How much of the resilient consumer spending trend is due to buying before Trump’s Trade War increases prices?
Buying before the promised / threatened tariffs hit.
If a meaningful %, purchase pull forward + lower purchasing power from higher prices could mean a rough year (or more) ahead.
This ad read (not ad, just read) is great.
You can hear the bit of a laugh after the reality TV line and tell the actor had fun with that part, or at least gives us the impression of enjoyment.
It’s filled with personality in a way that doesn’t overshadow the messaging, but makes it memorable.
Jan Swafford:
The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most.
We humans need to see the human doing it
John Haugeland:
the most ordinary conversations are fraught with life and all its meanings
Austin Kleon wrote Show Your Work. Now you must also show your humanity.
The guiding principles for marketing content now are:
Personality + Behind the Scenes + What’s “Boring” to You
If this sounds like influencer style social content to you, you’re right.
via DC
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
