Recently, I shared a tongue-in-cheek LinkedIn post after receiving an email from ANZ with the subject line: “Imminent Candidate Purge Notification.” It genuinely made me laugh. Not because I was offended. Quite the opposite. Somewhere between a perfectly reasonable business process and me opening my inbox, someone had unknowingly turned a recruitment email into something that sounded like it had been written by Skynet’s People & Culture team. “Candidate 47291. Your records are scheduled for permanent deletion…”
Fucking Brilliant. Completely unintentional, but brilliant.
The best part? ANZ responded publicly. They acknowledged the feedback, escalated it internally and changed the wording.
That’s good brand stewardship. It wasn’t defensive. It wasn’t performative. It was simply a brand recognising that even the smallest interactions deserve attention.
But this was never really about the word purge.
It reminded me of something I’ve believed for years…
YOUR BRAND DOESN’T STOP AT MARKETING…
In fact, I’d argue marketing is only responsible for introducing people to your brand. The rest of the business is responsible for proving it.
We spend months obsessing over positioning, brand guidelines, tone of voice, messaging frameworks, campaigns, sponsorships, social content and launch films. We debate colours. We debate typography. We debate photography styles. We debate whether the logo should be 24 or 32 pixels wide. Then we high-five ourselves because the brand looks beautiful.
Meanwhile, somewhere else in the business, Finance is sending invoices that sound nothing like the brand. HR is sending robotic recruitment emails. IT is writing error messages that feel like they were translated from binary. Procurement is implementing platforms that nobody ever stops to customise. Customer Service is using scripts written ten years ago. And suddenly the brand you’ve invested millions building quietly starts leaking out through a thousand tiny cracks. 💀
That’s the thing about people. They don’t experience organisations in departments.
Nobody ever says, “That wasn’t really ANZ. That was just their recruitment platform.” Or, “That wasn’t Qantas. That was just Operations.” They simply experience ANZ. Or Qantas. Or Apple. Every interaction becomes another data point helping them decide what that organisation feels like. Not what it says it stands for… what it actually feels like.
Which is why I’ve always loved airline safety videos.
Think about it for a second. They’re mandatory. Highly regulated. Compliance-driven. Every airline has exactly the same job to do: tell people where the exits are, how the oxygen masks work and what to do in an emergency. The information barely changes.
The old world treated that moment like an obligation. The best brands treated it like an opportunity.
Qantas. Air New Zealand. Virgin Australia. They all realised something beautifully simple. If someone has to watch this anyway… why not make it unmistakably ours? Why not make it entertaining? Why not make it memorable? Why not create something people actually look forward to seeing? Something they share. Something they remember years later. The compliance didn’t change. The information didn’t change. The feeling changed.
That’s what great brands understand.
EVERY FUCKING TOUCHPOINT IS A BRAND TOUCHPOINT…
Not just the glamorous ones.
// The password reset email. The chatbot. The rejection letter.
// The confirmation SMS. The invoice. The onboarding pack.
// The error message. The hold music. The automated workflow.
Every single one of them is teaching people who you are… whether you intended it to or not.
Maybe that’s why I get so “passionate” about this stuff. Because I genuinely believe brand is an operating system, not a marketing function. It should influence how you think, how you write, how you design, how you recruit, how you invoice, how you apologise and how you celebrate. It should be seen, heard and more importantly felt everywhere.
So here’s a challenge for every leadership team.
Next time you’re reviewing your brand guidelines, don’t just invite Marketing.
Invite HR. Invite Finance. Invite IT. Invite Customer Service. Invite Procurement.
Then spend a day walking through every email, every workflow, every automated notification and every customer interaction you can find.
Ask yourselves three questions:
- Does this sound like us?
- Does this feel like us?
- Would someone know it’s us if they never saw our logo?
Because that’s where the real work begins.
Not in the campaign. Not on the billboard. Not on LinkedIn.
But in the thousands of tiny moments where brands either reinforce what they stand for… or quietly undermine everything they’ve spent years trying to build.
That’s the stuff people remember.
Even if the subject line says “PURGE.” 💀🖤
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PS: Clarity is easy to talk about and surprisingly difficult to create. If your team is currently navigating complexity, competing priorities or strategic drift, I’d be happy to have a chat.
💀🖤
Cheers,
DANIEL JACOBS
http://bjornfox.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia
THE CREATIVE STRATEGIST 