Toniq

Making a resolution puts pressure on us and then, if we fail, we feel worse, and usually we go deeper into our vice. If you resolve to drink less in the new year and you find yourself on the couch with a tumbler of bourbon on a Saturday afternoon, you may suddenly think, well, I failed at that, may as well go all in.

Once you start paying attention to the built world, it becomes hard to ignore what it’s telling you. Buildings don’t argue. Roads don’t explain themselves. Infrastructure doesn’t defend its choices. It just sits there, doing exactly what it was designed to do, shaping behavior day after day.

There are habits we repeat because we repeated them last year, and the year before that, and somewhere along the way, repetition began to masquerade as meaning.

The brands that come closest to awe don’t feel like performances. They feel like places. Sometimes literal. Sometimes not. You don’t rush through them. You don’t fully understand them immediately. You spend time with them. And for a moment, you forget yourself.

That’s why so many people think AI is a bubble right now. Not because it doesn’t work. Not because it won’t change things. But because the industry stopped the show and passed the hat before most people had felt the pull of the next beat.

That’s usually where slop sneaks in. A lot of it has nothing to do with how something was made or what tools were used. You can usually feel the problem somewhere else. The work doesn’t seem to belong to anyone. No one sounds like they’d stand up for it if it missed the mark, or stick with it long enough to make it better.

Are brands actually saving us time, giving us time, opening up our time, or are they time bandits, quietly taking away moments that once mattered, moments we’ve now forgotten? Now we have time savers filling our time.

People don’t defend brands because they’re perfect. They defend them because they understand what the brand is trying to do and they agree with it.

That’s where the real question begins. How did these brands win the cultural lottery? What makes Kleenex a default, while other facial tissue brands remain just facial tissue? How did Bubble Wrap achieve immortality when competitors still sit in the corner labeled “protective cushioning” like a kid picked last for dodgeball?

Which brings me to the real question. What do brands owe their customers? What do they really owe them? Not the old line about the customer always being right. What lengths should a brand go to in order to keep people happy? And where’s the point where trying to make everyone happy actually makes things worse?

Brands fall into this same trap. They look at age, location, income, or whatever data point their dashboard spits out, and they build entire campaigns on top of it. They think they understand the person behind the number. Most of the time, they don’t come close.

There’s something inside us that lights up when we hit a moment that refuses to explain itself. It’s like the brain sits up a little straighter. Wait, what was that? What’s going on here? Why is there a penguin in a high school hallway? We lean closer because the story suddenly gives us a job to do. It lets us wonder.

As the industry shifted, the firms that didn’t pay attention to their brand presence didn’t fall behind because the work slipped. The work stayed strong. What slipped was the way they talked about it.

Empathy disappears because no one is really in charge of it. Product thinks marketing has it. Marketing assumes research covered it. Research waits for leadership to set the tone. Leadership assumes everyone already gets it. With no clear owner, empathy becomes vague. Everyone values it, but no one protects it.

Most brands will tell you they serve everyone. They talk about inclusivity. They talk about connection. They talk about meeting people where they are. But behind the scenes, in the quiet rooms where strategy decks live, there is an unspoken truth. Brands draw invisible age lines. They decide who they want and who they do not. They decide which ages feel aspirational and which feel like a liability.