Toniq

You see it every time someone says they’re “just being authentic” while running a playbook on how to be authentic. You see it in marketing, in content, in the way brands try to sound human without actually being human.

People like to believe we’ve evolved since those candlelit rituals in cold English cottages, but we really haven’t. The setting changed. The superstition didn’t. We still want to be clean. We still want to be seen as good. And when we can’t be, we find someone to carry the weight for us.

Tone is that invisible handshake before anything else lands. It tells people if you’re friend or foe, confident or careless, sincere or smug. Most of us think we control it—like a dial we can twist—but really, tone’s more like an echo. It changes shape once it hits someone else.

Somewhere between “Just do it” and “Live your best life,” we turned motion into morality. Sitting still became a sin. Taking a nap became a weakness. Doing less became something we had to justify with words like “self-care” or “recovery day.”

When something really gets to us, it almost never starts with reason. It starts as a slight tug you can’t quite name. Something in it grabbed me and didn’t let go. The Van Gogh exhibit wasn’t just a bunch of paintings. It felt alive, like his thoughts were drifting through the space.

Brands do this all the time. They get nervous, like that new waitress, and start to over-explain. They don’t trust that people will understand, so they spell it out. Every word. Every feeling. Every intended reaction.

It starts small. You thank your GPS for rerouting you. You apologize to Siri when you mumble. You say goodnight to a small black cylinder that lives on your nightstand and listens to your breathing. None of this feels strange anymore, which is exactly what’s strange about it

Perfection has a way of sneaking in through the side door. It rarely announces itself as fear. It dresses up as high standards, professionalism, or artistic integrity. It tells you that if you just tweak a little more, fix that one small thing, get the phrasing right, then you’ll finally be ready. But ready never comes.

Campaigns are adrenaline. They’re the marketing equivalent of crash diets. Everyone feels motivated, the energy spikes, there are kickoff meetings with bagels and bad coffee, and someone says something like “We just need to make a splash.” And for a brief moment, they do.

Trust is not a mood. It is a build. It is the quiet structure that sits under every choice, every conversation, and every promise you make. When it is sound, people move with ease.

We buy the sneakers because we believe in perseverance. We buy the shampoo because we believe in self-care. If you’re bald, like me, you believe in miracles. We buy the car because we believe in progress.

Too much of a good thing eventually stops being good. The same way one more spicy tuna roll can tip you from bliss to regret, one more tagline can push your brand from memorable to forgettable. It never happens in one big bite. It happens slowly, in tiny decisions that all feel right in the moment.

It fascinates me that we, as a collective species, can summon entire traditions out of thin air. Someone somewhere declares a date, gives it a name, and suddenly, people across the world are making cupcakes, creating hashtags, and designing commemorative t-shirts.

It does beg the question: why? Why does Coke advertise so much? Why does Coke do holiday bottles and spend millions of dollars on holiday commercials? For that matter, have you ever wondered why a brand like Coke, that is identifiable all over the world, still advertises so much and so often?

When I thought about it, I realized that churches understood branding long before marketing ever existed. They knew how to tell a story and keep it alive for generations. Every part of the experience was designed to make people feel something.