Agalia Tan

We lose the feeling that comes with a little mystery and a healthy amount of risk. When we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, you know what happens? We get to be surprised. Our anticipation builds in the not knowing – better get there early to figure out getting in, ask others if it’s their first time, scan a pamphlet for clues or read seat... See more

In CAPS LOCK , Ruben Pater traces the evolution of branding from livestock to slavery to mass-produced goods. Today it has obviously gone lightyears further, grooming every part of an experience that may not even be associated with a product you can hold in your hands. He writes: “Even a well-designed brand for a museum still uses the same logic of... See more

Good branding signals other things related to class and positionality – if an experience looks good, it’s because it was crafted at some point by a designer and a creative director who had the time, skills, and zeitgeist awareness to know what looks good (one of the founders of the swim club mentioned above is a graphic designer by trade, as an exa... See more

These are the run clubs and swim clubs with very robustly branded websites for some reason, websites that greet you with full-width videos of delighted people being very sweaty together. New ventures for “group conversation” or exclusive social spaces or curated clubs with sign-up flows and membership levels that evoke the rigor of a bank account r... See more

When curiosity is at tension with productivity, and play is eclipsed by monetization, we get nothing good.

As Rory Sutherland sees it,

“People effectively are laser focused on the things they can get bollocked for. And it's much, much easier to get bollocked for being illogical than it is to get bollocked for being unimaginative.

You can't bollock

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To sabotage the mindless saboteurs who are following the CIA’s manual, here are some new instructions:

01. ELI5 (Explain Like I’m Five) : Play dumb. Require over-simplification in the recommendation. Request or provide a super basic answer to help strip jargon and complexity. If it doesn’t make sense to a five year old, it won’t ever make sense. Ma... See more

How to Dissent

Simply, we need to ask three questions:

Why are we doing this?

Who is this for?

Does this matter to them?

We’ve sacrificed nuanced judgment for a trend report without a methodology.

We’ve sacrificed white space thinking for whatever the average is doing.

And we’ve sacrificed the attributes we care most about (resonance, loyalty, fandom, influence and impact) for the metrics easily available to us (clicks, views and follows).

As Rick Rubin puts it,

“If you

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As marketer and author Rory Sutherland puts it, many of the problems we face today are open ended. Yet we aren’t actually looking to solve these problems.

Instead, we’re looking to win arguments . Or as I put it, we’re looking to maintain our employer’s health insurance. Don’t rock the boat.