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