Allbirds is so boring, people stopped buying their shoes, and the company went from a £4 billion (B!) valuation during the pandemic to $40 million (M!) last week.

So, what exactly is so boring about Allbirds?

Funny you should ask. I actually wrote an Allbirds brand analysis for an investor a couple of years ago, when the share price had already dropped about 10x from its peak and value investors started being interested.

Now that the value destruction has been quantified (a 100x drop before going private) it’s worth revisiting what I wrote, in the hope that others (i.e., you) don’t fall into this trap.

Allbirds is one of the best examples of a purpose brand riding on the back of sustainability.

Now, I’m not here to say sustainable businesses can’t survive. What I will say, is that it’s not a brand concept you can own. “We’re sustainable” isn’t something that’ll make you unique, or bring you any kind of differentiation in the long term. In fact, it’s the kind of concept that will—by your very own agenda—condemn you to become a commodity: logically, if you really want the world to go your way and other businesses to do the sustainable thing, you can quickly see where your problem is going to be: they’ll all compete against you on the same terms.

So, clichés like “we’re sustainable” are basically intellectual commodities. And, as much as you might mean them, there’s nothing to stop people with bigger budgets from pulling the green-washed carpet from under your feet.

Which means you’ll inevitably end up in an “out-agreeing each other” scenario:

—”Ah, but we’re 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 sustainable!”
—”No, we’re even 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 sustainable!”

This, when the goal of a brand is to show the consumer how different you are to everyone else. How can you be different if you all agree with each other?

What’s more, Allbirds made a point of not looking particularly distinctive either. Which made sense for a short while: people in Silicon Valley wore Allbirds to signal that sustainability was more important to them than logos. Great, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of what these signals should look like. Signalling no importance to logos is still signalling!

For example, many years ago, when Asprey expanded from jewellery to become a lifestyle brand, they didn’t want to put their logo on the menswear labels: the only name that should appear in a gentleman’s jacket is his own. Fine, but then how do we know it’s an Asprey jacket? The solution we advocated was a purple stripe lining, which later went on to become a distinctive brand asset: Asprey later released the purple Stripe bag, the purple Stripe tea set, etc. Even the GMT line on the Asprey watch was a purple stripe.

Our rationale for the stripe was simple: from pinstripe suits to school ties and rugby shirts, stripes are the minimal aesthetic unit that conveys Englishness. So, the simplest and most understated way to express the ultimate authentic English lifestyle brand whose brand colour was a royal purple should be… purple stripes.

Understated is not another word for bland. But bland, unfortunately, is the one aspect showing just how much Allbirds was a product of its time—the age of blanding—when dozens of fashion brands thought it was a good idea to just write their name in the same sans-serif typeface as everyone else.

The lesson here is simple: don’t be boring, even (especially!) when boring is fashionable.

If someone asked me to redesign the calendar, I’d start the New Year on 24 March. Between Jesus’s circumcision and my birthday, I choose my birthday.

Cynics will say my over-inflated ego has taken over the asylum. Are we to rename March to Alexary, too?

But, let’s face it, New Year’s Day has a branding problem: its real, lived-in brand experience is very far from feeling anything like new.

24 March, by contrast, is all fresh air and springtime delight. So new!

“So what?” you say.

Well, there’s a phoney kind of New Year’s resolution that only exists as a result of New Year’s Day not matching its claim of newness with its experience. You know the type: vague, abstract, makes you feel ambitious just for having it. Get healthier. Build a great company. Change the world.

The problem isn’t that these resolutions lack ambition, it’s that our short-term actions are often hilariously misaligned with our long-term goals.

Now, here’s something most economists take for granted but most humans ignore: markets are forward-looking. Prices today contain expectations about tomorrow. Want to raise house prices in your neighbourhood today? Announce the construction of a new school to open in three years’ time.

One way to phrase this is that “the future reaches back and grabs the present by the collar”.

So, why don’t we run our lives with the same intelligence as the markets?

Take a classic example. A man wants to be healthy. But every evening in January, he chooses Netflix, beer and junk food. He wakes up full of regret, swears tomorrow will be different, and then—astonishingly—does the exact same thing again! A good, long walk never shows up as an option in the winter.

So, this is why most resolutions fail: they don’t “reach and grab the present by the collar”. They float above life, admired but irrelevant.

There are two ways to change this.

The first way: create a “holy grail”. A goal so ridiculously compelling you’d fight a bear for it. The funny thing is you’re not even supposed to reach it. Its real job is to grab your present by the collar and yell: “Absolutely not, you chaotic gremlin!” when you veer off-course. Think of SpaceX’s holy grail: Mars. Even if nobody ends up gardening on Mars, we still get reusable rockets and global internet. Nice.

Holy grails force certain choices. “Be successful” won’t stop you from doing dumb stuff, but “make all the world’s information universally accessible and useful” will make some ideas just feel wrong.

The second way: make the daily task enjoyable. Humans are weirdly great at this—a species that went from “eat or die” to Michelin-star restaurants, and from “wear this or die” to “this jacket is so me”. If working toward your goal feels as good as binge-watching a Netflix series, you’ll stick with it.

Which brings me back to our Netflix, beer and junk food man. How do we get a good, long walk to show up on his options list?

By starting the New Year, not in the winter, but on that most glorious day: 24 March.

Whenever I talk about the “Made in Italy” brand, people are surprised by the idea that the original mission for Italy’s Ministry of Culture was to serve as the foundation for what would today be termed its nation brand. We tend not to think of our culture as a deliberate construct. It’s something that’s just… there.

So, let’s go back 50 years to look at Italy’s nation brand development.

Back in the 70s, consumers had a very different idea of Italy than they do today. Less Verdi and Versace. More mafia and mummy’s boys. Less Fellini and Ferrari. More Brigate Rosse and bicycle thieves.

Following the theory that everything economic and political is “downstream” from culture, a project was set up to position Italy as the birthplace of everything that is beautiful in Western civilisation.

On this basis, the Ministry of Culture was created in 1974—six years before the launch of the “Made in Italy” brand. During those six years, the desirability of Italy itself was developed through a number of cultural programmes, all connected to each other by the simplest brand concept: 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲.

You can still sense the impact of this today when you see, for example, how Top Gear talks about Alfa Romeo. Every other car is qualified by numbers: torque, top speed, horsepower, acceleration... Then they get into an Alfa, turn on the opera music, and talk about passionate love.

But it’s not only passionate love we’re talking about. Italy is a country of family-run companies, so one tangent became “love of family”, manifested in products we’re proud to put our family name on. Italy is a country of food and agriculture, so another tangent became “love of the land”, manifested in the food we cook from local ingredients.

To push the latter, TV-programmes like “Linea Verde” were created: every Sunday, a TV crew would visit small villages to interview farmers on what they were growing, and farmers’ wives on what they were cooking.

These programmes were initially created because the Ministry of Culture had a very small budget, so they had to piggy-back and do the equivalent of brand collabs with other ministries; the Ministry of Agriculture, in this case. Which is a very interesting way to start up that I don’t think new brands think about enough.

But they quickly realised that the way to your heart is through your stomach (which explains why Artusi’s 19th century cookbook united Italians more than any political campaign). So, food took on a very central role in the nation branding project. After all, we all love our mothers and, when we are born, our food literally comes from her. It’s a very profound relationship. If you transpose “love for your mother” for “love for the motherland”, you can easily see the impact that food can have on the Italian identity, and the power with which it can be expressed abroad. It’s no coincidence there are more Italian restaurants in the world than anything else, and that basic Italian ingredients are to be found in kitchens around the world.

What’s interesting about all this is that, over the decades, this simple brand positioning has manifested itself in ever more complex ways to love Italy, each riding a slightly different tangent of the original concept. And then, of course, there are the countless brands all expressing it in their own way, with their own aesthetics. For every product in the world, there’s an Italian brand that makes it with love, and the list is long, long, long. Just running down the alphabet… Abarth, Alessi, Alfa Romeo, Aqua Panna, Arena Sport, Ariston, Armani, Barilla, Benelli, Benetton, Beretta, Bertolli, Bialetti, Bottega Veneta, Brembo, Brunello Cuccinelli, Bugatti, Bvlgari, Calzedonia, Campari, Carpano, Cerruti, Cinzano, Diadora, Diesel, Disaronno, DoDo, Dolce & Gabbana, Ducati, Elisabetta Franchi, Ellesse, Etro, Fendi, Ferragamo, Ferrari, Fiat, Francesco Rana, Gaggia, Gianfranco Ferré, Giovanni Rana, Gucci, Illy, Italdesign, Kappa, Lamborghini, Lancia, Lavazza, Loro Piana, Luisa Spagnoli, Malaguti, Martini, Max Mara, Miu Miu, Montegrappa, Moto Guzzi, Natuzzi, Nonino, Nutella, Olivetti, Perugina, Piaggio, Pininfarina, Pirelli, Pomellato, Pucci, Prada, Ramazzotti, Riva, Roberto Cavalli, Saclà, Sanpellegrino, Segafredo, Smeg, Schiaparelli, Stefanel, Superga, Tic Tac, Tod’s, Trussardi, Valentino, Versace, Vespa, Zagato, Zanotta, Zanussi, Zegna, …

This may lead some brand analysts to think it’s more complicated than it really is. But the source is still just one concept: 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲.

What can we learn from this? Well, let’s think of your company’s brand team as its Ministry of Culture. As complex as the cultural programme may eventually come to be, it still has to start from a simple, resonant, and original positioning. What’s the one word holding your brand together?

Before I start this essay, I’d like you to take a sheet of paper and write down a list of your five happiest memories.

Take all the time you need for this. The more you remember the way you felt when you experienced those happy memories, the more my point will make sense to you. I say this because humans are quite forgetful. If I asked you for your top five movies, chances are you’d miss some of your favourites, simply because, well, people forget...

Some time ago, I started a lecture on luxury at McCann Erickson asking everyone in the lecture room to do this. Then, we pulled out a few participants’ notes out of a hat, and collectively tried to put a price on the experiences.

The results were quite surprising to all: almost none of the happiest memories were expensive, or even had anything to do with money. Some did come as a long-awaited reward after a period of sacrifice—one of them was winning an olympic medal—so you could say there was a personal price paid there... But mostly the experiences people counted as the happiest memories in their life were free of any kind of commercial transaction.

Why do I focus on this? Because one way to think about the difference between premium brands and luxury brands is that money doesn’t play a role in luxury brands.

That is, premium brands tend to justify the money you pay for their products with very specific benefits. You’ll pay more for this version of the Audi A8 because it comes with leather seats. You’ll pay more for this plane seat because you get 30cm extra space for your legs. That kind of thing.

Luxury brands, on the other hand, don’t go for that kind of measure at all. Nothing specific about the product correlates with the price you’re paying, in the same way that nothing specific about a painting by Picasso correlates with the price you’re paying. It’s just, well, the price you’re paying to satisfy your desire for something deeply subjective, and therefore incomparable to something else.

We’ve spoken in previous essays about the absurdity of putting a Robert Parker-style rating of, say, 93 to Picasso’s Guernica and 94 to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Luxury’s position is that these numbered ratings are just as absurd for everything from wine to jewellery. In other words: it’s not just better, it’s incomparable. That’s why you want it.

So, then, what can brand directors learn from luxury brands?

Well, it’s simple, really: cultivating the incomparable is the very purpose of branding.

I tend to work with this mindset even when I’m working with clients who don’t operate in the luxury sector. Because, once you work from this premise, it’s not just that price is irrelevant for people who don’t care about prices (i.e. the traditional, expensive luxury brands) but for everyone else, too. A swim in an Austrian lake that cost exactly €0 ends up being on of the most luxurious moment in your life.

Your brand doesn’t have to be unique in absolute to get there, but it does have to be the salient option for a specific set of people. The moment you take away the argument that this particular hotel, for example, is the right one for you, you might as well start a price war on booking.com

Now, you have to be careful here, because you might just want to ask yourself if the intangible values you’ve been cultivating are really ownable. Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen hundreds of new brands building their proposition on intangible values. Dozens of brands riding the latest waves of eco-this, or fairtrade-that, or craft-this, or small batch-that. So, intangible values in and of themselves are far from making your product unique or incomparable if they’re clichés.

Think of clichés as a form of commodity. An intellectual commodity. So, a watch made by a Swiss company that talks about, say, heritage and attention to detail is on its way to becoming a commodity if it is indistinguishable from the hundred other Swiss companies talking about heritage and attention to detail. Another grain of rice in a bucket of rice, a.k.a. boring.

So, what to do?

Well, one thing to do is to consider the ways in which someone might just completely love the experience of having your product in their life.

But it’s tricky. You see, to get into the right mindset about how that can even happen, you have to give up on anything that’s measurable. In fact, you probably should suspend the part of your brain that has anything to do with measurability or logic. Which sounds nuts, of course, but once you get into this mindset, you’ll start noticing that companies spend huge amounts of money on things that may be amazing feats of measurable performance, but that nobody is particularly impressed with.

For example, most people who love EuroDisney would probably prefer their rides to last longer. But they would probably prefer the ride on the Eurostar that takes them to EuroDisney to be shorter.

So, if you were the CEO at Eurostar, the measurable and logical approach would be to spend lots and lots of money to get your rides to be shorter. You could easily spend billions doing that.

The alternative I’m talking about would be to get away from these easy (but expensive) solutions, and ask yourself why people want EuroDisney rides to be longer and Eurostar rides to be shorter. And the simple answer to that is that EuroDisney rides are great fun, whereas Eurostar rides are not. So that the successful course of action might not be to spend billions making Eurostar rides shorter, but to make them as fun as the rides at EuroDisney.

What might something like this look like? Well, that’s going to be subjective, but one really good starting point would be to stop thinking of yourself as being in the business of running a train company, but rather as being in the business of making memories.

A couple of years ago, a lot of people were very surprised to read that the richest man in the world was no longer Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but Bernard Arnault, whose company—LVMH—had just reached a market cap of half a trillion dollars. LVMH was the first company in Europe to reach this valuation and, shockingly, it wasn’t a tech company but a house of luxury brands.

Since then, it seems journalists can’t stop writing about the secret formula behind the luxury industry’s success, and LVMH’s success specifically.

All sorts of platitudes have been written about the usual critical factors: high quality, attention to detail, heritage, impeccable customer service, etc. For some, what you really, really need is a great brand story. For others, everything revolves around the brand experience.

While I have certainly advocated for these factors in the past—I wrote a column for Luxury Briefing magazine between 2004 and 2014—today I can’t help but feel like most of the analysis I’ve been reading these last few years is just beating around the bush.

Why?

Because the factors don’t work in isolation. Between story and experience, for example, it makes no sense to choose one. You must work on both, because they feed into each other: the experience frames the story, the story weaves meaning into the experience. Together, they create the emotional resonance you need to achieve your true objective.

So, then, what is your true objective?

Desirability, of course. Desirability is the key to generating deep value.

Here is Bernard Arnault himself, talking about desirability being his prime objective a few years ago: "L’objectif principal n'est ni la croissance, ni le profit, mais le développement de la désirabilité." Our principal objective is neither growth, nor profit, but the development of desirability.

Desirability is a weird thing for your business to hang its coat on, isn’t it?

To start, it’s impossible to measure, which makes it a very difficult topic in any board meeting or shareholder meeting, despite everyone knowing exactly how they feel when desire strikes their heart. It’s the most compelling force in the universe.

So, perhaps we can make a better case for it by analysing its constituent parts. The first part we will call “externally-driven desire”, the second “internally-driven desire”.

Externally-driven desire
Let’s borrow a concept from René Girard: mimesis. Simply put, humans are copying machines. We learn everything by copying those around us. The fact alone that you and I are communicating in the same language is a result of this: humans are born and, by copying the other humans talking around them, start talking themselves. Gibberish at first, then “mama” and “dada”, then the rest.

According to Girard, this mimetic aspect of our nature answers some of the most difficult problems for us. For example, the problem with free will is that you have to figure out what your will actually is. What is it that you want? The solution is written in our evolution as copying animals: we want what others want. Which others? The others we most want to be like.

Mimetic desire is the catalyst of both friendship and enmity. Consider two teenage girls who have grown up next door to each other. They’ve been best friends since they were little, played the same games together, read the same books, listened to the same boybands, etc.

Their desires mimic each other. Sometimes one of them will desire something, which will lead the other to copy that desire, which in turn will confirm to the first one that her desire is correct, etc. People might even laugh about how similar they speak, how they always know what the other one is going to say, etc.

The problem starts, of course, when one of them desires something of which there is only one. A boy in school, for example. Scarcity appears: there is a greater desire for something than the world can produce.

If one of the girls gets to satisfy her desire, this will create a source of envy, resentment, betrayal, conflict. The very force that brought them together, that made them one, now drives them apart. At best (or worst, depending on how you feel about these things…) the girls will become frenemies, spending the rest of their lives trying to one-up each other.

To throw this back into the luxury context, this is how one woman will get on Hermès’s waiting list for a Birkin bag, while the other woman will pay three times the price to skip the waiting list via a third-party broker and purchase the 2023 limited edition ostrich leather model. This will cause the first woman to tell her boyfriend something along the lines of “she didn’t even know about that bag until I told her about it!”

With these words, she will have swapped her standards—and her ensuing desires—for something she believes the other will never have. Notice that, in any scenario, choices are being made reactively, driven by external factors. So, now, let’s look at the internal factors.

Internally-driven desire
Here, we’ll borrow a concept from someone who spent a good 20 years of his life writing about the psychology of desire: Jacques Lacan. What he referred to as “objet a” is the ever-longed-for-and-never-found object (or rather, object-cause of desire) that we feel a sense of loss and nostalgia for, believing we once had it when we were in the state of “jouissance” (ecstasy or bliss) as babies in our mother’s arms, before submitting to language, articulated thoughts, and the messy business of being human.

The “objet a” (pronounced “objet petit a”) is the ineffable object-cause that causes our attention to fall onto something which then becomes the object of our desire. Over the course of our lives, we project that desire onto all kinds of objects and people, believing them to have something special about them that we cannot put our finger on. Quite literally, what we mean when we say that someone has “a certain je ne sais quoi”.

There’s a quote attributed to André Breton that expresses this perfectly: “All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name”. And, since we are seeking an ineffable and impossible object, the more objects we consume that promise to be it—but are not it—the more we desire the real it, projecting our “objet a” onto other objects of desire.

Interestingly, this eternal chase produces in itself a kind of “jouissance”, different to the original “jouissance” we believe to have experienced at the maternal body, which Lacan calls “surplus jouissance”. If you’ve ever heard older wealthy people talking about how they loved becoming rich much more than being rich, that’s probably what they’re referring to, because it’s as close to self-actualisation as you’re going to get in a material world.

Of course, if you think about it, the nostalgia they have for it is as illusory as the “objet a”: it was never there in the moment itself! Their memory put it there later on.

Real, Symbolic and Fantastic
Now, how does “objet a” actually inform us about desirability? Well, one crucial aspect to it is that Lacan places it at the intersection in the Venn diagram of Real, Symbolic and Fantastic. This in itself gives us an idea as to the reason luxury brands have managed to grow so much over the past half century.

Put simply, it’s cinema.

Our ability to experience fantasy (rather than just, well, fantasise about it) has grown ever more powerful and sophisticated over the past 70 years or so. As a result, our “objet a” seems much more “actualisable” to us, since we actually experience some form of it when we watch movies.

In this respect, notice how little was written in the press about Bernard Arnault’s acquisition of the CAA talent agency, when it really seems quite straightforward: film will be the way for LVMH to sustain the relationship between its luxury brands and the public’s “objet a”. In Gucci’s La Famiglia, we spoke about Cerruti’s and Saint Laurent’s love relationship with film. This is what that relationship looks like when it’s taken to the next level and becomes a core business strategy.

Once you start thinking of the film industry as an industry that actualises our fantasies—bringing them into the symbolic world and making them part of the fabric of our collectively shared reality—it becomes quite obvious that its semantic codes, its narrative structures, its archetypes, all serve to feed our desire.

Put simply, if you want your luxury brand to resonate on an emotional level with the public, film is where you should look for guidance.

So, there you have it: a little analysis of desirability for your brand concept to tap into. Hopefully, it will help you put your customer’s desires first when working out how to develop your brand.

My friend Nick Searle likes to walk. “Likes” is an understatement: he once landed at Heathrow Airport and decided the best way to get to our studio in Hammersmith was to walk all the way.

Many years ago, Nick and I were walking through some surprisingly wild woodlands near Holloway in London. After a while, we ended up walking on a path that was quite deeply sunk into the land and Nick said something that turned all kinds of lights on in my head: “This is why they call it Holloway”.

Of course! I had only ever thought of the word as a name, not as a word... A holloway is a path that is sunken in the land. Hollow way!

Many words are like that, pointing at something more meaningful than might appear at first sight. The German word Stammtisch is a wonderful, composite word. A Stamm is a tribe. A Tisch is table: tribal table. A group of friends regularly get together at the same table in a public place, like a pub or a brasserie. The table becomes their Stammtisch.

One week, your friend Bill can’t make it. Another week, it’s Ben who can’t make it. But everyone just carries on. We’ll see Bill and Ben next week: the Stammtisch remains the Stammtisch. Yes, it’s a table, but the word takes it far beyond the physical table and turns into a phenomenon, like the social equivalent of a whirlpool in a river. You could replace the table itself, you could even replace the individual friends over time, as some of them leave town and new faces show up on the scene. The Stammtisch would still be the Stammtisch. If the word didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it, just to point at the phenomenon.

In French, an amuse-bouche is an amusement for your mouth: something light and playful you’d eat with your apéritif before starting a longer meal, just to get the juices flowing. A few years ago, realising that our branding workshops could sometimes be long and difficult, I decided to open them with something light and playful, and called this part the amuse-tête. You should always open a long and difficult meeting with an amuse-tête, especially if you want participants to be playful and creative.

A few weeks ago, I had to come up with a name for this substack, where we examine how brands can become the opposite of boring. Of course, boring written backwards is... gnirob! Surely, this is the shortest, most economic word to describe the opposite of boring. I have a feeling Hemingway (Mr. Say-It-All-In-One-Word) would approve. Surprisingly, the gnirob.com domain name was still available. So, here we all are.

You don’t have to work with composite words to touch on something interesting. Baldassare Castiglione, who wrote the first book on court etiquette, coined the word sprezzatura, which could be loosely defined as “acting like you just don’t care about such trivial things”. If you translated it literally, it would mean something like “unpriceness”. The word embodies a whole way of being that implies, for example, that you should win a tennis match, but make light of the situation and generally appear as if you weren’t trying very hard. It takes a lot of confidence to do that. Gianni Agnelli, for example, had tons of sprezzatura: he always dressed very smart, but in a somewhat dishevelled, nonchalant way.

I suppose it’s precisely because there are such resonant words at our disposal—words that turn the lights on in your head—that I’m often a little disappointed when I ask companies what the concept is behind their name. In the dotcom era, for example, it used to be quite trendy to give your dotcom a composite name, like Razorfish or Moonpig or Strawberryfrog. Quite often, the explanation behind the name fell far short of the explosive energy that lies dormant in such juxtapositions.

The way I see it, if you’re looking for the lights to shine when people say your brand’s name, you should aim for emotional resonance. This emotional resonance occurs because we hear it and just “get it”. It’s the same kind of resonance that happens when we discover a new word that describes something we recognise—a word that should have existed all along, and now that it does, it helps our mind point at this concept in our heads. Gnirob!

I’ve often spoken about our insistence on discovering a brand’s “aboutness” before we can think of its name or graphic identity. One conclusion this essay is leading me to, is that it’s worth thinking of this “aboutness” as a dictionary definition without a word.

Imagine a world where your company’s product has been included in the dictionary, but there’s been a printing error and the only thing on the page is the word’s definition. Where the actual word is supposed to be, they just left a blank space. The emotional resonance of the word you might come up with to fill that blank space is probably worth looking into.

And, vice versa, if your company has a name, but you’ve been struggling to find what it is that consumers buy into when they buy your products, it’s probably worth imagining how a dictionary definition might read next to the word.

Demna’s 𝘓𝘢 𝘍𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘭𝘪𝘢 concept for Gucci got a lot of attention for looking less like a fashion collection and more like a line-up of film characters. The runway was full of instantly recognisable types: the mob wife, the power dresser, the hyper-polished social climber, etc. What made it interesting wasn’t the clothes themselves, but how quickly you understood the characters behind them.

This is something people who really “get” luxury have understood for a long time. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the reason Nino Cerruti hired us back in 1999. When I started working for him, I had zero experience in fashion or luxury, but plenty of experience art directing campaigns for films.

I often heard him comment on the fact that he loved designing costumes for films, because he liked dressing a personality more than a walking body on a catwalk. Interestingly, another brand we worked on for many years—Saint Laurent—have now turned this into their MO: their partnership with A24 has them designing costumes for one cultural hit after another.

People don’t buy products because of what they are. They buy them because of who they become. Estée Lauder said it a million times to all her employees: you’re not selling the product, you’re selling the person she wants to be.

There’s always a gap between someone’s current self and their ideal self, and that gap is where most buying decisions really happen. The gap opens the gate to a cinematic world your brand takes them to, in which they get to play with their identity. Bernard Arnault talked about it in many shareholder letters: the job of a luxury brand is to build desirability, and what people desire most isn’t the object itself; it’s the feeling of being the character who owns it. A handbag isn’t leather and stitching. A watch isn’t metal and gears. They’re props in the film someone projects to themselves about the character they’re looking to become.

One way to think about it is to imagine the consumer as Mario, the Nintendo character, and your product as the fire flower. Nobody wants the fire flower for its own sake. They want the fire flower to turn Mario into Super Mario. That’s, well, that’s the point! And yet, most brands are still obstinately selling the fire flower.

The customer isn’t really asking, “What do I get?” They’re asking, “Who will I be if this works?” That gap, between their reality and their imagined identity, is where your brand’s world exists. When a brand fills that gap, the decision to buy feels obvious.

The reason 𝘓𝘢 𝘍𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘭𝘪𝘢 works is not because the styling is clever, but because the identity is clear. You see the character, and you know whether you are that person, want to be that person, or wish you were brave enough to be that person. That clarity creates desire faster than any list of features ever could.

For anyone building a luxury brand, the takeaway is simple: offer a version of the customer they want to exist in the world as. If you can describe that version clearly, people move toward you without much convincing. If you can’t, no amount of better copy or prettier branding will fix it.

People don’t buy the product. They buy the Self that comes with it.

One of the things I get most challenged on is the idea that if you sell a simple, emotionally resonant brand concept, you can ride that wave for many, many decades and work on lots of different iterations of the concept until you just own the category entry point.

The reply I often get is that this approach is fine for products that have something you can actually differentiate on, but that it doesn’t work on products that are near-commodities.

So, let’s look at one sector that has these commodity-like features: tyres. Just as we talked about last week in the context of Dick Fosbury (who only won one Olympic medal for his high jump because everyone immediately copied his Fosbury Flop), this is a sector where everyone ends up copying everyone else very quickly, and offering similar products for similar prices.

And let’s analyse one brand that succeeded in this sector 100 years ago by owning a simple, brand concept for many decades. I’m talking about Michelin and the concept that took them to the top: “movement”.

In a world saturated with brands that peddle complication, distraction, and short-term hype stunts, there is something disarmingly elegant about the story of Michelin. For over a century, this company has done one thing exceptionally well: they sold “movement”. They engineered it, wrapped their brand around it, and built a globe-spanning empire out of the single, rolling idea that people just want to go places.

The genius of the Michelin brothers wasn’t so much in the fact that they sold better tyres (although they did). It was in the fact that they understood what tyres make possible: the act of moving itself. In other words, they didn’t just make great tyres; they made the conditions for those tyres to matter. They engineered the demand for movement, which in turn created demand for the one product they were obsessively focused on.

Let’s dive in.

1. The Accidental Industrialists

When the Michelin brothers took over their grandfather’s failing rubber factory in the late 1800s, it was a mess. Workers hadn’t been paid, the product line was a bizarre smorgasbord of farm tools and rubber hoses, and bankruptcy was hovering like a vulture.

Neither brother had any experience with this. Édouard was an art student. André, an engineer. Both preferred Parisian culture to factory squalor. Yet they were both relentless, intelligent, and allergic to mediocrity.

They began by ruthlessly cutting unprofitable product lines. But it wasn’t until Édouard wrestled for half a day with a passing tourist’s punctured bike tyre—a glued-on Dunlop monstrosity—that the future truly announced itself to them. After fixing the tyre and test-riding it, Édouard realised that pneumatic tyres were infinitely superior to the solid rubber tyres most people endured. His insight was brutally simple: make them easier to fix, and people will want them. The tyre they developed was baptised “the detachable”.

From there, they sprinted. André, the engineer turned marketer, spotted an upcoming long-distance bicycle race and declared they had to win it. When his brother hesitated, citing lack of time and readiness, André replied, “We are the only ones with a detachable tyre. All competitors will waste hours fixing their wheels except ours. This is an advantage we have and may never have again. Figure it out!”

They hired a retired racer, won the race by a landslide, and went from 12 tyres in stock to 10,000 riders using Michelin tyres within a year.

2. Everything for the Tyre, Tyres for Everything

From the start, the brothers chose focus over diversification. They would not be a rubber company. They would be a tyre company. Every other rubber factory at the time was dabbling: shoes, hoses, balls. Michelin built their business on monogamy. Their motto: “Everything for the tyre, tyres for everything.”

They saw the bicycle boom, built a product for it, and then leapt to the automobile before it even had a market. When others saw cars as a novelty, André saw them as inevitable. “The car will replace the horse,” he declared. They poured profits from bike tyres into car tyres, in a country that may have had as few as 350 vehicles on the road.

This wasn’t blind optimism. Just a different way of looking at things: the Michelin brothers knew their tyres were better, so, all they had to do was get more people moving to grow the demand.

3. Selling Movement

Here’s where the genius begins. Most companies make a product and then shout about it. Michelin made a product, then built the world where that product could thrive.

They encouraged driving. More driving meant more movement. More movement meant more wear. More wear meant more tyres.

It started with spectacle. They entered races. Sponsored air shows. Built demo rides with wooden wheels and pneumatic tyres so that attendees could feel the difference. They let the press cover it for free, and when that wasn’t enough, André wrote columns himself. Michelin Mondays became a fixture in the French press: guides, routes, inns, meals, mechanic locations.

Then came the maps. They made the first accordion-folded maps.

Then came the road signs. They built tens of thousands of road signs across France. Each one said Michelin in small letters next to the destination city.

Then came the masterstroke: the Michelin Guide.

4. The Michelin Guide: Movement Disguised as Hospitality

Launched in 1900 and given away for free for 20 years, the Michelin Guide was a 400-page red book filled with maps, inns, mechanics, and restaurants.

One way to think about it was as a tyre catalog without tyres. A Trojan horse for travel. Its logic: make people want to drive. That’s it. Make them drive further. Give them reasons to move.

And it worked. By 1912, 12 guides existed in multiple languages. Seven thousand pages in total. Nearly 275,000 copies distributed that year.

From this guide emerged the Michelin star system: one star meant “a good local meal if you’re passing by”. Two stars meant “worth the detour”. Three stars meant “worth the trip”. The destination recommended by Michelin became the excuse for the journey itself, and the journey wore out your tyres.

Through this mechanism, and through the fact that the automobile itself was an aspirational product, the Michelin brothers were selling aspiration, taste and prestige. And in doing so, they embedded themselves inside the ever-growing culture of movement. Their big insight was that great publicity required a simple concept, and well-run systems—not one-offs—to back it up. 150 people worked on the guide. 12,000 readers mailed in annual questionnaires. Michelin opened travel bureaus to plan your entire trip for free. Why? Because movement was the business model. Michelin didn’t sell rubber. Or even tyres, if you think about it. They sold a future of ever-increasing movement.

5. Summary: One Brand Concept, Infinite Leverage

The story of Michelin is, at its core, a testament to the long-term power of a single, clear brand concept. Most companies change slogans like you change your socks. They chase trends, pivot directions, and pollute their messaging with confusion. Michelin never did that. From the moment the brothers committed to detachable tires in the 1890s, they locked onto one idea—movement—and they never let it go.

Every action, campaign, product, or innovation traced back to that central concept. If it didn’t encourage more movement, they didn’t bother. If it did, they pursued it relentlessly. The Michelin Guide, the maps, the road signs, the races, the innovations—each was a spoke in the same wheel.

Success, in Michelin’s case, came not from diversification but from a monomaniacal focus. While competitors played the broader rubber field, Michelin made tyres, and they built a universe around those tyres. They made tyres cultural, aspirational, even glamorous. Not by changing the product, but by embedding it in the rituals of everyday travel, leisure, and ambition.

In today’s business climate, this strategy is almost countercultural. But it works. Pick one thing. Commit to it. Wrap every brand touchpoint around it. Let the world change, and grow by staying still.

“Movement” was Michelin’s brand concept. And they let it roll for over a hundred years. This is how you build a brand that lasts.

A few weeks ago, a client whose company we worked for a couple of years ago, expressed her amazement at how we had formulated a successful brand concept after just a few workshops and study weeks, when—after working many years in her sector—she herself hadn't been able to work it out.

The compliment was touching, but the actual answer to the question is simple.

Imagine two animals eating lunch. One is a wolf, the other is a human.

The wolf eats because it’s hungry. Its body has some nutritional needs that manifest themselves into the kind of things it feels like eating. It doesn’t know its carbs from its ketones, but it has 𝘷𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘴. So, if it feels like eating a rabbit? Boom. Rabbit time!

The wolf has zero formal knowledge about nutrition, or even what goes on inside its body. Its 𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗶𝘁 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 of what to eat works OK.

This has the advantage that it doesn’t need to be taught very much in order to feed itself, which means that its survival is not dependent on culture, or any kind of knowledge distributed in the minds of other wolves.

But it pales in comparison to the nutrition science—i.e., the formal knowledge backing up the human’s diet—which can extend the human’s life by many decades and branch out into sciences like pharmacology and healthcare.

When you eat something, biologists, chemists, physicians and nutrition scientists have a pretty good idea of what goes on in your body, and can use this knowledge to cure you from diseases as well as optimise your diet so you increase your ability to live a longer, healthier and happier life.

This kind of 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗹 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗹𝗲𝗱𝗴𝗲 has turned humans into the most successful animal on this planet.

And it does the same for brands and businesses: plenty of businesses operate just fine with a tacit understanding of what it is their clients want, and how to give it to them at a profit. But they pale in comparison to the formal brand knowledge that leads the most successful brands on Earth to occupy a space in our hearts and minds.

So, one way of conceiving the branding process is as the process of converting tacit understanding into formal knowledge. Essentially: 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸. Turning what they know in their bones into language. Repeatable, communicable, scalable language.

Which is how you go from chasing rabbits to building a global chain of Whole Foods.

One way to gauge the value of your brand is to ask a very simple question: would people miss it if it was gone?

More generally, who do people miss, and why? Let's see if we can learn something here.

In the last few years, the most famous person passing away was probably the Queen. She was unique, iconic and irreplaceable. The fact alone that nobody ever needed to say which queen they meant tells you just how unique she was.

Have you ever asked yourself why the Queen always wore single-coloured outfits? And so bright! How many people—other than David Bowie—can you imagine looking great in a Kermit green suit the way she did on her platinum jubilee?

The reason is very simple: standing in a crowd, wearing a bright, single-coloured outfit made her instantly distinctive and vividly memorable, even from a distance. Different in a sea of sameness.

The photo below was taken at England’s World Cup victory in 66. There are only two things to look at in a sea of indistinguishable people: the England team in red, and the Queen in gold.

As she hands out the golden trophy, she looks like the source of gold the trophy is made of. In effect, they're winning a bit of her glory. Whoever made this styling decision deserved an instant knighthood.

Can you imagine what this picture would have looked like if the Queen had just worn some outfit similar to the other women in the crowd?

Of course, it's easy to think this is just about appearances. But, as I have often argued in these essays, a brand's appearance is a by-product of what it is. In other words, you can get extra leverage if your distinctiveness and your differentiation line up. At the studio, our most successful brand identity designs have always been the ones most tightly connected to what the brand is about. If we know what it is, we know how it should look.

Why is it important that these two aspects should be lined up?

Because time is a friend to authentic brands, and an enemy to phoney brands.

Put simply, it takes decades for something unique and iconic to become irreplaceable. And it’s impossible to sustain a public image for decades without aligning how one is with how one appears.

Different in a sea of sameness. It's worth repeating this in the context of the question asked above: would people miss us if we closed shop? In a world where almost everything is interchangeable, people miss that which:

1. is unique.
2. looks iconic.
3. has grown to become irreplaceable.

The lesson is so simple that it’s going to sound self-evident: build something unique, and make it look iconic. Sustain that effort for a few decades and you, too, will grow to become irreplaceable.

Back when I was working on film campaigns, one thing that ended up really frustrating me was how ephemeral the projects actually were.

A film would come out in a few months’ time, we’d build the campaign for it all the way until it premiered, then it would play a few weeks in the cinema, and then just… disappear 🙄

Only very occasionally would we get to do something over the longer term, as happened with Fight Club, which spent very little time in the cinemas but did outrageously well in DVD sales.

When I made the transition to luxury brands, some of our first clients were jewellery brands (Asprey, Garrard, Boucheron and later Fabergé…). One client in particular was very focused on engagement jewellery, which is probably the one sector that is mostly affected by the 95/5 rule, which we could summarise as follows:

As much as people might like looking at your engagement rings, most of them are just not at a point in their lives when they’re about to get on one knee and propose.

Your ad may be really good, but at least 95% of your audience are just not in the market for what you’re selling. Which is a challenge.

But once you accept it as a fact of life, the great thing is that you'll learn two things that luxury and heritage brands can really benefit from.

First: since only 5% of your target audience are currently in the market for the product you’re selling, your job is to sell to the other 95%’s future selves, i.e., the “future version” of your customer who will be in the market for your product at some point in the future.

So, do the kind of creative work that will be:

a) memorable enough to still be in the mind when the future arrives

b) linked to your brand’s concept, so they don’t think of other brands when they enter your category entry point.

Second: since future buyers are being targeted with your adverts today, the effect of great work is cumulative. Its impact compounds over time. So, your job is to do the kind of creative work that isn’t just focused on longevity, but that benefits from this compounding effect. The longer you manage to ride the wave of your creative campaign, the more effective every single advert will be in the future, as it’s standing on the shoulders of ever-growing giants, so to speak.

It takes a certain kind of creative character and mindset to keep iterating a unique concept over many years in a way that seems fresh and new, never mind the many decades of consistency we tend to associate with the most successful luxury brands. The public may not get bored, but the marketing team certainly will. Building up fast hype just feels so exciting, and it probably shows up more impactful in short-term sales figures than slowly building the cultural halo some products get to acquire over many decades.

But if you want to move a mountain with the slightest whisper in 50 years’ time, it’s the long stories—like Hermès's Birkin bag or Garrard’s engagement ring for Diana—that will teach you how to get there. In this sense, your creativity is valued not in your ability to create new things, but in your ability to make old things feel new and exciting again, and again, and again. Turn boring into gnirob.

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy famously wrote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

It strikes me that the opposite is true for brands: “All unhappy brands are alike; each happy brand is happy in its own way.”

The sea of sameness is where brands go to drown, flailing about in an eternal struggle of high effort and low returns, because deep down we all know the consumer doesn’t really need a 101th “craft” IPA brand, a 101th “small-batch” gin brand, a 101th “fairtrade” coffee brand, a 101th “organic” cotton basics brand.

Uniqueness is the key reason consumers recall, recognise and resonate with brands in the first place. Let’s call these the three R's of the happy brand: 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹, 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲.

𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹
What do you blurt out when the bartender asks you what you’re drinking? The options are numerous, so what made you go for a pint of Guinness? A brand should do everything to cultivate a unique category concept in the consumer’s mind, and then develop this concept into the main reason why someone should buy something from the category at all. So, for example, it’s not so much that customers buy from UPS or DHL, but that they buy into “safety” or “speed”, and that their choice of courier is a side-effect of that “category in the mind”. A differentiated brand concept gets you there.

𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
Consistent brand marketing generates recognition, which pays off greater and greater dividends over time. You can see this clearly with really big brands: they have the advantage of standing on the shoulders of giants. They can even afford to be quite boring (!) for a while and still generate the recognition they need to continue, because they have the leverage of recognition they’ve accrued in the past. Distinctive brand assets get you there: you must look like you and nobody else but you. If I added “pooh-pooh-peeh-dooh” to the previous sentence, you would immediately recognise the song and make the association with Marilyn Monroe: that's a distinctive brand asset for her.

𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲
Without emotional resonance, none of the branding work you do will forge a memory path in the consumer’s mind. In fact, if you’re competing against a much bigger brand with bigger pockets, emotional resonance is the only leverage you have against them. Creative campaigns get you there: they multiply the value of your work to compete against their big budgets. So, your campaigns must trigger an emotional response. It sounds painfully obvious to point this out, and yet 9 out of 10 brands score a big fat 0 here.

With all three R’s, 𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗤𝗨𝗘 is what you must aim for:

- Aim for 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹 with a uniquely differentiated brand concept.
- Aim for 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 with work that consistently develops your uniquely distinctive brand assets.
- Aim for emotional 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 with uniquely creative work.

Do all three, do it for a while, and soon you’ll find a way for that flywheel to spin, and keep on spinning.

When I was a kid, we used to go swimming five times a week. After swimming, my parents didn’t argue with me about wearing a woolly hat. They didn’t lecture me about ear infections or wind chill or “you’ll thank us when you’re older”. No. They deployed psychological warfare.

They held up two hats. A red one. A blue one. “Which hat do you want to wear today?”

Notice what was missing? The option to say, “Neither, you tyrants”.

The decision was mine, but only within a beautifully curated sandbox of inevitability. I wasn’t choosing whether to wear a hat. I was choosing which colour of hat. Democracy, but make it decorative.

Now, let’s take this parenting masterclass and wander over to the cola battleground, where grown adults on LinkedIn are passionately debating who “won” the latest Pepsi ad featuring the iconic Coca-Cola Polar Bear who defects and chooses Pepsi in a taste test.

Most commentary zooms in on distinctive brand assets, because that’s what Pepsi did. The way I see it, that’s like arguing about where the coin disappeared to when a magician opens their hand. The real game isn’t about distinctiveness, but positioning.

Let’s establish something that shouldn’t require a marketing PhD: Pepsi works best when it plays the challenger. That’s its natural habitat. Ever since the “Pepsi Generation” era back in the 1960s, Pepsi positioned itself as the alternative to the establishment cool of The Coca-Cola Company.

Pepsi is the rebel. It’s been the rebel for so long that it now has a mortgage and mild back pain. Which may be the reason why we forgot it was the rebel. But here’s the irony about being a rebel: a challenger brand cannot exist without a category leader. You can’t be rebellious in a vacuum. If there’s no empire, there’s no rebellion. You’re just… loud.

So, Pepsi needs Coke for its own strategy to make sense.

Now, for the challenger model to thrive, two things need to be true:

1. The cola category must keep growing.

2. Consumers must feel the choice is red hat or blue hat. Pepsi or Coke. NOT some other, new kid on the block.

Because the real threat isn’t Coke. It’s the expanding parade of “better-for-you” alternatives like Poppi and Olipop, and “unhinged” brands like Liquid Death.

From this perspective, the polar bear ad didn’t just poke the Coke. It reinforced the idea that this is still a two-horse race.

So, did Pepsi benefit? Yes. Did Coke benefit too? Also yes. Market leaders quietly enjoy when challengers keep the category culturally relevant. It’s free cardio.

In the end, Pepsi didn’t steal the hat. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to remind everyone the only options are the two hats on the table. And that, my dear brand strategists, is how you keep people’s ears warm.

PART 1

This week, we’re looking at wine, an industry so trapped in its own mimetic echo chamber that it’s practically yelling at itself in a barrel room. And we’re going to figure out how to uncork (heh…) something far more powerful: a drink that’s crafted not in your vineyard, but 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗱𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗿’𝘀 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱.

So, let’s get started with something that’ll probably annoy 99% of my readers in the wine industry:

𝘐𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘺 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥-𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘥, 𝘴𝘶𝘯-𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘥, 𝘤𝘰𝘰𝘭-𝘤𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦, 𝘩𝘪𝘨𝘩-𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘦, 𝘴𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦, 𝘣𝘪𝘰𝘥𝘺𝘯𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘤, 𝘳𝘦𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦, 𝘧𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘺-𝘰𝘸𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘺𝘢𝘳𝘥.

Why?

Because everyone in the wine industry says exactly the same thing. If you’re using the same words as everyone else, your signal will drown in the noise.

Wine is perhaps the most mimetic industry on earth. Everyone speaks the same sacred language, worshipping the same trinity: Terroir, Tannins, Tradition.

Presenting your wine this way is like showing up at a party where everyone’s wearing the same black turtleneck, and insisting your turtleneck is special because it’s a slightly different shade of black.

What’s more, it’s the drinking equivalent of “selling a ¾ inch drill instead of a ¾ inch hole”: you’re selling from what you know, not from what the consumer desires.

Meanwhile, a brand like Yellow Tail gate-crashes the party wearing neon pink and says “Hey guys, who wants something fun with their barbecue?” Who invited them? We don’t know, but they’re the life of the party.

Yellow Tail didn’t chase points on Robert Parker’s list. They didn’t court the wine snobs. They realized that 90% of drinkers aren’t looking for a wine to pair with their existential angst about minerality; they’re just looking for something simple and joyful to go with grilled chicken and summer salads.

Yellow Tail said: “You know what our wine tastes like? Happy.”

And that’s why they sold millions while the rest of the industry was left debating why one wine got 93 points and the other 94.

Now, why is this so important? Because when you sound like everyone else, you get treated like everyone else. Which means:

- You get shoved into price comparison sites.
- You get stacked on shelves where only the discount sticker gets noticed.
- You become a hostage to rating systems and scores.

PART 2

Four legs goood, two legs baaad! We argued in Part 1 that the herd-like behaviour of 99% of wine brands turns them into hostages of price comparison sites and wine rating institutions (e.g., Robert Parker).

So, let’s start Part 2 by taking a moment to enjoy the absurdity of wine scores.

Imagine rating fine art the way wine is rated by Robert Parker:

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: 93 points.
Picasso’s Guernica: 94 points.

Absurd, isn’t it? Have you actually learned anything about these amazing artworks from the score? No? So, then, why let your value be defined by a number instead of a meaning?

Is it the nostalgia of the classroom that makes so many wine producers keen to get a mark from some kind of surrogate schoolteacher?

If so, growing out of this childish pursuit is an opportunity for you: given that 99% of wine brands are all chasing this—and appealing to a tiny market of conformist wine snobs as a result—here’s your chance to shine. Really shine.

Let’s detour briefly into the world of... circuses. Yes, circuses. Stick with me.

Back when you were a kid, going to the circus meant lions, trapeze artists, and clowns.

Then, as fewer people started to care, circuses started an arms race:

- Hire crazier acrobats!
- Buy bigger elephants!
- Get longer shoes for the clowns!

And profits collapsed anyway.

Enter Cirque du Soleil. They looked at the circus death spiral and said: “We’re not competing with clowns. We’re competing with Broadway.” Their only overlap with circuses is that they hire acrobats and funny people. That’s it.

Cirque du Soleil reinvented the category by refusing to fight in the old arena. They made something so beautiful and enchanting that it competed with theatre, opera, and musicals.

Now, let’s return to wine.

If you want real differentiation, stop obsessing over your terroir. Start obsessing over 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗿’𝘀 𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗼𝗶𝗿.

PART 3

Let’s start Part 3 by defining 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗿’𝘀 𝗧𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗼𝗶𝗿 properly, because it’s going to change how you see your brand.

The Drinker’s Terroir is not your vineyard. It’s the landscape inside your customer’s mind. It’s the nostalgia of a countryside road trip with their best friends. The romantic date night where they want to feel effortlessly cool. The Ibiza beach sunset where rosé tastes like liquid sunshine.

When people drink your wine, they’re not tasting your limestone soil. They’re tasting their own context. Who they’re with. What mood they’re in. Whether they’re wearing shoes or dancing barefoot in the kitchen.

In this context, your Bordeaux isn’t competing with another Bordeaux. It’s not even competing with another wine. It’s competing with G&Ts, with craft beer, or with the magical phrase: “I’ll have what you’re having.”

Your real terroir battle isn’t in the vineyard. It’s in the drinker’s mind. That’s where you plant the seeds of desire.

Let’s look at a brand that gets this. Castillo de Ibiza makes rosé. But they don’t sell it by talking about grape varietals or aging in stainless steel. They sell a fantasy. The golden sunset. The DJ spinning. The glittering Mediterranean. Their bottle whispers: “You’re not drinking wine. You’re sipping on Ibiza itself.”

That’s the drinker’s terroir. And it’s way more powerful than your clay subsoil and south-facing slopes.

You know who worked this out a long time ago? Cigarettes.

Let’s go back to the 20th century. When cigarettes were banned from making health claims, they pivoted hard. Marlboro stopped “selling tobacco”. What did they sell instead? Freedom. The rugged cowboy. The open range. The fantasy that lighting up makes you untouchable.

And sales exploded. Because people don’t buy products with their rational brain. They buy with their desires, their insecurities, their cravings to be someone else, even for a moment.

If Big Tobacco can figure that out, so can wine.

PART 4

In Part 3, we defined 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗿’𝘀 𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗼𝗶𝗿, making the point that you should stop defining your brand concept with wine clichés (terroir, tradition, etc).

So, what do you talk about instead?

You talk about what your drinker wants to feel:

Happy.
Free.
Chilled.
Rebellious.
Creative.
Romantic.
Jovial.
Cultured.
Fashionable.
Effortlessly cool.

There’s a different wine brand for every one of those concepts. All you have to do is equate your wine with a simple and emotionally resonant concept in order to become your drinker’s answer when someone asks: “What are you drinking?” Then, stick with that concept and riff with it for a couple of decades until you own that category in the drinker’s mind.

Let’s pick one of these: rebellious. Create a wine that says: “Drink this when you feel like breaking the rules.”

How far could you take this concept? Well, you could break the rules of your geographic appellations: blend grapes from different regions. Or—why not?—different continents. Why should a GSM blend (Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre) be confined to the Rhône? Imagine mixing Australian Syrah with Spanish Garnacha and French Mourvèdre. Would the snobs faint? Sure. Would drinkers get curious? Absolutely. Curiosity beats conformity.

Now, let’s be clear, I’m not advocating you should destroy your heritage in favour of some wild adventure that doesn’t feel authentic to you. The point here is to find something authentic about you that is interesting and emotionally resonant, and see how far down the road to singularity you could take it. Because it needs to be understood that, from your drinker’s point of view, your real competition isn’t another Bordeaux. It’s everything else that’s fighting for space in the drinker’s glass. And what goes in the drinker’s glass is what’s in the drinker’s mind.

So, stop selling your soil. Sell your drinker’s fantasy. Next time you’re tempted to brag about your sun exposure or your 93.5 Parker points… Pause, and ask yourself:

- Where does my drinker want to be when they sip this?
- Who do they want to become for those few golden minutes?
- What fantasy am I helping them step into?

Your job isn’t to sell fermented grape juice. Your job is to sell a moment, a mood, a magic little shift in someone’s day. Those things live in the drinker’s terroir. That’s where desire blooms. That’s where names mean something. That’s where brands stop being commodities and start being culture.

Have you ever stopped to think how bizarre it is that humans love music? I mean, what’s the point of all these sounds being played one after the other?

Even weirder: dancing. It’s really very odd, if you think about it: we move our feet from one spot to another, and then just move them back, while doing some weird movements with our arms. All of this without any apparent purpose.

And yet, many people have never looked happier than when they’re dancing. And many people have never been more emotionally engaged than when they listen to a beautiful composition.

The point of dancing is not to get from one side of the room to the other.

The point of music is not to get as fast as possible to the last note.

These things are 𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗰: they bring us joy in and of themselves.

Luxury experiences are exactly the same: we make autotelic the experience of doing things that other people do because they have to do them. The point isn’t to get you from A to B in a manner that is as smooth, fast and convenient as possible. It’s to take you from A to B and make it 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘁.

Now, why am I telling you this? Because the autotelic mindset allows you to turn your own brand into something like a luxury experience.

Your customer may not be able to afford the smoothest, fastest and most convenient way to get from A to B, but you can definitely make it time well spent if you find a way to make it joyful, interesting or educational.

Look at Audrey Hepburn in the picture here. She’s riding a Vespa, which is about 200x less expensive than driving a McLaren P1. Does she look bored to you?

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like… victory”, is one of the most memorable lines in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”.

In a number of essays, we’ve covered the idea that brands that stick to a simple brand concept will have more salience and memorability than brands that complicate their proposition with other factors (vision, mission, values, purpose, etc.)

I tend to use the words “brand concept” rather than, say, “brand story”. The main reason for this is that “story” leads brand managers down the road of thinking it’s all about words, when words are often just a small part of the concept. In “Apocalypse Now”, it’s the distinctive 𝘴𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘭 of napalm—not a story about napalm—that reminds Colonel Kilgore of victory.

Something else about the concept behind Colonel Kilgore’s love of napalm is how few words he needs to describe it. Just one word: victory.

This is what we’re going to talk about today: concepts so simple, you could say them in one word.

Here’s an example. Staples, the office supplies stores, make it really easy to find their bestselling items in the stores.

The price they pay for this is huge: if they made bestsellers hard to find, customers would put other things in their shopping cart on the way to finding what they were looking for. Customers would spend more!

So, why don’t Staples do this? Why do they forego the income from impulsive sales to lost customers?

Because their brand concept is “easy”. It’s the one thing that differentiates them from other office supplies stores. The way they see it, this sacrifice is the price they pay to be top-of-mind for everyone who wants to spend minimal time and effort on office supplies. Being top-of-mind is critical to them: they have to—yes or yes—be “the easy place to get what you need for your office” in order to carve the memory path in their customers’ minds that says “I need office supplies, let’s go to Staples”.

In effect, Staples are always sacrificing a bit of income today for extra income tomorrow, based on the compounding value of a simple and emotionally resonant brand concept. And I think this is what makes all the difference: when you pay an actual running cost for your brand concept, it forces you to stop treating it like the woo-woo many brand managers seem to be doing today, and actually do some proper work.

So, now, let’s see who else works with single word concepts? Many brands: Volvo (safety), Alfa Romeo (love), UPS (protection), DHL (speed), FedEx (overnight), Rolex (success), Patek Philippe (legacy), Corum (courage; at least, that’s what we created when we worked with them, but the company has been sold a couple of times since then), Yellow Tail (happy), , …

Twix, the chocolate snack brand, is interesting: their concept isn’t even tied very much to something specific about chocolate or snacks. The entire concept of Twix can be summarised in a single word: “two”. That’s it. There are two bars of Twix in every packet. Out of this simple concept, Mars have managed to build a billion-dollar brand, forever fuelled by fun things you can say and do when there are two of something.

For example, two chocolate bars implies that there’s a left and a right one, and that you might have to choose which one is your favourite. This naturally led to a campaign asking people to vote online for their favourite bar, Left Twix or Right Twix.

There’s a million ways you can make “two” fun: two Twix bars have a romantic story, two twins copying each other… You can even imagine what a brand collab could look like with this concept: it takes two to tango, so, do a fun brand collab between two Twix bars and a can of Tango.

Working with a single concept is hard. It initially feels like you’re leaving money on the table, because you could be appealing to these other people who want something else that your product could also satisfy. Once you overcome this mindset, though, the character of your brand will have a life of its own, and tell you what to do to succeed. All you’ll have to do is listen.

In Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, the ideal nobleman possessed sprezzatura: an effortless grace that concealed the labour behind it. You practiced for hours so you could look like you’d never practiced at all. You duelled, danced, and declaimed poetry as if you’d simply rolled out of bed pre-talented. It was the Renaissance version of “I just threw this on”, except “this” was a perfectly calibrated display of aristocratic dominance.

Sprezzatura worked because effort was embarrassing: visible strain implied you were climbing. The true elite didn’t climb. They floated.

Nearly every fashion designer I’ve worked with over the past 25 years has, at some point, talked about sprezzatura. Which, by definition, means that it might be worth considering whether the concept has become commodified, i.e. boring, i.e. the opposite of what we like to do here on GNIROB.

So, let’s consider the value of effortlessness in 2026, a time when AI can draft your emails, take better pictures than you, and summarise books you can pretend to have read. Effortlessness is no longer rare. In fact, we might argue it’s become the default.

Clearly this is a very different context. A context in which visible effort might start to look rebellious, perhaps even desirable.

Time to explore what an “anti-sprezzatura aesthetic” might be. One that expresses something like conspicuous exertion. We could call it sforzatura. There you go, you’ve only just subscribed to GNIROB and already we’ve coined a new word for you.

In an age when answers are instant and polished, the new cool might be showing your drafts. Posting your notes. Letting people see the crossed-out sentences and the “wait, that doesn’t make sense” moments. Long-form essays that wander and circle back. Podcasts where hosts visibly think in real time instead of delivering TED-ready monologues. The performance of effort becomes its own kind of status symbol.

Hang out with anyone preparing for an ultramarathon or a trail running event, and you quickly realise that a significant amount of brand value lies in the effort itself. Which, I think, is what the marathon-episodes from popular podcasts like Lex Fridman (which regularly last 3 hours or more) are tapping into. Anyone can watch a TED talk, but it takes effort to go into real depth.

Funnily enough, we already knew this in a completely different context: IKEA’s objects can augment their emotional value through the work performed by the consumer in assembling them. So, it’s not too crazy to imagine that brands relying on even more work from the consumer might develop a proper hardcore fanbase. The work becomes the medium of the expression of value, so to speak.

Ironically, this too can turn into signalling and affectation. Making ease look difficult—by insisting on friction, drafts, awkwardness, and visible grind. The curated “messy desk”. The artfully chaotic Substack. The carefully distressed sweater you keep at the country barn for when you're working on your sculptures. What’s happening intellectually will, at some point, have to happen stylistically. The styling that signals something along the lines of “I’m working on a grand project”.

I don’t know exactly what sforzatura will look like in full bloom. But I’d bet we’re about to see a lot more people trying very hard to make you notice how hard they’re trying.

Humans are the masters of turning things we have to do into things we enjoy doing.

We’re the animals who turned “we have to eat or we’ll starve to death” into “let’s go to that new restaurant in town, they just won a Michelin star”. We are the animals who turned “we have to multiply or we’ll go extinct” into “I do”. We’re the animals who turned “we have to wear clothes or we’ll freeze to death” into “this jacket is so me; every time I wear it, I feel like I’ve discovered my real self”.

In other words, we’ve turned things that are teleologic—that we do for an ulterior goal—into things that are autotelic—that we do for their own sake.

However, if you look at where branding and marketing has gone this last decade, it would appear that we’re heading into the diametrically opposed direction: lots of extrinsic purpose and very little intrinsic pleasure. It’s no longer “drink this because it tastes amazing”. It’s “drink this to do x”, where x can be anything from “save the planet” to “crush your goals”.

Which leads me to the question: how many problems that are not aesthetic could be solved if beauty was top of the list of KPIs?

Think about it: how many NIMBYs would there be if the newly proposed 1,000-house estate was going to be as beautiful as Venice?

How many cars would be thrown on the trash heap if they were designed for people to fall in love with them every time they drive to the shops?

Or, in your own life, how many times would you skip exercise if—instead of thinking about it as something you have to do—you delighted in the intrinsic pleasure of doing it?

Now that it’s framed like that, you can see the value of beauty and how weird it is that it should be a contrarian thing to aspire to.

This contrarian aspect is our opportunity. The greatest value is often hidden where nobody is looking. To illustrate, I’ll quote Bernard Arnault, who a couple of years ago wrote the following in an LVMH quarterly report: “The principal objective is neither growth, nor profit, but the development of desirability”.

I wrote earlier that humans are the animals who turn things they have to do into things they enjoy doing. A better way of saying it is that we’re the animals who turn needs into desires. Which means that, just as many businesses ask themselves what problem they are solving, there is great value to be uncovered by asking ourselves what desire we are cultivating.

Have you ever stood in front of the Eiffel Tower and wondered what its brand mission, vision, values, purpose and brand pillars were?

Neither have I. And yet, I often work with clients whose company is just as old and famous as the Eiffel Tower, who have at some point felt the urge to load up on this kind of pseudo-brand assets.

Typically, we’ll start our first historical analysis session with them, looking forward to seeing lots of authentic historical gems, when someone will instead present these pseudo-assets, all laid out in a pyramid, diamond or circle with arrows pointing from one keyword to the other.

If you’ve been there and you’re wondering why you’re unable to convert all this guff into a brand that people fall in love with, read on.

The task, first of all, is to KISS: keep it short and simple. For example, think about the brand as you would a famous person: what is this person famous for? This will help you ignore all the mess and search for the most important thing: the brand concept—by which I mean the consumer’s way of “getting it”.

What do you need for the consumer to “get it”? Well, let’s start with having an “it” for them to “get”.

“It” is the new and unique value you bring to the market. This is where I think many brand strategies go wrong: they’re just not truthful. You must start from the truth, i.e., from what you have. Not from some random brand vision that happens to be in vogue today.

Note: it's not that a brand vision is in itself a bad thing to work with. It's that, more often than not, brand vision statements are disconnected from what a business truly brings to the table.

If you extrapolate a bright future from the intrinsic value you create—asking yourself what the world would look like if you were wildly successful at creating this—you’ll have a much higher chance of working with an original, compelling and authentic vision, with the added benefit that it’s a vision you can actually realise: it starts from what you already have in your toolbox.

Next comes “getting” it. What I mean by this is an emotionally resonant way of understanding it. As in, if I explain a joke to you, you’ll understand it but you won’t “get it”. You need to “get it” to actually laugh.

Three things need to happen for the consumer to “get it”.

1: Keep it singular. In a world of information glut, consumers only have a tiny amount of space in their mind to dedicate to you. So, stick to just one thing.

2: Keep it striking. You can’t own a large space in the consumer's mind, but you can make it shine like a beacon.

3: Keep it special. If your brand talks about an “it” that is mostly associated with another brand, that brand is the one consumers will remember when they’re in a buying situation, not yours. Own something nobody else can own.

KISSing is far from easy. I’ve been doing it for a quarter of a century, and I’m still surprised by the intellectual effort it takes. But once you’ve done it, brand love is just a few steps away.

A king, a priest, and a rich man are sitting in a bar. No, wait, that sounds like the opening line for a joke. Let’s turn it into a riddle; this is a serious essay, after all... OK, next to the three men stands a common soldier holding a sword. Each of the three men orders the soldier to kill the other two. Who lives? Who dies?

This riddle sounds like a question about force. Your first answer might be that it’s up to the soldier: he’s the one with the sword! He has the ability to turn theory into bloodstains, so to speak.

But if the power lay in the hands of the soldier, why would any of these men even expect obedience from him? If power truly belonged to whoever could kill, history would be a chaotic list of angry-looking people holding pointy things.

Instead, soldiers obey kings who can’t pay, priests who can’t command, and rich men who can’t fight. They do this every day without needing to be physically forced.

Which means the sword isn’t the source of power. The sword is just a tool.

The king’s authority exists because people believe in the crown. The priest’s authority exists because people believe in divinity. The rich man’s authority exists because people believe in money.

None of these forces are tangible. You can’t stab someone with legitimacy. You can’t bludgeon someone with faith. And yet these forces routinely override the sword.

The upshot is this: power lives neither in the person giving the order, nor in the hand holding the weapon. Power lives in the shared belief that the order matters. The soldier obeys not because he must, but because he believes he should. Because the world has trained him to recognize certain voices as authoritative.

So, power is an agreement rehearsed so often that it just feels natural. In the words of Nike, you “just do it”.

One way to visualise this is that power is a shadow on a wall. It looks solid. It has shape and reach. But try to touch it and there’s nothing there. The shadow exists only because something else is casting it. Change the light and you change the shadow. In other words, control belief, and you control power. Shape what people accept as normal, legitimate, inevitable, and you don’t need the sword at all.

So, the riddle we started this essay with is not asking who is strongest. It’s asking who cultivates the illusion. Power survives only as long as people continue to believe in the rules of the game. The moment that belief fractures, a crown become just another hat, gold becomes just another metal, and a Bible becomes just another book.

Now, with that foundation in place, let’s talk about nations.

A nation is not a flag, an anthem, or a constitution. Those are accessories. A nation is a large-scale agreement between strangers who’ve never met each other to believe they belong to the same group. Benedict Anderson used to call them “imagined communities”.

Which makes nations some of the most powerful brands ever created.

If Nike somehow convinced millions of people to speak Nikish, to run to work every morning, to dress in tracksuits like it was a folkloric dress, to sing the “Just do it” anthem every year on 25 January (the day the company was founded), to feel emotional loyalty to the Swoosh, we wouldn’t call it a marketing miracle; we’d call it a geopolitical event.

Nations do exactly this, using language, food, myths, folkloric clothing, songs, and the occasional war to really drive the point home.

Nation branding, whether intentional or accidental, is about managing belief. About tending the light source that keeps the “power shadow” on the wall. The most successful nations aren’t the ones with the biggest swords. They’re the ones with the most convincing brands.

Germany is a useful example because its national narrative had to be assembled before the nation itself fully existed. Prior to unification, “Germany” was more of a vibe than a state: fragmented territories, competing loyalties, dialects that barely recognised one another. You couldn’t command “the Germans” because they hadn’t yet agreed they were a single thing.

What did exist were stories, dirndls, folk songs, legends that felt ancient and meaningful even when the borders were not. The Brothers Grimm didn’t invent folk tales; they curated them at exactly the moment they were needed. Their collections emerged in the early nineteenth century, alongside growing movements toward unification. Suddenly, people across different regions recognized the same characters, the same moral logic, the same symbolic landscapes.

So, before there could be political unity, there had to be narrative unity. A shared emotional vocabulary. Germany’s “power shadow” began forming long before there was a single crown to cast it. The belief came first; the borders followed.

Italy offers an even clearer case, mostly because one of its architects said it out loud. After unification, Massimo d’Azeglio remarked, “Italy has been made; now we must make Italians.”

Italy wasn’t lacking history. It was drowning in it. What it lacked was a shared daily experience that could override regional identities. Enter food, the most persuasive cultural technology humanity has ever invented. You can ignore a flag. You can disagree with a speech. It’s much harder to reject dinner.

Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well did more for Italian identity than most political campaigns. By collecting regional recipes and presenting them as Italian, Artusi offered citizens a visceral brand experience of what it meant to be Italian. An experience they would have every day, with every meal.

This is how nation branding works when it works: not through slogans, but through experiential habits. Belief settles in, meal after meal, folk song after folk song, national holiday after national holiday. Pretty soon, you just can’t imagine things existing any other way.

Modern nation brand directors and culture ministries often forget this. They commission logos, taglines, glossy campaigns announcing identity as if identity were a product launch. “A nation led by innovation”. “A crossroads of cultures”. “A bridge between East and West”. These are not nation brand concepts; they’re placeholders. They cast weak shadows on the wall because the light behind them is thin.

The strongest nation brands don’t announce themselves as brands. They feel inevitable and natural, like they’ve always been there. That’s the illusion, and it’s a powerful one: when belief is doing its job, power doesn’t even have to explain itself.

This also explains why nations panic when belief starts to wobble. Because belief is fragile, challenged by economic collapse, cultural contradiction, political corruption, ... Remember: change the light source, and the shadow changes. Symbols that once felt sacred start to feel theatrical. Traditions feel “marketed”. The audience notices the wires.

And once belief cracks, force rarely fixes it. You can’t threaten people into genuine belonging. You can only make them comply until they stop believing altogether.

So, the final point to make about it is this: no one ever fully controls belief. You can shape it, nurture it, protect it, but the moment people feel they are being told what to believe, the illusion weakens. Power survives longest when it pretends not to be trying, when it behaves with the political equivalent of sprezzatura.

That’s why nations endure not because they are strong, but because their brand is convincing. Because their “power shadow” looks so natural against the wall that people forget there is a light source at all.