Sensible

This is fascinating.

I have been brewing a theory that nowadays it has become almost impossible to distinguish between "premium" brands and "luxury" brands. I haven't read the referenced papers (I will) but those descriptors are very much "budget" vs "premium".

What happens when you lift the lower bar up a bit towards mid-price?

I have recently been doing some copywriting for two reasonably expensive brands that aspire to luxury status, one clothing and one car brand (sorry, "marque"). This has opened my eyes to the way the language between, say, a BMW and a Bentley is becoming interchangeable.

As luxury has become commodified (see the huge portfolios and reach of LVMH brands - e.g. Louis Vuitton on Leeds' high street) and more brands aspire toward the higher margins afforded by luxury status, so the language of premium and luxury merges.

I wonder if there has also been a Google-inspired dumbing-down of the individual style of writing, to appease the internet search overlords.

(I was reminded of the stir casued by "Cat's Pee on a Gooseberry Bush" a short-lived wine brand in the 90s. Different and memorable, not premium.)

AI is defintiely not going to improve things as it hoovers up all the wine descriptions and regurgitates soundalikes for time-pressured marketeers.

Drawing on ideas from the circular economy, along with management theory and organisational psychology, we propose a different way of thinking about work. We call it circular work.

Circular work flips the usual logic. Instead of treating people’s time, energy and skills as resources to be consumed, it sees work as a cycle – where effort is matched with recovery, learning and renewal. The goal isn’t just short-term output, but work that people can sustain without burning out.

At its core, circular work connects employee well-being and organisational performance and is built around four simple ideas:

all human work resources are connected – energy, skills, knowledge and relationships affect each other

it’s possible to recover and regenerate spent work resources – rest, support, and learning help employees bounce back

work can build or drain resources – how work is designed determines whether people thrive or are thwarted