bits & pieces

It became clear that what constituted trend forecasting “in itself” in the case of K-HOLE was the collective work of immaterial, unlocatable, affective, and knowledge labor. That, and the effusive, intangible, shape-shifting, and value-adding fog of branding. We realized that behind the multinational curtain is a decentralized quagmire where no one is held accountable and decisions are driven by fear. Corporations are people, US presidential candidate Mitt Romney said, and people need jobs, and jobs are jeopardized for all sorts of dumb, cyclical reasons without adding reckless departures from precedent. This is why, increasingly, most successful entrepreneurs—like most successful artists—come from some kind of money. Genuine risk-taking is usually the mark of desperation, mental illness, or both. We were brought in as crisis control, for brands and agencies to prove both internally and externally that they were self-aware and not ready to die.

Changing what people want is hard. We treat marketing like it’s super good at what it does, but the reality is that there’s a massive survivor bias in marketing. Everything gets marketed [and] most things fail. We only notice the tiny number of things that succeed and the fact that a lot of them are materially like garbage. That leads us to conclude that marketing can sell anything, but marketing really sells nothing—it’s a statistical rounding error.