Branding
Escapism Inc.
Why brands are fleeing reality—and what it costs them.
Hey escapists—
Lately, marketing doesn’t look like marketing.
Saint Laurent shoots films.
Jacquemus drops handbags the size of buses into impossible streets.
Hotels run mini soap operas.
Everyone else, armed with generative AI, floods the feed with worlds that never existed. Authentic storytelling? Too slow.
The new game is escapism as strategy—a quick dopamine jolt dressed as brand vision.
It works—for now. But the more interesting question isn’t ifit works.
It’s: what are we mortgaging to make it work?
Why the surreal sells (for now)
Attention is a predictive machine:we notice what violates our expectations. After a decade of hyper‑real content, the brain’s filters are numb. Surrealism—floating bags, liquid architecture, impossible sunsets—breaks the pattern, and the algorithm rewards whatever breaks patterns consistently.
That’s the whole play: novelty → watch time → distribution → social proof → budget.
The numbers explain the addiction. Saint Laurent’s surrealist show delivered eight‐figure earned media value. Jacquemus’ make‑believe stunts hit hundreds of thousands of likes on drops where the ideawas the product. A fragrance launch in Roblox pulled millions of interactions because, frankly, where else are you going to smell pixels?
Surrealism is cheap to scale now (hello, gen‑AI), and the ROI curve looks seductive.
But economics has a quiet law: every novelty has a half‑life.
The first giant handbag is magic. The fifth is wallpaper.
Where this road actually leads
Escapism scales until it doesn’t. Spectacle has creative inflation baked in: to get the same attention, you must go bigger, weirder, louder. Budgets rise, marginal returns fall, and the brand slowly detaches from product truth. You’re no longer selling the shoe—you’re selling the hallucination around the shoe.
There’s a deeper cost: connection drift.
Stories become so polished they feel hollow; tone turns theatrical; the audience senses puppetry. Short‑term metrics stay green (views, likes), while the long‑term signals rust (repeat purchase, word‑of‑mouth, price premium).
That’s how brands lose gravity: the narrative floats; the product stays on earth.
Timeline?
Look at the last decade’s cycles—Instagram minimalism → TikTok hyper‑reality → AI surrealism. Each wave burned hot for 2–4 years before fatigue and parody set in. When your aesthetic becomes a meme template, the spell is already breaking.
The long‑term bill (you will pay it)
Call it experience debt: you borrow attention today with spectacle and pay it back later with distrust if the product can’t match the promise. Three compounding interests:
- Trust erosion: If the fantasy outruns reality, customers feel fooled. Once trust fractures, performance media becomes a tax just to stand still.
- Meaning collapse: When everything is “epic,” nothing is meaningful. Distinctiveness blurs; memory structures fade. You trained the audience to chase novelty, not you.
- Operating drag: Ever‑escalating productions eat creative time and cash. Meanwhile, competitors quietly improve product and service—things that compound.
Escapism is a sugar high; the crash is operational.
When does the spell break?
You can see it coming if you stop staring at vanity metrics. Watch:
- Engagement mix shifts: likes hold, saves/comments fall—people are watching, not wanting.
- Search intent decouples: social mentions spike, branded search flatlines—awareness without desire.
- Price sensitivity creeps: discount dependence rises after big “world‑building” launches—illusion without willingness to pay.
- Parody lag shortens: time from launch to TikTok parody shrinks—your spectacle became a punchline.
Those are not vibes; they’re early‑warning indicators.
Is escape the answer? Yes—and no.
Yes, because spectacle cuts through a saturated feed. No, because escapism is a means, not a model. Rule of thumb: for every minute of spectacle you publish, deposit ten minutes of proof. Call them trust deposits.
They don’t trend, but they do compound.
What to do on Monday
- Anchor the unreal in a real asset: if the world is fake, the logo/shape/sound must be unmistakably yours. Otherwise you’re financing generic wonder.
- Cap the sugar: seasonal bursts, not a constant drip. Schedule exits; surprise by going quiet.
- Model the half‑life: forecast novelty decay in your media plans; don’t chase last month’s spike with a bigger spike.
- Instrument for meaning: track saves, replies, branded search, repeat rate—not just views. If spectacle isn’t pulling those, it’s theatre, not marketing.
- Close the loop: pair every campaign film with a product truth—durability test, sizing wizard, service promise, creator tutorial that survives the trend.
And in the End..
Escapism is the marketing drug of the moment: fast, dazzling, deceptively cheap. Use it—but don’t live on it.
The future won’t belong to the brands that build the loudest illusions. It will belong to the ones that know when to step out of the dream, show the work, and let product reality carry the story.
Put differently: earn attention with dreams, earn loyalty with proof.
Until next time, stay awake.
Alex
At Kredo Marketing we help brands grow without spectacle dependency. Strategy, clarity, and trust—because fantasy alone won’t pay the bills.
The Confidence Cartel
Hey mind-hackers—
There’s an entire industry that discovered the obvious truth: humans are insecure. And insecurity scales.
So they package “charisma,” “dark psychology,” “seduction systems,” and “high-ticket closing” into $997 courses with countdown timers and rented Lambos.
Not wisdom—just theatre, with good lighting. They call it transformation.
It’s really manipulation for sale.
The theatre of hope
The trick is always the same: recycle basic psychology, strip it of nuance, and serve it with a shot of shame. If you don’t buy, you “don’t want success badly enough.” They stack authority with borrowed symbols of wealth—luxury cars, fake screenshots, staged testimonials.
They manufacture urgency with countdown timers that reset every night. They create communities with insider slang, badges, and rituals to make you feel chosen. And then they drown you in 50 hours of fluff so you can’t tell if you’ve learned anything useful.
The product isn’t confidence or charisma. The product is hope—hope that shortcuts exist, that power can be downloaded, that status can be hacked. Hope is easy to sell, and easier still to upsell.
And when the scripts don’t work?
The guru’s defense is simple: you failed, not the method. Convenient.
Familiar faces, recycled scripts
We’ve seen this show before.
Julien Blanc’s pickup empire collapsed after global outrage, but the same material reappeared under a safer name: “social dynamics.”
NXIVM marketed itself as executive coaching before a court declared it a criminal enterprise. Even Tai Lopez’s garage video—the Lamborghini, the shelves of books—wasn’t selling knowledge.
It was selling the image of knowledge.
The iconography changes, the pitch doesn’t: create insecurity, present yourself as antidote, and monetize the cycle until the spotlight fades.
The fascinating thing? These figures rarely disappear.They pivot. The PUA coach becomes a “masculinity influencer.”
The failed crypto pusher becomes a productivity guru. They shed names like snakeskin but keep the same funnel architecture.
It works because platforms love banality.
A ten-second soundbite—“You’re broke because you’re lazy!”—will always travel faster than a lecture on opportunity cost. Algorithms don’t reward depth. They reward volume, cadence, outrage.
It works because parasocial relationships feel real. A stranger on YouTube can start to feel like a mentor in your living room. Once you believe you “know” them, you’re less likely to question their claims.
It works because the promise of secret knowledge is irresistible.
Humanity has always fallen for alchemy, mysticism, quick fixes. Why would TikTok be any different?
And it works because insecurity is infinite.
The market never saturates. There will always be someone who feels unconfident, powerless, or behind. That’s the raw material these sellers refine into dollars.
The economics of insecurity
The business model is brutally efficient.
Margins on info-products hover between 75–90%. A guru can spend $500 on ads to sell a $1,997 course and scale fast. A thousand sign-ups equals nearly $2 million in revenue. After refunds, affiliates, and chargebacks, many walk away with 15–30% net margin—healthy by any standard.
But the average shelf life of these businesses is short: 12 to 36 months.
Then fatigue sets in, platforms change policy, or reputations catch up. The guru rebrands, launches under a new domain, and restarts the machine. To them, a failed program isn’t a disaster. It’s just version one of the next funnel.
That’s why it feels like whack-a-mole. Shut down one name, three more appear. The business is designed to survive scandal by reincarnation.
And here’s the line that matters: persuasion respects your agency. Manipulation erodes it.
Persuasion gives you options, disclosure, and a chance to test. Manipulation hides costs, shames doubt, and resists verification.
Most of these sellers don’t want you to think. They want you to buy—and to blame yourself if it doesn’t work.
The pitch is airtight because it’s never falsifiable. If you succeed, the system worked. If you fail, you didn’t “want it bad enough.”
Either way, they win.
What it leaves behind
The most dangerous product online today isn’t fake crypto or dodgy skincare.
It’s weaponized insecurity.
These businesses rarely leave legacies, except for the trail of debt, disillusionment, and broken trust they plant in their customers. They don’t teach you to lead, to persuade, or to grow.
They teach you to buy the next fix.
And as long as platforms reward addictive content, as long as quick fixes feel easier than slow truths, the manipulation sellers will have another stage to perform on.
Until next time, stay skeptical.
Alex
At Kredo Marketing, we build systems that earn trust instead of exploiting it. If you want growth without manipulation, let’s talk.
Let Them Eat Aesthetics
Hey beauty skeptics—
Let’s kill a sacred cow: the idea that if something costs more, it must be more beautiful.
We’re not just talking luxury handbags or designer chairs.
This illusion creeps into how we see, desire, and validate everything around us.
And yes, there’s science to prove it.
Price messes with your brain
In 2008, Stanford and Caltech ran a sneaky little wine experiment.
People drank the same exact wine twice—once with a $10 label, once with a $90 label. Want to guess which one they raved about?
The expensive one. Their brains even lit up more in the pleasure zone (orbitofrontal cortex, if you’re into that kind of thing).
Same wine. Different story. Because the price wrote the story.
It doesn’t stop at wine. In 2020, researchers in Bologna gave people identical paintings with different price tags. The expensive ones? “More moving,” “more beautiful,” “deeper meaning.” Even art students fell for it.
Turns out your aesthetic judgment might just be a receipt in disguise.
How luxury brands trick your eyes
Luxury isn’t about better stuff. It’s about better theater.
Monochrome branding. Overexposed photography. Cryptic slogans. A logo so minimal it might not even exist. All of it whispers: “We’re expensive, therefore important.”
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called this symbolic violence. Translation: rich people make the rules of taste, and everyone else plays along.
And it works. A 2021 McKinsey report found that 70% of Gen Z luxury buyers picked “brand legacy and narrative” over actual product quality.
You’re not buying shoes. You’re buying a story where you’re the protagonist—and your shoes prove it.
Real beauty, small price
Some of the most iconic designs ever? Dirt cheap. And proudly so.
- Bic Cristal pen: Less than a euro. Transparent barrel, perfectly balanced, and a design so good it’s been copied endlessly—but never bettered. Even MoMA said yes.
- Fiat Panda (1980): Designed by Giugiaro as a tool, not a toy. Squared off, no frills, no fantasies. And yet, oddly poetic.
- Casio F-91W: A $20 watch that outlived fashion trends, batteries, and even surveillance fears. Functional, loyal, and iconic without trying.
- IKEA Billy: The democratic shelf. It doesn’t scream design—because it’s too busy serving it. And it’s probably in every city on Earth.
These objects didn’t ask to be beautiful. They became beautiful by being useful, honest, and real. No champagne-soaked launch parties. No limited editions. Just clever thinking, made accessible.
Why we still fall for price = beauty
Because we hate buyer’s remorse.
You drop €2,000 on something? You better love it. Even if it looks like a beige fungus. That’s post-purchase rationalization at work. Your brain edits the narrative to protect your ego.
And in a world full of design you don’t understand, price becomes your compass. It tells you what to like. What to envy. What to post.
But just because something is expensive doesn’t mean it’s beautiful.
It might just mean you’re scared to question it.
If luxury wants to survive the next generation of consumers, it has to grow up.
That means dropping the smoke and mirrors: no more false scarcity, inflated markups, or storytelling that hides mediocre craftsmanship behind heritage cosplay.
Ethical marketing isn’t a buzzword—it’s a correction.
It means pricing things based on real value: quality of materials, durability, originality of design. It means being transparent about production, not romanticizing sweatshops through sepia filters.
What would that market look like?
One where luxury isn’t about exclusion, but excellence. Where a beautiful object earns its price tag not through aura, but through intent. Where desirability comes from design, not deception.
Luxury can still be aspirational.
But let’s stop pretending mystery is a substitute for meaning.
Stop outsourcing your taste
Here’s a trick: next time you see a €12,000 chair in a showroom, imagine it at a flea market with a handwritten tag: “€70, negotiable.”
Would you still stop and stare?
Would you still call it art?
Because real beauty isn’t fragile.
It doesn’t need context. It doesn’t need a TED Talk or a celebrity endorsement. It just is.
And the moment you stop confusing cost with quality, you start seeing clearly.
Until next time, stay sharp.
Alex
At Kredo, we design brands that earn attention—not just price tags. If you’re building something that matters, we should talk.
Do Products Really Sell Themselves?
Hey demand chasers—
We’ve all heard it. “That product sells itself.” It’s the ultimate compliment—part envy, part resignation. But is it true?
Do some products really defy gravity and move on their own, without the push and pull of marketing? Or are we just blind to the invisible hands doing the selling?
Let’s break the myth apart. And maybe burn it a little.
The Illusion of the Self-Selling Product
There’s a seductive fantasy in business: if something is so good, it doesn’t need marketing.
Think of ChatGPT in late 2022. Ferrari. iPhone. The Birkin bag. Taylor Swift tickets. They all seem to flow through the market by some mysterious inertia. But that’s not absence of marketing. That’s marketing so deeply embedded, so culturally entrenched, that we no longer recognize it as such.
Ferrari doesn’t “sell.” It withholds. No test drives. No discounts. No influencer collabs. It’s scarcity turned into prestige. Every PR release is a masterclass in reverse psychology.
The Birkin bag has zero advertising spend. Yet has a waiting list, resale market, and entire YouTube channels dissecting “how to get one.” It’s the product equivalent of a religious artifact.
Taylor Swift? A billion-dollar tour machine powered by social currency, layered storytelling, Easter eggs, fan communities, media manipulation and a personal brand curated with surgical precision.
None of these are self-selling. They’re just so well-marketed they feel organic.
When Demand Exceeds Supply, Marketing Changes Clothes
Marketing isn’t always persuasion. Sometimes it’s framing. Sometimes it’s restraint.
In economics, when demand consistently exceeds supply, the job of marketing shifts. It’s no longer about pushing product.
It’s about managing desire.
This is what happened with Nintendo’s Wii, where artificial scarcity led to a 50% jump in media coverage and secondhand prices skyrocketing. Or with Glossier, where user-generated content, exclusivity drops, and minimalist branding made fans feel like insiders.
These strategies aren’t passive. They’re calculated. And they work because they understand that human psychology wants what it thinks it can’t have.
The Myth Is Dangerous (Especially for Startups)
Believing that great products sell themselves is a dangerous bias. It leads founders to underinvest in marketing, delay go-to-market planning, or ignore feedback loops.
In a 2023 survey by First Round Capital, 79% of failed startup founders cited “poor marketing execution”as a core reason for collapse.
Not product. Not funding. Marketing.
Stripe had a better developer experience. But it also built a legendary blog, launched on Hacker News, did partnerships with Y Combinator, and crafted elegant documentation.
Airbnb had photos. Craigslist didn’t. And they made sure everyone noticed.
If It Sells Itself, It’s Because Someone Worked for That
If a product seems to sell itself, it’s likely because:
- Someone shaped the narrative early.
- Someone built a community.
- Someone invested in design.
- Someone obsessed over product-market fit.
- Someone whispered in the right ears.
You just didn’t see it.
The “self-selling” myth is often just post-rationalized success. A product that looks effortless is usually the result of effort so well-deployed you missed it.
So… Does It Exist?
The honest answer? Rarely.
Some products catch a viral wave—timing, network effects, and a bit of luck. But even then, luck is just a name we give to unseen preparation.
Marketing isn’t just ads and copy. It’s product design. It’s timing. It’s distribution. It’s how you’re talked about when you’re not in the room.
So next time someone says, “This sells itself,” smile. And ask them: “Who made it look that way?”
Until next time, stay skeptical.
Alex
f your product’s great but no one knows it, you don’t need better luck. You need better marketing. At Kredo, we help brands design the demand they deserve.
Let’s make your product actually sell itself—by design.
Future Beauty Is Unreal — And Marketing Made It That Way
Hey beauty hackers —
We didn’t just photoshop faces. We photoshopped reality. Then we called it aspiration.
And now, after decades of airbrushed perfection and Instagram-filtered lives, we’re entering the next stage: bioprinted skin, AI-optimized symmetry, and synthetic hormones that can boost your face for the algorithm.
It sounds like science fiction. But it’s happening. And worse: it feels normal.
Welcome to the era where beauty isn’t just unattainable.
It’s post-human.
Let’s get one thing straight: marketing didn’t invent beauty standards. But it industrialized them. Turned them into KPIs.
When I started out in the industry, I remember working with a skincare brand where we tested thirty shades of “natural” skin tones — and the more unrealistic, the better they performed. The final ads looked like portraits of aliens: smooth, glowing, uncanny.
“It pops on feed,” the creative director said.
It popped, alright. It also helped create the visual grammar of the uncanny beautiful — a style that now dominates TikTok, Instagram, and your cousin’s wedding reel.
We taught algorithms what beauty looked like. And now they’re teaching us back.
Neuroaesthetics and the Rise of AI-Optimized Beauty
Let’s talk science.
Neuroaesthetics shows that humans respond to certain proportions, color balances, and symmetry patterns in deeply emotional ways. We’re wired to crave beauty that calms us, excites us, or signals health.
But here’s the twist: AI can now generate faces that hit those neural sweet spots better than real faces do. Not idealized.
Optimized.
So what happens when beauty is no longer human, but computational? When filters become surgical? When influencers look like digital clones?
Answer: people start to feel like defects.
You see it in the data: rising demand for cosmetic tweaks in teenagers. TikTok filters with 700 million uses in two days. Clinics offering “AI face scans” to suggest enhancements.
Marketing doesn’t need to sell a product. It sells an improved self. And when that self is a neural composite of data, emotion, and fantasy — you get a generation chasing perfection against a non-human benchmark.
Case Study: Dove’s Real Beauty Commitment (2024)
Let’s look at a brand that chose to go radically against the trend.
In 2024, Dove celebrated 20 years of its Real Beauty campaign with a clear message: no AI-generated faces, no post-human perfection. Just real people. Their campaign featured portraits of women of all ages and backgrounds — pores, wrinkles, freckles and all — shot in natural light, with zero filters.
One of the key visuals featured a 53-year-old community teacher from Lisbon, wearing no makeup, laughing openly in front of a classroom of teenagers. The image went viral across Europe, with the hashtag #NoDigitalDistortion trending for days. Unilever, Dove’s parent company, reported a 24% increase in engagement across German and Scandinavian markets.
But the real victory? Gen Z’s reaction. Thousands of young users reposted the campaign with captions like “this is what my mom looks like” or “finally someone who looks like my aunt.”
It wasn’t nostalgia. It was relief.
Dove didn’t just promote a product — it reclaimed the visual language of beauty. And it proved that in a market saturated by synthetic aesthetics, authenticity doesn’t just break through. It leads.
The Psychology of Beauty Fatigue
Psychologists call it “aesthetic numbness.”
It’s what happens when your brain is pummeled with flawless faces, perfect product shots, and algorithmically curated feeds for too long. Like a song on repeat, beauty — when too consistent — becomes background noise. The first time you saw a filter that smoothed the skin and added sparkles, you probably noticed. By the hundredth time? You scroll right past it.
Years ago, I sat in a meeting with a creative director who insisted we use the same retouched lighting, soft-focus filters, and pastel palette across every campaign image. “Consistency sells,” he said. But by the end of the quarter, engagement was down 18%. People weren’t angry. They were just… gone. Eyes glazed over. Comments stopped. We’d optimized the life out of it.
The human brain is bored by perfection. It craves micro-tension — like a crooked smile, a surprising color palette, a wrinkle that says this person has lived. Neuromarketing studies have shown that the amygdala, our emotional processing center, responds more intensely to unpredictable or slightly asymmetric visual inputs than to sterile balance.
Simply put: we feel more when things aren’t quite right.
That’s why brands embracing imperfection aren’t just doing it for ethics or aesthetics. They’re doing it for engagement. A freckled model, an out-of-place strand of hair, even the reflection of a photographer in the mirror — these “errors” draw us in because they break the loop of visual monotony. They remind us there’s a human behind the lens.
And in a marketplace where attention is currency, disruption is value.
So What Do We Do?
Here’s the tiplist:
- Make realness visible — not as a campaign stunt, but as a long-term narrative.
- Audit your aesthetic defaults — are you choosing visuals that reflect reality or just reflect the algorithm?
- Champion narrative beauty — faces with stories last longer in memory.
- Design for trust, not just attention — beauty that looks good but feels fake is a liability.
- Reclaim the uncanny — if you use AI, make it surreal, not synthetic. Art, not lie.
and in the End…
The future of beauty is up for grabs.
We can either keep chasing the ultra-optimized self, defined by pixels and predictions. Or we can rehumanize beauty — one imperfection at a time.
The market is already shifting. What was once edgy now feels hollow. And what once felt raw now feels rare. That’s your cue.
Beauty isn’t disappearing. It’s mutating.
Let’s make sure it doesn’t lose its soul.
Until next time, stay uncanny.
Alex
Want to craft campaigns that stand out without selling out?
Kredo Marketing helps brands rediscover their truth — in strategy, in design, in storytelling.
Let’s make marketing feel human again.
The Instagramification of Everything
Hey feed-surfers—
Have you noticed how everything looks like it’s trying to be… liked?
Coffee shops. Book covers. Packaging. Logos. Even cities.
We’re living in the golden age of “Instagramification”—a culture where every object, product, and experience is filtered through the logic of the grid: sharp lines, muted colors, sans-serif fonts, and photogenic shadows. Aesthetics optimized for scrolling. Not for meaning.
And that’s a problem.
When Form Devours Function
Go to any newly opened café in Paris, Milan, or Düsseldorf. Chances are it features terrazzo countertops, arched mirrors, plants in clay pots, and just the right hue of beige. It’s not that it’s ugly—it’s that you’ve seen it a hundred times.
What used to be local flair has turned into global sameness. A kind of aesthetic monoculture. Architecture, once contextual and expressive, is now often guided by how good it looks in a reel. Just like food, furniture, hotel lobbies, and even churches.
The logic is clear: if it photographs well, it spreads well. If it spreads well, it converts.
But what are we losing in the process?
The Instagram Brain
Psychologically, this shift has deeper consequences than we think. Studies in cognitive neuroscience suggest that our brains are increasingly wired to favor pattern recognition over substance digestion.
That is: we scroll faster, we judge quicker, and we remember less.
This is especially problematic in marketing. When visual branding relies too heavily on surface trends, brands begin to blur. They become pretty but forgettable. Studies show that the average brand impression lasts less than 2 secondsin a social scroll.
If your brand looks like the last ten your user saw, congratulations—you don’t exist.
And there’s more.
A 2022 paper from the Journal of Consumer Psychology notes that overly aestheticized product design creates what researchers call “cognitive friction”—when form overshadows function, users feel confused, even anxious. They hesitate. They churn.
But… Who’s It For, Really?
This aesthetic obsession is also an economic paradox. A company spends months designing a new app interface, storefront, or brand campaign. It wins awards. It gets reposted. But it doesn’t sell more. Or worse, it alienates the audience that actually pays.
Because here’s the catch:not every user is on Instagram. And even among those who are, not everyone values the same visual codes. In trying to please the algorithm, many brands stop speaking to their core audience.
They start designing for designers.
This disconnect is not just theoretical. Look at the countless rebrands that backfire because they swapped character for “modernity.” Think Tropicana’s infamous packaging redesign in 2009, which led to a 20% drop in sales—roughly $30 million lost in a few weeks.
Why? Because the new design looked cleaner… but felt generic. Customers didn’t recognize it. So they didn’t buy it.
A Counter-Example: Vitsœ in Germany
Let’s stay in Europe.
Vitsœ , the German-British company that produces Dieter Rams’ modular shelving system, has resisted this aesthetic contagion. Their branding is borderline anti-Instagram: minimal but not trendy, calm but not sterile. Their website feels more like a personal letter than a showroom.
Yet they have a cult following. Not because they shout louder—but because they whisper consistently. Their whole ethos is long-term thinking: sustainability, timeless design, slow consumption. And customers respond. They don’t just buy a product—they buy into a philosophy.
This is key: when everyone else is screaming visuals, a clear voice cuts through.
So what’s the cost of aesthetic conformity?
In economic terms:wasted budget. High design costs, low return.
In psychological terms: decision fatigue, shallow engagement, short-lived loyalty. In strategic terms: a brand that can’t differentiate itself.
Brands need to stop designing for screenshots and start designing for resonance.
Because in the end, likes don’t equal loyalty.
Tips for De-Instagramifying Your Brand
- Audit your visuals — Does your website, packaging, or content look like a Pinterest board from 2021? Be honest.
- Reclaim your voice — What does your brand sound like? If you took away all visuals, could someone still recognize you?
- Design for use, not likes — Ask: does this asset help my user do something better? Or just look good?
- Stay rooted in your story — Before choosing a style, revisit your why. Aesthetics should express it, not replace it.
- Test with outsiders — Get feedback from people who aren’t designers or marketers. If they “get it,” you’re doing it right.
There’s nothing wrong with beauty.
But when everything is optimized for optics, we risk building a world of brands that look alive but feel empty.
So here’s a better goal: design things that matter in feeds and in minds.
Because your job isn’t to go viral. Your job is to be remembered.
Until next time, stay sharp.
Alex
Want to escape the scroll-driven marketing trap?
Let’s design strategies that actually stick. 👉 www.kredo-marketing.com
Corporate ADHD: Why Brands Can’t Focus (And Customers Can Tell)
Hey attention crash-testers—
Ever walked into a meeting with five priorities? Congratulations, you have zero.
Brands are burning out. Not because of lack of ambition — but because they can’t sit still. One quarter it’s Gen Z. The next it’s TikTok. Then it’s sustainability. Now it’s AI. And don’t forget NFTs, because someone’s cousin made a million with a pixelated llama.
We’re not iterating. We’re twitching.
And like a sleep-deprived intern juggling Slack, Zoom, and a boss yelling “BE MORE DISRUPTIVE,” brands are living through a full-blown attention crisis.
The result? Customers feel it. Employees drown in it. Strategy dies because of it.
The Corporate ADHD Epidemic
Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, I was consulting for a mid-sized fashion brand in Berlin. They called us in because “they wanted to rebrand.”
Classic.
But by week two, they weren’t sure if the priority was expanding their menswear line, launching a podcast, building a Roblox activation, or going full vegan.
I remember asking the CEO in a workshop, “What’s the one thing your customers come to you for?”
He paused. Looked around. Then said: “Aesthetics?”
It was a question.
This is how it always starts: with a loss of focus disguised as opportunity.
Their Instagram became a random mess of half-baked campaigns. They launched a capsule collection no one understood. Eventually, their loyal base started drifting. They weren’t angry — just… confused. Within 12 months, revenue was down 23%.
This is what happens when you confuse busyness with progress. When you chase everything, you dilute everything.
The Illusion of Agility
Corporate ADHD hides behind words like “agile” and “fast-moving.” But real agility isn’t about reacting to every trend. It’s about knowing when not to.
A 2023 Deloitte report found that only 17% of brands that adopted “rapid pivot” strategies post-Covid saw long-term growth. The rest either plateaued or regressed. Why? Because in most cases, the pivot wasn’t rooted in strategy — it was panic rebranded as responsiveness.
Take CNN+. Remember that streaming service? Neither does anyone else. It launched in 2022. Died in 2022.
Why? Because CNN tried to play Netflix without understanding their own audience’s media habits. They mistook the content boom for a license to diversify, instead of asking the obvious: Do people want more CNN… or better CNN?
Case Study: Oatly’s Focused Weirdness
Now, let’s flip it.
Oatly is weird. Purposefully so. You might think of them as just “the oat milk brand with the loud packaging.” But behind the chaos is ruthless focus.
Their tone is eccentric, but consistent. Their messaging — from TV spots to carton sides — always reinforces the same identity: irreverent, plant-based, anti-corporate.
In 2020, they had a 70% market share in Sweden’s alt-milk category. Globally? They became a symbol of how to be everywhere without being everything.
Even when expanding into Asia, they didn’t dilute. Same fonts. Same humor. Same activist edge. That coherence makes them recognizable — and trustworthy. You don’t need to love oat milk to know what Oatly stands for.
That’s strategic focus. Not rigidity. Not sameness. Focus with personality.
Saying No
In 2022, I was working with a startup in the food tech scene — a scrappy team of twelve, great product, good energy. They’d just closed a decent seed round and were drunk on potential. At our kickoff meeting, the founder burst in late, phone still glued to his ear, and launched into a monologue:
“We want to expand into Germany, open a pop-up in London, relaunch the website, hire a Head of Brand, start a podcast, and explore a metaverse experience — oh, and maybe do something with NFTs.”
I remember blinking, sipping my lukewarm espresso, and saying, “Pick one. Then we’ll talk.”
They weren’t thrilled. They paused the project. I think the CMO even rolled his eyes.
Three months later, I got an email. Subject line: “We should’ve listened.”
The campaigns had flopped. Social was a ghost town. Developers were building two unfinished landing pages at once. Everyone was exhausted. They’d burned through half the budget, chasing noise over clarity.
It was a classic case of cognitive overload disguised as ambition. And saying no wasn’t just advice — it was the only act of strategic mercy I could offer.
Focus isn’t sexy. But it’s the only thing that scales.
Symptoms of Corporate ADHD
- You’re launching five things and maintaining none
- Your team is burned out but directionless
- You’re on every social platform — but with no strategy
- Quarterly goals shift monthly
- No one can articulate your brand’s core narrative in one sentence
According to a 2024 PwC survey, 64% of marketing leaders say their biggest struggle is “too many simultaneous priorities.”
So How Do You Treat It?
Here’s the checklist. Stick it to your office wall:
- Define what you don’t do — Strategy is subtraction.
- Audit your narrative every quarter — Are you still telling the same story?
- Build fewer things, but finish them — Launch less. Land more.
- Reward long-term KPIs — Not just engagement spikes.
- Make ‘no’ a default option — Kill ideas fast. Before they become projects.
I’ll leave you with this.
A few years back, while consulting for a lifestyle brand drowning in half-launched projects, I remember sitting in a dim-lit boardroom covered with sticky notes. The walls screamed potential. But none of it stuck. Each note represented a “priority” — which, by definition, meant none really were. The founder looked at me, wide-eyed, and asked: “So… which one do you think we should go all in on?”
I replied: “Which one would still matter if TikTok disappeared tomorrow?”
Silence.
That’s what focus sounds like.
In a business culture that rewards noise, focus is an act of rebellion. It means resisting the dopamine hit of constant novelty. It means building something — slowly, consistently — until it matters. And it means having the courage to stay boring long enough for your audience to trust you.
Because customers don’t leave because you’re boring. They leave because you’ve lost the plot.
Until next time, stay grounded.
Alex
If your brand feels overwhelmed by too many ideas and zero clarity, we can help. At Kredo Marketing, we turn chaos into strategy — and ambition into results. Let’s talk before your audience drifts away.
Digital Darwinism: Why Most Brands Aren’t Evolving
Hey evolutionary misfits—
Some brands evolve. Most just mutate. And the difference between the two?
Survival.
In the natural world, evolution is adaptive. It’s a response to the environment. But mutation? It’s random. It’s the business equivalent of slapping a TikTok account on a B2B software firm because “everyone’s doing it.”
Welcome to the age of Digital Darwinism, where tech moves faster than strategy, and survival isn’t guaranteed by innovation — but by relevance.
The Law of the Jungle Is Now the Law of the Feed
Evolution doesn’t reward the strongest or smartest. It rewards the most adaptable. And in marketing, adaptability doesn’t mean chasing trends — it means responding to user behavior, technological shifts, and cultural context with intention.
Blockbuster. In 2000, they laughed Netflix out of the room. In 2010, they were bankrupt. Not because streaming killed them overnight — but because they failed to adapt while their customers did.
It’s never the comet. It’s always the inertia.
Mutation Marketing: A Dangerous Game of Brand Roulette
We see it every day: brands mimicking each other like confused parrots. Suddenly, everyone’s “disruptive,” using the same shade of blue, writing like Duolingo, and putting “AI” in places it has no reason to be.
That’s not evolution. That’s panic-induced mutation.
A McKinsey study in 2023 found that 61% of rebrands failed to improve customer perception.
Why? Because they weren’t strategic responses.
They were stylistic overhauls without ecosystem thinking. If you’re just re-skinning your brand without re-thinking your relevance, you’re not evolving.
You’re molting.
Kodak vs. Fujifilm
Let’s rewind to the early 2000s. Both Kodak and Fujifilm were dominant forces in the film photography world, staring down the barrel of digital disruption.
Kodak had the upper hand in brand recognition. They even invented the digital camera back in 1975 — and shelved it to protect their film business. Their corporate DNA was deeply tied to physical film, and their internal culture was allergic to cannibalizing it.
Fujifilm, on the other hand, saw the writing on the wall and treated digital not as a threat but as a signpost. They invested heavily in R&D and diversified, leveraging their core capabilities in chemicals and imaging into medical diagnostics, regenerative medicine, and cosmetics (see: their successful skincare line Astalift). By 2012, they had cut their film business down to just 1% of total revenue — and thrived.
Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Fujifilm grew.
It’s not that one had better tech. It’s that one had the cultural flexibility to adapt — and the strategic foresight to redefine itself.
Both giants. Both hit by the rise of digital photography. One died. The other pivoted.
Kodak clung to film like a security blanket. Fujifilm, meanwhile, leveraged their chemical expertise to branch into cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare imaging. Today, Fujifilm is thriving.
Same threat. Different reaction. Different outcome.
Evolution is not about protecting the old. It’s about leveraging what’s core to adapt to what’s next.
Your Org Chart Is Fighting Evolution
It’s tempting to think evolution is a matter of tools. Better software, new platforms, smarter automation. But what if the real obstacle to evolution isn’t your stack — it’s your structure?
Most companies are built like machines: hierarchical, rigid, optimized for repeatability. But digital ecosystems are more like organisms — fluid, messy, adaptive. And when a machine meets an organism, guess who bends?
Legacy org charts are the biggest blockers to adaptive change. Why? Because they’re designed to preserve stability, not embrace flux. Consider how ideas travel inside a traditional company: a junior UX researcher has a brilliant insight from user testing. That insight needs buy-in from a PM, who needs approval from a director, who then waits on quarterly alignment from the brand VP. By the time it gets greenlit, the customer behavior has already changed.
According to a 2023 Capgemini report, companies with highly siloed structures were 42% less likely to complete digital transformation initiatives compared to those with cross-functional teams and flatter hierarchies.
Even when companies talk about agility, they often just repackage old structures with new terminology. “Squads” that still need director approval aren’t agile. They’re theatre.
And let’s not forget the human layer: job titles as identity, turf wars over brand ownership, resistance to anything that threatens legacy metrics. These aren’t just annoyances — they’re evolutionary handbrakes.
If your org chart rewards maintaining the status quo, you’re not set up to evolve.
You’re set up to ossify.
What Evolutionary Brands Actually Do
- They experiment with intent — Testing isn’t about novelty. It’s about feedback loops
- They hire anthropologists, not just analysts — Data shows you what. Anthropology shows you why.
- They invest in internal evolution — It’s not just the brand. It’s the mindset.
- They question legacy success — What worked five years ago might be the anchor today.
Look at Spotify: continuous redesigns, regional personalization, and AI-curated listening that adjusts to your mood.
That’s brand evolution in real-time.
Checklist: Are You Evolving or Just Twitching?
Think of this as your brand’s evolutionary stress test — a diagnostic to understand whether you’re adapting with purpose or just convulsing at every passing trend. Mutation is easy. Evolution is hard. Let’s find out where you stand.
- Do you have a test-and-learn loop integrated into marketing? Not just A/B testing banners, but systemic loops that influence product, communication, and UX? Brands like Booking.com run thousands of experiments weekly — what’s your volume?
- Are you tracking cultural shifts — not just industry trends? It’s easy to follow what competitors do. It’s harder (and more valuable) to decode cultural codes and shifts in user sentiment. Are you tuning into Reddit, TikTok, and Discord — or just reading LinkedIn posts?
- Is your design changing with user behavior or despite it? Figma’s rise wasn’t just because of design tools — it aligned with how distributed teams work. Is your design evolving from user input, or is it dictated by the latest Dribbble trends?
- Do your values evolve or just your color palette? Rebrands often change the visuals, but keep dated slogans and outdated tone. Patagonia evolved their messaging with climate urgency — have you evolved yours?
- Are your KPIs driving relevance or just performance? Are you tracking Net Promoter Score without understanding what drives it? Do you know why your bounce rate is high or just that it is?
The goal isn’t to tick boxes. It’s to trigger honest reflection. Because evolution requires discomfort. Mutation just needs panic.
and the winner is…
Brands don’t go extinct because the market changed.
They go extinct because they didn’t.
In the age of Digital Darwinism, clarity beats chaos, strategy beats novelty, and intentional evolution beats blind mutation.
Until next time, stay adaptive.
Alex
Want your brand to evolve, not just mutate?
Let’s work together to build strategies that survive the next wave.
👉 KREDO is Here!
Your Design Is Killing Conversions – Here’s Why Ego Is Expensive
Hey ego busters—
There’s a quiet epidemic in marketing: brands designing for themselves instead of their customers.
It looks like innovation. It feels like taste. It wins awards.
But when you peel back the pixels, you often find a product that looks amazing and performs terribly.
This isn’t just bad design — it’s ego design.
The Seduction of Branding Narcissism
Let’s face it: many design decisions come from the top, not from user data. Founders obsessed with minimalism. CMOs chasing competitors. Agencies crafting for Dribbble, not for usability.
In a 2023 survey by NN/g, 67% of in-house designers admitted they often adjusted interfaces to “meet stakeholder tastes” at the expense of user clarity.
That’s not user-centered. That’s a branding selfie.
And it’s expensive. Brands spend millions crafting digital experiences that alienate the very people they’re meant to serve.
In fact, Gartner reports that companies waste an average of 17% of their design budgets on aesthetic changes that offer no improvement in user performance.
Ego Design in Action — The Airline That Hid Its Booking Button
In 2021, a European airline launched a visually striking redesign. Hero videos. Parallax scroll. Invisible menu. Floating typography. It won a Webby and got praised in design blogs.
But within 3 months, customer support tickets rose by 38%, with most complaints about booking steps being unclear.
Internal analytics showed that click-through rate on the homepage CTA dropped by 44%. A UX audit revealed users literally couldn’t find the “Book Now” button unless they scrolled for 10 seconds.
The culprit? A creative director who wanted the homepage to “feel like a cinematic experience.”
The result? A cinematic disaster.
A follow-up test using eye-tracking showed that less than 12% of users noticed the booking button in under 8 seconds. That’s a lifetime in digital.
Ego Is Expensive. Confusion Is Costly.
Here’s what ego-driven design does:
- Adds friction in the name of flair.
- Prioritizes novelty over function.
- Assumes brand aesthetics matter more than cognitive clarity.
And it backfires. Badly.
A 2022 Forrester study found that poor UX design causes 89% of users to switch to a competitor after a frustrating interaction — and ego-driven interfaces ranked highest in frustration triggers.
Another meta-analysis by Baymard Institute reveals that a staggering 68% of e-commerce users abandon their carts due to usability issues, many of which stem from overcomplicated, self-indulgent design elements.
Why “Taste” Is Not Strategy
Taste is subjective. Usability is measurable.
When a CMO pushes a pastel palette because “it feels premium,” or a founder wants an all-text navigation bar to look different — you’re no longer designing for your audience. You’re designing for yourself.
Your metrics will suffer. Your team will get blamed. And your customers? They’ll bounce.
In 2023, a SaaS startup redesigned its onboarding flow to look “slicker.” After implementation, trial-to-paid conversion dropped by 21%.
Why?
They buried the signup logic under modal transitions and over-designed steps. A rollback to the older, simpler interface recovered the lost conversions within 2 weeks.
How to Spot Ego Design in Your Own Work
Ask:
- Who is this layout pleasing — our users, or our CEO?
- Are visual choices justified by data or just “gut feeling”?
- Have we A/B tested before locking in big aesthetic changes?
- Is the design helping the user act — or making us look cool?
The hardest part? Realizing your creative pride might be your conversion killer.
Also: check heatmaps. Where users actually click often reveals how misaligned your visual priorities are with their behavior.
Design for the Brain, Not for the Portfolio
Some of the highest-performing designs out there look… boring. Think Amazon, Booking.com, Basecamp.
But boring isn’t bad. Boring is invisible. Invisible means usable.
These platforms aren’t designed for portfolios — they’re designed to get users from point A to point B with zero cognitive overhead. That’s not boring. That’s brilliant.
Research from the Nielsen Norman Group shows that visually simple interfaces increase task success rate by up to 47% compared to high-design ones. When function leads form, friction disappears.
Actionable Strategy: Anti-Ego Design Sprint
Next time you’re about to redesign:
- Interview 5 customers. Ask what they expect to see first.
- Do a 3-second test: can they tell what you offer instantly?
- Remove 1 decorative element for every step in your funnel.
- Define success by clarity, not creativity.
- Assign one person on your team to play “usability devil’s advocate.” Their job? Push back on every ego-driven decision.
Remember: clarity converts. Ego flatters.
In the end..
Your brand is not your aesthetic. It’s the clarity of your promise, and the ease with which people can say yes to it.
Design for your users, not your ego.
Until next time, stay humble.
Alex
Tired of choosing between pretty and profitable?
At Kredo Marketing, we design with one goal in mind: clarity that converts.
Drop us a message — we actually listen.