Toniq

This isn’t just a fast food thing. It happens in almost every industry you can think of. One company releases something that works, and before long, the rest of the category starts circling the same idea.

So, in my bleary-eyed morning state, I am going to write about National Women’s History Month. Women were given the right to vote in 1919, and the law was ratified in 1920. However, if you look at the history of the suffrage movement, you’ll see that the whole thing started in the 1800s. More than a century later, women could finally go to their local voting place and express their views on who should be running this place.

When did this happen, and why? When did we go from “Do you need some help?” to “This is going viral”? When did we stop showing human decency to fellow humans and choose content instead?

There is something deeply comforting about the phrase “new and improved.” It suggests motion. It implies intelligence. It whispers that someone has been hard at work in a lab coat somewhere, making sure we’re not left behind.

When brands involve surveys and research in their messaging, what are they actually doing, and what do they owe the consumer?

This happens all too often. We get attached to things, and then those things close, vanish, or change. It makes me think about brands and how people get them entangled in their lives, and what they do when the brand goes away.

Why is it that when we have something straightforward, someone feels the need to improve it by adding more? More gadgets. More add-ons. Ore geegaws. More connections. More cheese. Why is it always more? Why can’t a thing just do a thing and leave it at that?

Maybe I should head to Instacare and tell the doctor I suspect a case of AI fatigue. I can picture him nodding, opening his laptop, typing “AI fatigue” into ChatGPT, and reading me the symptoms generated by the very thing I’m apparently exhausted by.

The old T-zone nonsense is a perfect example. When the factual claim became risky, the emotional one stepped in to do the work. The product didn’t change. The story did. And the story got intentionally vaguer.

Well, one reason might be human beings, their needs and wants. Do we want our jobs to be taken over by algorithms? The Luddites asked the same questions as they headed into the Industrial Revolution. With technology, there is always the question of just because we can do it, does that mean we should do it?

What about brands that get rejected? How do they respond? How do they continue on? Have any brands been thoroughly rejected, pulled themselves up, and made something of themselves?

When we talk about brands, we talk about brand personality, brand wants, brand traits, etc. We make brands out to be people with quirks and idiosyncrasies, a personality, and a drive. If brands are indeed like people, would it be smart for a brand to have a bucket list?

How do brands keep up with an ever-shifting definition of reality? Is the fictionalized reality we consume more inviting than the real thing? And if so, how should a brand respond?

 I read an article that said AI is beating the average human in creativity tests. You heard that right, it has been shown that advanced AI models can now outperform average humans in standardized creativity tests.

I skipped, as ninety percent of the population does, reading the excessively long, impossible-to-understand terms and conditions of my new phone. For that, I spent a year in hard labor on a mayonnaise farm somewhere in the bowels of America.