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Marketers are privileged indeed to make promises. Why make promises you know you can’t keep?

-Seth Godin

Marketing is a game of promises.

Conversion rates are promise delivery measurements.

Repeat customer rate is a trust barometer.

Puffery is over promising, repeatedly.

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These definitions from Robin Sloan are helpful:

An accurate definition of “influencer” is: a virtuoso of a particular internet platform; someone who has learned to use its mechanisms to achieve their own objectives, rather than the other way around.

An accurate definition of an internet “creator” would have to be: someone whose income is determined by a platform’s algorithms.

Aligns with why platforms suddenly started talking about the “creator economy” instead of just influencers.

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Give them pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.

-Alfred Hitchcock

Isn’t this essentially the premise of painkiller based marketing?

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Work can only be universal if it is rooted in a part of its creator which is most privately and particularly himself.

-Tyrone Guthrie

Brands typically try to smooth out the edges—polish everything to a uniform shine. In the post-AI world, it’s the idiosyncrasies that will make for truly winning brands.

Mission, vision, values are pieces of paper that can change with a board meeting.

Personality is actually having something to say and a unique way of saying it. Something that is core to the brand itself and not a committee’s reaction to societal trends.

See: Liquid Death

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Does Meta have its long-desired hardware platform? Or at least the start of it?

It’s extended the contract with the Ray-Ban parent company for more years of smart glasses collaboration.

Now, according to Bloomberg, Oakley is joining the crew.

Plus…

Company resumes work on smartwatch and develops AirPods rival

First real AR glasses, dubbed ‘Artemis,’ are planned for 2027

The question used to be: what will replace the smartphone?

But the path now seems to be to replace the interface and turn the smartphone into a personal, portable server for ambient computing peripherals and AI features.

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Doing business on the internet is about convincing people you don’t know that you have something they need or want. Think of a brand as the bridge between the two.

-Jack Butcher

Brands bridge the identity narrative between business and customer.

Brands are bat signals.
Not logos.

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I love this. It’s ridiculous. And it works because it’s ridiculous.

It’s so over the top that it’s not a dark pattern or a trick.

It’s also a great way to figure out who your true fans are.

via Harry Dry

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The best businesses understand and embed themselves into the lifestyles and self-conceptions of their customers.

When you sell a product, you’re not just selling a product, you’re affirming an identity.

-Greg Isenberg

Identity is a narrative.

The brand-customer relationship happens when the narrative the brand is telling dovetails with the narrative the customer is telling themselves.

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This quote from The Daily Upside doesn’t surprise me:

Sales of new homes picked up considerably to end 2024. But sales of old homes are at their slowest pace since 1995.

A big part of the pandemic housing market insanity was older workers buying their forever homes. Locking up the existing inventory at that time and taking a big portion off the potentially liquid market for the near future.

Also, more evidence of The Great Splintering.

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In the theatre the audience want to be surprised—but by things they expect.

-Tristan Bernard

And what is social media (and other digital outlets) these days if not a form of theatre?

People want to be surprised by your marketing, but not confused.

The comforting warmth of the familiar wrapped in a new package.

Of course, sometimes a big leap followed by consistency reframes the initial surprise as expectation.