This piece was featured on Greenbook.
With every technological revolution new industries are scaled and democratized. At first, it’s a boon: skills become accessible to many, and economic opportunities bloom. But when a skill is overcopied, charlatans move in to exploit and drastically reduce the quality. Many luxury brands undergo this - beginning as symbols of craftsmanship, then diluted into mere commodities, losing their glow. The premium creators in any category face a stark choice — innovate or race to the bottom. It’s up to the true innovators to light a torch that cuts through mediocrity.
This race has been happening in brand strategy and in the tricks & tools that fuel it. Where once deep thinking informed the most creative strategies, today, data’ or the wildly misused ‘insights’, which can now be brewed in hours instead of weeks, have seemed to be enough to satisfy the need for creative inspiration. Quantity and speed are confused for quality, creativity and imagination. Suddenly we found ourselves in the data business instead of the thinking business. Marketing and brand professionals were seduced and suckered by SaaS. New entrants began competing on scale, speed and efficiency of their ‘data-driven’ solutions and the marketing industry developed a collective amnesia for the love, care and attention they once invested into groundbreaking ideas. In this rush for efficiency they disconnected from the original reason for the data in the first place: to create a deeper, empathic bond between a brand and its audience. We traded the stirring song of human understanding for the static hum of machine-hewn data.
This cycle away from quality connection is not new. Marx observed how mechanization and mass productivity alienated us from our work, products and each other even before the industrial revolution was in full swing. And during each technological upheaval, we edge further from the thing tech was designed to assist. But another shift occurs too. When one connection starts to break, new ones germinate. The loss of empathy on one end drives a strong demand for it on the other. And eventually a new market breaks through. Humanity seems to always find its way back somehow.
As greed and efficiency bulldozed humanity from the mass and the middle, a new class of craft emerges. When Ford finally furnished the masses with four wheels, Rolls Royce leaned more deliberately into handcrafting and personalization - making a new virtue of it. And so, artisans—those masters of touch, taste, and quality—emerge to serve those who seek authenticity, quality and beauty. Sometimes outgrowths of these artisanal products themselves bring forth entirely new categories - again assisted by technology. This was the case with coffee.
As instant and drip coffee became a commodity, the connoisseur class thirsted for more human connection, expertise, quality and escapism. The growth of barista-served coffee itself democratized to become a middle-market category.
Even beer followed this cycle. The mass-market juggernaut, Budweiser, made beer a smooth, predictable commodity, stripping away the artisanal roots of its Czechoslovakian origins. But an artisan renaissance ignited after the last vestiges of its origins were gone, a new era of craft beer emerged to rebalance the need for it. Now a new category exists that the original Mr Busch might even be pleased to see.
I believe what we’re sensing in our present moment of turmoil is the start of an emotional bifurcation in the strategic thinking world. We fed a relentless parade of ‘data platforms,’ hoping that these digital intermediaries could whisper answers into our ears, but instead, they hijacked our instincts, making us serve the machine instead of ourselves. We lost contact with our creativity by asking asinine questions of tech-mediated empathy-interlopers. The fruits of democratized data in the creativity business was the destruction of value - as it was eventually in every technological revolution.
But when you siphon out the value for too long, the world finds a way of fighting back. Nature and humans refuse to be starved of meaning. You can only cut corners for so long before the market seeks out that quality elsewhere.
We are seeing this right now in the world of marketing and data. Providers who raced to directly resell the functional benefits of technology, such as speed, scale and low costs and quickly found themselves in a fist fight at the bottom of the a pit with other vendors with nothing to offer but speed and scale. They stole the word ‘insight’ and then robbed it of all its value.
Now that AI can fake the low end of data collection in minutes, a renewed need for quality is emerging. The craftspeople who dedicated the last decade honing their skills—those attuned to nuance, empathy, and authentic connection—are stepping into the spotlight again to reforge new standards of excellence..
We’ve seen it with better quality entertainment in recent times. And smarter, more sensitive empathetic approach to strategy is also returning. We’re seeing a renewed call for humanity, creativity, empathy and even intuition (a word banished in the A/B era) from marketers. Commentators and essayists in the design and brand world are mocking expressions like ‘data-driven’ and brands are once again shifting creative thinking out of the IT department (where data was housed) and back into the boardroom.
With fresh tech and tools turbocharging our ability to scale and accelerate, the real gold lies in harnessing these advancements to deepen our thinking and nurture reflection into how humans truly feel and behave to fuel creativity.
Okay Humans: Are you still in there? Do you feel a heartbeat beneath the wires and code?