I’ve written something before about Opinions & Assholes (everyone has one)…
I couldn’t help myself for this next blog post… 💀

I’ve watched the Levi’s Stadium conversation unfold this week and honestly, I think most people have completely missed the fucking point.

The hot takes have been “predictable” and bland…

“They should have wrapped it in denim. They should have integrated the stitching. They should have referenced the back pocket. They should have made the architecture feel more Levi’s”. They should have, they should have, they should have.

And whilst opinions are like assholes (i.e. everyone has one), what fascinates me is that nearly all of the commentary has focused on what Levi’s could have added, rather than recognising what they’ve already built.

Because the fact that Levi’s didn’t need to do any of those things is precisely why it’s such a powerful example of branding.

One of the biggest misconceptions in our industry is that brands grow because they attract attention. They don’t. Attention is important, but attention is fleeting. Memory is what matters. The strongest brands in the world understand that their job isn’t simply to get noticed today. Their job is to be remembered tomorrow.

When people saw Levi’s Stadium, they weren’t seeing a naming rights deal. They were seeing the accumulated effect of more than 170 years of disciplined brand building. They were seeing the result of decades spent investing in distinctive assets, memory structures and cultural meaning that have become inseparable from the brand itself. The red tab. The stitching. The leather patch. The horses. The silhouette of a 501. The colour red. The role the brand has played across generations, subcultures and communities. All of these things compound over time.

The irony is that the same people arguing Levi’s should have leaned harder into these assets are unknowingly proving how effective those assets already are. The fact they can immediately recall them, reference them and imagine them being used is evidence that the work has already been done.

That’s what strong brands do. They create shortcuts in our minds. They become familiar. Instantly recognisable. Easy to retrieve.

What many newer brands get wrong is that they’re obsessed with standing out. They chase trends, aesthetics, cultural moments, algorithms, colours, typography systems and whatever the latest platform is rewarding. Every few years the industry collectively falls in love with something new. Minimalism. Maximalism. Millennial pink. Brat green. Whatever happens to be fashionable at the time. The problem is that trends create attention, but assets create memory. One is rented. The other is owned.

I’ve always believed being distinctive is more important than being different.

Different is easy. Different can be copied. Different often disappears the moment the next trend arrives. Distinctiveness is much harder because it requires consistency. It requires repetition. It requires discipline. It requires organisations to continue investing in the same signals long after marketers have become bored of them.

That’s another uncomfortable truth. Marketers often confuse boredom with ineffectiveness. We spend every day immersed in brands, campaigns and assets. Consumers don’t. What feels repetitive to us often feels familiar to them. What feels old to us is often what makes a brand easy to recognise in the first place.

Levi’s didn’t become an icon because they reinvented themselves every few years. They became an icon because they understood what was worth protecting. They understood that familiarity is not the enemy of creativity. Familiarity is one of the most valuable assets a brand can own.

The real lesson from Levi’s Stadium isn’t that they should have done more. It’s that they didn’t have to. The strongest brands eventually reach a point where the logo gets smaller, the branding gets quieter and the impact gets bigger. Not because they’re doing less work, but because they’ve already spent decades doing the hard work.

To me, that’s not a missed opportunity. That’s the reward.

—

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

One of the biggest misconceptions in marketing is that growth comes from doing more… More content. More campaigns. More products. More channels. More customers. More followers. More every-fucking-thing.

But some of the fastest growth I’ve ever seen came from doing the opposite.

It came from getting clearer.

Years ago, I had the privilege of working with the founders of Threebyone, the business behind Neuw Denim, Rollas and Abrand Jans. Looking back, one of the biggest lessons wasn’t about denim. It wasn’t about retail. It wasn’t even about marketing.

It was about culture.

On paper, all three brands sold jeans. In reality, they occupied completely different worlds.

Neuw was built around individuality, creativity and self-expression. It attracted musicians, photographers, designers, agency folk and people who generally didn’t care much for fitting neatly into boxes. The jeans weren’t really the product. The product was identity. The stories, scars and experiences that make us who we are.

Rollas occupied a different space. There was still an Australian spirit to it, but it felt more relaxed, nostalgic and effortless. There was music, there was romance, there was a little rebellion, but there was also accessibility. It felt like a brand people could see themselves in.

Abrand played a different role again. Younger. Louder. Faster. More trend aware. More social. More connected to self-expression, belonging and identity formation. The products changed faster. The culture moved faster. The audience expected something different.

Three brands. Three audiences. Three cultural spaces.

And that’s where most businesses get growth wrong. They think growth comes from reaching more people. Growth usually comes from mattering more to the right people.

The best brands I’ve worked on weren’t obsessed with demographics. They were obsessed with understanding the role they played in people’s lives and the culture surrounding them. That’s a very different exercise.

Which brings me to trends.

Marketers bloody love trends. #Obsessed

Soft girl era. Clean girl era. Quiet luxury era. Whatever era TikTok decides to invent next week.

The problem is that most people confuse trends with culture.

A trend is simply the visible expression of something happening underneath. It’s the symptom, not the cause. The real opportunity sits beneath the trend.

// Why are people gravitating towards softness?
// Why are people rejecting hustle culture?
// Why are younger generations dressing, behaving and consuming differently?
// Why are attitudes shifting?

That’s where strategy lives.

Not in the trend itself, but in the tension and cultural shift driving it.

The best brands don’t chase culture. They participate in it. They contribute to it. Sometimes they help shape it. But they don’t stand on the sidelines desperately trying to borrow relevance because they saw something trending on TikTok.

Culture isn’t a costume you put on for a campaign.

It’s a community you belong to… and the strongest brands understand exactly where they belong.

That’s why I often think growth is less of a marketing challenge and more of a clarity challenge. Most businesses don’t have a content problem. They don’t have a social media problem. They don’t have a performance marketing problem.

They have a meaning problem.

They don’t know who they’re for. They don’t know what role they play. They don’t know what makes them distinctive.

So they end up doing more. More content. More activity. More campaigns. More noise.

When what they actually need is more clarity.

The brands that win aren’t always the biggest. They’re the ones that understand people better than their competitors do. They understand the culture they’re participating in, the role they play within it, and the value they create for the people they serve.

Everything else is just execution…

—

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

I bought a pair of noise-cancelling headphones years ago because I wanted better sound quality. Turns out I completely misunderstood the point…

The goal wasn’t to make the music louder.
The goal was to make everything else quieter.

And lately I’ve been thinking that’s probably one of the more important lessons I’ve learned about strategy, creativity and modern work.

We’re surrounded by noise.

Notifications. Meetings. Slack messages.
Emails. LinkedIn experts. Podcasts.
Newsletters. Dashboards. Opinions…

More information than any human being could reasonably process.

Yet somehow we’ve convinced ourselves the answer is more.

More inputs. More data. More reports.
More tabs open. More productivity hacks.

As strategists, marketers and leaders, we’re often expected to consume enormous amounts of information and somehow make sense of it. Research reports, interview transcripts, focus groups, sales data, social listening, stakeholder feedback, competitor reviews and whatever fresh hell someone has uploaded into a shared drive this week.

The challenge isn’t finding information anymore.
The challenge is figuring out what matters.

Because information isn’t insight. Volume isn’t wisdom. And activity sure as shit isn’t progress.

Some of the best thinking I’ve ever done didn’t happen sitting at a desk. It happened walking the dog, driving the car, staring out a plane window or standing in the shower pretending I wasn’t thinking about work.

Which is funny, because we’re taught that productivity looks like focus. Head down. Laptop open. Working.

But some problems aren’t solved by concentrating harder. They’re solved by creating enough space for your brain to finally connect the dots. That’s why I’ve become increasingly obsessed with environments.

Not productivity, but Environments.

Knowing where you do your best analytical thinking. Knowing when your brain is firing. Knowing when you should push through. Knowing when you should walk away.

Most people spend their lives optimising tools. Very few spend time optimising themselves. And I think that’s where the real advantage sits.

Not in hearing more. In hearing less.

In a world obsessed with amplification, clarity is becoming a superpower.

And the people who can consistently separate signal from noise will always outperform the people simply consuming more of it.

—

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

—

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how many businesses don’t actually have a marketing problem…

They have a leadership problem disguised as marketing.

And honestly? Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Most founder brands, charities, NFPs and growing businesses can’t afford a proper CMO, Head of Marketing or senior commercial marketing leader. So what happens instead is marketing becomes a shared hallucination. A group project. A democratic free-for-all where everybody has opinions about “the brand” despite nobody actually steering the fucking thing properly.

// The founder has opinions.
// Sales has opinions.
// Finance has opinions.
// The board has opinions.
// The agency has opinions.
// Hell… The intern who watched three TikToks about “growth hacking” suddenly has opinions.

And slowly, over time, the business turns into a Frankenstein stitched together from random advice, reactive decision-making and panic disguised as productivity.

Which is where things get really interesting. Because most organisations think they’re doing marketing.

But what they’re actually doing is communications.

There’s a huge difference.

Marketing was originally supposed to influence:
product, pricing, distribution, experience, customer behaviour, commercial growth, market positioning, competitive advantage, fame, memory, culture++++++

Now?

Fuck. Me: Most internal “marketing teams” are basically exhausted content engines trying to justify their own existence through dashboards, engagement metrics and acronyms nobody outside the industry gives a shit about.

“Look at the CTR.”
“Look at the CAC.”
“Look at the impressions.”
“Look at the engagement.”

Cool. But how about WTF?

But is the business actually becoming more valuable?

Is it becoming more memorable?
More trusted?
More culturally relevant?
More commercially effective?
More distinctive?
More chosen?

Or are we all just feeding a machine because activity feels safer than strategic clarity?

// Mark Ritson would probably argue most businesses haven’t practiced proper brand management in years.

// Byron Sharp would likely point out that nobody can buy your brand if nobody fucking remembers it.

// Porter would quietly remind everyone that operational effectiveness is not strategy.

// Kahneman would whisper “Humans are irrational, you spreadsheet goblins.”

// And Godin would probably ask the most important question of all:
“Why would anyone choose to talk about you in the first place?”

But somewhere along the way, marketing became obsessed with proving short-term value rather than creating long-term value.

And I get why.

Because performance marketing gives businesses the illusion of certainty. Numbers. Attribution. Graphs. Dashboards. Immediate feedback loops. It feels measurable. Defensible. Safe.

Until six years later when the company realises nobody actually gives a shit about the brand anymore.

Les Binet and Peter Field have been screaming this for years. Short-term optimisation slowly cannibalises long-term growth. But businesses continue doing it because “performance” is easier to explain in boardrooms than emotional salience, memory structures and cultural meaning.

And honestly? I don’t entirely blame internal marketing teams either.

Inside agencies you have a platoon of head hours and skills:
strategists, researchers, media specialists, behavioural scientists, developers, SEO experts, UX designers, copywriters, creative directors, producers, analysts, account leads & office support animals…

Entire ecosystems of expertise.

Then client-side you often have one exhausted Senior Marketing Manager expected to:
manage agencies, approve creative, write copy, analyse performance, brief designers, update websites, handle PR, manage events, report to leadership,
run socials, justify budget, justify existence and somehow still “drive growth”.

Half the time they’re drowning.
The other half they’re trying to prove they deserve to exist.

And this is exactly why so many businesses end up running marketing departments without actual marketing leadership.

Not communications leadership.
Not channel management.
Not content production.

Marketing leadership. Someone capable of zooming out and asking:

What are we actually trying to become?

// What’s fragmented?
// What’s duplicated?
// What’s reactive?
// What’s wasting energy?
// What’s performative?
// What should we stop doing?
// What should we protect at all costs?

Because the irony is most organisations don’t need:
more content, more campaigns, more automation, more dashboards, more AI-generated slop, or another fucking workshop about workshops.

They need clarity.

A clear position.
A clear strategy.
A clear understanding of what should never be optimised away in the first place.

Anyway….

DM or Comment “WORLD PEACE” and I’ll send you a complimentary dashboard proving your brand is culturally irrelevant at scale.

—

💀🖤

Cheers,

DANIEL JACOBS
http://bjornfox.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia

There’s a weird thing happening in marketing right now.

Everyone’s obsessed with trends… but barely anyone’s asking why they exist in the first place.

A few screenshots. A few buzzwords. A few “consumer shifts”. Suddenly someone’s stitched together a trend report explaining why every brand now needs to sound like a therapist with a matcha addiction.

And look, I fucking love a good trend deck. But most trend forecasting is really just pattern spotting in nicer shoes. Someone sees the same colour palette, packaging aesthetic or TikTok behaviour show up three times and suddenly we’re calling it “the future of culture”.

Brave 💀

The problem is that trends aren’t actually the truth. They’re the receipt. They’re evidence that something deeper is happening underneath.

Quiet luxury was never really about beige coats and expensive boredom. It was status changing shape. Wellness isn’t about mushroom powder and magnesium spray. It’s burnout in activewear. AI isn’t just a tech trend. It’s people desperately trying to buy back time before their brains leak out of their ears.

That’s the real job. Not spotting the thing. Understanding the tension underneath the thing.

This is where brands get themselves into trouble. They copy the code, not the meaning. A premium brand starts behaving cheap. A bank starts talking like a TikTok intern. A natural brand suddenly looks synthetic because someone wanted “more shelf pop”.

Which brings me to GAIA Skincare Naturals.

We use it at home for our little bub and genuinely love it because it feels natural, gentle and trusted. Less fake shit. Less nasties. The kind of brand you buy because you’re trying to feel slightly less guilty about raising kids in a world full of chemicals and microplastics.

But then I saw the newer kids packaging…

Bright. Loud. Toy-like.

Does it stand out more on shelf? Sure…

Does it still feel like GAIA? That’s the tension.

Because the buyer isn’t really the kid pointing at purple. It’s the parent thinking: is this safe, is this gentle, can I trust this on my child’s skin? So when the packaging starts feeling more synthetic than the promise, the brand meaning starts wobbling. That’s not a design problem. That’s a positioning problem wearing a pump bottle.

A bad trend read says: “Kids packaging is getting brighter. Make it brighter.”

A smarter strategic read says: “Parents want fun without losing trust.”

Big difference.

One is decoration. The other is strategy.

Because culture isn’t just what’s trending. It’s what makes behaviour make sense. What people are tired of. What they’re craving. What they’re rejecting. What they want to signal. What they’re trying to feel in control of.

That’s why trends move fast, but meaning compounds.

And the brands that win are usually the ones that know what not to lose while everyone else is busy changing costumes.

—

💀🖤

Cheers,

DANIEL JACOBS
http://www.thecreativestrategist.com.au
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia

There’s a real (parent) insightful moment no one really talks about.

Not when the baby arrives. Not when they start crawling. Not even when they start walking. It’s the moment you quietly realise your house feels like yours again. For the past year, our living room wasn’t really a living room. It was a baby zone. Half of it taken up by foam mats, a massive playpen and toys everywhere. A quarter reserved for the dogs. And then this small leftover corner where we sat, ate and lived.

We didn’t live in our house. We lived around our baby.

// THE SHIFT

But something changed. She’s 16 months now. Stage five clinger. Wants to be around us constantly anyway. And it hit us. Why are we still designing the house like she needs her own world when all she wants is to be in ours? So we started reclaiming it. We removed the playpen, pulled everything back and reset the space. And suddenly, the living room felt like a living room again. Not a daycare.

Now it feels like a house where a baby lives, not a baby’s house where we exist.

// NOTHING CHANGED.
EVERYTHING CHANGED.

That shift says something bigger about life stages.

Because nothing about us has actually changed. Same taste. Same aesthetic. Same love for a beautiful space. But our needs changed temporarily, and now they’re evolving again. Take something simple like our coffee table. It’s a beautiful piece, hand-carved from an old Indian door. Pre-baby, it was fucking perfect. Post-baby, it’s too big, too hard, and too risky. It dominates the space in a way that just doesn’t work anymore. So now we’re looking for something new. Not less considered. Not less beautiful. Just something that fits this moment. Smaller. Moveable. Adaptable. Something that lets us reclaim the space without ignoring the fact that a toddler still lives here.

// WHERE MARKETERS GET IT WRONG

This is where most marketing falls apart. We reduce people to segments. Parents. New parents. Families. As if that label suddenly defines everything about them. But people don’t wake up and become someone else overnight.

We’re still us. We’ve just moved through a phase.

// LIFE STAGES MATTER MORE THAN LABELS

At one point, you’re selling us baby gates, playpens and foam mats. Everything is about safety, containment and control. Then suddenly, without warning, we’re looking for something else entirely. We want our space back. We want design again. We want flexibility. We want to feel like ourselves again. Not because we stopped being parents. But because we’re starting to remember we’re also people. The same person you sold a big, beautiful coffee table to is the same person now searching for a smaller one. And one day, they’ll want the big one again.

Same person. Different moment.

// THE REAL OPPORTUNITY

If you’re building brands, products or experiences, this matters more than any persona deck. Stop thinking in static categories.

Start thinking in (life stages x transitions x tension points).

Because growth doesn’t happen when someone becomes a parent. It happens in the moments where they’re figuring out how to be a parent without losing themselves.

// RECLAIMING SPACE

For us, it started with something simple. Reclaiming our living room. Not removing her from it, but bringing her into ours.

And somehow, that changed everything.

—

💀 🖤

Cheers,

DANIEL JACOBS
http://www.thecreativestrategist.com.au
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia

Let’s talk about marketing objectives, because most briefs that come through are cooked.

Not bad, not wrong, just trying to do way too much at once. You’ll see it straight away. “We want to launch a new product, build awareness, drive sales, increase retention, grow brand love, make people feel something, make them smile, make them remember us forever and maybe tattoo the logo on their arm like No Ragrets”.

All in one brief. Cool. So what are we actually doing?

I get why it happens. Businesses have pressure. Stakeholders want their thing in there. Everyone’s got a KPI they’re accountable for. So the brief becomes this big bucket of expectations. Let’s just do it all. Kill a few birds with one stone. Except you don’t. You miss all of them. You burn time, waste budget, dilute the idea, and end up putting something into the world that looks fine, sounds fine, feels safe, and achieves not much.

The best marketers I’ve worked with never do this.

The best briefs are actually boring on paper!

They’re clear, tight, precise. They answer one question. What are we actually trying to do here? Not ten things, not a wishlist, one thing.

Part of the problem is people mix up objectives. There are layers to it. You’ve got business objectives. That’s the big stuff. Revenue, growth, market share, what the board cares about. Then marketing objectives. Acquisition, penetration, retention, sales, moving the business forward. Then brand objectives. Awareness, trust, consideration, long term memory, the stuff that compounds over time. All important.

All valid. None of them are the brief.

The brief is the communication objective. What do we want people to actually think, feel or do after seeing this? That’s it. That’s the fucking job…

Say you’re launching a new pair of jeans. Not just any jeans, these are four way stretch, proper innovation, denim Jesus. The brief is not “drive sales, increase retention, build loyalty, grow brand love, educate the consumer”.

The brief is simple. Make some noise. Get attention. Break what people expect from denim. Make people stop scrolling and actually care. Everything else flows from that.

Another thing people get wrong is KPIs. They start loading the brief with metrics. We need to increase traffic, improve conversion, hit this number. That’s fine, but that’s not the job of the idea. That’s how you measure whether it worked.

The job is to create something worth noticing in the first place.

The simplest way I’ve ever seen this explained was with pens. Take a few pens, throw three at someone and tell them to catch them. They panic, miss most of them, maybe get lucky with one. Now throw one. They catch it. That’s it. That’s the whole point.

You might be able to hit two objectives if everything lines up perfectly, but most of the time it’s one, and the more you try to add, the more you water everything down.

Strategy isn’t about adding more thinking. It’s about removing everything that doesn’t matter so the one thing that does actually lands.

If your brief is trying to do everything, it’s not a strategy, it’s a wishlist.

—

💀 🖤

Cheers,

DANIEL JACOBS
http://www.thecreativestrategist.com.au
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia

AI is extraordinary. There’s no doubt about that.

It can write, analyse, design, synthesise, code, optimise and problem-solve faster than most of us on our best day. It can compress hours of thinking into seconds. It can surface patterns we would never spot. It can feel like a superpower.

And it is. Just ask my 70+ Year old mother. Growing up in a household where mum “knows best” just got worse… she’s got fucking Chat GPT backing her up.

So, even though Artificial Intelligence is awesome and all… it is also a temptation.

Not because it will replace us, but because it will seduce us into skipping the hard part. The thinking part. The wrestling. The reps.

The real risk isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s cognitive atrophy.

Your brain is a muscle. If you don’t use it, it weakens. We accept this in every other area of life. Athletes train. Musicians practice. Businesses refine. Skill compounds through repetition and resistance.

Thinking is no different.

Yet increasingly, people are outsourcing the very things that build their cognitive strength. First drafts. Frameworks. Research synthesis. Strategic direction. Even judgement. Before they have properly tried.

That is not augmentation. That is substitution.

We have been here before… Students once read to memorise rather than understand. They could recite the answer, but they could not apply it. They could not adapt it. They could not evolve it. The surface looked competent. The foundation was fragile.

AI risks amplifying that pattern.

You can generate an answer instantly. But do you actually understand it? Can you interrogate it? Can you challenge it? Can you sense when it is wrong? Can you connect it to lived context?

If not, you are not smarter. You are dependent.

Meanwhile, AI is levelling up. It is training on data, recognising patterns, improving at scale. Some humans, on the other hand, are thinking less, struggling more with complexity, skipping discomfort and defaulting to convenience.

Growth does not happen in convenience. It happens in friction. In the messy middle. In the moment when you are unsure and must sit with it. In the process of forming a point of view rather than copying one.

That is where neural pathways are strengthened. That is where judgement is built. That is where taste is refined.

You do not build cognitive stamina by avoiding the reps.

Now consider the next generation. Children growing up with instant answers to everything. No deep reading. No trial and error. No grappling with ambiguity. Just prompt, response, copy, submit.

Convenience is seductive. But development requires resistance.

If we remove resistance entirely, what are we building? Speed without depth. Output without ownership. Efficiency without understanding.

This is not an argument against AI. Quite the opposite. AI is one of the most powerful tools we have ever created. It can elevate thinking, accelerate iteration and expand possibility.

But it should be a sparring partner, not a replacement brain.

Bring a point of view first. Wrestle with the problem. Draft the messy version. Struggle through the ambiguity. Then use AI to pressure test it, expand it, refine it and sharpen it.

Harness its power to strengthen yours.

In the near future, everyone will have access to the same tools. The differentiator will not be who uses AI. It will be who can think independently of it. Who understands mechanics. Who can connect cultural nuance. Who has developed judgement through experience rather than prompts.

AI can generate patterns. It cannot generate lived wisdom. It cannot replace the intuition formed by years of making decisions, getting them wrong, and learning.

A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. And instant answers never built a strong mind.

Use AI. Build with AI. Experiment with AI.

But feed your brain. Train your judgement. Do the reps.

Because the real danger is not machines getting smarter.

It is humans choosing not to…

*mic drop*

—

💀 🖤

Cheers,

DANIEL JACOBS
http://www.thecreativestrategist.com.au
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia