Toniq

You can be the underdog for a long time. You can be the underdog for fifteen years. You can be the underdog right up until the moment you've covered the whole country in pink dots, and your subscriber count is shoulder-to-shoulder with the giants you spent your life fighting. And then, very quietly, the underdog story stops working.

I'm not arguing the game shouldn't exist. I'm noticing what it tells us about the moment this title landed. That a marketing team workshopped it and won. The world is in a mess. Everyone who is paying attention agrees on that much, even when they agree on nothing else. And in that mess, the products that travel are often the products that name the mess as the feature.

So, my friend's comment about my muse being out of focus was interesting, and it started me thinking about muses, what is a muse, why is a muse, and, as is always the case, how it connects to my work with ThoughtLab. And this brought up the question: if you’re a brand, do you have a muse?

Storytelling is really big in branding. Everything has a story, an arc, a main character, and on and on. Brands don’t say to customers, “Here’s a story, buy this product or service, or you’ll get your ass kicked.” Why? Two reasons. One, that’s not something you say to a customer. Threatening has never been a good sales technique. Two, because it’s not really a story.

There was a time when brand impact was easier to see, or at least easier to understand. That doesn’t mean it was pure. It doesn’t mean every company has a golden heart beating underneath the sales report.

The five-legged goat works because it wasn't hidden, apologized for, or quietly corrected. It was allowed to remain visible. That's the part I can't stop thinking about, because Disney isn't some scrappy little brand still figuring out who it is. Disney is Disney. It's one of the most controlled, polished, operationally obsessed brands on earth.

She kept climbing onto the desk and saying, “Au-dessus de.” Then she kept jumping down, standing beside it, and saying, “À côté de.” Again and again, until the difference finally landed in all of us.

But Dawkins has done some great work, including his seminal book The God Delusion. Recently, he has come under fire for his pronouncement that AI, specifically his AI agent, Claudia, is conscious. Even if it doesn’t know it, Dawkins claims that after spending time chatting and sharing his new book with his AI bestie, Claudia is a conscious being.

Not because clocks are holy. Or that every office needs to be run like a Victorian orphanage. And certainly not because everyone should spend their life terrified of the second hand. Because being late is almost never just about the person who is late.

The fool was never just an entertainer. The court paid for a clown and got something stranger in return: a man whose job was to walk into the most powerful room in the kingdom and tell the most powerful person in the kingdom that he was being an idiot. In verse.

Brands do this constantly. They reach for words that still feel alive inside the building but sound half-dead by the time they reach another human being. Disruptive has been through too much. Authentic now arrives wearing a name tag.

Milestones happen, and they happen without us noticing very much. They happen in everyday life, under everyday circumstances, and yet, more often than not, we miss them until someone or something points them out to us later.

Know the law. She said it with such confidence, and yet she was wrong. This made me think of something, some item or idea I had seen recently. Then it came to me, oh right, this is like every YouTube video I’ve seen where someone says, I know the law

It happens to us now and then: a brand we love is suddenly gone. How does that happen and why? Who's in charge of brand funerals, and what is the process of allowing a brand to die? Can a brand live forever? What does that take? Good questions.

Stories make the impossible seem possible. A good story takes you out of your own life for a moment and fills your mind with what-ifs. For those few moments when someone sits on your desk and says, “You’re not going to believe what just happened,” your mind says, “I will believe; I want to believe; tell me the story.”