap. It’s the trap every brand that wins by being a challenger eventually walks into.

Villains Don’t Survive Success

Think about Amazon. Amazon’s first villain was the bookstore. The inefficient, limited, overpriced bookstore where you couldn’t find anything past the bestseller table without flagging down a teenager in an apron. The villain story was your time is too valuable to shop like this. That worked. Amazon won. So they moved the villain. The new villain became anything you have to leave your house to buy. That worked too. Amazon won again. And then they moved it again, this time to commerce infrastructure, to physical retail itself, to the idea that the whole internet should be running on Amazon Web Services. Each time they won, they redesigned the villain before the old one ran out of gas.

That’s the part most brands miss. They wait until the villain stops working, and by then it’s too late, because they’ve already started to feel like the villain themselves.

Tesla is in this exact spot right now. Tesla won by being the company that proved electric cars weren’t dorky. But in reality, if you look at the Tesla truck, goodness, that is one ugly vehicle. The villain was fossil fuels, lazy automakers, and the cultural assumption that anything good for the planet had to look like a refrigerator on wheels. Tesla beat that villain so thoroughly that every major automaker now makes electric cars. Which means Tesla’s original villain is gone.

Tesla now competes with Ford, Hyundai, BMW, and a dozen Chinese brands you’ve never heard of, and the “we’re different” energy that powered the brand for a decade is leaking out fast. Tesla still behaves culturally like a challenger while operating economically like a dominant manufacturer. The original story frame no longer matches the position the company actually occupies. The challenger has won, and nobody’s redesigned the story.

pic

What Category Drift Actually Looks Like

That, by the way, is what category drift looks like from the outside. It doesn’t show up as a single bad decision. It shows up as a slow softening of the edges.

The ads get more generic. The brand stops picking fights. The founder starts giving the same interviews everyone else is giving. The press releases sound corporate. None of it is a disaster on its own, but stack a year of it together, and the brand has lost the thing that made it worth caring about. It still works. It just doesn’t matter the way it used to.

And mattering, as anyone who’s run a brand knows, is the part you can’t buy back once you’ve lost it.

The Brands That Keep Moving

The brands that get through this moment, the ones that don’t slide into being the boring giant they replaced, do something specific. They redesign the POV at the moment of the win, not after. New villain. New tension. New category frame.

They don’t pretend they’re still the underdog, because that gets pathetic fast, like watchingme fit into my high school prom dress, many levels of pathetic in that scenario. But they also don’t just settle into being the new establishment. They find something bigger to push against.

Apple has done this its whole life. Apple’s villain has been, in order: IBM (the suits), Microsoft (the bores), the music industry (the gatekeepers), the phone carriers (the captors), and now, increasingly, surveillance capitalism itself (the watchers). Each time the old villain became unviable, usually because Apple won, they reached for a bigger one. The brand stayed sharp because the opposition stayed sharp.

It wasn’t the same opposition, but it was always there, doing the work of giving the brand something to push against.

I don’t know what T-Mobile’s next villain is. I’m not sure they know either. The easy move would be to pivot to AI, and 5G applications and “the network of the future,” but everyone’s saying that, and saying what everyone else is saying isn’t a POV. It’s a press release.

The harder move, and the better one, would be to look at what people actually hate about being constantly connected right now, and decide T-Mobile is going to be the company that pushes against that.

Maybe the villain is data harvesting. Maybe it’s the way every carrier wants to become a content company and shove you into a walled garden. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re all paying for a thousand subscriptions we don’t remember signing up for, and the phone company is the worst offender. (I am, at this very moment, paying $4.99 a month for something called “Premium Visual Voicemail,” and I don’t know what that is, and I am afraid to ask. Who am I kidding? I’m just afraid.)

I don’t know. But the point isn’t that I should know. The point is that they should know, and the window to figure it out is now, while the pink dots still feel like a win and not yet like a ceiling.

pic

The Most Dangerous Moment in a Brand’s Life

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss. The win is the most dangerous moment in a brand’s life. It feels like the end of the story, but it’s actually the start of the next one.

The hard part isn’t getting to the top of the hill. The hard part is what you do once you’re up there, and the people who used to cheer for you start looking around and asking, okay, now what?

Most brands answer that question badly. They settle in. They put on the suit. They start running ads that look like the ads their old villains used to run. They become beloved by the people who liked them when they were scrappy, and indistinguishable from the giants to the people meeting them for the first time.

Within ten years, they’re the company somebody else builds their underdog story against, and they never see it coming, because they still think they’re the rebels.

The brands that don’t go that way understand something most don’t. They understand that a category-of-one position isn’t a place you arrive at. It’s a thing you have to keep redesigning. The villain that made you sharp at year five won’t make you sharp at year fifteen. The frame that built the category isn’t the frame that holds the category. And the day you cover the whole country in pink dots is the day you have to start over. Not on the network, not on the product, but on the story.

The Morning After the Pink Dots

I keep thinking about that map. The pink dots. The visual knee-jerk of total coverage. It’s a beautiful piece of marketing, honestly. It does its job. It lands the punch. But I also keep thinking about what happens the morning after.

The marketing team comes in. The map is up on the wall. Somebody says, what’s next? And there’s a long pause. The kind of pause where you can hear the air conditioner or Lester from the intern poll sweat. Because the answer isn’t a campaign.

The answer is a category redesign, and most brands aren’t built for that conversation. They’re built for the conversation about creative refreshes, platform launches, and updated brand books. The conversation that ends with a deck.

The hard conversation, the one about who is the next villain, and whether our worldview is still sharp enough to point at it, usually doesn’t happen. Or it happens too late, after the brand has already started to feel like the dinosaur it used to make fun of.

If you’re building a brand right now, and your POV is built around being the alternative to the bad guys, take the win seriously before you get there. Start designing the next position before you need it. Ask yourself what the brand stands for once the original villain is gone.

Because the villain will be gone. Either you’ll beat them, or the world will move past them, or the category will shift, and the answer your brand had for the last decade won’t be the answer anymore.

You see this outside telecom and tech all the time. Clients usually don’t describe it this way. They say things like:

• Our brand feels tired
• We used to be the disruptor, and now we’re not sure what we are
• The messaging that worked five years ago doesn’t work anymore, and I can’t tell you why

Almost always, what’s actually happening is that the villain they were built against has either lost or left the field, and nobody noticed the change in position. The brand kept doing what it used to do. The world stopped responding the way it used to respond. And the gap between those two things, between the old position and the new reality, is where brands die slowly without ever knowing they’re dying.

The pink dots are pretty. They’re a great ad. They’re also a warning shot. The map is filled in.

Now what?

pic

The Takeaway

Most challenger brands think the hard part is winning. It isn’t. The hard part is staying strategically sharp after the win.

Brands built in opposition eventually run into the same structural problem: the villain that made them culturally magnetic disappears. Sometimes, because they defeated it, or because the market moved on. Either way, the original tension that gave the brand its energy starts to collapse.

That’s when category drift begins.

Not all at once, and usually not through some catastrophic mistake. The brand simply starts to sound more corporate, behave more cautiously, and lose the sharpness that once made people care. The original positioning still exists, but it no longer aligns with the company’s role in the market.

The brands that survive this transition don’t pretend they’re still underdogs. They redesign the story before the old one stops working. They find a new tension, a new worldview, a new enemy worth pushing against.

At ThoughtLab, we see this pattern repeatedly: the companies that sustain category leadership are rarely the ones that cling to the narrative that made them famous. They’re the ones willing to reframe their role in the market before the market does it for them.

Because category leadership isn’t a permanent position. It’s a narrative problem that has to be solved again and again.

And the moment your map is covered in pink dots is usually the moment the old story expires.

I sit and talk into a small recorder, which I have always done when it’s late at night, and I don’t feel like putting pen to paper. Right now, it’s a Plaud. Most of what I record is fine, the kind of thing that disappears if you don’t catch it.

The other day I caught this.

A commercial came on for a video game. Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred. That’s the actual name. There was an earlier one called Vessel of Hatred. I know the obvious argument is about games and kids and violence, and I don’t really want to have that argument. It’s been litigated for forty years and exhausted everyone. What stayed with me was smaller and stranger.

The product is called Hatred.

Not “the villain in the game is hatred.” Not “the game explores themes of hatred.” The expansion is named hatred. Hatred is the brand. Hatred is what you buy. The marketing department sat in a room and decided that the word most likely to land hardest on a TV screen during a commercial break was hatred.

And they were probably right.

Because I don’t think this is a story about kids. I think it’s a story about us.

Somewhere along the way, hatred stopped being a thing we were embarrassed to sell. It became a thing that sells. Not as a warning. Not as a cautionary tale. As the headline. As the offer. The product equivalent of writing YES, HATRED, THAT ONE on the box and watching the box move.

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.

I noticed it because I’m old. That’s not a flex because at my age, flexing hurts, and it’s not an apology. It’s just true that people inside a culture stop smelling the house they live in, and visitors notice the smell immediately. I’m a visitor now. I get to notice.

THE WORD ON THE BOX 

The thing about a name is that it always gives something away. It tells you what a brand thinks will get through, what kind of signal it believes people are ready to receive, and how much work it expects one word to do. A name can be gentle, clever, blunt, or trying a little too hard, but it’s never nothing.

That’s what stayed with me about hatred being used this way. Not buried inside the story, or held at a distance, or treated as dangerous, corrosive, sad, human, ugly. Put right there on the box instead, polished up and made sellable. The stranger thing is that the word doesn’t seem to need much explaining anymore. It arrives already understood.

A brand name has a job. It has to carry mood, promise, category, audience, and energy. It has to move fast because people don’t stop to study most things. They glance, they feel something, they decide whether to lean in or keep moving. So when a product leads with a word like hatred, it’s not an accident. It’s a bet on recognition. It assumes the audience will know what to do with it, and that the word will carry enough heat to pull the eye.

That’s the part that feels different. Hatred is not being smuggled in under the guise of metaphor. It’s not dressed up as conflict or darkness or revenge, some cleaner and safer version of the same appetite. It’s standing in the front window. And maybe that’s where the question begins. Not whether a brand is allowed to use the word, of course it is, but what happens when the hardest word in the room becomes one of the easiest to sell.

pic

THIS IS NOT REALLY ABOUT VIDEO GAMES 

The easy version of this piece would be to turn it into a complaint about video games. I don’t want to do that. For one thing, I don’t know enough about the game to make that argument honestly. For another, the broader argument has been going on forever, and most people in it already know what they think.

What caught me was the marketing instinct. The commercial confidence of it. The sense that hatred is no longer too much, too dark, too blunt, or too ugly to carry the offer. It can sit there in the title and do its job.

That feels like the more useful thing to notice. Not because this one game explains anything on its own, but because it belongs to a larger weather system. We are surrounded by products, headlines, shows, campaigns, platforms, and personalities that understand how well anger travels. They know resentment has velocity, conflict gets shared, and the darker feelings are often easier to activate than the better ones.

This is not about video games. It’s about what the culture has made available to sell. It’s about the emotional inventory sitting on the shelf now. And hatred, apparently, is in stock.

BRANDS DON’T INVENT THE APPETITE. THEY READ IT. 

Brands are not innocent in all this, but they’re rarely magicians either. They don’t create desire from a blank page. They listen for it. They study where the attention goes, which words carry voltage, which emotions make people pause long enough to care. Then they build around what they find.

A name like “Lord of Hatred” is not just a creative choice. It is a reading of the room. Someone believed the word would work because the culture had already made room for it to work.

That’s the harder truth. Hatred sells because some version of it is already moving through the bloodstream. Not always in the obvious ways. It can show up as contempt, tribal comfort, or the little private pleasure of seeing the people we dislike get what we think they deserve. The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude, which means exactly that, pleasure from someone else’s pain. Those wacky, wacky Germans.

That’s not a gaming problem. That’s not even just a marketing problem. That’s a human problem with a media plan.

Marketing is very good at finding the part of us that is already awake. It can put a handle on a feeling and make the vague thing visible. Once that feeling has a name, a campaign, and a little universe around it, it becomes easier to carry around — and harder to put down.

That may be the part we don’t like to admit. The market doesn’t only sell us what we need. It sells us what we’re willing to recognize in ourselves. Hatred would not make it onto the box if everyone recoiled from it. It gets there because enough people understand the signal, even if they would never describe themselves that way.

pic

THE MOMENT TEACHES THE MARKETER 

This is where naming gets serious. A name is not just a label you stick on something after the real work is done. It is part of the work. It tells people where to look, what to feel, and what kind of emotional contract they are entering.

That does not mean every name has to be gentle or morally spotless. Nobody wants a culture where every product sounds like herbal tea for nervous accountants. There is room for names that are sharp, dark, or unsettling. The issue is not whether a brand can use difficult language. The issue is whether anyone in the room stops long enough to ask what the language is doing.

That question matters because marketing has a way of making things feel normal. Put a word in the right typeface, repeat it enough, wrap it in music and motion, and the word starts to change temperature. After a while, it no longer arrives as a shock. It becomes part of the room.

At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time on the hidden work language does before anyone buys, shares, or repeats. The best branding does not just grab attention — it understands the cost of the attention it grabs. A name can do its job and still be cheap. It can be memorable for the wrong reason. Those aren’t always popular things to say in a meeting where everyone wants the sharpest hook. But they should probably be said more often.

THE LINE QUESTION 

The question is not whether a brand is allowed to sell something. Most of the time, the answer is yes. A brand can sell darkness, conflict, or danger. It can push against good taste. It can live in the uglier parts of the imagination. That has always been part of art, entertainment, and commerce. The better question is whether every sellable feeling deserves to be sold as hard as we know how to sell it.

That’s not a censorship argument. It’s not a panic button. It’s the question that seems to disappear when the room gets excited about a strong idea. A name can hit, a campaign can have teeth, and the audience can respond before anyone asks what everyone is actually nodding to.

Maybe that’s the line. Not a rule written in permanent ink. Not a committee with clipboards deciding what words are allowed. Just a moment in the room where someone asks: are we amplifying something we actually want more of?

That question won’t always kill the idea. It probably shouldn’t. Dark ideas can be honest, and uncomfortable language can earn its place. But there is a difference between exploring a hard human feeling and turning that feeling into the cleanest hook in the room.

That difference matters. Not because brands are responsible for the whole moral condition of the planet — that would be a ridiculous burden to put on a naming meeting. But brands participate. They add weight. They make certain feelings easier to repeat. They help decide what starts to feel ordinary. And once something feels ordinary, it gets much harder to notice.

pic

THE TAKEAWAY 

Maybe the point is not that a video game used the word hatred. The point is that the word felt commercially useful enough to lead with, and most of us barely blinked.

That is what brands should pay attention to. A name can land and still normalize something while it lands. The strongest hook in the room can also be the cheapest one. Speed through the culture is not the same as worth.

At ThoughtLab, we believe language does work before anyone notices it working. A name can invite, sharpen, or sell. It can also make something ugly feel ordinary if enough craft is wrapped around it. That does not mean brands need to become timid. It means they need to become more awake.

Every brand is answering a question, whether it means to or not: what are we putting into the world, and what are we asking people to stop finding strange?

I’m not sure where the line is. I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But I think there should be people in the room willing to ask whether a sellable thing is also a thing worth selling.

I’m going back to the Plaud. Something else will arrive.

Last night, in a lot by the sea, I went to the circus. A huge red-and-white tent was set up on the lot, the ocean air filling it with a sweet combination of brine and possibility. I had a great seat, close enough to see the expressions on the performers’ faces, yet far enough away to get the whole picture. I love the circus. Where else can you see clowns, acrobats, contortionists, and jugglers in one spot and not worry about catching an STD? We don’t have vaudeville any longer, but the circus is working hard to keep that tradition alive.

I was a clown. Not a class clown, an actual performing clown. I worked under a tent. I did bits. I made people laugh and rarely made a kid cry. Because I had good teachers, I understood the purpose and meaning of being a clown. I loved it and, you know, I was good at it. So when I go to the circus, and I go whenever I see an ad for one, I’m watching with a love of the craft and a memory of what it was like.

Sitting there last night, watching the tent breathe and the audience lean forward, I felt that old recognition. Not nostalgia exactly. More like remembering a language I used to speak with my whole body. There are some forms of imagination that don’t ask permission before entering the room. They arrive painted, sweating, grinning, already in motion.

After the show, as I walked home, I bumped into a friend of mine who is an artist. A real, working, pieces in a gallery, artist. He said I seemed excited, and I congratulated him on his keen observation skills. “I am excited,” I told him, “I’ve just been to the circus.” With that, I let loose all the thrills of the acts, the fun, the excitement, the danger, and how it all brought back memories of my clown days. “And now,” he said, “What are you doing now?” I was thrown by the question. I knew he didn’t mean at that moment. I was heading home; he knew that, but his question was more all-encompassing. Not what are you doing this moment, but what are you doing with these feelings, memories, and emotions. What will you create? is what he was asking. I don’t know, was all I could say to him. He smiled, put his hand on my shoulder, and said,  “Your muse is out of focus.” And then he walked off toward his usual bar, leaving me on the street, alone, wondering what the hell he meant and if I could get a muse on DoorDash.

The thing is, I’ve never had a muse. I’ve met women who inspired me, but usually they inspired me to act like an idiot and put notes and flowers on their cars. But I never considered any woman as a muse. Mostly because the idea of a muse seems old-fashioned, out of date, and it’s hard to have a muse when said muse has a restraining order out on you. But the women in the diaphonous dress, lying about on couches, teasing me, looking at me with smoky eyes and inspiring me into writing more, better, deeper, that has never been a part of my process. I know only a few folks who’ve had muses, and they mostly turned out to be dysfunctional relationships, and no writing was done. 

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?

What a brand muse actually is

I don’t think a brand muse is mystical. I don’t think she floats into a quarterly planning meeting wearing a sheer robe, taps the CMO on the forehead, and whispers the next campaign platform into existence. Though, honestly, I would attend that meeting.

A brand muse is less dramatic than that, and probably more useful. It’s the instinct underneath the work. The thing a brand keeps returning to when it has to make a choice. It’s the pressure that says, ” This sounds like us, this doesn’t, this is alive, this is just approved.”

That matters because brands make decisions all day long. Brands make choices all day long, from campaigns to product names to the weird little customer emails nobody thinks matter until they sound like they were written by a haunted compliance department.  written by someone who has clearly been trapped in a compliance basement since 2009. Every one of those choices either sharpens the brand or blurs it a little more.

When the muse is in focus, the brand knows what kind of world it belongs to. Not in a precious way. Not in a “we are a movement” way, unless the brand has earned that, and very few have. I mean, it has a kind of weather, a sense of humor, and enough nerve to know what belongs to it and what doesn’t.  The difference between a sentence that would be said and a sentence that only exists because sixteen people survived a meeting and nobody had the strength to fight anymore.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. A muse is not the work itself. She’s what helps the work know where to go.

For a clown, maybe that’s timing. For a writer, maybe it’s the little internal shiver that tells you a line is either honest or trying too hard. For a brand, it’s the creative instinct that gives everything a center. Without it, the work can still be clean. It can still be strategic. It can still be very pleased with itself in a deck.

But it won’t have a pulse.

pic

When the muse is in focus

You can feel it when a brand knows what it is doing.

Not everything is loud. Not everything has to juggle fire while riding a horse. Sometimes the work is quiet and exact. Sometimes it’s strange enough to make someone in the room nervous. The point is not volume. The point is focus.

Old Spice knew. At some point, somebody looked at a men’s body wash brand and decided the answer was not more steam, more abs, or another man staring into a mirror as if soap had finally solved his childhood trauma. The answer was absurdity with a straight face. A man on a horse. A voice that moved faster than logic. A whole little universe where confidence had become unhinged, but somehow still smelled good.

That is a muse in focus. You may not like the work. You may be tired of the work. But you know, immediately, that it belongs to Old Spice.

Liberty Mutual has it too, even though I still can’t fully explain why. LiMu Emu and Doug should probably not work. An emu and a man in a little insurance sitcom sounds like the result of a whiteboard session that went unattended for too long. But there they are, year after year, living inside this odd little world the brand keeps choosing on purpose. That “on purpose” matters.

A lot of brands stumble into something interesting once, then spend the next three years sanding it down so nobody gets blamed for liking it. The braver thing is to keep going. To protect the strange little door once it opens. To say, yes, this is ours, even if someone in a conference room has questions.

That’s what focus looks like. The work has a center. It can bend without becoming someone else. It can change campaigns, change formats, change the joke, and still carry the same charge.

The muse is not there to make the brand pretty. She is there to make the brand recognizable in its bones.

When the muse gets blurred

You can feel that too, though it doesn’t always announce itself as failure. The work still looks professional. That’s the dangerous part. Nothing is broken in an obvious way. The lighting is good, the voiceover is warm, and the message has been tested until everyone who needed to feel safe could feel safe before lunch. Then the thing arrives in the world with no pulse.

This is why so many car commercials feel like they were all raised in the same extremely clean suburb. There is always a road and a view, always someone driving as if changing lanes has revealed something tender and enormous about the human condition. And, they never use their directional.

Nobody sets out to make forgettable work. I don’t believe that. Somewhere early on, the idea probably had teeth. It might have let the car behave strangely, or given the driver something more interesting than a smoother commute. It might even have come close to telling the truth, which in advertising can be treated like finding a raccoon in the nursery. Then the idea entered the room, which is usually where the blur begins. Not because the people there are stupid. Most of them are smart, and many of them have good taste. But a clear instinct is hard to defend when everyone else is holding a spreadsheet. The unusual thing has to explain itself. The safe thing just has to sit there looking responsible.

So the edge comes off. The joke gets smaller. The line that made everyone nervous becomes a line that makes no one feel anything. By the time the work is finished, it has survived the process, but survival is not the same as life.

That’s the blurred muse. You can still see the outline of what might have been there, something with shape, something with nerve, something that once knew where it wanted to go. But now it’s just another car on another beautiful road, heading nowhere in particular.

pic

The people who blur her

The easy version of this argument is that boring work comes from boring people. I don’t buy that.

Some of the people in those rooms are talented. The boring work is not proof that everyone involved is boring. A person can have taste, nerve, and a half-finished screenplay in a drawer, then still spend Tuesday afternoon asking whether the strange idea might make legal uncomfortable. That’s not a lack of imagination. That’s fear with a calendar invite. They didn’t enter the room, hoping to sand the life out of something. They entered the room responsible for money, reputation, timelines, jobs, and the terrible little weather system known as approval.

That kind of pressure changes people. A strange idea can be thrilling when it’s still in someone’s head, but once it has to survive a meeting, thrill starts looking like risk. Risk needs a defense. Defense needs numbers. Numbers have a way of making instinct seem childish, even when instinct is the only reason the work was alive in the first place.

So people get careful. They ask for the line to be softened. They wonder if the joke will land. They say the concept is interesting, which is often where interesting concepts go to hear the bad news. Nobody thinks they’re killing anything. They’re just making the work easier to approve.

That’s how the muse gets blurred. Not by one villain with a red pen, but by good people trying not to be wrong in public.

And I get it. Being wrong in public is awful. Being the person who approved the weird thing is even worse if the weird thing fails. But there’s a cost to making everything defensible before it’s allowed to breathe. After a while, the work no longer feels created. It feels managed.

That may be the real danger. Not failure. Not even bad taste. The real danger is a room full of smart people slowly teaching each other to distrust the first living thing that walks in.

How to know she’s gone

You can usually tell when the muse has left the building because the work starts sounding perfectly reasonable.

That’s the curse of it. Dead work rarely announces itself by being terrible. Terrible would almost be a mercy. Terrible has a smell. What usually shows up is something clean, balanced, approved, and impossible to remember five minutes later. The sentences behave. The visuals behave. The whole thing behaves itself right into the grave.

This is where brand work gets tricky, because everyone can point to the parts that are technically working. The message is clear. The audience is defined. The strategy has a nice little sentence at the top of the deck, wearing the shoes it bought for a conference. On paper, nothing looks wrong. But the work could belong to anyone.

That’s the giveaway. Swap the logo, and the body doesn’t reject the transplant. The voice has no fingerprints. The idea has no strange little scar that makes it unmistakable. It may be professional, but professional is not the same as alive.

A brand with no muse can still produce a lot of work. It can fill the calendar, feed the campaign, and keep the machine warm. What it can’t do is make people feel that someone with a point of view was in the room. There’s no sense of choice. No pressure. No odd little angle that tells you a human being fought for something.

And maybe that’s what my friend meant when he said my muse was out of focus. Maybe he wasn’t accusing me of having no imagination. Maybe he was telling me the signal had gotten soft. The thing I used to recognize under the tent, the thing that arrived painted and sweating and already in motion, was still there somewhere. I just wasn’t looking at it clearly enough.

pic

The Takeaway

I keep thinking back to that tent by the sea.

The performers knew where the edge was. You could feel it. Not because everything was dangerous, though some of it was, but because the whole thing had a pulse. Clowning, when it’s done well, is not just falling down in large pants. It’s timing, taste, nerve, and a deep respect for the audience. You have to know what you’re serving. You have to know what kind of foolishness belongs to you.

Maybe that’s true for brands too.

A brand without a muse can still function. It can sell things, run meetings, make ads, send emails that begin with “We’re excited to announce.” The machine can keep moving for a long time without anyone asking whether the work still has a soul. But when the muse is out of focus, everything gets a little softer. The voice loses its shape. The strange parts get explained away. The work becomes easier to approve and harder to care about.

At ThoughtLab, that’s often where the real work begins. Not with making a brand louder or prettier, but helping it see what’s already trying to come through. The instinct. The nerve. The thing under the makeup.

I don’t know if I have a muse. I still think she sounds like trouble, and I have enough of that without inviting a woman in a diaphanous dress to start making notes in the margins. But I know what it feels like when something comes into focus. I felt it under the tent. I felt it walking home. I felt it when my friend put a hand on my shoulder and said the thing I didn’t want to hear.

Your muse is out of focus.

Maybe that’s not an insult. Maybe it’s an invitation to look harder.

My father had this little quirk. Whenever we kids did something wrong, he would pull us aside and say, “Let me tell you a story.” Then he’d basically say, if you do that again, I’m gonna kick your ass. Simple, clear, to the point. However, as I got older, I began to realize he wasn’t really telling us a story. A story has a hero, a journey, guides, and lessons. My father’s stories had him kicking our asses.

Did we go on a journey? Nope. Did we have guides in these stories? No. It was Dad kicking the asses of his kids. Not a story, well certainly not a good story. There were never any surprises. A mean character never had a change of heart. A main character never discovered their purpose. His stories could be boiled down to seven words: “Do it again, I’ll kick your ass.” But no matter what happened, Dad would always start with, “Let me tell you a story.”

Storytelling is really big in branding. Everything has a story, an arc, a main character, and on and on. Brands don’t say to customers, “Here’s a story, buy this product or service, or you’ll get your ass kicked.” Why? Two reasons. One, that’s not something you say to a customer. Threatening has never been a good sales technique. Two, because it’s not really a story. “Once upon a time, I got my ass kicked, so I bought a jet ski” is not a good story.

As a copywriter, I find story important. Finding a brand’s story, the story of a logo, and all sorts of storytelling go into branding and marketing. But from time to time, I have to wonder whether storytelling is really the be-all and end-all I was taught to believe. Does everything need a story, or have we started calling everything a story because it makes the work sound deeper than it is?

pic

Not Everything Is a Story

That’s the thing about the word story. It can make almost anything sound more important than it is. A company history becomes a story. A mission statement becomes a story. A homepage becomes a story. Suddenly, every piece of brand communication is being treated as if it needs a main character, an emotional arc, and a little music swelling beneath it.

But sometimes a thing is just a thing. A product description is there to describe the product. An About page is there to tell people who you are, what you do, and why you exist. A service page needs to explain the service before it takes anyone on a journey. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, there’s something kind of refreshing about it. 

The problem is not storytelling. The problem is calling everything storytelling because the word makes the work feel deeper. Story sounds warm, human, and meaningful, so we keep reaching for it, even when what we actually have is a message, a claim, a promise, an explanation, or a perfectly useful bit of information.

And those things matter too. A message can be powerful. A promise can mean something. An explanation can be generous. Information can be exactly what someone needs. Not every sentence has to carry the burden of myth.

A real story has movement. Something changes. Someone wants something. Something gets in the way. There’s pressure, consequence, discovery, or at least some kind of shift from where we began. Without that, you may have good copy. You may have smart positioning. You may have a clean paragraph that does its job beautifully. But you probably don’t have a story.

Why Brands Love the Word So Much

There’s a reason storytelling became such a big word in branding. It sounds warmer than strategy, deeper than messaging, and more human than content. Nobody wants to sit in a room and say, “Let’s organize some useful information in a way people can understand.” That may be the right thing to do, but it doesn’t exactly make the lights flicker. 

Story gives the work a little glow. A product can start to feel like part of something bigger. A company history can become more than a timeline. An About page can carry emotional weight rather than just listing names, dates, values, and a polished team photo. 

And honestly, some of that is good. Story helps people care. It gives a brand shape. A founder’s frustration becomes a reason for being. A customer senses there’s a human mind behind the business, not just a group of people trapped forever inside a slide deck. 

The trouble starts when the word becomes automatic. Suddenly, brand exercises have to uncover the story, copy has to tell the story, and presentations promise a narrative arc even when the real job is much simpler than that. At a certain point, story stops being a useful tool and becomes a fancy label we slap on anything that has more than two paragraphs. 

That’s when the word begins to blur. Story starts to mean message, positioning, brand platform, or whatever happens to be on the screen when someone says, “What’s the story here?” 

And maybe that’s the real problem. Not that brands care about story too much, but that we’ve made the word so large it can barely do its job anymore.

pic

A Real Story Needs Tension

A real story needs something to push against. It doesn’t have to be dramatic in the movie trailer sense. Nobody needs to be running through an airport, chasing a stolen briefcase, or standing in the rain realizing they’ve misunderstood love for the last twenty years. But something has to be unsettled. Someone has to want something, and it has to be difficult enough to make us care what happens next. This is also where my father’s stories fell a little short. There was tension, technically. I’ll give him that. But tension is more than when, where, and how I might get my ass kicked if I did the thing again. That was more of a warning with stage direction. It had stakes, sure, but not much discovery. There was no mystery, no turn, no deeper meaning hiding under the threat. The whole thing started with “let me tell you a story” and ended exactly where you knew it would end.

That’s where a lot of brand storytelling gets thin. The language says story, but the actual material says summary. A company was founded. A product was created. A team believed in quality. A service was built to help people. All of that may be true, and some of it may even be useful, but it doesn’t become a story just because we put it in chronological order and add a few warm adjectives.

The tension is usually hiding somewhere else. It’s in the thing the founder couldn’t stop noticing. It’s in the problem everyone else had learned to tolerate. It’s in the frustration that kept showing up until someone finally said, there has to be a better way to do this. That’s where the story begins to breathe a little. Not in the date the company opened its doors, but in the reason those doors needed to open in the first place.

This matters because people can feel the difference. They may not sit there analyzing structure or asking where the inciting incident is, because thankfully, most people have better things to do. But they can tell when something has weight. They can tell when a brand is circling something real instead of decorating a timeline. They can tell when the words are pointing to actual human pressure, not just arranging facts into a prettier shape.

That’s why tension matters. Without it, you may have a nice origin paragraph. You may have a polished About page. You may have a neat little sequence of events that moves from “we saw a need” to “we built a solution” to “now we’re passionate about helping customers.” But story needs more than movement from one sentence to the next. It needs a reason to keep listening.

Sometimes Clarity Beats Storytelling

This is where brands can get themselves into trouble. They take something that needs to be clear and try to make it feel profound. A simple point gets wrapped in a journey. A useful answer gets buried under so much atmosphere that the customer has to dig through the story just to figure out what’s being offered. Not every brand moment needs that. A product page may just need to explain the product. A service page may need to say what the service is, who it helps, and why it matters. A pricing page may need to be a pricing page, where the real hero isn’t the founder or the bold new future of the industry. It’s the price being easy to find. There’s nothing small about clarity. In fact, clarity can be one of the most generous things a brand offers. It respects the person on the other side. It says, ” We know you’re busy. We know you came here for a reason. We’re not going to make you wander through our emotional landscape before we tell you what we do.”

That doesn’t mean the writing has to be dry. It doesn’t mean the brand has to become a vending machine with a logo. Clear doesn’t have to mean flat. It can still have voice, warmth, and a point of view. It can still feel human. It just doesn’t have to pretend every sentence is part of some grand narrative arc.

Sometimes the strongest copy is not the copy that tells the biggest story. It’s the copy that knows exactly what job it has, does that job well, and gets out of the way before it starts wearing a cape.

pic

The Danger of Story-Shaped Fog

When brands force story where it doesn’t belong, the writing starts to get foggy. Simple ideas stretch into big emotional claims. Clear points become soft and rounded. Everything starts to sound important, but not always useful. You can feel the copy trying very hard to mean something, even when the thing underneath it might have been stronger if someone had just said it plainly.

That’s how you end up with brand language that sounds good until you ask what it actually means. “Our journey began with a simple belief.” “We’re redefining what’s possible.” “We exist to empower people to live better.” None of these are automatically bad, but they become a problem when they float above the real thing. What belief? What possibility? Better how? For whom? In what actual way?

Story-shaped fog happens when brands confuse emotional language with emotional truth. Instead of making the idea more specific, they make the language bigger. The message gets dressed up, but it doesn’t get clearer. 

And people feel that too. Maybe they don’t stop and think, this brand has confused narrative framing with strategic clarity. That would be a strange thing to think while shopping for socks or looking for a dentist. But they can feel when the words are doing too much. They can feel when a brand is asking for emotional investment it hasn’t earned yet.

A real story reveals something. Fog hides something. And if the audience has to keep pushing through all that mood just to understand what the brand actually does, the story is not helping. It’s getting in the way.

The Better Question

Maybe the better question is not always, “What’s the story?” Maybe the better question is, “What is this really?”

Because once you ask that, the work gets more honest. Maybe there really is a story. Maybe there’s a real tension, a meaningful shift, and a reason to care. But at least now the story has to prove it belongs there. 

But maybe it’s not a story. Maybe it’s just a message, a promise, or one clean sentence that tells people what they need to know. 

That doesn’t make it less valuable. It might make it more valuable. The job is not to turn everything into a story. The job is to understand what each piece of communication needs to do, then let it do that thing as clearly and honestly as possible.

The answer might be story, strategy, or plain language with a little life in it. The real skill is knowing the difference. 

pic

The Takeaway

Storytelling still matters. I believe that. This isn’t an argument against story, and I don’t want it to be. Stories help people understand. They help people remember. They give shape to things that might otherwise feel scattered or flat. A good brand story can carry belief, tension, purpose, personality, and a reason to care all at once.

But not everything is a story. Some things are messages, promises, or useful pieces of information standing there, doing honest work, asking not to be dragged into a hero’s journey against their will. 

That’s where brands need to be more careful. When story is real, use it. When the tension is there, shape it. When there’s a human reason behind the brand, bring it forward and let people feel it. But when clarity would serve the audience better, don’t bury it under narrative just because “storytelling” sounds more important in the meeting.

At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time helping brands find the difference. Sometimes there’s a story worth uncovering. Other times, the better work is sharpening the message and stripping away the fog until the idea is clear enough to use. 

Because the goal is not to call everything a story. The goal is to say the thing in the way it deserves to be said.

I recall saving up money from my job as a bagger at a grocery store, getting on the bus with some friends, heading to Beverly, Massachusetts, and walking to the Cabot Street Theater to see Le Grand David and His Own Spectacular Magic Company. The longest-running live stage magic show in one theater in history. It was spectacular. All your classic magic tricks: sawing a woman in half, the metamorphosis, one man is put in a bag, the bag is sealed with chains and locks, and he’s dropped into a chest. The chest is then chained and padlocked, and another man stands on top of the chest, pulls a curtain up around himself, drops it in two seconds, and the guy in the chest is now on top of the chest, and the guy in the bag in the chest is the guy who was on top. And it happened in the blink of an eye.

I have a friend who is a magician, and I used to go see this show with him. He knew how to do the illusions, but he still studied every moment like he was finding the secret to life. I loved the show: classic Auguste clowns, beautiful women, live music, and just the most mind-blowing illusions. My friend would say, “I know how to do that one,” but he’d never tell me, and I was so happy. One of my favorite moments in the show was when an older magician would come right to the lip of the stage wearing a cape. He’d take the cape off, spin it in the air, and pass it over the ground, and as he pulled it away, there was a bunny. It was the moment of pure magic to me. All the other illusions had boxes, ropes, and stuff. This was a man, a cape, and a bunny. I loved it.

Now, I could have asked my friend how it was done, and with enough hounding, he would have told me. I could probably look it up online. I mean, magicians have to learn how to do this stuff, so there must be information on it, right? I never did. The other stuff I could figure out if I thought about it enough, but the bunny and the cape, no idea, and I liked it that way. My friend said to me once, “Be careful. You can learn how all the tricks are done, but that will ruin the magic.” And he was right. For me, and for most of us, we may wonder, “How did he do that?” but we don’t really want to know. There’s an understanding between performer and audience. We each know there is a practical answer to how the woman levitates, but we let the moment go undiscovered so we can feel the magic. We want to believe for a few hours that the laws of physics can be broken, that a woman can fly, that a man can cut a woman in half and she’ll live. Or, even simpler, that a man with a cape can make bunnies appear out of thin air.

I’m thinking about this today because I fear there is a lack of magic in our lives. Maybe it’s not magic. Maybe it’s wonder. There is a lack of something that allows for magic and wonder to be part of our lives. This became crushingly clear when I read a BBC article saying that Banksy’s identity has been discovered. Following that, there were stories asking whether the person they identified is really Banksy, with more speculation and on and on. Instead of just appreciating his work, his cleverness, and the mystery around him, people had to know. They had to know who this guy is and how he does his work. They all wanted to know how the bunny appeared. And my question is, why?

Why do we need to know his identity? Why do we need to know how the bunny appears? To know is to, well, know, I guess, but in some situations, to know is also the end of it. Once you know the trick, why bother seeing the show? Once you know who Banksy is, he’s just a guy. The mystique of the guy who painted the revolutionary throwing a sandwich is just another graffiti artist. Part of what makes Banksy Banksy is the mystery. One day, a wall is just a wall, but overnight it’s transformed by the artist’s skill and vision into a political statement, a rallying point, a social commentary that’s speaking to a huge swath of the population. Knowing who he is actually diminishes the message, because now it’s about the man, not the art. So I ask again, why?

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. And we need those answers, right? But do we?

What Explanation Takes With It

We tend to assume explanation makes things better. More context, more access, more information. We talk about all of that like it’s automatically a gain, as if knowing how something works always deepens our experience of it. But that isn’t always true. Sometimes explanation enters the room, and something else leaves.

What leaves is often the part that made us care in the first place. Tension leaves. Anticipation leaves. That strange little gap between what we’ve seen and what we can account for leaves too, and that gap matters more than we admit. It’s often where wonder lives. Once everything gets reduced to process, identity, method, and mechanics, the experience changes. We may know more, but we feel less. We’re no longer inside the moment. We’re outside it, studying how it was built.

That’s true of magic, obviously, but it’s true of much more than magic. It happens in art. It happens in performance. It happens in culture. There are some things that want to be experienced before they’re dissected, and sometimes the dissection is the thing that drains them. You get the answer, sure, but the feeling that sent you searching in the first place starts to thin out.

Maybe that’s the trade we keep making without fully noticing it. We satisfy curiosity, but we flatten the experience. We get access, but lose awe. We get the mechanism, but lose the moment. And once that happens, it’s hard to recover what was alive in it before.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. Knowing is not always the same as seeing, and explanation is not always the same as understanding.

Clarity Is Not the Same as Exposure

None of this is an argument for vagueness, and it’s not an argument for hiding things that matter. People deserve honesty. They deserve clarity. If something affects trust, safety, money, or truth, then yes, say it plainly. Be clear. Be direct. Don’t hide behind mystique and call it depth.

But that’s not really what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the strange modern belief that everything becomes better once it’s fully explained, fully exposed, fully dragged into the light. That belief sounds smart, maybe even virtuous, but it misses something basic about how people actually experience the world. Not every meaningful thing arrives as information. Some things arrive as feeling first. Some things work because they leave room. Room to wonder, room to interpret, room to lean in.

That’s the difference. Clarity helps us understand what something is. Overexposure can strip away how it feels. One creates orientation. The other can collapse tension. And tension, in the right places, isn’t a flaw. It’s part of the experience. It’s what keeps us engaged. It’s what gives certain things their charge.

You can see this all over the place now. The endless behind-the-scenes footage. The constant decoding. The insistence that every artist, every idea, every piece of work needs to come with a full explanation attached to it, as if the audience can’t be trusted to meet it halfway. As if the work itself isn’t enough. As if interpretation is somehow inferior to disclosure.

Maybe that’s what feels off. We’ve started treating total exposure as a kind of virtue, even in places where it leaves the experience thinner than it was before.

We’ve Turned Revelation Into a Reflex

Somewhere along the way, revelation stopped being an occasional pleasure and became a reflex. We don’t just encounter things now. We decode them. We explain them, expose them, reduce them, package them, and pass them around as if the highest form of engagement is to strip away whatever made the thing shimmer in the first place.

You can see it in the way people talk about artists, ideas, and even experiences now. Everything comes with a demand for the backstory, the process, the identity, the hidden meaning, the trick behind the trick. The work is no longer enough. It has to be opened up and accounted for. It has to be made legible from every angle, even if that legibility drains some of the life out of it.

That instinct has shaped advertising, too. So much of it now is built around the promise of revelation. The secret they don’t want you to know. The thing hiding in plain sight. The truth finally exposed. It’s all framed as access, as if access itself were the prize. But access is not the same thing as depth, and exposure is not the same thing as meaning. Sometimes it’s just more information wrapped in urgency.

What gets lost in all of this is the audience’s role in the experience. If everything is explained, there’s nothing left to feel your way toward. Nothing left to interpret. Nothing left to discover in your own time. The whole thing arrives already flattened, already solved, already dead on the table.

The Takeaway

Maybe that’s what I’m really arguing for here. Not secrecy. Not confusion. Just a little restraint. A little respect for the fact that not everything meaningful needs to be pulled apart the moment it appears.

We’ve gotten very used to the idea that more explanation is always better. More access, more context, more exposure, more reveal. But there are parts of life that don’t improve under that kind of light. They shrink. They lose air. They stop moving. What once felt alive starts to feel handled.

Maybe that’s because some things need space to work on us. A magic trick. A piece of art. A public mystery. Even a person. Not everything has to arrive with an answer attached to it. Not everything gets deeper once the mechanism is exposed. Sometimes the experience is the meaning. Sometimes the wonder is the point.

I still think about that bunny. Not because I solved it, and not because I ever wanted to. I think about it because for a moment it let me feel something clean and impossible, and I was smart enough, or lucky enough, to leave it alone.

Maybe we’d all be better off if we left a few more things alone. Not out of ignorance, but out of respect for what mystery makes possible.