THE CREATIVE STRATEGIST

ARE WE GAMIFYING A GENERATION INTO GAMBLERS?

BINGO BONGO // YOU’RE A DUMB DINGO

I was standing in Australia Post yesterday returning a couple of things purchased from Amazon (PS: shoutout to how easy and frictionless their return process is), chatting to the guy behind the counter about how ridiculously simple the whole process has become. Scan this. Drop that. Refund appears. Sometimes, depending on the product, they don’t even want the bloody thing back because the economics of shipping, processing, checking and restocking it probably make less sense than simply refunding you and moving on. We got onto the topic of Temu and I said something I’ve thought for a while… I still personally prefer Amazon. It’s clean. It’s familiar. It feels tested. I generally know where I am, what I’m doing and what is going to happen next. Temu, at least to me, feels like somebody put an e-Comm store, a pokies machine, a game show and a fucking pinball machine into a blender. Things flash. Things move. There’s urgency. There are prizes. There are wheels. There are deals on deals on deals. There’s always something else screaming at you to tap it, unlock it, claim it, win it or come back later. And maybe that’s the point. Because what if some ecommerce platforms aren’t really designed to help you buy something anymore? What if they’re designed to keep you playing?

THE INTERFACE ISN’T DECORATION

We talk about user experience as if it’s this lovely neutral discipline. Make things easy. Remove friction. Help people find what they need. Create delight. Lovely. But design is never neutral. Every interface is teaching you how to behave. Every button, notification, countdown, reward, animation, streak, badge, spin, surprise discount or “you almost won” moment is nudging you towards something. Sometimes that something is genuinely useful. Sometimes it’s getting you through a complicated process without wanting to throw your phone through a wall. But sometimes the objective isn’t ease at all. It’s frequency. Repetition. Time spent. Another tap. Another hit. Another chance. And once you start looking at some modern digital experiences through that lens, the gap between “gamification” and “gambling mechanics” starts getting a little fucking uncomfortable.

Pokies have understood this for decades. You don’t need someone to win constantly. In fact, constant winning would probably destroy the whole thing.

// What keeps people engaged is uncertainty.

Maybe this time. Nearly. Try again. Something flashes. Something makes a noise. Something celebrates you. Something tells you there’s another opportunity just around the corner. Online gambling simply took those mechanics and removed the need to physically walk into a casino. Now we’re taking similar behavioural ingredients and spreading them across ecommerce, gaming, loyalty programs, social media, dating apps, investing platforms, competitions and even charities. Spin this wheel. Open this box. Maintain this streak. Check in tomorrow. Buy now for another chance. Donate and you might win a house. Refer a friend and unlock another entry. It’s all technically different. But psychologically? Sometimes I’m not sure it’s as different as we’d like to pretend.

ARE WE TEACHING PEOPLE TO SHOP, OR TEACHING THEM TO PUNT?

This is the bit that really gets to me…

We have entire generations growing up inside interfaces designed around instant feedback, randomness, rewards, scarcity, streaks and repeated attempts. Gen Z. Gen Alpha. Tweens. Kids younger than that. They’re learning digital behaviour before they’ve even got a fucking bank account.

Tap something. Get something. Come back tomorrow. Get something.

Spin again. Try again. Buy again.

And I’m not suggesting that playing a game on an eComm app means a 12 year old is destined to walk into Crown Casino as soon as they hit 18 and blow their pay cheque on black jack or roulette.

// That would be ridiculous. Human behaviour isn’t that neat.

But I do think there’s a more interesting question underneath it:

What behaviours are we normalising?

The risk isn’t that we teach people gambling specifically. Maybe we teach them to become comfortable with the underlying rhythm of it.

Chance. Reward. Loss. Anticipation. Repeat.

That fucking matters.

“BUT IT’S FUN”

This is where it gets messy, because gamification isn’t inherently bad. Fun is good. Play is good. Surprise is good. Design that makes boring shit less boring is good.

A loyalty program that gives someone a little hit of progress can be great. A charity raffle can raise enormous amounts of money for something worthwhile. A brand can use games to create participation, entertainment and cultural relevance.

// The problem is that “engagement” has become one of those words we almost never interrogate hard enough.

We celebrate engagement because somebody stayed longer, clicked more, returned more frequently or completed another action.

Cool. But engaged doing what? And why?

There is a huge difference between someone willingly participating because the experience is entertaining and somebody being behaviourally engineered into a loop they’re finding increasingly difficult to leave.

// Yet commercially, both can produce a beautiful fucking engagement graph.

That’s the tension.

FRICTION ISN’T ALWAYS THE ENEMY

For years, UX has been obsessed with removing friction.

// One click. One tap. Buy now. Instant checkout.

// Instant credit. Instant access. Instant reward.

We’ve treated friction as if it’s always a design failure. But maybe some friction is useful. Maybe sometimes a good experience gives people enough space to make an actual decision.

Do I need this? Do I want this? Can I afford this?

Why the fuck am I doing this again?

Because when every action is immediate, exciting and rewarded, we’re not just designing convenience. We can start designing impulsivity… and that raises a much bigger responsibility for designers, marketers, product teams and businesses.

// Just because we CAN make somebody click doesn’t automatically mean we should.

WHERE THE FUCK IS THE LINE?

I don’t have a perfect answer TBH… And honestly, I don’t trust anyone who claims they do. The line will move depending on the audience, the product, the stakes, the mechanics and the intent.

But maybe, just maybe we should start asking better questions before we throw another wheel, streak, mystery box or artificial countdown into an experience because someone said “we need more engagement”.

Does this make the experience more useful? Does it make it more enjoyable?

Or does it simply make it harder to leave?

Are we rewarding participation, or manufacturing compulsion? Are we helping people make decisions, or deliberately shortening the distance between impulse and transaction?

And if a child spent 10 years interacting with experiences built around random rewards, endless loops, urgency and “one more try”, would we genuinely be comfortable saying none of that has any influence on the behaviours they carry into adulthood?

Who fucking knows… But I think it’s worth asking.

Because good UX shouldn’t just be about designing the shortest path to conversion. It should probably also be about understanding the kind of behaviour we’re creating along the way. So, maybe the question isn’t whether we can make people keep playing…

// Maybe it’s whether we should be designing everything like a fucking game in the first place.

—

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

JUST KEEP SWIMMING // GRIT, RESILIENCE AND SIMPLY BEING HUMAN

RIP Negativity

There’s a line from Finding Nemo that has somehow become more relevant to me the older I get…

“Just keep swimming.”

It’s ridiculously simple, almost stupidly so. But maybe that’s why it works. Because resilience isn’t always some heroic comeback story. Sometimes it’s simply staying in motion when you don’t know what happens next. Showing up when you’re uncertain. Feeling like absolute shit and still having another go.

It’s been dwelling in my mind more than ever because there seems to be a huge amount of uncertainty around right now. Jobs. Careers. Money. Businesses. Tech changing everything underneath us. People being made redundant, sending application after application, questioning skills they’ve spent twenty years building, wondering whether they’re behind, whether they’ve fucked something up, or whether everyone else somehow received an instruction manual for adulthood that they missed.

// And I think we’re incredibly hard on ourselves through it….

GRIT ISN’T PRETENDING EVERYTHING IS FINE

I remember one of my fav episodes with Mel Robbins having a chat with Angela Duckworth (absolutely brilliant), whose work on grit I’ve loved for years. If you haven’t seen Duckworth’s TED Talk on grit, go find it. It’s worth your time.

Cool, but so what Dan? Well, it made me reflect on things that we often get wrong….

Resilience does not mean being emotionless. Grit does not mean grinding yourself into the ground. Persistence does not mean pretending everything is okay.

I grew up with a fairly strong version of “just get on with it”. When I served in the military (in a past life), you weren’t exactly rewarded for complaining… You were tired? Get over it. Uncomfortable? Get on with it. Angry, frustrated, homesick? Nobody cares… In some ways that mentality is necessary, but you also become very fucking good at compartmentalising.

Before that I spent around 15 years in Singapore and grew up around parts of Asian culture where there could be a similar expectation, just expressed differently. Control yourself. Don’t make a scene. Work harder. Don’t embarrass yourself. Don’t embarrass anyone else. Keep your feelings to yourself. Conform. Conform. Conform….

Different environment. Similar lesson…

// Feel less. Function more.

And for a while, that works. Until it doesn’t…

THE PEOPLE WE REMEMBER

But I also remember the opposite.

Those rare adults you encountered growing up who didn’t immediately tell you to toughen up, calm down or stop crying. Maybe it was a teacher, relative, coach or family friend. They just sat with you. Listened. Put an arm around you (back then, it was totes acceptable). Let you feel whatever the fuck you were feeling.

You probably don’t remember exactly what they said. But you sure as hell remember how they made you feel.

Seen. Heard. Safe enough to feel, and just be you.

// I don’t think we grow out of needing that. We just get better at pretending we do.

So perhaps part of adulthood is learning how to become that person for ourselves. Not wallowing indefinitely. Not turning every bad day into an identity crisis. Just being able to say “Yeah, this hurts. I’m scared. I’m disappointed. I’m angry. I don’t know what happens next”.

Without immediately trying to fix it.

FEEL IT. THEN KEEP SWIMMING.

Maybe you lost your job. Maybe you didn’t get the one you desperately wanted. Maybe you’ve sent 100 applications and heard fuck all back. Maybe the business isn’t working. Maybe everyone on LinkedIn seems to be announcing promotions, funding rounds and exciting new chapters while you’re sitting there wondering if you’ve somehow gone backwards (fuck me, I’ve definitely felt this way numerous times).

Fucking Feel it.

Own it.

Be pissed off. Cry. Write. Sing. Play guitar. Go for a walk. Sit in the park. Put headphones on and listen to the song you know is going to absolutely destroy you (Let it snow). Talk to someone who doesn’t feel compelled to turn your life into an action plan within thirty seconds.

The point isn’t to perform resilience. It’s to process reality.

// Because suppressing a feeling doesn’t make you tougher. It usually just means you’re postponing dealing with it.

And then, when you’re ready, take another stroke.

Send one application. Make one phone call. Reply to the email. Ask someone for help. Get out of bed. Try something different. Try the same thing one more fucking time. You don’t need to solve the next five years today.

RESILIENCE ISN’T BOUNCING BACK

I’m not even sure I like the phrase “bounce back”.

It implies we’re supposed to return to exactly who we were before something difficult happened. Kinda like when people refer to post-partum mums as “wow you bounced back quickly)…

// But sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you shouldn’t.

Life changes you. Failure changes you. Redundancy changes you. Grief changes you. Rejection changes you.

You might lose confidence but gain perspective. Become more cautious in one area and braver in another. Realise something you spent years chasing doesn’t matter nearly as much as you thought it did.

Maybe resilience isn’t bouncing back.

// Maybe it’s moving forward without needing to become the person you were before. And maybe… just maybe, grit isn’t never wanting to quit.

Sometimes grit is wanting to quit very fucking badly, allowing yourself to feel that, and then showing up again tomorrow anyway.

DORY WAS ONTO SOMETHING

That’s why I keep coming back to Dory. She doesn’t say “swim perfectly”. She doesn’t say swim faster than everyone else. She doesn’t say know exactly where you’re going.

// She just keeps moving.

That feels particularly important when life is uncertain because our brains are incredibly good at turning temporary situations into permanent identities.

// I don’t have a job becomes I’ll never find a job.

// My business is struggling becomes I’m a failure.

// I don’t know what I’m doing next becomes I have no direction.

Those are not the same things….

// One describes what is happening. The other decides who you are.

So if things feel a little fucked at the moment, give yourself permission to be human about it. Feel it. Sit with it. Find the people who let you be yourself around them. Try to be that person for somebody else too. Then have another go.

You don’t need the whole fucking ocean mapped out.

Just keep swimming.

—

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

PEOPLE ARE LOST BECAUSE THEY’VE STOPPED WANDERING

A skeleton hiker studies a trail map beneath signs for Misty Hollow and Lost Creek.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KNOWING SOMETHING AND UNDERSTANDING IT

// We live in a world absolutely drowning in information.

Reports. Dashboards. Podcasts. Books. Articles. Data. Research. TikToks. LinkedIn posts. Customer feedback. Sales numbers. Market movements. Brand trackers. White papers. AI summaries.

Someone somewhere has probably already measured, analysed, explained, visualised or made a fucking carousel about whatever it is you are trying to understand. And yet, despite having access to more information than any generation before us, I still don’t believe that we necessarily understand the world any better. Maybe we know more things. But knowing something and understanding it are not the same thing.

// It’s something that I preach about at work, and even in life…
Learned experience and lived experience.

Learned experience is what somebody, something or some source can teach you. You read it. Study it. Analyse it. Ask questions about it. You learn how something supposedly works.

Lived experience is different. It is what you absorb by being close enough to something for long enough that you start noticing the things nobody bothered putting in the textbook. The contradictions. The rituals. The weird little behaviours. The invisible rules. The things people say they do versus what they actually do. The things that make absolutely no sense from the outside but perfect sense once you’ve spent time inside.

Information tells you what something looks like. Proximity starts telling you what it feels like. Neither is inherently better. We need both. But I think we’ve become obsessed with the first and occasionally forgotten the second.

YOU CAN STUDY WEALTH. OR YOU CAN BE AROUND IT.

// One of my favourite examples is wealth. I grew up around wealth, but none of it was mine. 💀💀💀

And I think that distinction gave me an interesting vantage point because I was close enough to observe it without necessarily belonging to it. You can learn about affluent consumers through household income, net worth, postcode, spending behaviour, luxury purchases, travel habits, investment profiles and whatever segmentation somebody has developed to put rich people into six conveniently pretty coloured boxes. All useful.

// But from inside that world, wealth starts looking different.

You notice that the loudest symbols of money aren’t necessarily the ones that matter most. You notice that someone might spend an obscene amount on a piece of art and argue over a $9.99 delivery charge. You notice language, habits, manners, access, confidence, expectations and tiny assumptions about how the world works.

None of that means every wealthy person behaves identically. Of course they don’t. That would be fucking ridonkulous. But proximity exposes nuances that are incredibly difficult to see when you are standing outside looking through the window.

// The closer you get to a world, the less stereotypical it usually becomes.

And I think that applies to almost every group of people we attempt to understand. Parents. Teachers. Tradies. Doctors. Migrants. Teenagers. Farmers. Founders. Nurses. Gamers. Retirees. People living with disabilities. People experiencing poverty. People who collect Pokémon cards. People who fucking love caravans.

There is always an inner world, not necessarily some exclusive club, but a shared collection of behaviours, assumptions, frustrations, jokes, language and meaning that becomes much easier to see when you spend time close to it.

YOU DON’T GO TO THE ZOO TO UNDERSTAND A LION. YOU GO TO THE MOTHERFUCKING JUNGLE

This is probably where my strategist brain creeps in, because throughout my career I’ve been expected to understand a lot about a lot of different people very quickly. One week you might be learning about power tools, the next infant nutrition, cancer research, beef, fashion, insurance, telecommunications, restaurants or superannuation. You become a walking junk drawer of references. Research findings. Sales reports. Consumer behaviour. Cultural trends. Category conventions. Product specifications. Customer journeys.

// Random shit you read fifteen years ago that suddenly becomes relevant in a meeting on Tuesday morning.

And yes, you learn…. But at some point you also have to leave the fucking building.

If you want to understand how people shop, go shopping. If you want to understand a restaurant, sit in it. If you want to understand parents, spend time around parents when everyone is tired, dinner is late and the toddler has decided trousers are an infringement of their civil liberties.

// Because behaviour changes with context.

A person answering questions in a focus group is not necessarily the same person standing in Coles at 6:45pm trying to decide what the fuck to cook for dinner.

// You don’t go to the zoo to understand what it means to be a lion in the wild. You go to the jungle.

The environment matters. Pressure matters. Time matters. Other people matter. Money matters. Mood matters. Culture matters. The reason somebody behaves a certain way often only becomes apparent when you see the circumstances surrounding the behaviour.

BUT SIMPLY BEING THERE DOESN’T MEAN YOU UNDERSTOOD IT

// There is a trap on the other side of this argument too.

Lived experience can sound wonderfully profound until somebody says, “Well, I went there once and this is what people are like.”

Hell No!

Being somewhere does not automatically mean you understood it.

Two people can travel to exactly the same country and experience almost entirely different worlds. One person can go to Italy and become fascinated by architecture, religion, family, history, food, migration, regional identity, class, politics, design and how centuries of history are still visible in everyday behaviour. Another person can go to Lake Como, recreate twelve Instagram photos, eat at whatever restaurant TikTok told them to visit and fly home.

Neither person necessarily had the “wrong” holiday. People travel for different reasons. But they were paying attention to different things.

// Lived experience without curiosity is just something that happened to you.

That, for me, is the important bit.

You can live somewhere for twenty years and remain incredibly incurious about it. You can work beside someone for a decade and never really understand their experience. You can travel the world and somehow encounter almost nothing that challenges the world you already knew.

Experience only becomes useful when you notice.
// When you ask why.

When something doesn’t make sense and instead of dismissing it as weird, you become interested in why it makes perfect sense to somebody else.

CURIOSITY IS THE CONVERTER

Maybe the real distinction isn’t actually learned versus lived.

Maybe it is learned + lived + curiosity. Learned experience gives you information. Lived experience gives you proximity. Curiosity turns both into understanding.

// Knowledge accumulates. Curiosity connects.

This is why some incredibly educated people can still have surprisingly narrow views of the world, while someone without a wall full of qualifications can occasionally see something everyone else missed. Education gives us tools. Experience gives us reference points. Curiosity determines what we do with them.

It is also why I’ve never completely bought into the idea that expertise means having all the answers.

Quite often the most interesting people I meet know enough to realise how much they don’t know. They ask better questions. They are comfortable saying, “I don’t understand this yet.” They notice contradictions instead of trying to eliminate them.

And contradictions are where the interesting shit usually lives. People want convenience but resent automation. People want personalised experiences but worry about privacy. People say they want more choice and then become paralysed when offered too much of it.

// Human beings are wonderfully fucking inconsistent.

Understanding those inconsistencies requires more than information. You need context.

GET OUT OF YOUR OWN FUCKING WORLD

// There is another part of lived experience I think matters enormously i.e. deliberately spending time outside your own world.

Most of us live inside relatively predictable bubbles. We work with people with similar jobs. Read similar things. Follow similar accounts. Live around people with reasonably similar socioeconomic circumstances. Have dinner with people whose worldview doesn’t usually violently collide with our own. Algorithms make this even easier because they constantly hand us evidence that the world looks remarkably similar to whatever we already believed it looked like.

// Then we confuse familiarity with reality.

But there are thousands of completely different versions of normal happening around us simultaneously. Normal for a single parent working two jobs is different from normal for a tech founder. Normal for an eighty-year-old living alone is different from normal for a twenty-two-year-old living with six mates.

// Your normal is not normal. It is simply the version of the world you happen to know best. And that’s exactly why wandering matters.

MAYBE WE’VE STOPPED WANDERING

There’s a wordplay I keep coming back to…

Wonder. Wander.

// The world is still full of wonder, but I think we’ve stopped wandering through it.

We sit at desks wondering why people behave the way they do while the actual people are outside the window. We commission another report. Build another dashboard. Ask another AI tool. Run another survey. Add another data source. Make another bloody persona.

And sometimes all of that is necessary. But sometimes the thing we’re missing cannot be downloaded. You have to go somewhere. See something.

// Some of the most interesting truths in the world are hiding inside things everyone stopped noticing.

THE MAP IS STILL USEFUL

None of this is an argument against research, education, expertise, data or learning.

Quite the opposite. The map matters.

A map can stop you wandering in circles. It shows you where others have been. It condenses generations of knowledge into something you can use. It gives language to things you might otherwise struggle to describe.

// But nobody confuses reading a map of Tokyo with having walked through Tokyo.

Nobody reads a recipe and claims they have tasted the meal.
Nobody looks at a weather report and believes they have felt the rain.

// A representation of reality is still not reality.

And maybe that’s the distinction I’ve been trying to get across.

Learned experience gives us representations. Lived experience gives us encounters.

// Curiosity helps us connect the two.

PEOPLE ARE LOST BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT WANDERING

I have no desire to become a walking encyclopedia. It sounds fucking exhausting, and awfully heavy. I’d much rather become a better collector of experiences, observations, conversations, contradictions and questions.

But sometimes you have to get close enough to the world itself to understand:

Why the fuck did that make perfect sense to them?

—

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

HOW THE FUCK DO YOU BUILD A BRAND WHEN YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO BUILD A BRAND?

Welcome to the BumStingers AfterBurners

Big brands can buy repetition. Small brands have to earn memory.

A box turned up at my place from Declan at Keating & Co. Condiments.
Think – Chilli Oils. Hot Sauces. Characters and names that included Funky Beast. Berserker. Weird little monsters. Loud colours. A handwritten note. Various products that appear designed to make bland food considerably better and tomorrow morning considerably worse.

// And before I’d even tasted the bloody things, I was already thinking about the brand…

Because here’s the problem with most brand-building advice… it’s right.
And completely fucking useless if you’re broke 💀💀💀

Build mental availability. Increase penetration. Build physical availability. Reach more category buyers. Create distinctive assets. Be consistent. Rinse, Repeat and Reap the Rewards.

// Most Excellent.

Now try doing that when Coca-Cola has a few billion dollars and you’ve got 300 Instagram followers, 500 jars in your garage and enough money left for either a market stall or your electricity bill LOL.

The rules don’t change when you’re small. Your weapons do.

A big brand can afford to be forgettable once because it can pay to interrupt you another 300 times. A small brand might get one shot. One shelf. One scroll. One box arriving at someone’s house. One mate pulling your bottle out at a BBQ.

// Or as encapsulated by the immaculate Poet of our modern time (Marshal Mathers): “You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow / This opportunity comes once in a lifetime”.

So that interaction needs to work fucking hard.

That’s what struck me about Keating & Co. It doesn’t look like a tiny condiment company desperately cosplaying as a multinational FMCG brand. It looks like itself. Weird characters. Clashing colours. Ridiculous names. Attitude. You might hate it. Good. At least you noticed it.

And that’s lesson one for small brands: stop trying to look big. Start trying to look unmistakably you.

// You probably can’t afford fame yet. But you can afford distinctiveness.

A name people remember. A colour you keep using. A character. A phrase. A packaging system. A point of view. Something you repeat so relentlessly that eventually somebody recognises you without needing to read the fucking logo.

Founders often get this backwards. They’re constantly changing things because “they’re bored” or feel like they need something “fresh”…. New packaging. New tone. New social template. New campaign idea. Meanwhile the customer has seen the brand twice…(if at all).

You’re sick of it., but they’ve barely met you.
// Then there’s differentiation. Different job entirely.

Differentiation gives me a reason to choose you. Distinctiveness helps me recognise you when I’m ready to choose.

If the sauce genuinely tastes different, brilliant. If there’s a different ingredient, process, format or philosophy, even better. But being better is fairly useless if nobody remembers which fucking jar was yours.

Then you need something worth talking about.

Small businesses obsess over followers because followers look like distribution. But the better question might be: what have you created that makes one human want to tell another human about you?

// “Pretty good chilli sauce” is dead on arrival.

“// You need to try this ridiculous thing called Funky Beast” has legs.

The product name is talkable. The packaging is talkable. The founder is talkable. The box is talkable. The market stall is talkable. The handwritten note is talkable. Someone leaving it on the table because the jar looks fucking cool is talkable.

When you can’t afford to buy much attention, make the things you already pay for carry more attention.

// And start smaller than your ego wants to.

You don’t need Australia to mentally associate your brand with “condiments”. Maybe you want a thousand people to associate you with the chilli oil that fixes boring eggs. Or dumplings. Or pizza night. Or the stupidly spicy thing you buy your mate who claims nothing is hot enough (aka me).

// That’s mental availability too.

You’re attaching the brand to a moment. Then another. Then another…

Must I go on to land this point?

Same goes for physical availability. No, you probably won’t launch nationally into Woolies tomorrow. But every market, independent grocer, restaurant, collaboration, online bundle and café puts you somewhere you weren’t yesterday.

And here’s where being small can actually be an advantage.

// You can borrow other people’s audiences.

A chef already has customers. A café already has foot traffic. A creator already has followers. Another small food business already has people who trust it.

Instead of asking, “How do we get 100,000 followers?”, maybe ask:

Who already has the next 100 people we need?

The smartest thing small brands can do isn’t ignore How Brands Grow because they can’t afford the textbook version.

It’s find cheaper ways of creating the same effects.

You still need penetration.
You still need memory.
You still need availability.
You still need distinctive assets.
You still eventually need reach.

But before you start setting fire to money on Meta, perhaps make sure there’s actually something worth amplifying.

Find out what customers repeat back to you. What they reorder. What they photograph. What they tell their mates. What they call you. Where they use you. Why they choose you.

Paid media should pour petrol on something already burning. It shouldn’t be asked to set wet wood on fire.

Maybe that’s the real opportunity for small brands.

You can’t outspend the giants. So don’t.

Cool story bro, but WTF can we do then?

// Out-interest them.

// Out-personality them.

// Out-listen them.

// Move faster than them.

// Be closer to the customer than them.

// Make something people actually want to put on the table, photograph, remember and tell someone else about.

Because before you can afford share of voice, you need to earn share of memory.

And that’s what this little box from two blokes making condiments got me thinking about.

So, here’s a huge thank you to Declan the legend!

The chilli oil was excellent. My mouth is very grateful.

// My arse is yet to submit its review.

—

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 COST OF MODERN LIVING

Death by a thousand subscriptions.

Everyone’s talking about the cost of living.

I think we’re asking the wrong question.

What if the problem isn’t just that everything costs more? What if there are simply more things to spend money on than at any other point in history?The Meta algorithm Gods presented to me a Sunrise segment (a popular morning breakfast show here in Australia) earlier this morning about “The Rise of Side Hustles in Australia“.

Nearly half of Australians now have one…

Some are doing it to get ahead, some are saving for travel, but many are simply trying to keep up with the rising cost of living.

// As a strategist, I almost switched off from the story itself and headed straight to the comments. That’s often where the real insight lives. People are less polished, more honest, and far more likely to reveal what they’re actually thinking than they are in a research group or survey. It’s messy, but it’s rich.

// One comment stood out.

Someone argued that there was nothing new here because people have always worked second jobs. They’re right. My parents’ generation did. My grandparents’ generation certainly did. But what they pointed out that people are turning what used to be treats into everyday habits…

But I don’t think what’s changed is the need to earn more. I think what’s changed is what we’re trying to fund.

THE EXPLOSION OF CONSUMPTION

Every generation has faced financial pressure. Housing has always been expensive for someone. Inflation isn’t unique. Economic uncertainty certainly isn’t.

// But this generation is the first to live in a world where entirely new categories of consumption have emerged in the space of a couple of decades.

Before the internet, life was… simpler.

Not necessarily better, just simpler.

You had a watch because you needed to know the time. You had a phone because you needed to call someone. If you wanted takeaway, you drove to pick it up. Coffee was something you mostly made at home. Going out for dinner wasn’t something you did because you couldn’t be fucked cooking – It was an occasion or a special event. TV was whatever happened to be on – which was often hit and miss. If you missed your favourite show because you were out kicking a ball around with your mates, – well, that’s shit bad luck for you. There was no pause, rewind or “start from the beginning”. You waited until next week, or you missed it altogether.

It’s funny how the ad breaks were almost part of the ritual.

Someone would yell, “Quick! Ads!” and suddenly everyone was sprinting to the toilet or the kitchen before the movie came back on. Looking back, it’s ridiculous and an experience no one will ever have to face in this lifetime and beyond.

But at the time, it was just life.

// Those constraints shaped our behaviour in ways we probably didn’t appreciate. We planned around them. We accepted them. We found other ways to spend our time.

CONVENIENCE BECAME A BUSINESS MODEL

Fast forward to today and we’ve quietly built an economy around removing friction from almost everything.

Can’t be fucked cooking?
No worries, there’s Uber Eats.

Don’t want ads?
Cool, just pay for Premium.

Don’t like what’s being served on Free-to-air TV?
Sweet, just hit Subscribe and spend hours deciding on what to watch…

Don’t want to wait for your grocery run?
Same-day delivery…

Don’t want to remember anything?
Buy iCloud storage.

—

Individually, none of these things seem particularly expensive. Most are less than the cost of lunch. Collectively, though, convenience has become its own category of spending.

It’s death by a thousand subscriptions.

Netflix. Stan. Disney+. Spotify. ChatGPT. iCloud. Google Drive. Amazon Prime. Uber One. Gym memberships. Pilates. Coffee on the way to work. Food delivery fees. Service fees. Processing fees.

None of these existed for my parents when they were trying to buy their first home.

It’s fucking fascinating. We’re not just spending more because prices have increased. We’re spending more because there are simply more things to spend money on.

WHAT IF WE LIVED LIKE IT WAS 1998?

This isn’t one of those lazy “stop buying smashed avo” arguments. They’re intellectually bankrupt because they reduce a complex economic problem to personal discipline.

I’m interested in something much more behavioural.

What if someone decided to live exactly as Australians did before smartphones and the subscription economy?

Coffee at home.

Free-to-air TV.

The one Home telephone line… *shudders*

Cooking most nights.

Going for a run,

—

What if someone under 30 lived exactly as Australians did in 1998 for twelve months?

No subscriptions.

NOw… Imagine what would happen?

Would they save $5,000 a year?

$10,000?

$20,000?

// I genuinely don’t know.

But I’d love to find out.

Not because I think everyone should reject modern life, but because I wonder whether we’ve become so accustomed to paying for convenience that we no longer recognise it as discretionary spending.

THE REAL COST OF MODERN LIVING

Maybe the conversation about the cost of living has been framed too narrowly. We talk about inflation, Interest rates, Housing affordability.,Wages etc.

// They’re all real issues.

But what if the cost of living isn’t just about what things cost anymore? What if it’s also about how many things now exist to consume?

Every decade creates new products and services.

The digital era created entirely new categories of consumption.

Maybe that’s the hidden story. Not that life has become more expensive.

// But that modern life has become more expensive to participate in.

And I can’t help wondering whether, in solving so many of life’s little inconveniences, we’ve quietly created a generation that’s paying for convenience without ever stopping to ask what it’s was actually worth.

—

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 OG CREATIVE STRATEGIST IS DEAD…

At least according to LinkedIn… (so it must be fucking true, right?)

Every few weeks another “Creative Strategist” role appears in my LinkedIn feed. Not because I’m actively searching for one. The algorithm has simply decided this is who I am. And every time I make the same mistake. I click, hoping this will be the one that actually resembles the discipline I fell in love with. Maybe this company is genuinely looking for someone to uncover insights, challenge assumptions, shape creative direction and solve meaningful business problems. Instead, I find another job description asking for someone to manage Meta campaigns, optimise ROAS, improve click-through rates, brief creators, write social copy, analyse dashboards and report on performance. Occasionally they’ll sprinkle in a line about “creative thinking”, usually somewhere between stakeholder management and proficiency in Asana.

The title says Creative Strategist. The responsibilities say something entirely different.

// Now, before anyone gets defensive, this isn’t a criticism of those jobs.

They’re valuable. Businesses absolutely need people who understand paid media, social, CRM, performance marketing and digital optimisation. These are specialist disciplines that have become increasingly sophisticated over the last decade. The problem isn’t the work. The problem is what we’ve started calling it.

THIS WASN’T ALWAYS THE JOB.

// Creative strategy didn’t begin inside Ads Manager.

Long before social media, before Google Analytics and certainly before TikTok, creative strategy emerged from the world of account planning. The strategist wasn’t there to optimise campaigns after they’d been made. Their job was to help shape what got made in the first place. They immersed themselves in human behaviour, searching for tensions, contradictions, motivations and insights that could unlock better creative thinking. Their contribution wasn’t another variation of the headline. It was understanding people well enough that the creative team had something genuinely interesting to say. Strategy existed to make creativity more meaningful. Not more efficient.

That’s an important distinction because somewhere along the way we’ve confused effectiveness with optimisation.

WE’VE STARTED CONFUSING SPECIALISATION WITH STRATEGY.

// They’re related. They’re not interchangeable.

Today we have paid media strategists, social strategists, CRM strategists, lifecycle strategists, SEO strategists, creator strategists and performance marketers. Every one of those roles deserves respect because every one requires genuine expertise. But they’re specialists in a channel, a platform or a capability. Their role is to maximise performance within an existing system. A Creative Strategist, on the other hand, should be questioning the system itself. They’re asking whether the positioning is distinctive enough. Whether the proposition is compelling. Whether the audience has been defined properly. Whether the insight is actually insightful. Whether the team is solving the right problem before spending six weeks polishing the wrong answer.

Those aren’t execution questions… They’re strategic ones.

PERHAPS THE TITLE HAS JUST BECOME MORE ATTRACTIVE.

// Who wouldn’t want to be called a strategist?

Let’s be honest. “Creative Strategist” sounds better than “Paid Media Manager“. It sounds broader than “Content Lead“. It implies influence. It suggests you’re helping define the direction of the work rather than simply executing it. That’s probably why we’ve seen the title spread so rapidly across marketing. Recruiters like it. Candidates like it. Businesses like it. Everyone wins.

Well, almost everyone.

// The only thing that loses is the meaning of the words themselves.

MY ISSUE ISN’T WITH THE PEOPLE.

// It’s with the advertising industry.

Most people with “Creative Strategist” on their LinkedIn profile are doing exactly what they’ve been hired to do. This isn’t an attack on them. It’s an observation about the way our industry has gradually redefined one of its most interesting disciplines. We’ve taken a role that once revolved around human insight, strategic thinking and creative direction and quietly turned it into a catch-all title for anyone working somewhere between content, paid media and performance marketing. That’s not because those disciplines aren’t important. It’s because we’ve become lazy with language.

And for an industry that prides itself on the power of words, that’s quite the irony.

PERHAPS THE BIGGEST LOSS ISN’T CREATIVITY.

// It’s strategy.

When every execution role becomes a strategy role, strategy slowly loses its meaning. It becomes synonymous with optimisation. We stop asking bigger questions because we’re too busy measuring smaller ones. Should we be making this campaign at all? Is this actually the problem worth solving? Is there a more interesting opportunity we’ve completely overlooked? Those questions don’t usually appear in a dashboard, but they’re often the ones that determine whether a brand grows, stagnates or disappears altogether.

Perhaps that’s why I keep clicking on those job ads. Not because I’m looking for work. Because I’m still hoping to find someone looking for a Creative Strategist.

Not just someone responsible for making ads perform a little better.

Someone responsible for making the work worth creating in the first place.

—

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

YOUR BIGGEST BRAND PROBLEM ISN’T OUTSIDE YOUR BUSINESS. IT’S SITTING AROUND YOUR LEADERSHIP TABLE.

Leadership Teams getting back to the Bones of Branding

One of the biggest misconceptions in business is that brand belongs to the marketing department.

// Newsflash… It doesn’t.

Brand belongs to the organisation. Or at least, it should.

The marketing team might be responsible for communicating the brand, but they don’t own the thousands of decisions that shape how it’s actually experienced. That’s everyone else’s job. Every pricing decision. Every product roadmap. Every hiring decision. Every customer interaction. Every operational shortcut. Every sales conversation. Every investment. Every “yes”. Every “no”. Over time, those decisions become your reputation. They become your brand. Which is why I’ve always believed that growing a branded business is one of the few responsibilities shared equally across an executive leadership team.

// Yet something fascinating happens when I sit down with organisations.

Ask a CEO what the business stands for and you’ll get an answer. Ask the CMO and you’ll get another. The CFO sees it through commercial performance. The COO through operational excellence. Sales through revenue. Product through innovation. HR through culture.

None of them are wrong….

But they’re often not saying the same thing either.

Not because they’re incapable. Not because they don’t care. But because somewhere along the way, everyone started carrying around their own slightly different version of the truth. Close enough that nobody notices. Different enough that it quietly influences decisions every single day.

// The irony is almost laughable.

Businesses will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to understand their customers e.g. they’ll commission research, segmentation studies, NPS tracking, brand trackers, ethnographies and workshops.

They’ll obsess over what people outside the organisation think.

// Yet almost nobody ever stops to ask a much simpler question.

Does our own executive team actually see the same business?

Not what they think they should say.

What they genuinely believe.

Because if your leadership team can’t independently articulate why customers choose you, what makes you different, where you’re heading, what should never change and what you’re trying to become… why would you expect the rest of the organisation to?

Alignment isn’t a culture exercise. It’s a commercial one.

Misalignment creates friction. Friction slows decisions. Slower decisions create inconsistent experiences. Inconsistent experiences weaken brands. And weak brands become businesses forced to compete on price, promotion and performance instead of meaning.

// It’s one of the reasons I built an Executive Brand Health Check-up.

Not because the world needs another fucking survey….

Because sometimes the most valuable thing an executive team can receive isn’t another strategy deck.

IT’S A MIRROR…

// A brutally honest, objective reflection of how aligned they actually are.

// No consultants sitting in the room.

// No groupthink.

// No politics.

Just each executive answering the same questions, independently, before comparing the results.

It’s amazing what surfaces…. Sometimes it’s reassuring Sometimes it’s uncomfortable. Good. Because if you’re resting on your laurels, then you’re probably not growing. Do I have your attention yet?

Almost always, it starts conversations that probably should have happened years earlier.

If you’re curious… and brave enough – I’m happy to send it through.

Think of it as your annual physical.

Because the healthiest brands aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets.
// They’re the ones whose leadership teams are rowing in the same direction.

—

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

GLOBAL STRATEGY. LOCAL TRUTH.

A skeleton wearing a crown controls a globe with puppet strings in a vintage study

I caught up with Mark Brown last week (Managing Partner & Creative Director at Sentius Creative) over a coffee. We ended up disappearing down one of those rabbit holes that curious minds seem to enjoy… talking about global brands, masterbrand strategy, localisation, relevance, culture – and why some brands feel like they belong wherever they go, while others feel like tourists.

// At one point Mark asked me a simple question.

“If a global masterbrand strategy already exists… what actually changes?”

It’s a bloody good question. Because on paper, you’d think the answer would be… “Nothing.”

After all, isn’t the whole point of a masterbrand strategy consistency?
// The answer surprised him.

The thing that changes isn’t the brand. It’s the culture.

That’s the distinction most organisations miss.

I’ve spent a good part of my career sitting between global teams and local markets. Working on brands like L’Oréal, Kleenex, Milwaukee Tool and others where the masterbrand strategy already existed. The strategy wasn’t broken. The positioning wasn’t broken. The purpose wasn’t broken. None of those things needed rewriting.

The challenge wasn’t to reinvent the brand. It was to make sure the brand belonged.

That’s a completely different job. People often think localisation means changing words e.g. Changing imagery. Changing colours. Tweaking copy.

// That’s translation…. Translation changes language. Interpretation changes meaning.

They’re not the same thing.

Take Milwaukee Tool as an example.

The tools don’t change because they cross a border. The product doesn’t suddenly become different because it’s being sold in Australia instead of America.

But tradie culture?

That’s a different story. The language is different. The humour is different. The relationships are different. The way respect is earned is different. The cultural references are different.

The insight remains… The expression evolves.

The exact same thing happened working on Kleenex.

A campaign that feels perfectly normal in the US doesn’t automatically resonate in Australia. Not because Australians are fundamentally different people.

Because culture shapes context. Humour. Tone. Family dynamics. Language. Social norms. Even the way emotion is expressed.

They’re all filters.

// And those filters determine whether a brand feels authentic… or imported.

That’s why I’ve never liked the phrase “rolling out a campaign.”

It implies that people are the same everywhere. They’re fucking not.

The strongest global brands understand something incredibly simple. People don’t buy global brands because they’re global. They buy them because they feel like they belong.

Which means the job of strategy isn’t to protect every execution. It’s to protect the essence.

// Who the brand is. What it believes.

// The role it wants to play in people’s lives.

These are the things you never fuck with… Everything else deserves to be questioned. Because consistency doesn’t mean sameness. Consistency means making people feel the same thing… …even if you have to say it differently.

Things I’ve learnt translating global brands into local markets…

// Masterbrand strategy provides direction. Local strategy creates relevance.

// Translation changes words. Interpretation changes meaning.

// Culture shapes expression. It shouldn’t redefine identity.

// A campaign shouldn’t feel imported.

// The strongest global brands don’t ask, “How do we stay consistent?” They ask, “How do we stay true?”

—

// Brands don’t fail locally because the strategy was wrong…
They fail because they forgot culture was part of the strategy all along.

NB: It’s always refreshing meeting people who enjoy disappearing down strategic rabbit holes as much as I do. Hit me up, if you’d like to explore one together.

—

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 TRUTH ABOUT GUT FEELING

Gut Feelings – Right to the Bone

The older I get, the less I believe in coincidence… and the more I believe in pattern recognition. For shizzle…

For years I’ve struggled to explain why I trust my gut so much. I’d find myself sitting in workshops, presentations or client meetings and within minutes I’d know something wasn’t quite right. Sometimes it was a positioning. Sometimes it was a campaign. Sometimes it was a founder. Sometimes it was an opportunity. I couldn’t always explain why I felt that way, but more often than not, time proved it right.

// Then I heard Mel Robbins describe intuition as pattern recognition.

And fuck me… Everything clicked.

Gut feel isn’t magic. It’s memory.

// Not conscious memory. Pattern memory.

Every conversation you’ve had. Every mistake you’ve made. Every brand you’ve studied. Every person you’ve met. Every airport. Every supermarket. Every campaign. Every article. Every failure. Every success.

// Your brain is constantly collecting dots.

Intuition is simply what happens when it connects them faster than your conscious mind can explain them. That’s why great strategists often arrive at an answer before they’ve written the presentation. PS: Totes not claiming I’m a great strategist. I mean, I’m good… but great? TBD

I’ve always said one of my strengths is connecting dots...

// The funny thing is… I never really knew how.

I’d just look at a business and almost instinctively know where the tension was. I’d hear a founder talk for ten minutes and start questioning their positioning. I’d walk through a supermarket and immediately notice why one product felt more distinctive than another. I’d watch a TV commercial and know why it would probably fail.

I wasn’t guessing. I was recognising.

Strategy is decades of pattern recognition disguised as instinct.

People often think strategy is about frameworks. Or workshops. Or Post-it notes.

// It’s not.

Those things help organise thinking. They don’t create it. The real work happened years earlier e.g. Reading books. Observing people. Listening to conversations. Travelling. Watching culture shift. Failing. Winning.

Working across different industries. Seeing the same human behaviours play out in completely different categories.

Eventually you stop seeing brands. You start seeing patterns.

That’s why a strategist can walk into a room, hear the brief, and within minutes have a proposition, a positioning or an idea. It looks like intuition. It isn’t…

It’s twenty years of inputs being processed in real time.

Kinda like the same way a firefighter can walk into a building and instantly know something feels wrong. The same way a surgeon notices something others don’t. The same way an experienced parent knows when their child isn’t themselves.

They’re not psychic. They’re recognising patterns.

Never let someone make you apologise for your gut*

*Read this again.

That doesn’t mean your intuition is always right. It doesn’t mean you skip research. It sure as hell doesn’t mean you ignore evidence/data.

// Research validates. Data confirms. Testing refines.

But intuition? Intuition points you in the direction worth investigating.

There’s a difference. And it’s not just true in business.

Think about the last time you met someone and something just felt… off.

You couldn’t explain it. You didn’t have evidence. You just fucking knew.

Or the job interview where everyone said the right things, yet you walked away with a knot in your stomach. Or the business opportunity that looked perfect on paper, but never quite sat right.

How many times have you ignored your gut… only to realise six months later it was trying to protect you?

Here’s what I’ve come to believe…

// Your intuition isn’t irrational. It’s actually informed.

It’s built from thousands of tiny observations you’ve forgotten you ever made.

That’s why experience matters. That’s why curiosity matters. That’s why reading widely, travelling, meeting people, working across industries and staying obsessed with human behaviour matters.

You’re not just collecting knowledge. You’re building a better pattern recognition engine. *Mind Blown*

Things I’m trying to remember more often…

// Trust your gut… but validate it.

// Read widely. Every input becomes another pattern.

// Curiosity adds up

// Experience isn’t measured in years. It’s measured in observations.

// The best strategists don’t see more… they connect more.

Maybe that’s what experience really is…

Not knowing all the answers., but just recognising “the pattern” before everyone else does. It’s the reason I trust my gut more than anything, more than ever.

—

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

YOUR BRAND DOESN’T LIVE IN YOUR CAMPAIGNS. IT LIVES IN YOUR SYSTEMS.

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.” 💀🖤

—

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 INTERFACE ISN’T DECORATION

ARE WE TEACHING PEOPLE TO SHOP, OR TEACHING THEM TO PUNT?

“BUT IT’S FUN”

FRICTION ISN’T ALWAYS THE ENEMY

WHERE THE FUCK IS THE LINE?

GRIT ISN’T PRETENDING EVERYTHING IS FINE

THE PEOPLE WE REMEMBER

FEEL IT. THEN KEEP SWIMMING.

RESILIENCE ISN’T BOUNCING BACK

DORY WAS ONTO SOMETHING

YOU CAN STUDY WEALTH. OR YOU CAN BE AROUND IT.

YOU DON’T GO TO THE ZOO TO UNDERSTAND A LION. YOU GO TO THE MOTHERFUCKING JUNGLE

BUT SIMPLY BEING THERE DOESN’T MEAN YOU UNDERSTOOD IT

CURIOSITY IS THE CONVERTER

GET OUT OF YOUR OWN FUCKING WORLD

MAYBE WE’VE STOPPED WANDERING

THE MAP IS STILL USEFUL

PEOPLE ARE LOST BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT WANDERING

THIS WASN’T ALWAYS THE JOB.

WE’VE STARTED CONFUSING SPECIALISATION WITH STRATEGY.

PERHAPS THE TITLE HAS JUST BECOME MORE ATTRACTIVE.

MY ISSUE ISN’T WITH THE PEOPLE.

PERHAPS THE BIGGEST LOSS ISN’T CREATIVITY.

Things I’ve learnt translating global brands into local markets…

// Brands don’t fail locally because the strategy was wrong…They fail because they forgot culture was part of the strategy all along.

Things I’m trying to remember more often…

YOUR BRAND DOESN’T STOP AT MARKETING…

EVERY FUCKING TOUCHPOINT IS A BRAND TOUCHPOINT…

// Brands don’t fail locally because the strategy was wrong…
They fail because they forgot culture was part of the strategy all along.