Why logic (sometimes) is anesthesia for brands

Ignore your competitors

In a digital landscape flattened by infinite choices, the instinct is to seek shelter in the "proven." Brands monitor competitors, mirror successful moves, and obsess over data to mitigate risk. But this quest for security carries a lethal hidden cost: it destroys the friction required to build genuine memory.

Logic makes you safe. It also makes you invisible.

The Mirror Trap

Most organizations play defense: they look outside to decide who they want to be. They conduct massive market research to identify what the audience expects, then build a strategy to meet those exact expectations.

While this appears data-driven, it suffers from a fundamental flaw. In traditional research, people rarely articulate their true motivations; they recite what is socially acceptable. When everyone uses the same "safe" data to fulfill the same expectations, the result is a market of identical outputs.

This is what Alex Murrell described as The Age of Average in his famous piece: a world where art, architecture, and branding are converging into a point of aesthetic singularity.

Functional, polished, and wonderfully forgettable.

Pablo Rochat via Instagram

Radiate, don't reflect

True resonance is achieved by offering a vision. Instead of a mirror, a brand must be a projector, casting its own identity into the world and inviting the audience to react to its unique perspective.

This requires a shift from strictly logical decision-making to a more visceral embrace of the counter-intuitive.

This is the transition from being Market-Driven (responding to the current state) to being Market-Driving (shaping the future).

If a strategy feels perfectly safe, it is likely already being done by someone else. Probably even better. To carve a place in the viewer's mind, you must risk being misunderstood at first, to eventually be recognized later.

Context over Virality

The obsession with "virality" has led to a homogenization of culture. To break through the noise, communication must prioritize contextual truth over viral templates.

Virality is often a symptom of low-cost signaling. It relies on "optimized" hooks that trigger the same dopamine loops as everyone else. This is the Short-termism crisis: chasing metrics that look good on a report but fail to build lasting brand equity.

It’s all about inhabiting the same reality as your audience. When a brand reacts to the unspoken dynamics of the world its users live in, it ceases to be a vendor and becomes a companion. It stops interrupting users and starts sharing with them.