Subversion as creative strategy

In an analogy, this is how most writers, creators, and entrepreneurs think about product creation, innovation, digital transformation, and marketing. They start with “what exists,” and then aim to “disrupt” or “change” or “transform” the way it is. They assume the market. They say, “Impressionism is what people clearly want. So let’s do impressioni

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I notice we tend to talk about challenger brands from the implicit position of ‘Blimey! Who would have guessed that would work?!’ Yet from the very first second you hear a good challenger idea, it’s screamingly obvious when it’s gonna slay⁵. The whole challenger approach IS JUST ANOTHER CHAPTER IN THE BOOK OF CONVENTIONAL WISDOM INNIT.

people to work with. If you look around you, you’ll notice that the most powerful brand storytelling leverages the power of absurdity, illogicality, costliness, inefficiency and nonsensicality, because convention, similarity and rationality, for all their usefulness, convey no message about who you are and who you aren’t. ‘Meaning is conveyed by th

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