Copies, substitutes, imitations, and counterfeits have always been part of the market. In recent years, these formats have spread across very different categories and, at the same time, the boundaries between original, fake, "almost-there," and substitute have become more fluid, more contextual, and more dependent on familiarity and pattern of use.

The point of this piece is to look at all of this with less judgment (e.g., using a copy is tacky, changing a formula is dishonest, etc.) and to avoid simplistic explanations, ones that treat these phenomena as purely supply-side or purely demand-side. It's also, above all, about thinking through the kinds of relationships between brands and people that these strategies feed.

We have several paths to explore here: openly acknowledged substitutes, degraded originals, perceptible fakes, indistinguishable fakes, and things that are the same thing, but under a different name.

Openly acknowledged substitutes

The first type is the openly acknowledged substitute, which builds its value proposition through direct comparison with the original category. Perhaps the most literal example of this is the margarine I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, which references the category it imitates right in its name and implies a favorable comparison. Created in 1979 and still going strong today, despite changing hands multiple times (it was Unilever's from 1986 to 2018), it's arguably one of the most successful and longest-running examples of this positioning logic.

A more modern example, massively hyped a few years ago but now growing at far more modest rates than the 2020–2021 enthusiasm suggested, is meat substitutes. Within this category, perhaps the most emblematic product is the Impossible Burger, both for its technical effort at similarity and its emphasis on favorable comparison with the meat version: the word "impossible" directly alludes to the contrast between its ingredient list and the flavor it delivers.

The problem is that building a value proposition on top of the original category necessarily triggers the comparison, possibly an unfavorable one, immediately. To try to get around this, several NotCo products created an interesting twist on the pioneer margarine's strategy: negation (what psychologists would call establishing identity by contrast). The problem is that even negation still directly references the original category.

In Chile, this debate moved out of marketing and into the courts: NotCo had the sale of some products challenged, with an initial ruling in favor of restricting terms like "milk," later overturned on appeal. In Brazil, there was no direct legal confrontation, but the emergence and growth of these products was accompanied by a regulatory push requiring terms like "plant-based analog of," precisely to avoid confusion and create some distance from the reference to animal-derived products.

The core point: in many cases, the substitute isn't trying to deceive, in principle; it's trying to replace a known category that has some undesirable element while still claiming proximity to the desirable parts of it. It sells itself as a functional alternative, with claims that could be summarized as "X, but without the Y," as demonstrated here by Fabio (yes, that Fabio!):

• Margarine: the taste of butter, without sending your LDL through the roof

• Impossible Burger: the taste of a quality beef burger without the environmental impact / animal cruelty

• Contratypes (the honest ones): practically identical to that amazing fragrance you love, without costing a small fortune

If we use ecological relationships as an analogy for the type of relationship at play, it's mutualism between the customer and the brand producing the substitute; but it can be a form of "semantic parasitism" on the original categories, whose key attributes get appropriated. The judge of this dispute, as always, is the customer, who measures the distance between promise and delivery using the ruler of their own experience and available information.

Here's a reflection without a clear answer: all these examples evoke the original category or product. There's a heated debate in the marketing world about whether directly mentioning competitors is harmful, and that debate heated up considerably with Pepsi's Super Bowl ad this year, which showed the Coca-Cola polar bear doing a blind taste test. Does the same logic apply to categories? Does mentioning the original category clarify the concept, or does it doom the substitute to a game it starts out losing?

In our world of research and insights, the clearest fit here is synthetic personas (meaning the idea of qualitatively simulating real people using LLMs). With evidence mounting that the promise falls well short of reality, the constant need for updates with real data to keep them from becoming stuck in time, the absence of lived experience, the tendency to regress toward the mean and toward training data biases, they no longer look quite so promising. The industry's own discourse, which moved quickly from "user research without the users" to "might be useful for testing scripts and questionnaires" as scrutiny increased, suggests the semantic parasitism hit hard; even if they seem "real" to the uninitiated.

Originals in constant degradation

The second type is a near-original in steady decline, certainly the most common in consumer goods. It's the classic case of the product that keeps the category name and the brand while hollowing out its substance.

Instagram post

R&D team figuring out how much they can cheapen the formula without losing market share.

Driven both by cost and performance pressures and by the desire to shift tax classifications (examples: when certain categories receive more favorable tax treatment, the temptation is always to stretch the definition as far as it will go; see diary beverages and compounds, or the various fragrance families like EDP, EDT, and eau de cologne), consumer goods companies are constantly reformulating their products. In many cases, pushing the limits of what's acceptable to both consumers and regulators, moving toward what I'm calling "almost-theres": something already far from the original version, but not quite far enough to require a different name — a precarious place to be.

Two categories illustrate the possible market dynamics of these constant reformulations particularly well: beer and chocolate.

For a long time, the use of corn and other grains beyond barley has been part of the industrial logic of Brazilian beer. Because this wasn't clearly visible on the label (it appeared as "malted or unmalted cereals"), most people simply didn't know. In the 2010s, as premiumization was driven by craft beer and growing public interest, consumer knowledge started to rise. When a USP study came out showing the proportion of corn in popular beers, the issue went mainstream: it was scandalous because people didn't know, and they immediately associated it with low quality, which isn't necessarily true. Even so, the backlash was enough to force a reassessment of the category's messaging, with "100% malt" gaining a much more prominent position, even in mass-market products. In 2018, ingredients like corn became mandatory on labels.

Chocolate had already been on a trajectory of gradual ingredient cost-cutting, a trend dramatically accelerated by the cocoa price shock of 2023–2024. As a result, the criticism, previously more common in other countries and in foodie and elite circles, reached the Brazilian general public roughly last year. This broader public debate is directly connected to new regulation passed by Congress this April, which among other things raises the minimum cocoa solids content required to call something chocolate. It's not just here: a viral public complaint from the grandson of Reese's founder led the manufacturer to commit to returning to the original formula. Videos of "almost-chocolates" that turn rubbery and won't melt when heated have been circulating widely online, the result of compositions very different from what consumers expect.

The industry tends to frame this as mutualism ("we're managing to offer the product at a price consumers can afford"), but that's a narrative that only holds as long as the information asymmetry holds; in the eyes of anyone who sees what's actually happening, it can look like pure parasitism. These cases suggest the relationship needs that asymmetry to survive, given that the backlash came precisely when access to certain information arrived in both cases.

The research and insights version of this degradation shows up most clearly in online panels. After years of quality processes and controls that were flying by the seat of their pants, poorly audited externally and under heavy price competition, it eventually led to a major fraud scandal in the US. In some ways, this was a predictable problem: the raw material being squeezed here is the human being whose honest opinion we need, and they're the ones who have to come out ahead first. The quality and prevention discussion has become more visible in our market, especially there; but is it enough to address the lack of transparency and the participant experience?

The philosophical question of the "almost-theres," with no clear answer, is how much a category in a race to the bottom can be hollowed out before it has to be called something else, or collapses entirely.

Perceptible fakes

The perceptible fake is an imperfect copy that tries to pass as the original for at least some of the people who encounter it, often not the person who bought it. The obvious examples are imperfect copies of luxury goods and, more recently, electronics. Aesthetic prosthetics of all kinds also fit here: wigs, hair extensions, false lashes, dental veneers, and so on.

I'll use the ubiquitous knockoff JBL speakers blasting distorted audio, the kind you hear everywhere at street markets and beaches, as my example. This type of fake operates on the premise that, for someone who knows the original, the difference may be obvious, which makes its value highly dependent on each person's familiarity. At the same time, there's a group of people for whom they're "good enough," or for whom the quality gap doesn't justify the price gap. Another factor that often enters the equation is social judgment: whether there's a social cost to being seen or "exposed" as using something fake, and whether that cost matters to the user. This last characteristic is particularly interesting and unique to this type of fake when we're talking about physical products.

Because of this, the value architecture of this type of fake is among the most complex. A classical economist might apply a utilitarian justification: the perceived cost-benefit makes sense. An anthropologist or sociologist fond of Bourdieu might say that the value of things depends on the type of social signaling desired. A behavioral scientist might invoke cognitive biases to explain the gap between our interpretation and reality. All of these lenses are true, but none tells the whole story.

That said, and in defense of Bourdieu, as in that iconic scene from the first Devil Wears Prada, even when we say we don't care about something, we keep signaling and being read by what we signal; it's a system with no "outside" when we live in society. Still on the subject of social cost: we don't always see clearly what we're signaling. The classic comedy example is the guy wearing a wig who believes no one can tell. The intended signal doesn't match how it's perceived because it's entirely mediated by risk and familiarity.

Because of these particularities, the ecological relationships here are messier: fakes are clearly parasitizing the original products, and possibly also parasitizing the signaling of the person who buys them; but that effect depends on whether the fake is "exposable" in that context. And yet, in the buyer's mind, it's mutualism!

Three recent examples of perceptible fakes in research and insights:

• The study Claude called "the world's largest qualitative study", which, for anyone who knows the fundamentals of what qualitative actually is, is at best a quant study with open-ended questions in a conversational format.

• Social listening cosplaying as quantitative research: using open public mentions as if they were representative, and presenting data in percentages as if people had actually been asked. Embarrassing.

• A company publishes a study with a margin of error, run on their own proprietary panel. If the panel is proprietary, the margin of error tells you how well the study represents that panel, not the world at large. A textbook sleight of hand, and a brazen one at that.

Indistinguishable fakes

Unlike perceptible fakes, indistinguishable fakes hold up even to scrutiny from those with more familiarity, because they involve a far greater effort to reproduce the physical characteristics; the goal is to be as identical as possible, not just to seem similar.

There's a Chinese word for this concept that has caught on strongly there: píngti (平替), which roughly translates to affordable substitute. In English, people call them dupes or clones. The Brazilian press has been calling them superfakes. These are reproductions of much higher quality than ordinary fakes.

Anyone who thinks these high-quality copies are only made in China is very mistaken. In other countries where labor is cheaper, like Vietnam and Bangladesh, factory B-grades or copies produced on the same production lines and/or with the same materials as the originals are readily channeled into large regional marketplaces like Lazada or global ones like the well-known AliExpress.

They're invading a huge number of categories where manufacturing quality was an important barrier to entry and artificial scarcity is a major part of the price justification: handbags, watches, limited-edition sneakers, and countless others. One of the key barriers to perceptible fakes in these categories was precisely social judgment. With greater similarity, the framing becomes closer to that of openly acknowledged substitutes: the same physical appearance and the same social signaling, for less. Greater exposure on social media helps reduce the stigma and, in a way, normalizes it as a choice.

The rise of this type of fake brings an uncomfortable truth for anyone who believes branding solves everything: perhaps people aren't as willing to pay for a brand if the physical performance and the signaling capacity for others are equivalent, and the social risk is close to zero.

This logic of the perfect copy opens up new strategic paths:

• Copy as territorial defense: De Beers, one of the world's largest diamond miners, created in 2018 a separate synthetic diamond brand, Lightbox, selling at very low prices to deliberately commoditize lab-grown diamonds and signal to the market that they are something very different from natural ones, protecting the core business from cannibalization.

• Copy as political pressure. Culture jamming is the idea of using symbols, images, and communication codes in a critical and subversive way. That's what Mumumelon does, explicitly copying pieces from sportswear giant Lululemon, using alternative materials and processes, as a way of critiquing its environmental credentials, supply chain, and pricing.

• Separating the copy from the authentic as a service. In markets where copies are already very common, third-party authentication services exist as part of the value proposition, as with StockX or as an optional feature in targeted categories like eBay.

In research and insights, this seems to be the space that many players in synthetic data want to occupy, and our biases work in their favor, because they're convincing. The problem is that indistinguishable appearance is very different from indistinguishable quality; representing and understanding in the same way, especially for those who understand what lies beneath the visible surface, is another matter entirely.

The same thing, just reframed and renamed

This last type is perhaps the most insidious, because its practitioners take something that exists, replicate the content, but change the framing and/or the name; to escape the scrutiny or stigma present in the original versions, or even to sidestep regulatory constraints.

A recent example: testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), tied to legitimate medical needs, reframed as "hormonal optimization" when used for obviously aesthetic and sexual purposes. Unlike the standard clinical path, the patient journey and medical protocol arrive almost pre-packaged: the patient shows up at the doctor's office already wanting the thing, the doctor, known for practicing the thing, detects "evidence" that the thing is necessary and promptly prescribes it. It's a growing market in many parts of the world, including the United States, where distribution is already widespread, as well as in Brazil and the UK, where social media acts as a demand trigger. The latent demand is strong enough that hormonology markets itself as a reframing of endocrinology, to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the practice.

Another recent example: you're betting on the outcome of a military conflict involving human lives or on the use of nuclear weapons in the coming years; but relax, it's not gambling, it's prediction markets. There's a great deal of rhetorical gymnastics to explain the technical differences, but it's the new framing doing most of the work of separating one thing from the other; so much so that Brazil's CMN regulatory body vetoed them precisely because it didn't buy the narrative. No false moralizing here: betting isn't necessarily problematic. The issue is trying to polish the rawness of winning or losing money on events with enormous human costs, and calling it investing; without even getting into the minefield of information asymmetry.

This type of fake doesn't work by masking its characteristics like the previous ones; it pulls a slicker trick: it keeps almost all the signals in plain sight, but denies the identity, obvious to some, that would trigger harder scrutiny. It's like that Woody Woodpecker bit where he describes himself in perfect detail to the very person hunting him down, and then says he doesn't know the guy: "Yo no lo conozco, señor."

@previewcd

Não o conheço, senhor😄😄 #picapau #nostalgia #classico #desenhos

Research? No, señor, that's *cultural listening.*

The research and insights version of this happens when a process full of elements that clearly belong to the research universe, qualitative research in particular (active listening, interviewing or observing people, analyzing behavior vs. stated attitudes, etc.), gets rebranded with something glamorous enough to dodge the hard questions that the word "research" would attract: "sprint", "cultural listening", "intelligence blah-blah-blah," among many others. And then you go to the company's LinkedIn page and it's classified as market research, management consulting or information services. Sorry, what?

Final reflections

If we know and accept that reputation is built on repeated positive interactions, the hollowing out of substance in frequently purchased consumer goods seems like a particularly bad idea. Isn't that exactly how you alienate your most loyal customers, the ones most capable of noticing the difference?

Among all these alternative products, fakes, simulations, and reframings, part of the market manages to sell simulacra, almost-theres, and degraded versions; not because buyers consciously want less, but because they can't clearly see what's been taken away. There's nothing wrong with proposing alternatives; but if information asymmetry is what sustains the value proposition, the countdown to its implosion may have already begun: a problem for brands that should be thinking in decades, not quarters.

Thanks for reading to the end — see you in the next edition!

Our pursuit of convenience has evolutionary roots: we're wired to conserve energy because we emerged in a context of scarcity, not caloric abundance. That trait, once a feature, has become a bug that’s increasingly incompatible with the reality we live in today, overloading hardware that hasn't been updated since the early Pleistocene. No fast updates are expected, given the manufacturer's track record.

The 20th century was when many of the physical frictions in the human experience were removed — the proliferation of cars and public transit, the mechanization of housework, and the rise of industrial food. In many aspects, it was liberating and wonderful — who would rather hand-wash their clothes or swap the vacuum cleaner for a broom? But the result is that many people now leave the house and pay to move their bodies, and since 2010, the WHO has treated physical inactivity as a global epidemic. It took a long journey to understand what we were losing and to recognize how important those frictions actually were.

In the 21st century, we are on a trajectory of reducing other types of friction: relational, cognitive, and intellectual.

A great (and very Brazilian) example of how the price for the removal of some frictions comes later and in subtler forms is the dominance of asynchronous communication. When we communicate asynchronously, we don't have to make ourselves available on someone else's schedule, we can multitask, and we can advance our own goals autonomously. But then, in the cozy warmth of passive-aggressive emails or the ambiguous silence of WhatsApp, we stop discussing things that would take two minutes on a call or a face-to-face conversation — exchanges made far richer by tone of voice and body language, capable of avoiding conflict, nurturing relationships, and making communication genuinely, only by other metrics.

Friction reduction is a core part of the appeal of much of what we consume, from delivery apps to ready-made juices. Capturing value, in many cases, means shortening the effort between people and what they want. UX is a discipline fundamentally focused on reducing digital friction (so much so that measuring effort is crucial), sometimes with noble goals, other times not so much. The very process of building brands is also friction reduction: it's about shortening the path to memory and to the decision.

All of this suggests that friction reduction is a driving force behind design, marketing, and product and service innovation — the problem is how this reduction, in many instances, works against our interests both individually and collectively, especially in the long run.

Stop! Hammer time

The arrival of LLMs has been like a hammer that sees any and all human friction that can pass through the digital as a potential nail.

One of the recent targets is relational frictions. In June of last year, I wrote about the rise of synthetic relationships and the productization of our difficulty in dealing with alterity (one of the most-read pieces in this newsletter), but what happened since then is impressive. We have more “agentic” dating apps because swiping right has apparently already become too much friction, griefbots designed to ease the friction of processing grief, and Meta recently patented an LLM that simulates people posting after they have died — yet another major reduction in the friction of the work of Charlie Brooker, screenwriter of Black Mirror.

Going against the grain, some are beginning to recognize the risks of removing these frictions. China recently moved forward with a regulatory package against AI anthropomorphization — limiting how much systems can simulate human emotions and bonds. The principle is simple and clear-eyed: the ability to emulate personality, affection, and care is not genuine humanity, and this needs to be explicit at all times for those who use it. Their framing focuses on the risk of manipulation and inducing dependency, especially for the young and elderly, and not on the “human flavor” as on our side of the world. Can we really only solve the problems created by one sledgehammer with another — the regulatory one?

Intellectual and cognitive frictions: the illusion of instant mastery and the explosion of the Dunning-Kruger effect

Sure feels like it, but reality is something else | via Giphy

Our relationship with technical and academic knowledge was already shifting, with the capacity to optimize the form and the emotions triggered (laughter, cuteness, but also hatred, outrage, and positive reinforcement of beliefs) becoming a key driver of visibility and consequently, financial success, at the expense of factual accuracy and lived experience. This brought forth two fundamental outcomes: the conflation of reach and authority (which I have already mentioned here, including in the context of human insights and market research) and the shattering of our understanding of reality.

The arrival of LLMs, beyond radically reducing the friction of producing text, also profoundly changes how we access more technical and specialized knowledge — in a wonderfully disintermediated, near-instant way. You send a photo of your open PC and AI helps you swap out the parts. You upload your lab results and it gives you a full breakdown of what's going on and answers every question you have.

There's a genuinely great side to this: laypeople can protect themselves from professions that use information or technical asymmetry (mechanics, lawyers, and so on) to control the client relationship. But then we start to believe we know enough to make decisions on our own in domains we don't actually understand very well, and that, hey, consulting a specialist might not be necessary after all.

The problem is that this illusion only lasts until the moment we are confronted by someone who actually knows what they are talking about and isn't using a machine to statistically infer the most probable answer.

The results of these behaviors playing out at scale are already visible: a massive amplification of the Dunning-Kruger effect and of illusory exceptionalism which is when we want to commoditize the work of others but think it's unacceptable for ours to be commoditized. Since these limitations are inherently human, those on the front lines of exposure to this new context are disproportionately affected by them, starting with some technology leaders who expect to revolutionize sectors without a minimum understanding of the human processes and dynamics involved.

This dramatically increases the pressure on those who do specialized intellectual work.

Under pressure

In this pressure cooker that is the anxiety about where LLMs fit in the world and our more ambivalent and critical relationship with our online presence and social media, we are already seeking frictions deliberately in response to this reality in which we live. Perhaps we are collectively beginning to understand that the problems created by technology aren't necessarily solved by more technology.

In an earlier piece on the saturation of the attention economy, I wrote about a more critical look at our online presence and the emergence of initiatives and businesses built around "forced presence" and the offline. Since then, the temperature has risen:

• Zuck in the hot seat over the impact of his platforms on children and young people — and internal Meta studies that leaked show robust evidence of harm.

• In Toy Story 5, soon to be released, the villain is a tablet.

• Year-over-year engagement is falling across multiple platforms: Instagram (-26%), Threads (-18%), and LinkedIn (-5%).

• And to top it off, Nature published a study empirically confirming that yes, the medium is the message — exactly as Marshall McLuhan predicted.

From the early days of the influencer era around 2014, when Kim Kardashian "broke the internet" and we discovered that some people's everyday lives could be highly monetizable without intermediaries like gossip magazines, it took more than ten years for a broad and structured backlash to emerge.

But the criticism is expanding in scope. In education, countries that lead global indices are “de-digitalizing” classrooms, reviving handwriting and delaying the introduction of computers and tablets.

In gaming, there is a large and profitable wave of harder games that force players to figure out what to do on their own, both in the indie world (Hollow Knight and its successor Silksong) and in the AAA world (Elden Ring and other souls-like), in a kind of revival of a much older design philosophy like that of the first Legend of Zelda, which was totally exploratory and depended on curiosity, trial and error, and a willingness to get lost in another world. The friction was, in a way, the reward itself.

What happens if this idea gains social momentum?

The search for deliberate friction crosses ideologies and values

To illustrate how this search appears even in social groups with very different worldviews, I brought some practices that have been on the rise and being more discussed in Brazil in recent times.

The political compass of searching for friction - the illustration is just for fun, don’t take it too seriously

What do the growing interest in Legendários (a Brazilian Evangelical men's movement focused on physical and spiritual trials), triathlons among executives, the practice of manual crafts such as ceramics, and urban garden and agroecology collectives have in common?

On the surface, they seem like distinct things with no apparent relation between them, especially if we look through the lens of external signaling (what it says about me to others):

• Agroecology and urban gardens — signals collectivism and ethical sense, value creation and subsistence “outside the system,” self-sufficiency.

• Legendários — signals masculinity through physical ordeals, reinforcement of traditional gender roles, and male socialization centered on activities, rather than conversations.

• Ceramics and other manual work—signaling of creativity and artistic sensitivity, appreciation of the artisanal (in contrast to the industrial / mass-produced) and of small scale workers.

• Triathlete executives—proving oneself and performance optimization, status signaling through participation in international events and physical capacity.

But they share something deeper, when you look from the inside:

• Being offline

• Self challenging

• The emphasis on the sensory experience over the intellectual and, also, on active involvement instead of passive consumption

• 100% focused attention as a base requirement

• Unmediated socialization

• Identity displacement and temporary reset of social roles—during the the activity, I am no one's father or mother, I am not a customer or supplier, I am not a boss or employee.

These are practices that function as a temporary suspension of our ordinary lives. In anthropology, this has a name: liminality.

But this doesn't necessarily cut across socioeconomic lines

What these activities also have in common is that they assume significant availability of money or, at the very least, time, two things that are particularly unevenly distributed in Brazil.

It is essential that we remember how much this reflection on intellectual and cognitive friction can perfectly be representative primarily of our bubble of intellectual work and the corporate world, both historically restricted to a narrow elite in Brazil. The world outside it may perfectly fine with embracing what little leisure they have with less guilt and have no desire to climb any mountain.

To argue with data: we can see this in practice with the adoption and use of LLMs, which has a huge SEG bias — it’s 32% among Brazilian internet users, (criterion: used in the last 12 months / any purpose) but there’s 69% in A, 54% in B, 49% in C and 16% in D/E SEGs. The TIC Domicílios 2025 (the Brazilian ICT Household Survey), the source of these data, understands that this represents about 50 million people, comparable to the population of the state of São Paulo, which has 46 million—it is far from being “everyone”! Besides this, professional use is much more concentrated in A than in the others.

Note: Base / universe = internet users | Professional, Personal and Research bases = LLM users.

A key methodological aside here. Unlike other studies recently released with very different figures, this survey is probabilistic (that is, it uses controlled randomness in sampling, making it far more representative and allowing for a calculable margin of error—0.8% in this case) and based on in-person, household data collection (which ensures much broader and more controlled coverage—it is not limited to those who volunteer to participate!), unlike online panels.

These panels, by definition, overrepresent certain groups: heavier internet users, people in metropolitan areas, younger populations, and socioeconomic segments for whom participation incentives are more appealing. As a result, studies based on them may end up describing their own panel composition better than they describe Brazil at large. This is why such methods are not used for electoral or opinion polling, or in any context where the goal is to measure the country — not just those willing to answer an online survey. We’ve seen large discrepancies like this before: recently in the UK, with a supposed revival of religiosity, and in Brazil, with data on alcohol consumption among young people.

This is another practical example of how the reduction of friction (cost, deadlines, complexity of the operation, discernment of buyers, honesty of sellers) can also bring unintended effects elsewhere. The rhetoric of “good enough,” “objectivity is the enemy decision-making” and the hype around synthetic data — vastly modeled on studies done with convenience samples — can accidentally amplify bubbles, fabricate consensus, increase FOMO and distance us from objective reality (and objectivity is a pursuit, not a destination). And this is in an informational context already highly fragmented, politically polarized, distributed and absorbed according to our previous beliefs. Friction that brings us closer to reality is worth preserving!

Who are we talking about then?

To help place this phenomenon socially, it's worth recalling that György Lukács argued back in the 1940s that the existential is a bourgeois concern and that only about 17% of Brazil is AB SEG, depending on the criteria.

Most employment here is tied to agribusiness, retail, construction, and in-person services like restaurants, hair salons, and logistics. Even in office work, most roles are operational and administrative rather than purely intellectual, in both the logical and creative senses.

But the real highlight here is something else: the greatest impact tends to arrive first precisely in the segment that builds social distinction by contrast to manual and operational labor. If the most cataclysmic scenario actually materializes and certain types of intellectual work have their market value destroyed, we may witness a plot twist no Russian revolutionary, however visionary, could have imagined: the temporary economic and prestige decline of bureaucratic work in favor of the physical labor. In countries where adoption is moving faster — with more workers in advanced manufacturing and more IT and finance in services — there are already signs this may be happening.

Unlikely heroes of blue collar work - an impossible future?

A shorter cycle from idealization to backlash

However remote that possibility may seem in the short term, the tension and anxiety are palpable — especially in a country like ours, where this kind of work has almost always been a social marker and physical labor has always been undervalued. This real risk of economic decline and of identity and symbolic erosion fits what sociologists call anomie and what Alvin Toffler called "future shock."

When smartphones and social media arrived, public reactions were different: the mood was one of near-universal excitement. iPhones were aspirational objects and watching Apple launches was collective entertainment. The downsides of these novelties may not have been as immediately visible or as frightening.

Even in research and insights, people were excitedly declaring that quantitative research would wither, that representativeness was dogma, that social media would become the world's biggest focus group... 🤷🏻

That's not to say there were no critics — some of them quite visionary. The first public mention of "crackberry," the term mocking the addictive potential of smartphones, dates back to 2001. The tech press called Steve Jobs's charisma and stage presence a "reality distortion field," especially when he sold as revolutionary things the competition had been doing for years.

An archaeological record of the hype and idealization of that era. If you were working in marketing in 2009, you've probably seen this video

But now it's different — in part because the adoption of LLMs isn't happening entirely voluntarily. It's being driven by competitive pressures of all kinds: top-down mandates, some even tied to promotions, productivity demands, aggressive cost-cutting, fear of being left behind. A lot of people are being pushed, not walking in willingly. Many critics use precisely this dynamic as their argument: if the technology were entirely trustworthy or desirable, perhaps no one would need to be pressured to use it.

“I like to think about the mysteries of life” | “I like to think about PROMPT”| via Bruna Sudoski

On top of that, people's individual experiences vary wildly. There are complex tasks where the performance is remarkable and simple ones where the results are consistently frustrating. This highly heterogeneous adoption dynamic tends to generate far more resistance, criticism, and early concern about negative, even catastrophic, impacts of all kinds.

If technology adoption cycles generally move through stages: first hype and idealization, then normalization and mass adoption, and finally disillusionment or backlash — with LLMs this timeline is far more chaotic: the idealization, the fear, and the pushback are happening almost simultaneously, which means we're already weighing what we have to lose.

The evolution of the recycle bin icon | Do memes count as weak signals?

If technological adoption cycles in general pass through stages — first of hype and idealization, then normalization and mass adoption, and finally disenchantment or backlash — with LLMs this timeline is more chaotic: the idealization, the fear, and the contrary reactions are happening almost at the same time, which makes us already weigh now what we have to lose.

What comes next: a renewed appreciation of process and the arms race for the “human touch”?

One of the spaces where these negative reactions are most visible is in LLM-generated content on social media and even in journalism. "Sloppification" and the criticism that comes with it are already part of a broad conversation, especially when commercial interests are involved — a discussion that seems to be more about how to use these tools than whether to use them at all.

In luxury and art, process has always been an inseparable part of building narrative and value: Nappa leather, the walnut trim of vintage Jaguars, the hand-dyeing of Japanese selvedge denim, dishes prepared from scratch with hard-to-source ingredients in fine dining, the frame-by-frame animations of Studio Ghibli. These are the things that, once you understand the effort involved and the role it plays in the final result, you come to appreciate even more.

Costly signaling is exactly that: when we use markers that show others that what we made or communicated involved serious effort or expense. It's an important concept in game theory, behavioral economics, and negotiation. When something appears expensive, labor-intensive, or sophisticated, it shapes how people assess its value. But this mechanism can operate in different ways:

• It can negatively affect the perceived value of something: you attend an event and receive a cheap promotional gift — rather than improving your impression of the brand, you leave disappointed. Their effort didn't translate into a positive perception.

• It can be used to create the illusion of effort: as in the semantic hollowing-out of the word "artisanal," applied to clearly industrialized products like sliced bread and frozen pizza. Same goes for that LinkedIn post that deleted the em-dashes but kept all the LLM tics that we've already learned to recognize - is robotic text the crappy swag bag of intellectual work?

Advertising, for example, is more persuasive when there is costly signaling. But we're in a moment where the focus on volume and flooding the zone is so intense that we fail to notice: if the perceived effort is zero, the perceived value also tends toward zero. Will this push us toward appreciating genuine intellectual effort more?

The problem: is it possible to do costly signaling in something that isn’t necessarily physically perceptible?

If intellectual work no longer carries visible markers of the effort involved, and reaching some outcome stops being a competitive advantage, does the differentiator become the process? Recent evidence from music: while 97% of people are unable to distinguish music made with generative tools from conventional music, 73% believe this use should be openly disclosed, 45% would like filtering tools, and 40% would always skip tracks produced that way.

The process, in human learning, is what ensures we internalize experiences and grow — even in things that might seem like a waste of time or whose importance is hard to prove. The falls and the gradual recognition of what physical balance feels like when learning to ride a bike. The calluses that form on your fingers from practicing guitar. The darkening vision and near-fainting as you build physical conditioning in a martial art or a demanding sport. The paragraphs you need to re-read several times in a difficult text. Staring at a blank screen or page for a long time before writing. All of these processes produce tacit knowledge that can't always be put into words.

Martin Heidegger said that language is an incomplete system for transmitting information — a discussion that becomes acutely relevant in the moment we're living through. Talking about something is not doing the thing, and not necessarily learning about the thing either. There are sensations, emotions, and experiences that language is insufficient to convey, and that is an inseparable part of human experience. This explains both a possible ceiling in LLM capabilities and the new venture from Yann LeCun, who wants to model the world directly, not through language.

Now, if it's clear that we value these frictions and efforts — even when they can't be transmitted through language — and, as I argue here, we'll increasingly reflect on which ones are worth preserving and which ones are worth investing time and money in, a new arena emerges: signaling itself. If the value of what we do isn't immediately recognizable, we look for substitute signals to demonstrate that it exists: degrees, certifications, years of experience, association with recognized institutions, or humanizing traces that indicate the effort was real.

WALL-E: a robot more human than most LinkedIn posts | via ScreenRant

And speaking of the future…

Technological uncertainty is high, but the human dynamics are visible and reveal the incentives

We're in the middle of a social experiment that stirs strong emotions. How we see the issue increasingly depends on how we see technology: fatalistically, enthusiastically, skeptically, cynically, or even catastrophically — which makes the discussion more polarized and more grounded in belief than in fact. This plays out even among some of the brightest minds in the world across different fields of knowledge. There's no scenario in which everyone is right at the same time, and at this level of divergence, some of the mistakes will be very costly.

Rather than just debating technology's potential, perhaps we should pay closer attention to the human dynamics around it — for example, how gaining access to the right people and to capital involves echoing a certain discourse, or where the preaching diverges sharply from the practice among key figures in tech. As always: cui bono and follow the money.

Elvira Hancock in Scarface (1983), on the relationship between creators and their creatures

So what now?

• There may be room for brands that sell as a service or participate in a relevant way in frictions considered productive, valuable, or rewarding. Shall we work on identifying which ones those are?

• “Offline is the new luxury” is a cute framing that tells only half the story. Historically, low-cost products like powdered juices and free-to-play games are invariably pushed to those with less choice. This can transform AI slop into the cultural and cognitive equivalent of instant noodles. If it happens, we have a real chance of having cognitive inequality expanded — which would also create a promising market for those who can mitigate this impact.

• Don't assume your audience / leads / clients / consumers are suckers who can't tell your brand voice or your LinkedIn posts sound robotic and riddled with LLM tics. The temptation to crank up the volume in the knife fight for attention we're all stuck in is real — but if everyone does the same thing, the collective effect is a disaster. The higher the proportion of garbage content, the worse or smaller the audience for that channel gets. Game theory in action: if everyone pees in the pool, who still jumps in? What happens when every channel out there turns into a 24/7 infomercial?

• Attention is not trust, attention is not relevance, attention is not intent. A practical example: we spend a lot of time thinking about and being exposed to certain public figures. Does that increase our favorability toward them? In some cases, it's quite the opposite — as the internet has put it perfectly: "Everything I know about this person I learned against my will."

Wrapping up: in a time where, in the competition for attention and capital, people will even claim that consciousness, one of the hardest problems in science, is already in the machine, this month's recommendation is Michael Pollan's interview on consciousness and on which frictions may be worth preserving. Thank you for reading to the end, and see you in the next edition!

A great deal of our contemporary myopia in marketing, insights, and innovation is a direct derivative of our insistence on understanding the United States as the global culture’s North Star (or rather, from our perspective, the Southern Cross).

Articles discussing the growing influence of South Korea, China, and Latin America have abounded lately. What seems less discussed is exactly who’s losing, or at least, who’s no longer growing because of this. Cultural influence isn’t strictly a zero-sum game, but consuming culture involves the use of time, which is a finite and unrecoverable resource.

Despite all this, the expectation remains high that what happened there will happen here. The internet is flooded with people creating carousels based on articles from "smart-set” American media like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Vox as if they were major trends for Brazil. It is an absurd level of intellectual provincialism, a contemporary reprise of the old story about the women of the Portuguese court who arrived in Brazil wearing turbans to hide lice, which everyone then imitated because they thought it to be the latest fashion in Europe.

Major events over there still seem stuck in the paradigm of “the future starts here,” constantly treating highly specific American contexts as if they made total sense elsewhere in the world. Much of our corporate elite is a partner in this nonsense. The sheer size of the Brazilian delegations and the secondary market that exists around these events (guru parrots, tour organizers, etc.) is a testament to this, and in part, almost a neurosis: we refuse to understand the obvious, because doing so would require deconstructing our entire view of how the world works.

Brazilians at major American events. Via Brother of Jorel

Everyone is following a formula from the last century, built upon abstractions that are increasingly less true and no longer account for the complexity of world transformations. Let me explain…

The cracks in the armor and increasingly less aspirational lifestyles

Yes, they are still the world's largest economy, though there are several signs of relative decline. Their peak share of global GDP was in the 1960s, reaching 40%, but since the 1980s it has hovered around a reasonably stable 20%.

The status of the dollar as the world's reserve currency, one of the pillars of U.S. economic power, peaked in the 90s, but in the last ten years, it has lost nearly 10% of its share. There is heated debate over whether this is transitory or a turning point.

More recently, economic concern has shifted toward an almost total dependence on consumer-focused AI, which circular investments, inflated expectations, and exaggerated promises suggest might not pay off and could end in a nasty fall. And this time, the criticisms regarding these signs of decline aren't coming from anti-establishment figures, but from the inside, from people like Ray Dalio, Daron Acemoglu, or Goldman Sachs itself.

But the central point here is different: we cannot treat economic preponderance as a synonym for cultural influence, nor for the aspirational nature of values and lifestyles. You know that story about preferring to be feared or loved? One doesn't guarantee the other, sometimes it’s exactly the opposite.

Exported models from the past are in decline

The pillar of the American lifestyle export in the 20th century was the enormous purchasing power of the American middle class, once described as the “world’s hedge fund.” This relative strength, which peaked in the 90s, hasn’t been a reality for at least a decade. And this decline is not only continuing but worsening: the top 10% of earners already concentrate half of all consumer spending.

The multi-room house. Two large cars in the garage. Hypermarkets. Vacations in resorts or theme parks. These major historical symbols of that lifestyle are in decline or stagnation, at least over there.

Other negative showcases are frequent highlights in the international press: the absurd state of the healthcare system, extreme gun violence compared to other wealthy nations (they have led in homicides per capita for years!), and a cost of living so heavy that even high salaries can’t compensate. The result is a culture where money, and with it, professional success, occupies such a central place in life that it subordinates everything else: relationships, friendships, time. It’s a balance that doesn’t add up for many people.

Viral post from a Dutch tech worker from a few weeks ago

Europeans see the higher salaries and lower taxes but prefer their long paid vacations and quality of life. In wealthy Asia, there are pockets of influence, visible in things like the enormous interest in American vintage fashion and workwear, but neighboring countries seem to be more direct influences than the U.S. Global public opinion about the country is also moving in a negative direction, although this may be transitory and linked to political issues.

The consequence is that the lifestyles the U.S. sold to the world seem increasingly less desirable internationally. The cultural implications are immense. What happens when we no longer want to be like them?

The American cultural industry still has weight but it’s a shadow of its former self

For those who grew up at the height of the Cold War or in the 90s, it’s clear that this influence is now comparatively smaller. The manifestations are diverse, but in music, there is clear evidence.

Music: no longer the prima donna, just a choir singer who still sings loudly

American music was the global soundtrack for most of the 20th century, from 30s jazz to the explosion of rock in the 50s and 60s, and hip hop as a highly influential cultural export, especially from the 80s onward.

But today seems different. A recent study measured the proportion of the most-played songs on Spotify by origin in various countries over a year, showing the strength of local music in some of the world's most relevant markets, including Brazil.

Via https://www.skoove.com/blog/spotify-local-vs-global-music/ - worth reading!

Some things stand out: South Korea carries more weight than the U.S. in most countries from the Bosphorus Strait eastward, and U.S. influence is concentrated in English-speaking countries and, to a lesser extent, Northern Europe. China, though outside this study, also has a strong local market that is gaining international relevance.

Of course, Spotify isn’t the entire music market, which is much harder to measure today than in the era of physical media sales. But due to its universality, it’s a good proxy for how things work globally. In Brazil, data crossing other platforms places us as even more interested in our own music.

Now, if we could convert this metric into plays per dollar spent, the influence of countries like South Korea, Puerto Rico, and Colombia would be absolutely disproportionate. It’s a bit like comparing P&G with a smaller local chemical brand, the difference in the order of magnitude of investment is too large. This serves as proof that cultural relevance and influence are not strictly economic factors.

If it were possible to do a similar study in previous decades, especially pre-Napster, it is very likely that the Americans would be much more dominant than they are today, given the distribution power of a few major labels, radio payola, and the influence of MTV.

Audiovisual: Hollywood in a loop and growing interest in other stories formats and repertoires

Much of the audiovisual industry is stuck in a loop of superheroes, sequels, and prequels because creative daring is being besieged by financial results. Is it worth creating a new franchise or simply making another Avengers movie or another Superman remake?

In contrast, for those tired of repeated formulas, it’s easy to escape the romantic comedies, the high school teen dramas, and the reality shows built on the same old stereotypes.

Ironically, perhaps the American company that best understood this movement was Netflix, precisely because it produces a massive amount of local content in the countries where it operates and suggests this content to users around the world. Yes, there are countries like Brazil and France where there is a legal obligation for the production and broadcasting of national audiovisual content, but it is interesting to observe that this happens even in countries where this obligation does not exist!

This is so true that a growing portion of its major global hits are not American productions, such as: Squid Game (South Korea), Money Heist (Spain), Roma (Mexico), or Fauda (Israel) - even the roar of K-pop Demon Hunters, which is indeed an American production, is a crossover of Asian formats. They understood that entertainment based on other cultures, languages, and formats had much more potential for broad distribution than Hollywood imagined, even bypassing taboos like 'Americans won't watch anything with subtitles

Us and them: a conversation about data and self-esteem

Them: a self-referential culture obsessed with data

The American national baseball tournament is called the "World Series," even though the U.S. and Canada are the only participating countries. In the truly international tournament, the WBC, played by 20 countries, Japan is the nation with most wins. The U.S. is one of the wealthy countries with the fewest people traveling abroad. The American school curriculum is notoriously much more centered on their own History and Geography than on providing a global view.

This cultural navel-gazing (often framed as American Exceptionalism) is already a relic of the 20th century. Part of the inhospitable political climate there is precisely a war of narratives about their place in the world, with part of the country in denial facing a post-'End of History' decline that is increasingly apparent. It's a kind of midlife crisis of their national identity - part American Beauty, part the second half of Boogie Nights."

Still on the subject of sports, every athlete appearing in a sports broadcast has their history of passes, blocks, three-pointers, or whatever is relevant for that sport rigorously documented. Every career becomes a technical profile, almost like an RPG character sheet. They have a deep appreciation for data.

This appreciation appears in various other manifestations with practical market consequences: a few years ago, 53% of global spending on market research and insights was done in the U.S. Furthermore, major institutes like Pew Research and Gallup have various continuous studies on subjects like time use, values, etc., with decades of history.

This wide availability of data is wonderful. The problem is us using these data and observations that have nothing to do with our reality as if they were a beacon for our future or to cover our own gaps.

Us: the Streetlight Effect and underdog determinism

The "Streetlight Effect" is an observation bias: we look for answers where there is light and not where the problem or phenomenon actually is.

The massive volume of data on absolutely everything in the U.S. amplifies this effect. We give disproportionate importance to things that were actually absorbed or are happening there and, because of that, stop looking at the countless ones that never got here or that happened in a completely different way.

Practical example: broadband access in Brazil arrived on mobile before the home PC for most people: due to cost, purchasing power, infrastructure, context, we were mobile-first before they were!

Self-esteem: some with so much others with so little

A key aggravator for this condition is our tendency to believe that the legitimate origin of ideas is always elsewhere, which makes us buy their presumption of leadership and self-reference at face value, even when reality says otherwise.

Santos Dumont versus the Wright Brothers. Bossa Nova inspiring The Doors. Clube da Esquina as a fundamental inspiration for Genesis. Rod Stewart blatantly plagiarizing Jorge Ben Jor. Beyoncé sampling our funk. In countless instances, the creative spark is ours and the assimilator is the other. Not to mention so many things we only start to value after they are recognized abroad: Bebel Gilberto, for example.

People repeat on the internet that Brazilians are born marketers, but apparently, we are terrible at marketing our own legacy and culture.

Yes, there are indeed several businesses, brands, and products that are direct copies of what exists in the U.S. However, that space is opened exactly by our cultural particularities, economic barriers like import taxes, and because we aren't necessarily a super profitable market comparatively, despite these hurdles.

The fragility of the abstractions sustaining this worldview

We use frameworks and models to reduce the complexity of the world. The intention is good: to make things easier to understand and to systematize knowledge. The terrible side effect is what gets lost along the way for the sake of simplification.

The problem is reducing the study of emerging consumer behaviors and trends to the aspirations of modern youth in the cultural capitals of the Anglophone and/or wealthy West. This isn't an accident or coincidence: it’s the result of treating youth as the unquestionable protagonists of society and the sole holders of the "new," a stupidity of which we here in Brazil are partners and accomplices, and of which the obsession with the so-called Generation Z is an omnipresent symptom. It also stems from treating the Anglophone world as the epicenter of global aspirations, two things that were much closer to being true in the last century than they are today.

This idea of youth as the epicenter reflects the context of the emergence of youth culture in the 50s and 60s much more than it corresponds to today's reality. Yet, that same wealthy West we consider the center of humanity is getting older and living longer, as is most of Latin America, including ourselves.

Even this hierarchical notion that grants privileged status to youth is not something endemic to our own culture, our indigenous peoples, many of the African ethnicities brought here by force like the Nagôs and Bantus, or even the Southern Europeans who make up the most recent immigration in Brazil celebrate maturity and give it very important social roles. From whom did we learn that being older is to be a pariah, a second-class consumer and citizen?

The practical examples of these two flawed shortcuts are diverse:

1. Generations: based on their historical and economic context and not ours. They introduce a massive class bias (i.e. people who had Super Nintendos in the 90s were high income, not most of us) and echo foreign ethnocentrism when looking at less developed countries like Brazil. This silences more universal local influences and factors that most people remember, like Xuxa or the wave of pagode groups from that same period. It also ignores major local historical and economic events with immense weight, such as the re-democratization and the 2014-2016 recession.

2. The great wealth transfer being treated as something very relevant for Brazil. Those who truly accumulated wealth were the American middle class, and to a lesser extent, the European middle class. During the post-war Baby Boom, which demographers agree did not happen in a comparable way in Brazil, our birth rate was already high (~6 children/woman vs. their peak of 3.8), but we had a much higher infant mortality rate (160/1,000 vs. 29/1,000 in 1950). With the bulk of Brazilian assets concentrated in real estate, not in stocks or funds like in the US, and the high average of children per couple in that generation (3-4 children vs. 2-3), the ones who will truly make money from this transfer in Brazil, besides the few who will actually inherit wealth, are the probate attorneys, not the younger generation in general as will happen there.

“Os Retirantes” (1944), by Candido Portinari, is an image that better represents our post-war era than the rosy-cheeked sailors and the rise of the American suburban middle class.

We are in the middle of a dreadful wave of clickbait disguised as sociological analysis that ticks both boxes: using American data to talk about a supposedly Brazilian or global phenomenon and treating turning 30 or 40 as a kind of condemnation to irrelevance in countries where that is precisely the largest age block of the population.

The problem is that this type of content will appear as a source in your agency's strategy deck or will become a carousel and be taken as truth in a context of news and data consumption that is increasingly devoid of critical thinking and reading comprehension. So no, it is not harmless — if marketing, design, and product/service development are grounded in human understanding, this type of content isn't just "empty calories," it's trans fat, something that accumulates with deleterious long-term effects.

What we urgently need to leave behind

FIRST: stop treating youth as the epicenter of social influence.

Besides being an echo of a historical context that has passed, this reflects both a narcissistic fantasy of protagonism (with science to support it!) and a corporate bubble that is very different from the outside world. In that bubble, people over 40 are far less present, and when they are, they are almost always in positions of power as partners, owners, or bosses, and as such, they are the authority or the model to be challenged or deconstructed. Can you see where the stigma comes from?

This obsession blinds us to countless opportunities in audiences that are not only the population majority but also have more purchasing power. Countless studies show they don't feel represented and are neglected by brands and companies - are you guys really data-driven?

SECOND: stop treating the U.S. as a kind of contemporary Rome, but rather as an important global voice in a choir with several other rising stars.

The fragmentation brought by digital culture both closes the door to more universal phenomena and opens it to new voices. In culture, this is easy to see, not only with the increasing space occupied by other countries but with how some highly influential American exports also seem to be in decline or have already gone through a cycle of appropriation and derivation that has completely transformed them - in itself a sign of relevance!

Contrary to what it seems, the way out of our chronic "underdog-ism" is neither jingoism nor a third-worldist blaming of others. It’s trying to see our place in the world more objectively! A synthesis can exist that gives real weight to things without needing to idealize anything. Nothing is harder (but more strategic) than seeing oneself clearly from the outside.

THIRD: the notion that our corporate, urban, and higher income reality is aspirational for people other than ourselves.

Yes, advertising agencies and the fashion world are also corporations, increasingly consolidated in both sectors. The idea that people below us in the socioeconomic pyramid, in smaller cities, or not linked to creative industries necessarily aspire to be us is a relic from when e-commerce and social media didn't exist and there were significant information and distribution bottlenecks, not only financial ones. So much so that these same industries are constantly appropriating non-hegemonic or “alternative” aesthetics to sell “authenticity,” both inside and outside Brazil. It is much more vain (and pathetic) self-reference than a true understanding of these dynamics.

via Giphy

We insist on believing in things that have already been disproven in various fields of knowledge. Enough with influence pyramids, opaque segmentations, magical archetypes, and gross simplifications.

Things are much more case-by-case and context-dependent, rather than following the predictable flow of amateur and poorly evidenced trend reports. We treat dynamics that apply to fast-moving consumer goods as if they were generalizable to completely different categories and sectors. The “astrologization” of consumer behavior needs to die so that something more relevant and grounded can be born in its place, as happened with the rise of Astronomy during the Enlightenment.

One of the first steps for this is for us to abandon the paradigm of cultural influence as something centralized, hierarchical, monolithic, deterministic, and that fits into a little PowerPoint diagram or something that happens “automatically” — and the fault isn't just with those who propose it, but with those who accept it.

Thanks for reading and see you next edition!

The post-pandemic inflationary shock and wage stagnation in many parts of the world are powerful vectors of change, affecting the political chessboard, possibly our collective sense of isolation and, of course, our purchase choices.

Squeezed purchasing power is pushing many people to seek alternatives. The classic paths for established giants, in fast-moving consumer goods in particular, are to go through shrinkflation and reformulating products with cheaper ingredients. In supermarkets and pharmacies, this is when private labels usually take off.

via Will Poskett

But there is another, more interesting path opening up. In several categories, brands are emerging that deliver exceptional performance at more accessible prices. This movement is riding a wave of growing geopolitical and cultural decentralization (which is a topic for another text in itself!) and is accelerated by the issue of tariffs. With the origin of products coming under more scrutiny, the characteristics we associate with countries are changing rapidly.

On this new map, the old bastions of quality like 'German engineering,' 'designed in California,' or 'Swiss movement' (if we’re talking about watches) still matter, but their monopoly on our perception is crumbling. They are no longer the only possible seals of approval, and not everyone wants to - or can - pay the premium for them. This opens the door for brands to tell their stories in different ways.

Consumer electronics: the proliferation of Chinese value and premium brands and “Chifi”

In consumer electronics, China is rapidly moving beyond its past of low-quality (or even high-quality) copies of Western products and is moving towards using its productive efficiencies to create brands that challenge more traditional competitors not only in price, but increasingly in technical features and quality.

A less obvious manifestation than what is happening in the automotive market (and without the direct incentive of the Chinese government) that illustrates this phenomenon very well is the idea of Chifi, a concept that mixes China with High Fidelity — and which is a great analogy for this new role of Chinese brands in the world. Confronting traditional premium audio equipment brands from America, Europe, and Japan like Bose, Sennheiser, or Sony, several Chinese brands are specializing in products with extremely high performance and yet are significantly cheaper than these competitors.

Brands like KZ have changed what is expected from entry-level earphones, with accessible products far superior to the buds that came with your phone, and others are also venturing into the high end of the market, like Moondrop and Hifiman. A second group, among which is FiiO, which has as its mission to elevate the "made in China" reputation, are not just in earphones but also in amplifiers, speakers, and various others. Not content with the unbeatable cost-benefit, some of these brands are highly experimental, both in engineering and design. The differentiator is no longer just access to cheaper components and the ecosystem of suppliers and skilled labor.

Instagram post

watch out, AirPods!

This same logic, not necessarily for value but for performance, applies to various other categories, for example keyboards (Keychron giving Logitech and Razer headaches), robot vacuums (Roborock and Dreame advancing on iRobot, Samsung and other more established ones), handheld consoles (Ayaneo and GPD advancing on Steamdeck and ROG Ally) and many others. But this path is not possible only for brands that manufacture their products in Shenzen and other Chinese industrial hubs…

Perfumery outside the European bubble

The devaluation of the real and the loss of purchasing power in the last decade pushed many historical consumers of imported perfumes towards more accessible alternatives. Brazilian perfumery itself benefited greatly and developed a lot, which was certainly a factor in the internationalization of some of our brands.

This context of eroding purchasing power helps explain in part the growth of Middle Eastern perfumery around the world and notably also in Brazil — another example of the prominence of value brands (in the Kotlerian definition, so focus on perceived value delivery) from outside the West globalizing and gaining ground.

There, fragrances have ancient roots and deep cultural value which in itself is excellent raw material for brand narratives, as is the presence of certain notes and ingredients that are not so common for us like Oud or myrrh. Besides that, they have the reputation of being exceptional in the "technical" metrics like longevity (how long the perfume lasts) and projection (the distance the perfume can be felt) — and where entry-level brands generally fail and luxury brands justify part of the expense.

It's the combination of this technical performance and competitive pricing, packaged in a legitimate cultural narrative, that create a very seductive value proposition, like Chifi's, for brands like Lattafa, Armaf, and Rasasi, all from the United Arab Emirates.

India and specialized high-performance skincare

India is the world's largest producer of generic drugs. This expertise in fine chemistry and pharmaceutical formulations is overflowing into the skincare market and creating global brands, which started by eating at the edges in markets where the Indian diaspora is larger (United Kingdom, USA, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, etc.).

Two brands in particular have stories that fit here:

• Minimalist, founded in 2020, is in a way an Indian response to the Canadian brand The Ordinary, with a total focus on active ingredients and transparent communication, delivering more performance for better prices. In addition to India's local production efficiencies, the greater focus on local skin and climate characteristics also helped - so much so that they were bought by Hindustan Unilever in January of this year.

• Dr. Sheth's was founded by two Indian dermatologists and a pharmacist and attacked a weak point of European brands: the lack of R&D for darker skin tones and hot and humid climates — so much so that their tagline is “for Indian skin”. Priced as “mass prestige” in its home country, above entry-level brands but below European ones like Clinique, it was bought in 2022 by the Honasa Consumer group, a “house of brands” owner of Mamaearth, a D2C brand of baby products that is also expanding internationally.

Despite the ANVISA regulatory barrier preventing official sale in Brazil, the latent demand is visible: the brands are already a topic of discussion in enthusiast forums and their products are found in marketplaces through importers — Chifi also started to gain relevance in Brazil that way back around 2020!

What happens to the world of brands if the historical suppliers of raw materials and cheap labor decide to create their own global brands?

Imagine what could happen when other countries with already recognized national commodities or products (Egyptian or Peruvian Pima cotton, Turkish towels, silk and the entire textile industry of Vietnam, etc.) decide to play this game too? Here in Brazil, the weight of Egyptian cotton as a sign of quality has long arrived in home textiles and more recently, along with Pima, it is a claim that helps justify basic t-shirts that cost over 200 or even 300 Brazilian Reais — is there room for value brands based in the countries of origin?

The rules of the game and what all these brands have in common

They are built on less obvious ways of signaling status

Seen from the outside, it may seem that people who choose value brands are simply more rational, more practical, or more dispassionate, but it goes beyond that. One of the things that these brands, the more niche ones in particular, have in common is that they deliver a more exclusive, countercultural or even contrarian sense of belonging, in the sense of knowing things that other people don't. This feeling of being in the know or a connoisseur is a more subtle status signaling than the “I have it, you don’t” of part of the traditional luxury industry. I've already talked about how the search for the is something that moves culture and the place of brands and products in it . In marketing, it seems that many people aim for these less subtle forms and forget the others.

The “pride of spending little”

There are both cultures and individuals who take pride in their ability to bargain. Ultimately, it is also a form of signaling: of intelligence, negotiation skills, of not being gullible or a spendthrift like others.

Know anyone like that?

The marketing world tends to treat rationality as the opposite of emotion, but they almost always go together. Objective performance, validated by trusted third parties at an attractive price, is the perfect rationalization our brain needs to allow itself to embrace the impulse. It's behavior that only seems rational on the surface, but only our discourse or justification about this behavior is.

This is precisely why perceived value, ideally in ways that can be objectively measured, is the most important thing. The feeling of “I'm coming out on top” is a very powerful motivation. I always talk a lot about Game Theory in the relationships between brands that produce and people who buy - an “easy” way to win a negotiation is when you convince your counterpart that they are the ones coming out on top — but some companies have a hard time accepting that this feeling is cemented in the buyer's reality and not in the seller's discourse.

The figure of the insider and the expert plays a key role in building value and in communication

Unlike what it seems on Linkedin, the P for promotion is not the only one that exists in marketing, where it seems the logic of high recurrence and dependence on constant mass communication of fast-moving consumer goods is more rule than exception.

For every Duolingo, Liquid Death or other marketer darling brand that is built primarily on fun branding and a funny presence on social media, there are several others passing unnoticed on your radar and grinding the competition at the intersection of the P's of Price and Product, and this outrageous perceived value is precisely the thing that makes promotion run on its own (or with less effort) at a much lower acquisition cost.

For products that are somehow anchored in performance, no celebrity endorsement will be as persuasive as that of a vibrant community of insiders and enthusiasts, be they foodies, audiophiles, coffee nerds, and so on. Even the role of content creators is different: it is the level of personal involvement and technical knowledge that transmit credibility and authority, not the raw reach — the latter can even be a factor of distrust in some cases. The "toll" to enter this world is to impress real-world customers with a lot of repertoire or interest - a minority of these possibly have an audience of their own. They are the ones who will evaluate the credibility of your claims and help form the opinion of other people looking for guidance.

Now, think about how much this matters even more if LLMs start to play a bigger role in our discovery and evaluation of products, as they will aggregate these online testimonials and make “meta-analyses” of the reviews from specialists and interested parties, like a custom-made and turbocharged Metacritic.

The place of origin in positioning

In our geopolitical rearrangement, using the as an element of differentiation, a narrative pillar and in some cases, even national pride, are paths that make a lot of sense. In the case of several of these brands, the “underdog” position is implicit and everybody loves an underdog.

The value brand positioning can often be a first step towards even more lucrative or consolidated paths

via Giphy

Several brands that are consolidated, broad-appeal or mainstream today were value brands when they were entrants. Think of the Japanese automakers in the 80s in the US and the turnaround of the Korean ones at the end of the 90s around the world. As much as this path may be desirable for some, it is not the only one possible. But where can you go?

Evolving into a cult brand is a natural path for those with an inherently more restricted appeal, especially since being a darling of critics and insiders but not of the general public can increase the value proposition. Think of Mubi in comparison to Netflix or Apple before the iPhone and the migration from PowerPC to Intel chips.

The direction of premium or luxury is also an attractive alternative. This same validation coming from critics, experts and connoisseurs, if taken to a level of more universal recognition and reputation, can allow for higher or even Veblen-esque pricing. Returning to the automakers, it's the story of Lexus.

While a lot of people are signaling status and networking looking for the future of business at the same few events like a Websummit or a SXSW, the future of your category may arise in niche retail, in enthusiast discussions or from a country completely off your radar. And this change doesn't always come from the top of the market, from the aspirational, from branding or the intangible, but from a practical motivation to look for better alternatives for less and from the psychological and social rewards of the results of that motivation.

A follow-up to the previous edition

A reader of the last edition on betification missed an exploration of the mechanisms that lead to gambling addiction and asked for an extra block of text talking about it. I'm happy when this kind of thing happens because the idea of this newsletter is to provoke reflections, and writing long texts is kind of like shouting into the void - you never know what kind of reaction you're causing in people beyond the coldness of analytics. I encourage everyone who reads and enjoys this newsletter to make this type of request and comment — it also helps it land in your inbox.

So let's get to it. First, there are the cognitive biases that make us misjudge the risks and our chances of winning, which affect everyone to different degrees:

• The illusion of control: It's thinking that lucky numbers, rituals, or patterns influence winnings, beyond pure statistics - just one of the innumerable terrible outcomes of magical thinking. Its manifestation in online and sports betting are the panels for creating multi-layered bets (e.g., "player X will shoot on goal + team Y will have more than 6 corners + both teams score"), the platform creates the illusion that you are assembling a complex analysis. You feel you have control, when in reality you are just betting more on highly random events.

• The gambler's fallacy: Thinking that you will "eventually" win after a sequence of losses — this happens more to those who skipped combinatorics class in school. A practical example: an online roulette wheel that emphatically displays the last 20 numbers that came up. If there's a long sequence of red numbers, the interface implicitly suggests betting on black, directly exploiting your belief that black is "overdue."

• Chasing losses: The behavior of seeking to recover lost money, which leads to worse losses and more compulsive behavior. It is a direct derivative of loss aversion, which is our tendency to feel losses more intensely than gains of the same order of magnitude. In betting platforms, this is typically reinforced in 3 ways, which can be called a manifestation of dark UX: the "bet again" button always present after a loss and with zero friction; instant deposits to grease this process; and the offer of a partial cash out — which is giving you back a part of the lost money as a little push so you don't stop. This also taps into the sunk cost fallacy — "I've already spent $XXXX, if I stop, I've lost it all for nothing."

• Availability bias: We overestimate the importance of what we see frequently and the likelihood of events that are easier to recall. In these platforms, the banners showing the latest winners or big prizes all the time make it seem like winning is much more probable than it actually is.

Then, we also have the factors that affect how we deal with rewards:

• Intermittent reinforcement in Psychology is the understanding that when the reward is not given every time the behavior happens, it reinforces it more, leaves people more alert, and creates more expectation - thus, making it more addictive. All the play of lights, animations, and sound effects that amplify the tension and drama (like in slot machines) in this moment before you know if you've won or not are to maximize this effect.

• Near misses are results that are almost a victory but are still a loss, which our brain processes in a similar way to victory, activating the reward centers - think of that collective "OOOOOH" from a ball hitting the crossbar. But without the prize, the cycle of frustration and desire pushes the person to try again. Any display of the maximum prize during the draw plays on this (e.g., the trio of 7s in a slot machine, the most powerful cards in a gacha-type game, etc.). In some cases, there are consolation prizes for these near misses to give an additional push for one more try.

• Dynamic odds are perhaps the most important difference between the online and offline betting worlds. The odds are the chances that a certain combination will happen in a game, for example, a certain pair of cards at a blackjack table, the 50% chance of black or red in roulette, and so on. On a virtual slot machine or a sports betting platform, these values can be altered dynamically and constantly, so for example, they can be used to attract new players with ad campaigns, making it seem like wins are much more common than they actually are, and also be altered to incentivize or curb behaviors contextually based on each player's history — effectively manipulating each person's reward system in real-time.

To conclude, there are also social, genetic, and environmental factors:

• Social proof and normalization: The feeling that "everyone is doing it" helps make everything more acceptable — that's what the massive sponsorships and the tsunami of advertising are for.

• Early introduction: The earlier in life gambling and its mechanics are introduced, the more prone we are to follow them and have problematic behaviors in the future, and the less equipped we are to deal with the problems. Coincidentally, after writing the original text, I stumbled upon this excellent video that explores this subject further and even links our propensity for gambling and financial risk to recessions. Since the text's publication, it seems people are worried about this here: loot boxes are now illegal in Brazil for minors under 18, a change that came in the same package of measures as "adultization."

• Genetic aspects: Twin studies, the gold standard for separating genetic from environmental influences, estimate that the heritability of gambling disorder is between 40% and 60%. Furthermore, men statistically demonstrate a higher propensity to take financial risks than women. There are also specific genes that regulate the brain's reward system, especially the dopamine circuit, which can mean a system less sensitive to stimuli. People with this characteristic may need much stronger stimuli to feel pleasure, making them more prone to seek high-risk, high-reward activities, such as gambling.

• The narrative of individual culpability also becomes increasingly murky, as there is also growing evidence that willpower is not enough to solve it after the habit has been acquired, backed by studies on habit formation.

Thank you for reading to the end, and until the next edition!

How did we get here?

The global explosion of online betting, which we now see dominating sports sponsorships, advertising spending, and parts of the digital landscape, is not an exclusively Brazilian phenomenon. In the United States, for example, it's so ubiquitous that it was the subject of a Simpsons episode this year where Bart gets addicted to betting. Similar problems and concerns are multiplying in many other large countries.

But this wave didn't originate in the major markets it now dominates.

The 90s

Online betting began in small, island nations with a history of being used as tax havens. Antigua and Barbuda was the pioneer in 1994, creating the first legislation for the operation of online casinos. Malta and Gibraltar soon followed, first as operational hubs, then with an environment of low taxes and stable regulations, which opened the door for the first global companies in the sector to establish themselves.

United Kingdom, 2005 — The Turning Point 

What transformed this niche into a mass phenomenon came from the United Kingdom with the Gambling Act of 2005. There, the culture of sports betting of various kinds (boxing, horse racing, etc.) has a long and deep-rooted history, even documented in popular culture — movie buffs will remember Brad Pitt as a boxer in Snatch (2000) and that the Shelby family's first business in Peaky Blinders was a bookmaker's shop. It was the first major country to regulate the sector more broadly and to allow mass advertising on television and the internet, which set a precedent for the model to be replicated in many other parts of the world. Have a look:

Art imitates life? | Via Giphy

• 2010: France passes a law to regulate sports betting, including horse racing and online poker, but keeps online casinos banned.

• 2013: Brazil approves the General Law on Sports Betting.

• 2018: The U.S. Supreme Court overturns PASPA (Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act), opening the door for states to regulate sports betting and online gambling on their own.

• 2021: Germany implements a state treaty (Glücksspielstaatsvertrag) that legalized sports betting, poker, and online casinos with strong regulatory controls, including maximum deposit limits and anti-money laundering policies.

In Canada and Australia, what is permitted varies by province.

In Asia, in countries with stricter laws like China (where the state has a monopoly on gambling and only the lottery is allowed) or South Korea (where gambling restrictions apply even to citizens abroad), spending on betting through gray markets or offshoring (on online platforms in other countries) is enormous. In Japan, another culture with a strong link to gambling (but also with a strong history of repression), there are considerations to legalize some currently prohibited forms precisely to close the massive loophole of these parallel markets, as well as to prevent addiction and consumer abuse.

This online gambling phenomenon is widely discussed for its problematic consequences like addiction, money laundering, and all sorts of perverse incentives that arise when companies become the biggest sponsors of professional sports. But what flies under the radar for many is how mechanics taken directly from gambling are increasingly present in markets with far less scrutiny and debate.

Entire categories of products and services are based on the appeal of surprise and random rewards, even some we consider more innocent.

Check it out.

Free-to-Play Games

Free-to-play (F2P) games, from Candy Crush to Clash Royale, from Fortnite to Genshin Impact, generally become profitable because of a small percentage of players known as "whales." Whales are the big spenders, and although they are a tiny fraction of the total (in some cases, 0.15% of players can account for over 50% of revenue), their spending adds up. The cost per transaction is small, but the cumulative lifetime value (LTV) can reach thousands or even millions of dollars — replicating the dynamics of online and traditional casinos, where a small minority (often problem gamblers in the case of casinos) brings in the majority of the revenue.

The mechanics are so similar that "loot boxes" (treasure chests with random, luck-dependent items purchased with real money) have been completely banned in some countries (Netherlands and Belgium, since 2018) and must disclose the odds of obtaining rare items in others (China, 2017; South Korea, 2019, among others), with more countries studying regulation or bans, seeing them as analogous to gambling aimed at children and teenagers. This idea of "treasure chests" isn't entirely new. Thirty- and forty-something players of Magic: The Gathering, the card game launched in 1993, know well that the chance of getting a rare item can change the course of a game. Since these items are randomly distributed in sealed packs, it keeps many players constantly buying card packs. The difference now is the scale and ubiquity.

This behavior of whales makes them highly valued by the industry, so much so that the entire design of these games revolves around monetizing this small part of the user base, using not only the levers of randomness and reward but also status: personalized offers, VIP experiences, and more. They depend on them to stay afloat, as the vast majority of players of these games spend nothing. The idea is so present in popular culture that many young people refer to people of average appearance as having a "free skin."

This model has been so successful that several developers like EA and Ubisoft have introduced microtransactions into paid games, much to the disgust of most gaming communities and, arguably, another case of enshittification. Some types of free-to-play games are known as "gacha" because they borrow a mechanic from the physical world: that of...

Gachapons

Gachapons are machines with a random assortment of simple, often serialized toys (different groups of kittens, various miniature food dishes, Naruto characters, etc.), where some may be more desirable than others. So you keep putting in coins until you get what you really want.

Photo by Perry Merrity II on Unsplash

Gachapons are almost as common in Japan as vending machines and were inspired by the gumball machines we associate with American diners of the 50s and 60s. They exploded in popularity in the country during the 70s and 80s, partly thanks to Bandai Namco, one of the world's largest toy manufacturers. Bandai is known for Ultraman and Astro Boy figures in the 60s, for Tamagotchis by those who grew up in the 90s, and by anime fans for Dragon Ball, Gundam, and One Piece — which makes the idea of collectible toys with a variable reward element old news in countries within Japan's sphere of influence. You know what else everyone is talking about that operates on an identical logic?

The Labubus

Although the spark that supposedly caused the social contagion explosion was Lalisa Manobal (from the K-pop group Blackpink and an actress in the latest season of White Lotus) talking about her obsession with them to Vanity Fair, a critical part of the appeal of Popmart's viral sensation is precisely the blind boxes - this is evident in her own testimony.

Although it's possible to buy some models directly, it's estimated that 70% of the company's revenue comes from the sale of these boxes. And this combination (celebrity exposure in the right context, variable rewards, collectibility, and partnerships with other licensed products) is a much more reasonable explanation for their success than the empty words of "design" and "authenticity" circulating in some carousels out there. For those without repertoire, everything is new. There is a much deeper analysis of their business here.

Speaking of collections...

How Has the Logic of Gambling Affected Collecting?

Collecting is one of those deliciously human irrationalities that has been with us since our earliest days. For anthropologists, collections represent lived experiences and social identities. For psychologists, the act of collecting satisfies needs like identity reinforcement, social connection, and memory preservation, in addition to activating reward mechanisms in the brain.

Our grandparents collected stamps, coins, porcelain, teaspoons. Those shadow boxes for wine corks sold like hotcakes. Everyone has a friend who has collected something beer-related: bottles, cans, caps. Watches, bags and backpacks, audio equipment, perfumes, orchids - anything goes! And each of these worlds has passionate enthusiasts who can see millimeter differences between products and editions, almost like archaeologists of their own consumption.

Collecting is an extremely desirable circumstance for any market due to its direct effects: recurrence, loyalty potential, upsell potential, etc. Even the indirect effects are profitable: they can create a vibrant secondary market, in some cases an extremely speculative one, or even open up space for related services. For example, eBay, one of the great meccas for various types of collecting, has offered authentication as a service since 2020 for watches and sneakers and has been expanding to other categories like streetwear, jewelry, and bags.

What's different today from those collections of the past? Simple: brands are actively controlling the supply and manipulating the odds to create scarcity even in categories where such mechanics didn't exist before. How?

The "Drop" Culture 

From streetwear pioneers like Supreme to the highly competitive raffles of Nike's SNKRS app, the culture of the "drop" — a limited-quantity release in a restricted time frame (which makes interested parties think there won't be enough for everyone, creating urgency) - has spread to every imaginable market, including those related to collecting.

I mentioned Magic: The Gathering earlier in the text - this year they released a co-branded card series with Final Fantasy, another giant franchise in the geek universe. The limited supply sold out and inflated prices even in pre-orders. In April, Hasbro, the owner of Magic, had already announced that this series was the most successful of all time - but the official launch was in June! There were even $200 million in sales in a single day.

Serialization 

Humans have an innate need for closure and completion — psychologists call this the need for cognitive closure. Some even see the need to complete collections as a manifestation of this need. And there are scientific studies that show that collecting is correlated with certain personality traits, not with any particular generation.

More product categories are being sold as sets or lines, such as Lego's architecture or flower series, which clearly have a very different audience from the medieval castles and police departments made for children.

A great recent example of the intersection of serialization and drop culture was the launch of the "Moonswatch" series, a co-branding of Omega and Swatch, with initially 11 models released gradually. They were based on a rare and very expensive classic (the Speedmaster Moonwatch), but at much more accessible prices, sold only in the group's physical stores with small inventories. Of course, the primary audience is enthusiasts and collectors, but the huge lines and media buzz helped break into the mainstream and bring in excellent numbers. Furthermore, the original 11 have now become 31. And some people still think this market is dead because of smartwatches!

The "Grails" 

Any psychoanalyst can attest that our desire is intimately related to the unavailability of the object.

A "grail" (in the sense of the Holy Grail, the object lost to history), in the world of collecting, is what we call the most desired or unattainable item, due to cost or rarity — the pinnacle, the pièce de résistance of a collector. It could be a pair of Yeezys from when they were still with Nike. It could even be that amber Duralex dinnerware set, a Brazilian classic from the 80s and 90s, now with hugely inflated values because they are no longer produced.

While some products achieve this status naturally for enthusiasts and collectors (like a ghost orchid, due to its difficulty to cultivate), many brands play with this legendary status and may bring back reissues or reinterpretations. It happened with the Jordan 1 "Lost & Found" in 2022, which is a reissue of the 1985 Jordan 1 "Chicago," the model that started it all. Or even the launch of the Nintendo Classic Mini in 2017, which shows that the Japanese company noticed both the growth of classic game emulation and the value of old consoles on the secondary market.

Just to wrap up: three key points about "betified" collecting: the speed and scale of communication, the integration with highly speculative digital secondary markets (which enhances the sense of urgency and scarcity), and the entry into many non-traditionally collectible categories.

Where else is this logic spreading?

Investing as Collective Entertainment

Investing was once strictly a solitary act or one mediated by a financial agent (bank manager, advisor, broker, etc.). Today, in many cases, like at a poker table or a roulette wheel, part of the experience is social — watching others win and lose, as well as endorsing people and companies.

Several behaviors demonstrate this appeal: mass shorting and longing with zero basis in future projections, but on earning calls and balance sheets — as was the case with GameStop, a story that became a book. Celebrities and politicians issuing their own cryptocurrencies. Replicating Nancy Pelosi's portfolio on Robinhood just for the joke (not that the results aren't noteworthy or even worthy of legislative change). Posting "loss po*n" on Reddit, both on the American r/wallstreetbets and its very Brazilian counterpart, r/Farialimabets.

Many of these mechanics, while satisfying and effective, can move the needle in unethical ways or cause significant individual harm. If Kotler himself sees marketing as "the original Behavioral Economics" (a great read!), how do we steer the incentives to prevent this from happening?

Can we deliver experiences that people value without amplifying problematic aspects?

The benefits

Many of these initiatives have very cool, mutually beneficial sides that are extremely attractive for the long-term value of brands:

• They create context for socializing around shared interests. Think of school friends getting together to complete the World Cup sticker album. But what if that interest is perennial and not just transactional...

• They are capable of creating real communities (today, the "grail" for so many brands) almost spontaneously, depending on the product. The existence of enthusiasts and collectors provides meaning, belonging, status, and symbolic value that transcends physical and digital products, in addition to reducing dependence on the constant shouting for attention that the "Promotion" P of marketing has become in the last decade.

• The lines at store doors on drop days, the unboxing videos, people publicly displaying their creations and collections (think Lego and Minecraft)—all of this is both social proof and earned media.

The thing is, many businesses that use these mechanisms eventually reach a crossroads. As with so many things in life, the dose makes the poison. On one hand, there is the path of cultivation: embracing enthusiasts to create closeness, using surprise to generate delight, and uncertainty to create a sense of suspense and adventure...

The risks

On the other... the problems begin when the goal is to maximize the lifetime value of the little human out there at all costs, even if it destroys their well-being and could put an expiration date on their future consumption (exactly like in a certain sector dominated by international organized crime), ignoring all sorts of collateral damage, both to them and to the brand. The same mechanics that create healthy bonds can be used to fuel compulsions. The entry point to an "abusive" customer relationship is often quantitative myopia. It's the McNamara fallacy: an obsession with what can be measured that ignores much of what really matters but is qualitative and involves finding the stories your dashboard doesn't tell.

The inflated numbers are addicting, right Tony? On our side of the table, the little colored numbers going up and down also affect our reward systems...

“I can quit anytime I want” | via Giphy

The result of this obsession is an extractive relationship, with no balance between the value it creates and what it takes. It's not just an ethical dilemma — if we're willing to mine the reward system or the dependency of those being harmed to the last consequence (even if it's a small part of the whole!), the truth is we are already planting the seed of the business's own demise. This gradual "let's-see-what-we-can-get-away-with" degradation of the offering is the root of the concept of enshittification. You can't blame everything on free will (which is increasingly questioned scientifically) and individual responsibility when we ourselves act to suppress both.

The first path creates loyal fans, a collective sense of purpose, and subcultures with a life of their own. The second creates captive customers with an expiration date and regulatory liabilities.

Customer experience isn't (just) an NPS of 75+; it's being able to answer "yes" to two questions:

• Are we ensuring our actions don't cause any significant negative impact on our customers' lives?

• Are we melting down the accumulated value we've created for short-term gains?

Long-term bonds, as in human-to-human relationships, require mutually beneficial relationships, not exploitation. Any relationship that is strictly transactional tends to be short-lived and have zero trust between the parties - it's applied Game Theory. That's why I say that our work here at Zeitgeist is to do "couples therapy for brands and people."

To finish, a short digression: what other movements might be related to this one?

Serendipity > predictability? 

If the space for chance and spontaneous discovery has shrunk because we are surrounded by algorithms pushing us more and more things that reinforce our existing tastes and beliefs (which is why I always say the evil of this century is confirmation bias), could this have something to do with the "productization of surprise" spreading to categories and products where it wasn't present before?

Re-evaluation of digital dematerialization and minimalism 

People who grew up or are living their adult lives without bookshelves, furniture full of CDs or vinyl, vast collections of physical game cartridges, or other types of collections may be more interested in having physical representations of their tastes and cultural references - as well as signaling their affiliations to others.

The great shift East

The growing influence of East Asia (China, South Korea, Japan) on global culture is a fact, appearing in both small and large things. On a micro level, readers in São Paulo may have noticed the gastronomic "Little Japan" in the Paraíso neighborhood, the gastronomic "Little China" in the South Zone, and the increasing presence of Korean restaurants outside of historic immigrant neighborhoods and into the most upscale culinary districts.

On a macro level, the tourism volume and the growing aspirational nature of these Asian destinations mean more cultural exchange. As has happened at other times in history, it's safe to expect that these exchanges will increasingly influence our business models, strategies, and ways of seeing the world. Just as our old Brazilian friend installment plans exploded in the developed world as Buy Now Pay Later, things established in these countries have a greater chance of being successfully appropriated by brands elsewhere — blind boxes are a great example. If you want help thinking about how these things affect your business, just say hi.

Thank you very much for reading to the end, and until the next edition!

Don’t Look Up Ahead

The conversation about possible futures is at fever pitch. Everyone is (or wants to be) a futurist. If you counted the words in the titles of talks at an event like Hacktown (our closest local relative to SXSW), where I spoke last week, “future(s),” “possible,” “desirable,” and, of course, “AI” would top the list. It’s reminiscent of what happened to Design Thinking a decade ago. Maybe it’s a sign of the times: in the 2010s, we were collectively more excited about technology’s potential and eager to push back against corporate stodginess; in the 2020s, the mood is heavier, darker — in part because power is concentrated in the hands of very few companies and individuals — to the point where imagining optimistic, less dystopian outcomes has become a challenge in itself.

Even so, most of these better-future dreamers ignore an urgent present — perhaps because it’s less engaging on social media or an unsexy subject. We are rapidly becoming a middle-aged planet. Practically all Western countries and several BRICS nations, including Brazil, are close to hitting a median age of 40. The US, even while attracting younger immigrants, is at 38.5. The European Union was already at 44.5 in 2023. China is at 39.

In consumer goods marketing, with a few exceptions like O Boticário, the focus seems more on chasing this week’s trend or reverse-engineering the success of the Labubus than on adapting strategy to what may be the most significant demographic shift in Brazil’s history.

Over the next 15 years, our 60+ population will jump from 16% to 28%, while every younger age group will shrink in share — except for the 40-59, block, who will stay above a quarter of the population (26.2% today, the largest Census segment). Guess where the weight of responsibility will land? On a life stage defined by heavy obligations and by being, statistically, the least happy and satisfied period of life - even when controlling for gender, culture, and income. What those numbers don’t immediately show is that this group will make up most of the economically active population (60% aged 45+ by 2040, IPEA) — something that should already be driving a sweeping strategic rethink, internally and externally, in many companies.

Middle age: the middle child of life stages

Unlike generational labels — built on arbitrary cut-offs, tied to American events, and lacking any scientific validation and basically a marketer’s horoscope — middle age actually exists. It has clearly defined characteristics studied in psychology, biology, and medicine, and appears as a distinct life stage, often marked by rites and symbols, in many cultures. The exact age range varies for genetic, environmental, and social reasons, but the concept is universal.

Many simplistically call this group the “sandwich generation,” as many are juggling care for dependent children and elderly parents. That’s partly true, but incomplete. As the number of people caring for elderly relatives soars, we’ve also never had so many childless couples, people living alone, and so few multigenerational households in Brazil.

Perhaps the more relevant “sandwiching” is this life stage squeezed between society’s obsession with youth and its legitimate concern about aging populations — not only because the challenges (and opportunities) are many, but because they currently head 40% of Brazilian households and hold the largest share of income, not just in Brazil but in much of the world.

If a core part of a marketer’s or entrepreneur’s job is to find underserved markets and unmet needs, what explains why a segment with this much scale, influence, purchasing power, and poorly addressed pain points gets so little strategic focus?

Judgment, stigma and a future that depends on them

We have abundant scientific, cultural, and behavioral evidence that middle age today looks nothing like the outdated image still entrenched in our collective imagination. Yet a vision steeped in imported clichés, stereotypes, and prejudice still dominates.

The prevailing narratives mask this marginalization under platitudes treated as insights — like “we all want to be young” — when the data increasingly shows that what this group really wants is not to be treated as second-class citizens for half their lives. It’s not that youth is inherently better — it’s that middle age is almost always portrayed as decadent, frustrated, undesirable, subordinate, or, in some portrayals, even morally corrupt. Who benefits from that?

As long as we keep treating middle age as “b grade meat” — both in the consumer market and in the workplace — despite its multiple layers of importance and opportunity, and despite the fact that much of our collective future depends on this group navigating challenges like employability, preventive health, and the looming risk of pension and healthcare system breakdown, much of the world will continue to outpace us. Other countries have already advanced further in both public policy and market initiatives - and we have the privilege of being able to learn from both their successes and their failures.

I explored this topic in (much) more detail at Hacktown, with a full presentation including national and international references in business, public policy, and a deeper look at why this subject gets so little attention — if this is a topic that interests you, or if your brand is looking for white-space opportunities, you know where to find me. As always, thanks for reading to the end - see you in the next edition.

Much has been said about the immediate effects of the pandemic — on mental health, digital consumption, and the reinvention of work. But a few years later, we're still uncovering deeper impacts of that period. One of them seems particularly transformative: the erosion of our relational skills and, perhaps more alarming, our very willingness to engage in “organic” human interaction.

The pandemic didn’t create loneliness, but it seems to have accelerated a trend of social withdrawal that was already gaining traction around the world. What we’re seeing now goes beyond a preference for remote work or binge-watching instead of meeting up with friends. It’s a reorganization of bonds: with less physical presence, less tolerance for ambiguity and frustration. And more mediated, transactional, substitutive, and more recently, synthetic relationships - are they a cause, a consequence, or neither?

What's the current state of social isolation and loneliness around the world?

It seems to be a global phenomenon, albeit with highly distinct expressions in different cultures.

Asia

• In Japan, extreme social withdrawal is a long-standing issue. The hikikomori, defined as people who don’t leave home for at least six months without a diagnosed psychiatric condition, number around 1.46 million aged 15-64 - nearly 2% of the total population. There's even research exploring hikikomori as a global phenomenon, not just a Japanese issue. Nightlife, traditionally tied to work culture, is also declining, due to economic and cultural shifts.

• In South Korea, the numbers are also striking. A 2023 Ministry of Health report revealed that over 5% of young people aged 19–39 live in social isolation, many not leaving their homes for weeks or months at a time.

• In India, there’s been a notable drop in multigenerational households (from 34% to a projected 27%, according to census data), long a cultural staple. Academic literature links this shift to increased loneliness among the elderly. But other studies also point to rising loneliness among young people and teenagers.

• In China, population aging and a large gender imbalance are significant factors. 28% of older adults report being affected by loneliness. Meanwhile, among younger people, paid companionship services - for shopping, chatting, gaming, etc. - are gaining popularity.

Europe

• A survey by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre found that 13% of adults in the EU reported feeling lonely “most or all of the time” in the past four weeks, though there's major variation between countries and regions.

• In Paris and Barcelona, studies suggest that weekend pedestrian traffic is still below pre-pandemic levels, possibly indicating a shift in public social engagement.

United States

• One major study shows Americans are increasingly homebound, with activities that used to be done outside - like eating out, attending religious services, and education - now happening more frequently at home.

• A Gallup poll shows a gender gap: 25% of men aged 15-34 said they felt “very lonely” the previous day, compared to 18% of women in the same age group - well above the 15% average in other wealthy countries.

• The latest World Happiness Report noted that 25% of young people in the U.S. eat every meal alone, a 53% increase since 2003.

• Despite media focus on youth, loneliness actually peaks in midlife there.

• As dating apps enter a crisis, we’re seeing the rise of agentic dating apps, and even demos like Cluely - an AI sales assistant repurposed as a “dating co-pilot”. Some of those things make Black Mirror seem more like a trend report than social critique. And we’re only beginning to see the second-order effects emerge.

What about Brazil?

• During the pandemic, a global survey ranked Brazil highest for perceived loneliness: 50% of Brazilians reported feeling lonely, compared to a global average of 33%, and 43% said it negatively affected their mental health.

• Later, a robust study by PoderData found that, by a small margin, young people are the least likely of all age groups to see friends in person daily or weekly. Another study by the same institute shows that the number of people with no friends is rising, a trend that also shows up among underage teenagers in IBGE’s national youth survey (PeNSE).

Our social muscles are atrophying — but is this just a digital side effect?

Esther Perel, a psychotherapist specializing in intimacy, has been talking about social atrophy for a while now. For her, it’s the loss of basic relational skills - listening attentively, tolerating ambiguity, coping with frustration - driven by a context where human relationships are increasingly rare, mediated, or avoided altogether. She argues that while the pandemic accelerated this erosion, it didn’t cause it. The roots lie in digital hyperconnectivity, our obsession with efficiency, and the medicalization of emotional discomfort — creating a culture of low tolerance for otherness. Perel says we’re less exposed to everyday interpersonal conflict and, therefore, less prepared for the inherent friction of real, unfiltered relationships.

To avoid scapegoating a single culprit - culture, social media, the pandemic, or whatever — let’s zoom out!

It’s a multifactorial phenomenon — but time and money are always in the picture

We can’t take the economy out of the equation. The post-pandemic cost-of-living crisis — driven by inflation, wage stagnation, and labor precarity — has fueled social withdrawal, even in wealthy countries. In Australia, for example, one-third of the population is looking for a second job just to make ends meet. Around the world, seeing friends, going out, or simply moving through a city is bumping up against tighter budgets. If socializing requires planning and spontaneity disappears, public life withers.

A recent UN study shows that finances are one of the biggest barriers to having children in many countries. A brand-new academic paper even links the changing role of dogs in society to falling birth rates, especially in the West and wealthy Asia - a sign of substitutive bonds, perhaps. I’ve also already written about the growing importance of DINKs in Brazil in shorter content.

Time is a key factor here too - philosophically (what we prioritize) and behaviorally (how we actually spend it).

Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-born philosopher, describes our modern relationship with time as oscillating between self-exploitation and burnout — leading to a constant, generalized exhaustion. Another, lesser-known philosopher, Will Davies, writes about how competition has become a core trait of individuals, not just markets, and how the logic of economic efficiency is now applied to everything — including ourselves. That makes time a resource to be exploited to the limit, with chronic stress and anxiety as byproducts.

Looking at actual time use, some patterns are obvious. That “quick scroll” on Instagram that turns into 20 minutes sounds more appealing than calling a friend who might be busy or wants to vent instead of listening to you vent. As well as canceled hangouts, difficulty making plans, shrinking friend circles... Meanwhile, your Android Digital Wellbeing or iOS Screen Time data tells on you — how do we lack time for some things but have too much for others? If we’re always tired and overwhelmed, constantly performing and delivering (often self-imposed), it’s easier to justify small indulgences or distractions. Especially because how we perceive time is context-dependent and entirely subjective. The problem is, the cumulative effect of these convenient choices may be weakening our bonds - and, by extension, ourselves. I’ve written about this before too.

Often, it’s humans who frustrate us — the boss, the client, the coworker, the partner, the family member, the child. So maybe avoiding rejection, silence, hostility, or disappointment from others is a strong motivator behind our turn to mediated alternatives — ones where we retain the illusion of control. That would suggest we’re becoming more avoidant, and therefore lonelier. If we want to look beyond the symptoms and self-reporting, we have to ask: what markets are being reshaped by these behaviors? What else are they connected to?

The normalization of transactional intimate relationships - is it happening?

The hype around sugar relationships has cooled down in the media - it even made it into a Brazilian soap opera plotline back in 2019 - but that doesn’t mean the market has disappeared or stagnated. A quick look at the numbers in Brazil:

• The top 3 sugar dating platforms by user base in Brazil are MeuPatrocínio (15.7 million), Universo Sugar (2.5 million), and SugarDaddyMeet (1 million), the only international one. Depending on user overlap, we’re talking about 7 to 9% of the entire Brazilian population!

• The first thing that stands out is the oversupply of sugar babies (a term that applies to both men and women) compared to daddies and mommies - that is, far more people are willing to offer companionship and potentially sex for money than to pay for it, with different ratios depending on the platform.

• The stereotype would have us imagine middle-aged men with much younger women, but that’s not quite what the data says. On MeuPatrocínio, the average age of sugar babies is 27, and of daddies, 37. The latter report an average monthly income of R$141,000 and personal wealth over R$13 million - putting them in 0,1% earning levels.

• 83% of sugar daddies registered on the platform in Brasília are married.

So, what are we seeing here? A digital transformation of the traditional “mistress” setup with a better-defined service level agreement? A looser form of sex work? An attempt to eliminate ambiguity? A utilitarian or even nihilistic take on intimacy? Yet another break from the ideal of romantic love? Elsewhere, scholars are already digging into the nuances…

Parasocial relationships — from paid access to simulated intimacy

A parasocial relationship is a one-sided emotional bond with someone who does not reciprocate or even acknowledge it. I’ve written before about parasocial ties with public figures on social media, and how these people — and the behaviors they inspire — should not be treated as representative of society at large. I also touched on the idea of collective illusions - how our perception of reality shifts based on what we believe to be consensus, exposing just how impressionable we really are. It helps explain the massive online buzz around reborn babies (another parasocial bond!), despite the market being rather small.

That chart showing OnlyFans as the company with the highest revenue per employee in the world made the rounds in tech media recently. But beyond replacing the now-irrelevant glamour magazines for which the appeal was nude public figures, content creators - including subcelebrities and athletes, just like in the old days - and the classic Instagram/TikTok thirst traps, have struck gold. But it’s the intermediaries that are making huge money.

In Brazil, the market is so hot we have a local player, Privacy, with over 16 million users, which may have already surpassed OnlyFans in traffic volume - and it has already expanded to other Latin American countries.

What the numbers don’t show is what users are actually looking for - it goes beyond sexual images or paying to own a piece of an idealized figure, like Belle Delphine’s bathwater or, more recently, Sydney Sweeney’s. The top-earning creators say they’re doing emotional labor, above all. So much so that these simulated interactions have made intimacy at scale an industry of its own, complete with call centers - sitting right at the border between parasocial and transactional. Naturally, the model has already been localized and adapted to the Brazilian market, sometimes using entirely AI-generated models. Which brings us to…

The rise of 100% synthetic relationships

At a recent event, Sam Altman remarked that younger users are already relying on his tool to make major life decisions. Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is hoping to solve loneliness with “AI friends.”

A growing number of scholars are now analyzing our “relationships” with AI as parasocial, examining the asymmetry and its troubling effects: habit formation, emotional investment, attachment, dependency, even delusions.

It’s easy to dismiss all this as nostalgic hand-wringing from older folks trying to convince the young that “things used to be better.” But the techno-optimist comparison to calculators or GPS misses the mark. Our spatial awareness and mental math skills are infinitely less critical to our current survival - and to our humanity - than our capacity for building meaningful relationships.

Could we be repeating that early “crush” phase we had with social media? The honeymoon period where everything felt revolutionary, exciting, and free - until we collectively woke up, sometimes painfully, to the realization that we were the product all along? We’ve seen what happens when it’s finally time to monetize the user base…

More knowledge jobs and the widespread adoption of cars and appliances have reduced our daily physical effort, making sedentary lives the norm. The scale and convenience of processed food turned poverty’s physical form from malnutrition to obesity, and led to the emergence of food deserts even in urban areas. Expanded access is a win, yes - but we can’t overlook how much cost and convenience shape our choices.

What if the combination of economic incentive, scalability, and ease pushes synthetic (or semi-synthetic) bonds so far into the mainstream that forming real, organic, unmediated human intimacy becomes a conscious effort — like exercising or cutting junk food — something we must deliberately choose, because too little friction comes at a huge long-term cost?

A flash-forward from the past, to remind us that convenience can be too much. Courtesy of Pixar, 2008!

What if this is already happening, to some extent? If the sea of AI slop that has already flooded LinkedIn and Instagram - both with narrative crutches like “This isn’t a simple change — it’s a real revolution!” talking about things like Labubus, and with endless parroting of clichés - is a sign of our near future as a society, in this wacky race where we ask a machine for help to be socially validated by another? The threat is not the use itself, but killing the market for alternatives.

AI girlfriends are not real girlfriends, AI therapists are not real therapy, synthetic personas are not real human beings who live or buy real products. Our willingness to replace real relationships with crude simulacra — whether because we can’t handle the frustrations that dealing with others imposes or just for convenience - suggests that what we really should fear is not the dystopian fantasy of machine domination, but that we become more and more mechanical, robotic, obsessed with efficiencies that drain the meaning of things, and less and less capable of reading context with the naked eye.

If this is the context, what if more brands were true enablers of unfiltered human connection instead of just attention grabbers? Wouldn’t it be better to prepare for this future now, instead of denying it until the last moment and ending up as the villains? It can be as big as Vivo’s campaign, or as small and sensitive as the Dutch supermarket that created a separate checkout line for people who want to chat with cashiers - mostly older, lonely customers.

To finish, this month’s recommendation is a really interesting analysis by Derek Thompson on the subject, which frames loneliness more as a lower social predisposition and partly voluntary — matching what I said earlier about avoidant tendencies. But keep in mind he’s talking about the American context!

Thanks for reading all the way through, see you next month!

We're living through an interesting marketing moment. There's increasing evidence about what works, what doesn't, and more recently, how to measure the impact of things we've always intuitively believed to be effective, like branding. As a result, we're beginning to let go of old certainties (like last-click attribution) and replacing tools and abstractions with more robust ones.

In qualitative research, we've always known that our choice of analytical framework, often referred to as a lens (thematic analysis, ethnography, semiotics, etc.), significantly changes how we view things.

However, not every lens or abstraction is useful, and the problem with the bad ones is that they shape how we perceive the world and distort what we're seeing.

The lenses we use absolutely influence our perception of reality. Have you noticed any patterns or groupings in this projection?

Our macro environment is conducive

In a country like Brazil, ranked first in falling for fake news, with a very high incidence of functional and digital illiteracy, where more than half the population believes there are hidden cancer cures suppressed by commercial interests, and where sports betting is rationalized as an investment, it's no surprise that simplistic or misleading ideas gain significant traction here. We have incredible qualities as a people and culture, but critical thinking isn't collectively our strong suit.

The Forer Effect and the tricks we fall for because of it

The Forer effect (or Barnum effect) is a cognitive bias that makes people believe that generic personality descriptions apply specifically to them, even though they could apply to almost anyone. You know those Buzzfeed-style quizzes that tell you which Harry Potter house you belong to or which Succession character you are, and you think it's spot-on? Let's understand why that happens.

Bertrand Forer, an American psychologist, conducted a very interesting experiment. He administered a personality test to his students, informing them that, based on their responses, they would receive a personalized analysis. Afterward, each student received a written description of their personality - with the crucial detail that everyone received the exact same text.

The description consisted of vague and ambiguous statements that appeared to have psychological depth. Among them were assertions like: "You have a great need for other people to like and admire you," "Although you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them," and "You tend to be critical of yourself." Then, Forer asked the students to rate, on a scale from 0 to 5, how well the description applied to them. The result was surprising: the average score was 4.26 - meaning the students judged the completely generic descriptions as very accurate. Now do you understand the talk about "Generation Z seeks authenticity?" I've written about this before.

This effect is also known as the Barnum effect because of P.T. Barnum, a 19th-century circus owner and notorious charlatan, supposedly the author of the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute." The effect partially explains why we believe in things like horoscopes, the Enneagram, and other scientifically unfounded attempts to explain personality traits.

Meanwhile, Big Five or OCEAN, the most validated model for studying personality, is relatively unknown outside academia and HR - do all the legwork, get none of the credit?

But it's not just vague descriptions or those that apply to everyone, like Buzzfeed quizzes, that make these things believable, according to studies. What else makes us believe:

• Seeing the source as an authority - academics, scientists, celebrities, large companies, all have an innate ease in pushing nonsense onto others. Several notorious charlatans have master's degrees and PhDs, thousands of followers, a lot of money, or all of the above.

• When the mentioned characteristics tend to be positive

• When we attribute personal meaning to what we're receiving or filter the truth of what we're hearing based on our individual experiences

You know something we hear about daily that ticks all these boxes and still adds the magical ingredient of tribalism and rivalry between groups that makes so many things go viral on social media, like remote vs. in-person work: Generations.

Generations: A timeline of how a poorly structured idea from the U.S. took over our feeds and became global

A timeline of how generations became the standard framework for reading society:

Germany, 1928

Karl Mannheim published "The Problem of Generations," proposing to group individuals of similar age because they share experiences during their formative youth period. For him, chronological age is insufficient - identity arises from active involvement in these events, which influences values and behaviors. He also considered fundamental differences in class, culture, and location, being transparent about the limitations of the theory he proposed unlike most of what followed.

United States, 1991

Playwright William Strauss and historian Neil Howe divided generations in the United States in the book "Generations" into four archetypes (this very idea is more comparative mythology than scientific - sorry, Jung fans and branding folks!): Artists, Prophets, Nomads, and Heroes, linked to four living generations at the time in the country - Silent, Baby Boomers, X, and Millennials. The term Millennial itself is a creation of Neil Howe.

Based on this not-so-solid foundation, they extended these same archetypes to explain the past and predict the future, suggesting that they repeated and would continue to repeat throughout American history - a simplistic and pretentiously prophetic historical determinism, more Nostradamus than Hobsbawm. The book's subtitle is "The History of America's Future from 1584 to 2069."

If this sounds more like the Wheel of Time to you than a theory that truly explains what it ambitiously aims to, you're not alone. There's a detailed critical analysis discussing the theory's limitations and omissions here - the more politically inclined will note that Steve Bannon is one of their ideas' defenders.

United States, late 1990s

The American media embraces the idea of generations, and soon, stereotyping and criticism of youth disguised as concern for the future, historically recurring, grace the covers of magazines like Time.

Worldwide, 2000s - What was once only for the U.S. becomes global

At a certain point, with the sheer influence that marketing has as an industry in the U.S., the idea of generations is exported as if it applied worldwide. Due to globalization (at the time, an unstoppable force, though the story is different today) and the internet, the promise was that our major historical milestones and life circumstances would be more shared from then on, something that's not even completely true in the U.S...

In the 2020s, criticism finally begins to emerge

Huge generalizations made on tiny amounts of people, varnished by beautifully designed carousels and PPTs with misleading hooks, became a constant. Many repeating exactly the same nonsense said about Millennials in the 2010s about Generation Z, which became the new main characters: "seek authenticity," "value self-expression," "are digital natives," "are more conscious" - not coincidentally, characteristic traits of youth as a whole, not a specific generation.

Various scholars and institutions began publishing studies and critiques on the subject. In 2021, a group of demographers sent an open letter to the Pew Research Center, perhaps the organization most responsible for popularizing the idea of generations worldwide and one of the leading authorities on public opinion in the U.S., stating that it was an arbitrary, unscientific idea that hinders serious research on the subject. They relented and committed to almost completely eliminating the criterion, except in cases where different generations can be compared at the same life stage - and they are one of the few organizations worldwide with sufficient historical data to make such comparisons. If they, who were the main propagators, abandoned it because the criticisms are legitimate, what are we waiting for?

From HBR to BBH Labs and Mark Ritson, the criticisms began to leave the social sciences and reach the market. A common point among all is that intra-generational similarities are very little and that insisting on them creates false stereotypes and factoids. HBR's article even states that stereotypes change our behavior.

Here in Brazil, Superinteressante (a major pop science magazine) published a scathing article, but the silence in the research and insights market is deafening, with rare exceptions, including someone in my network who brilliantly summarized the problem: "People aren't born in vintages." No one wants to be the killjoy who spoils the fun? The client is always right? Anything for engagement?

Is it still possible to give the benefit of the doubt and treat the insistence on an imprecise, unscientific, and arbitrary criterion as ignorance, not malice?

The problem is there’s a harsh human truth here — we only condemn pseudoscience and fake news when others believe in them and when we’re not emotionally or financially invested in them, or when they’re not part of our identity. That’s how conspiracy theories are born. There’s even an episode of The Simpsons about this — the feeling of belonging and community weighs heavily. We had a global demonstration of this phenomenon with the rise of anti-vaccine movements during the pandemic.

That’s why understanding cognitive biases and fallacies is fundamental for researchers, strategists, and marketers: to recognize flaws in one’s own reasoning. Are generations the marketing world’s favorite flat earth theory?

Llame ya and buy my course to understand the future of gen Z - via Giphy

Why abandon generations as a criterion?

1 - The central premise treats historical context as far more universal and determining than it actually is. Ironically, Mannheim, one of the pioneers, took this limitation into account, but most of what came after did not.

2 – We ignore far better criteria, backed by decades of serious research, which focus precisely on what changes less. Adolescence, middle age, and other life stages are studied culturally, socially, and psychologically in established fields like developmental psychology. Unlike in generations, age brackets tend to be more fixed. That’s because they’re linked to things like brain development, socialization, social roles at different life stages - things that vary much less over time and are therefore far more enduring. But we ignore all that to listen to Joe Blow, LinkedIn’s Gen Z specialist, whose repertoire basically revolves around his social circle. But hey, his carousel posts are soooo cool!

3 - It assigns generations characteristics that actually relate to life stages. We’re almost always very different people at 20 and at 40. All those studies showing generational slices mislead readers. For example, by portraying the search for stability and risk aversion as traits of Gen X and Boomers (not older people - weren’t they like that in their 20s too?) or emphasizing idealism in Gen Z - will they really stay the same when they’re older?

4 - It’s a particularly bad lens for understanding children and youth. For example, in 2025, Pew Research’s definition of Gen Z covers ages 13 to 28 — meaning it spans puberty through the average age at which Brazilian women have their first child! What similarities could a group that broad possibly have, when every 2-3 years people change so much? Not to mention differences in income, education, culture, lifestyle, etc.

On the other hand, working with a global leader in youth entertainment, I was struck by the level of detail they had in segmenting products by life stage (early and middle childhood, tweens, teens, young adults, etc.), sometimes with smaller subdivisions, always highlighting what makes each period unique - cognitive and behavioral issues - with incredible detail that undoubtedly helps explain the success of almost everything they do. Nuances matter!

5 - “Digital nativity” is a flawed concept that the idea of generations amplifies, ignoring the impact of purchasing power and other variables on tech adoption - always assuming older people are necessarily less able or interested in using new tech. Ageist and worrying in a rapidly aging world, including Brazil.

6 - If we’re talking marketing, the primary criterion is the relationship with the category - which generally best predicts how people will act. Meaning, if we want to understand how people consume coffee, the most important things should be the specifics of that relationship: frequency, what types they buy, how they prepare it, and so on. If I prefer a moka pot over drip coffee, it’s unlikely my generation has anything to do with that.

How long will those controlling advertising budgets, strategy, and branding keep applauding nonsense and treating groups of millions as if birth years were destiny and as if our values and choices were just products of the historical context? How long will marketing folks, agencies, and unfortunately even researchers - who should be leading this debate - keep claiming to be “data driven” while insisting on a criterion that is proven to be one of the worst for understanding humans in groups? In a time of so much change, wouldn’t it be more rational to focus on what changes less and has more consolidated knowledge?

Not to mention how this insistence punishes intellectual honesty, which should be a more encouraged trait in our field. If we remove from the room those who are transparent about blind spots and methodological limitations, who’s left?

If you’re feeling bad after reading this — maybe reflecting on generalizations you made, decisions you took, or studies you’ve been involved with — you’re not alone! Let me extend a hand. Since childhood, I’ve always been curious about personality, behavior, culture. On long car trips, I would quiz adults about how people from other countries were and what the future would be like. In elementary school, I devoured books on mythology and astrology, and for a science fair project, my presentation was casting people’s astrological charts using a borrowed laptop. No, no teacher objected to an astrology presentation at the science fair — embarrassing! I’ve worked in research for over 20 years, and I too once believed generations might be an interesting angle to understand consumer trends and made presentations about it for clients, much earlier in my career. But I never stopped studying the subject (and I try to read viewpoints opposite to mine) and here I openly admit: I was wrong before! Because that’s what growth is, right? Changing your mind when you find better arguments and evidence.

On the other hand, if you radically disagree with me, I’d love to hear your arguments - comments are open - but for a fair conversation, bring data. Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.

Gif by pbr on Giphy

To conclude: you know the drill - next time someone tries to sell you a perspective “through the generational lens,” remember that lenses, literal or metaphorical, shape what we see and can create terrible distortions. And in our info-overloaded world, seeing poorly is a luxury we can’t afford.

If it’s just for fun, maybe it’s better to read Susan Miller (huge in Brazil BTW!): she’s a brilliant storyteller, but you won’t use that to justify strategic decisions about brands or people. And more: she figured out that no one comes back to check if last month’s forecast was right - sound familiar to some content you read out there? It’s time to separate entertainment from understanding.

But Rodrigo, everyone uses it. You want me to stop? To correct others?

One step at a time. We once believed the Earth was the center of the universe, thought it was normal to drive without a seatbelt and to smoke (or be smoked) indoors. Change starts with doubt, then a conversation, an argument, a choice. This text is just an invitation. Like when we calmly explain the value of qualitative research to those who ask, “Can I trust something done with 12 people?” And as your mom would say: you’re not everyone. That’s why you got this far. Thanks for reading till the end!

This is the second piece in a series about lies we choose to believe, which began in the previous edition discussing authenticity.

We live in difficult times to understand, with rapid and constant changes and a fragmented understanding of reality - this is a context in which the insights industry should be thriving, and some argue, even have C-suite representation in companies. What incentive alignments exist that prevent this from happening as it could?

Are we applauding nonsense?

The bankruptcy of our collective critical thinking as a side effect of our media consumption seems to be showing up in insights and research too:

• Content production is perhaps the most powerful tool for image and reputation building in B2B today and consequently, for acquisition, especially for challengers - just look at discussions about thought leadership, founder-led growth, etc., regardless of company size. This is partly because in the last decade we've saturated all possible outbound channels, and truly segmented paid media (LinkedIn Ads) is expensive and not everyone gets good returns from it.

• Public interest in consumer behavior and trends is both a blessing and a curse - it's what Scott Galloway would classify as a "sexy job" - one that attracts attention but doesn't necessarily provide proportional compensation, and what Grant McCracken says attracts the wrong people for the wrong reasons (essential reading for insights people!). It's like what happens during the World Cup: suddenly everyone becomes an armchair coach, convinced they could outstrategize the national team's real coach - typically someone with multiple championships and decades of expertise. Consumer behavior is a subject that suffers from the same problem: even those who don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about feel entitled to give opinions, and on social media, it doesn't matter if there's substance or truth, only if it generates identification and resonates.

• Typical B2B audiences are dramatically smaller than B2C ones. No short video about attribution, CRM, or more technical marketing topics can achieve reach, engagement, or audience like a more general topic such as a makeup tutorial, with rare exceptions like Chris Walker. The solution part of the market found was to create more superficial content focused on engaging laypeople and the general public, fundamentally repackaging things people already believe or things that have always happened as if they were new.

The problem with content becoming so important is that we've gone from technical (but boring!) formats like webinars to discuss important topics to a content production and consumption dynamic closer to B2C - shallower, faster, with more general appeal and with a huge perverse incentive to produce poorly thought out, misleading but highly engaging nonsense.

via Baurzhan I.

Want to see some examples? A list of some I've already deconstructed here before:

• Tradwives as a trend: Number of views ≠ behavior adoption, not everything we watch is inspiring or will be emulated, or, still, the fundamental dynamics of social media: outrage is very engaging. And the entire information trail leads to a single BBC article that spoke with two women.

• Mini-retirements of Generation Z: At a time full of important issues about the professional future of young people such as NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) and the risk to junior and entry positions in intellectual work, what gets attention is this nonsense. The evidence that exists: two testimonials from HR people and some viral videos, all coming from the US, where there is no paid vacation by law, except in 4 states. Coincidence?

• Generation Z "doesn't drink anymore": First, the myopia: if Generation Z is 13 to 28 years old, a large part of the block can't even legally drink yet. Second, the old premise of "if it happens in the US/developed world, it will happen in Brazil next" - the problem is that we only count the times when this happens but ignore when it doesn't. Third, from the largest study that covers the subject in Brazil, with 9,000 telephone interviews in all macro-regions of the country, with questions about past behavior (last 30 days) and not future intention (to stop, reassess consumption, etc.): 18-24 year-olds are the most likely to drink excessively when they drink (25-34 year-olds are very close), it's the second age group with the highest prevalence of abusive consumption and, according to historical data, one of the groups in which abusive consumption is increasing, not decreasing (though numerically, not statistically). They are also the most likely of all age groups to have had an episode of alcoholic amnesia in the last 12 months, the most likely to have drunk upon waking up to help with a hangover, and to consume 6 or more drinks on one occasion at least once a month. So they are indeed drinking!

The traditional press is indeed in crisis and has been in this game of clicks first and journalism second for a long time, which should make us use secondary data much more carefully. The problem is when those who should separate the wheat from the chaff replicate this kind of nonsense or use it as evidence in their analysis!

As a historical figure whose name I won't repeat here said, a lie repeated many times becomes truth.

The seduction of oversimplifications

But it's not really news that people have been selling oversimplifications as insight, and it's not necessarily just because of algorithms.

A certain French anthropologist, who unfortunately is still celebrated in some circles, wrote a book where he claimed to have understood the hidden cultural code of humanity, which shapes perceptions, behaviors, and emotional responses - the key to understanding everything related to consumption! How was the fieldwork that originated this "revolution"? There wasn't any - he based it on Jungian archetypes, reducing complex cultures to one or a few codes, and of course, reinforcing stereotypes: Germans are (all) (only) disciplined, French are (all) (only) hedonistic, and so on. Kind of like the Instagram branding folks who say your brand isn't taking off because you chose the wrong archetype.

The contrast with the understanding of nuance and the intellectual humility of a Darcy Ribeiro, who dedicated his life to studying the formation of our people, is scandalous. That alone should be reason for skepticism. As Carl Sagan would say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

But the industry swallowed it whole. And we're not talking about the general public or the less educated—we're talking about executives at massive global companies, even though he was eventually (partially) exposed for lying about his resume. What does this reveal about our gullibility and our hunger for magical solutions to deeply complex problems? Amazing how a thin veneer of intellectualism can grease the wheels of deception, isn't it?

I won't tell you who he inspired in Brazil, because our lawyers wouldn't let me, but I'll cite Grant McCracken for the second time in this text because he made a much more restrained and elegant critique of this guy's work than I would.

Insights: (should be) the "fact-checking" area?

Our industry should be more like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye - experts who make the complex accessible by translating evidence-based ideas into practical applications for clients. Instead, too many of us have adopted the influencer-doctor approach, peddling testosterone pellets as 'hormonal optimization' and think the right business model is telling clients what (they think) they want to hear or whatever has more engagement potential on social media. The result? Viral TikTok videos being passed as 'movements,' a “trend” consisting of half a dozen people in Brooklyn, producing 'insights' about generations that were not even born yet, and treating diverse groups of 50 million people as if they were a single homogeneous entity.

If we're truly in the business of delivering actionable insights useful ideas based on data (and yes, rigorously gathered qualitative data counts!), our greatest value comes from confronting prevailing opinions, baseless narratives, and silent consensuses with hard facts and critical analysis. This productive friction is what hones strategy to a razor's edge. While we love to sell those 'aha!' moments of discovery, the real worth of our work often lies in asking 'Wait, have we misunderstood this entirely?' It's about weaving together disparate methodologies and diverse perspectives to extract meaning from complexity - a process perfectly captured by sensemaking, a powerful concept that's sadly fallen by the wayside in recent years.

Sensemaking is applied critical thinking in action. Sensemaking means connecting dots between seemingly unrelated data from diverse sources in non-obvious ways, helping decision-makers distinguish between “seems like” and “really is”. Sensemaking is an inherently multidisciplinary idea, even though there are anthropologists, psychoanalysts, behavioral scientists, and neuroscientists who want to treat human understanding as a monopoly of their disciplines.

We're in the business of "hard truths" and lateral thinking, but the market buys convenient lies in bulk.

If scale were synonymous with quality, we'd eat fast food every day

For more than a decade, most of the insights industry has been putting scale ahead of quality. Undoubtedly, there is a customer market that wants to pay for predictability and circumstances where speed really is what matters most. Perhaps many don't know how to evaluate quality. The problem is thinking that because fast food is well known, always the same, and fast, you should eat there every day.

In the meantime, some problems persist, spread throughout the market:

• Insufficient quality controls and fraud in online panels - a problem that the industry itself created with the race to the bottom! After this bomb (ten years and $10 million in fraud!), will end users of research pay more attention to this?

• There’s been a proliferation of companies selling operational capabilities rather than expertise. Think about it: will an online panel provider or research tech platform ever advise you that phone or in-person data collection would yield better results? Of course not. This approach shifts the methodological decision-making burden entirely to the client, who often lacks sufficient background knowledge to make these technical choices effectively. Is there a lack of alternatives that are simultaneously full service and lean?

• The market simultaneously expects quality data yet is willing to buy research in a SaaS subscription model, ignoring the hidden cost of stuffing the same few participants with questionnaires while their rewards are reduced. Who do you think they squeeze to make it viable, their margin or the operational cost?

• Biased recruitment with opaque processes and no bias control in qualitative studies - the end result is obvious, but there are plenty of people who don't understand the importance or who pretend not to see.

• Participant engagement and experience being consistently a minor concern and at the same time, something that demonstrably impacts quality. The bar has been lowered so much that now there's an international standard. The more we treat this as an accessory issue and not a central one, the more quality falls and the perceived value of the work and category go with it.

The parallel with the idea of enshittification, which I've also written about, is direct: like the major digital platforms, enterprise clients (the end client who wants to pay as little as possible, is in a hurry, and often doesn't know how to evaluate quality - at our end, the worst type) are privileged in the short term at the expense of the users (the research participants) who are ultimately the raw material without which the work doesn't happen.

Each endorsement of this model is a vote in favor of factory farming of human insights - are we defending models we truly believe in with our budgets?

And what is the great solution proposed for these challenges?

In the midst of the general euphoria about AI, the current hype of synthetic data only reinforces that, for some, the race to be faster and cheaper and to shove AI into parts of the process where it perhaps shouldn't matter more than solving the real problems. Wouldn't it be reasonable to use today's technological possibilities to solve the problems that still persist? AI helps with many things, but it doesn't do metaphysical transmutation yet.

This isn't necessarily an argument against synthetic data, partly because this is a complex discussion, full of nuances and with very different performances depending on the use case (and extremely biased benchmarks to measure effectiveness!), but against selling it as a panacea, indiscriminate use, and using it as a way to manufacture consensus to eventually remove humans from the equation - in my humble opinion, the biggest risk. The same strategy of manufactured consensus of "online panels are good enough, whoever is against it is a Luddite" without really knowing what's inside them that brought us to where we are in price anchoring and leveling down - I've talked about this before too!

It turns out the "Luddites" were right - so much so that most studies where coverage is fundamental, like election polling and the Consumer Price Index, continue to be done using more comprehensive collection methods (and there are countless cases where this is true for market research as well), but which are indeed more expensive and slower. Why? Because they're still the best alternative! These are choices that need to be more thoughtful and less automatic. The difference now is that we have (much) more to lose!

One thing that's already apparent in some uses is that the discourse of those who sell is different from that of those who have tried it, especially when we talk about technical users and researchers - we have to carefully choose who we're going to listen to.

It's kind of like the chocolate industry thinking the great revolution is hydrogenated vegetable fat. The good side is that this is exactly the market context that sets up conditions for a Dengo or a bean-to-bar wave to start...

This isn't a discussion about using AI or not - there are already incredible things in our daily lives involving transcription, translation, data visualization, and analysis support tools that accelerate and improve deliveries, reduce operational work, but don't negatively affect quality or put the process in a black box. It's about where, how, and why to use it.

And to top it off, the elephant in the room: this search for scale ultimately serves to sustain bloated and inefficient structures and generate value for partners or shareholders, not necessarily to deliver more quality to the client. Do the cobbler’s children have no shoes when it comes to customer centricity? With leaner structures and more discerning clients, would this subject still attract the same attention?

Don't confuse me with the facts

Rubbing more salt in the wound, what not everyone knows is that a large part of the work of larger consultancies and research companies is done in white label arrangements with smaller consultants or companies. In theory, everyone is happy: the smaller company pocketed six figures, the larger company that outsourced and sold the project pocketed seven, and the end client who privileged brand instead of delivery to protect their position and have someone to blame if the project goes wrong also. In practice, it seems the end client gets the worst part of the deal and may be making a very irrational choice, especially if the idea was to pay for brand.

Now explain to me, if you're paying for size or brand as a proxy for trust, predictability, or low risk, how is it to know that your supplier is outsourcing to a smaller one and that you could pay much less for the same delivery? At this time when the discussion about the manufacturing and origin of luxury products is being so discussed, isn't it time to reevaluate?

We've known for a long time that the variables that affect quality in insights are origin and quality of data and technical capacity, creativity, and applicability of analyses. If buyers already know this, why are the incentives so misaligned? Is it habit? Death by consensus in a decision that passes through many different pens? Fear of change? Stockholm Syndrome?

Is there an alternative? There is, but we need to understand our priorities when choosing.

More operational efficiency can also be using a lean or modular structure centered on the expertise of the executors and the quality of the raw material to ensure that quality comes first without the cost being eye-popping or Veblenian. To follow with the gastronomic analogy, just look at Jay Fai or Izakaya Toyo. The two founders are still in the kitchen working very hard, have enormous zeal with ingredients, deliver incredible value for money, and the public, generally foodies with more gastronomic repertoire, ends up being who understands and wants to pay for quality.

In this context where we can automate more and more of the repetitive and operational work, this makes even more sense.

Can we transpose Dieter Rams' principles of good design to organizational design in insights and be more like a F1 team and less like a transatlantic doing a handbrake turn? I argue that we can, but then who buys needs to reflect more on why they are buying, especially because...

Status and affiliation are poorly disguised decision factors in B2B

Saying B2B purchases are less rational than they seem is stating the obvious. Fear is the obvious emotion that guides many purchases, encapsulated in the well-known phrase "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." But status and belonging play an essential role in B2B - just look at the size of the Brazilian delegation at some international events and the tsunami of posts during and after. Is it about the content? Tangentially, but clearly not only and it seems to be less and less the main motivation. How many corporate decisions that are actually about status and belonging have you seen rationalized as investment? How does this affect the choice of partners in your company?

Qualitative is fundamental and generally where most of the great discoveries really happen, if we do it well

We close our presentations with "It is by logic that we prove but it is by intuition that we discover," a quote from Henri Poincaré, a mathematical genius, theoretical physicist, and philosopher of science, famous for having a broader view of both mathematics and science as a whole, treating scientific theories not as mirrors of reality, but as conventions that are tools we use because they work better to understand a certain problem and not out of dogma or epistemological affinity. In a way, his thinking contributed to the idea of mixed methods, which came later. I think this already says a lot about how we treat the subject around here.

In eventual market cooldowns or pressures for speed and costs, there are researchers who say "we'll need to relativize rigor" or "Oh but we're not saving humanity or doing a clinical trial." No, but we're supporting business decisions that don't just affect clients' finances, but the lives of thousands of people, often critically. The errors can be costly financially, reputationally, and socially or lead to chain reactions, like doubling down on a flawed hypothesis. The old adage of garbage in, garbage out undoubtedly applies to qualitative as well.

We can't have so little responsibility for the result of our own work and then preach to others on purpose, active listening, systemic vision, and regenerative design.

Moreover, intuition, contrary to what some believe, is not a magical power, but rather an accelerated process of decision-making based on previous experiences and consolidated knowledge, and its quality derives from these two things - but it's far from infallible.

Our brain is a wonderful pattern recognition machine. The problem is that it's so wonderful that it often sees patterns where there aren't any, like Jesus drawn on toast, 11:11 on the clock, a puppy in the cloud, a butterfly in a Rorschach test, and so on. That's why...

Theory and hypothesis formulation needs to be more than entertainment

I've already written previously about the importance of looking at things that numbers can’t show. Here, we're talking about the other side of the coin. This issue of external validity is often a minor concern in the strictly qualitative way of seeing the world. That's why the idea of triangulation is so important - because many "mono" methodological and disciplinary views will often have serious blind spots or be poorly generalizable.

The very choice of words in the form of communication already reveals the intention and capacity for self-criticism. Someone who recognizes the limitations of their own methods will say "it seems," "the data suggests," "it may be that" or even present the findings as a question. It's the antithesis of "Generation ABC wants D," "The new era of XYZ has begun," "X is the new Y." Sounding confident can help sell and be persuasive, but where do we draw the line? Isn't the very dynamics of content production an incentive to proposing theories without rhyme or reason, playing mainly on our biases of novelty, confirmation, and representativeness?

Quantitative: we need to learn to read the nutrition labels

Month in and month out, a study appears in the press like "Brazilians are willing to spend more on sustainable products." Years come and go, landfills continue to fill, Asian fast fashion continues to grow double digits, and the category leaders largely remain the same. How is this possible?

It's the oldest problem in the world in research - called the say-do gap and there are various technical strategies to get around this that this type of study consistently ignores. Citing just the obvious ones:

• Avoid or rephrase questions for which there is a morally correct answer. Social desirability bias!

• Questions about specific contexts and circumstances are always better than general questions - maybe the person is willing to spend more, say, on razor blades but not on deodorants. They respond thinking of a general context that doesn't exist and you're left with data that says nothing.

• Measuring past behavior in a reasonable interval is always more accurate than measuring future intention. I may have the intention of going to the gym five times a week, not eating fried food, and saving 50% of my salary, but is that what I actually do? We're terrible at imagining our future selves - projection bias and empathy gap.

There is an endless amount of books published on how to write questionnaires, phrasing of questions, and a lot of people who think their freestyle is better than proven methods (hello Dunning-Kruger effect!), or have a deliberate intention to torture the data. All these things are research fundamentals. Why do we let people who don't know this write questionnaires? This is one of the reasons why I think it's terrible that we call the idea of untrained people conducting research "democratization" — it paints us as oppressors, elitists, gatekeepers, but the reality is more like letting unlicensed people drive or do structural renovations without an architect. One could argue that there are many cases where it's better not to do it than to do it badly so as not to create false certainties.

“It’s ok, I watched a YouTube tutorial on how to run the project”

Then when evaluating quality, people look at who did or paid for the study and at most the sample size, but the technical side, including question phrasing, sample distribution, opaque methodologies, etc., which is where the dirt hides, goes unnoticed. What incentive exists for better studies to come out if the scrutiny doesn't happen and if the quality requirement is minimal?

But now, how do we solve it?

In a very editorial and opinion-based view, the scourge of this century (so far, at least), greatly enhanced by the context, seem to be confirmation bias and the Dunning-Kruger effect. Unlike the scourge of the 19th century and of the romantic poets, these two don't have a vaccine and depend on each person's critical thinking and are about looking inward.

The problem is when we think that only humans out there are credulous and fallible and we are not. The problem is thinking that there's only misinformation in politics, public health, investment recommendations, and crazy diets. The problem is that all these comfortable lies blind us to the things that are really happening and impact our businesses, the brands under our responsibility, and our careers.

When we watch documentaries or hear stories about cult leaders like Osho and Jim Jones or notorious charlatans like João de Deus, we get indignant about how people didn't realize sooner that they were dealing with ill-intentioned, lying, or abusive people - because the cost of recognizing the lie increases the longer we spend believing it, a manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy. For the spell to be broken, someone needs to show us (and we need to be open to hearing!) that the emperor has no clothes.

Making better decisions involves recognizing our fallibility and stopping to listen to those who challenge us, not those who say what we want to hear and appeal to our worst instincts - with this in mind, we can reward the behaviors that lead us where we want to go. To close this edition, one last recommendation: Alain de Botton (the philosopher, from the School of Life) on Harry Stebbings' 20VC, in an interesting discussion about marketing that tangentially touches on the place of insights in the world and in this text.

Thank you for reading to the end and see you in the next edition!

One of the most curious things about working with marketing, research, consumer behavior, and trends is that we spend so much time talking about other people's biases, heuristics, rationalizations, and aspirations, but very little about our own. It's as if we, regardless of which side of the table we're on, are magically exempt from the inconsistencies and self-deceptions that affect the other humans we study.

Are we exceptions to the rule or just really bad at seeing ourselves from the outside? I have bad news if you believe the first alternative...

This text is the first in a series about lies we choose to believe.

"People want authenticity" - the most repeated and emptiest phrase in the marketing world

In art and culture, authenticity can refer to the genuine expression of a cultural tradition, for example: an authentic Mexican restaurant (as opposed to something more adapted to local taste, fusion, etc.).

In existentialist philosophy, authenticity is a central concept that refers to the correspondence between a person's actions and their deepest values and convictions - it's being true to oneself.

In the context of human relationships, being authentic means acting without social masks, presenting oneself in a truthful way without pretensions.

Authentic is a word that has various meanings and applications. These are some of the main ones:

• Genuine or true - something that isn't false, a copy, or imitation

• Legitimate - that has recognized legal or moral validity

• Traditional - something prepared according to original or ancestral methods

• Historical - object or document that truly belongs to the period it claims to represent

• Natural - that hasn't been adulterated or artificially modified

• Original - that maintains the essential characteristics of its origin

• Reliable - that deserves credibility for its consistency

• True to oneself - person who acts according to their own values and beliefs

For brand discussions, the last three seem to make the most sense and suggest a commitment to values beyond making money. But first, what relationship does authenticity have with success?

It's not the root cause of success, but it can build legacy and meaning in the long term

It's demonstrably untrue that authenticity leads to more success or is the root cause of success, at least when we talk about individuals. History is full of episodes of extremely authentic and original artists and other creative professionals who died unknown and poor. Many of those considered geniuses today only received recognition posthumously or at the end of their lives - Van Gogh is perhaps the best-known example. Being authentic, in the sense of being true to oneself and legitimate, can indeed be more memorable in the long term and create legacy - it's a long-term strategy, not a shortcut.

The parallel with brand building is almost obvious: it only reinforces that strong branding is consistency + distinctive assets, which in the case of art, we can understand as a unique and recognizable style (by this criterion, Romero Britto would fit here - is he authentic or not? Tell me in the comments). The problem is that before this works, the thing needs to be known and have a minimum of interested parties to get the ball rolling (Product market fit? Mental availability and physical availability?), which are problems that no degree of authenticity solves.

Music is a great parallel for talking about authenticity because artists are both people and brands at the same time, and the intensity of the emotional and symbolic bonds that admirers create with them are a reference for those who work with brands.

If authenticity guaranteed success, the most-played lists would be very different

In music, for each unique and authentic genius like Miles Davis or Gilberto Gil, we have hundreds of successes fabricated from conception, with the Monkees in the 60s, through Milli Vanilli in the 80s (who didn't even really sing their own songs!), the horde of American boy bands from the 00s, to Max Martin, who turned making hits into a formula, and K-pop which took pre-existing formulas to the nth power, with talent selection and training that are a mix of corporate graduate program and survival reality show, with "personalities" defined with audience identification in mind and extremely rigid rules of conduct because of brand safety.

In Brazil, since "Meteoro" in 2009, we've been in a long cycle of audience expansion and domination of sertanejo in our music market. This commercial power undoubtedly has merits, but authenticity is certainly not its most striking characteristic. Sorocaba is the closest we have to a Max Martin or perhaps a contemporary version of Sullivan and Massadas.

One could argue that there is nothing less authentic than planned, derivative, formulaic, and mass-produced success, and yet it's clear how this doesn't affect the resounding success of these formulas at all. Is authenticity really what sells and what people want?

From the double-entendre Carnival songs of a hundred years ago, through Elvis's pelvic movements, to the biggest Carnival hit of 2014 and also this year's, if there is one repeated and consistent element in what becomes successful in mass culture (and also in social media, that's why the expression "thirst trap" exists), that element is vulgarity, not authenticity. But that doesn't warm the heart or reinforce the beliefs of those who read the report or post, right? Here's a warning for insight buyers who only listen to those who say what you want to hear.

Authenticity for whom? What we perceive as authentic depends on which group we want to fit into.

Our perception of what is authentic is a function of:

• the success and visibility of what we're analyzing. You know that thing where a weird rich or famous person is eccentric and a poor person is just kind of crazy?

• our affiliation groups, by identification or rejection. Going back to Romero Britto, an indisputable and rare commercial success in the world of Brazilian fine arts, why is it so common for him to be detested in certain groups? Because liking or not liking, beyond aesthetic affinity, signals belonging to different groups.

• our individual status-seeking strategies. Practical example: if I arrive at a dinner at friends' house with a Catena Zapata, which is a wine recognized as good and that many people know, it sends a different message than if I arrive with a more expensive, award-winning and less-known wine from a smaller winery - how do I want to represent myself? The idea of quiet luxury manifests this well - status signaling can be coded only for those who have enough repertoire to understand.

In general, those who give importance to less visible authenticity, at least in part build identity by positioning themselves in opposition to the popular, belonging to a restricted group, or build status by positioning themselves as knowledgeable or understanding.

Squidward, the countercultural icon of Bikini Bottom, hates popular culture, but did everything to be featured in "Fancy Houses" magazine. Sounds familiar?

There is a clear parallel between these groups and what Malcolm Gladwell calls mavens (something like connoisseurs or enthusiasts) in The Tipping Point and what design thinking calls the "extreme user," and contrary to the oft-repeated lie, this behavior has nothing to do with age or youth (even though youth is a critical period of identity construction and experimentation), but rather with the relationship with the object of interest - be they enthusiasts of specialty coffees, obscure musical genres, art films, minimalist travelers, mileage program optimizers, and numerous other groups.

This partly explains why there are so many products, services, and ideas that never cross the chasm of innovation. On one hand, there are audiences that don't want "their things" to become popular. Scarcity doesn't just affect the value of physical things - it also affects the value of symbolic things. On the other hand, some things are "too authentic" to have massive success. Is it because they aren't known enough and/or lack product market fit with larger audiences, or because they're too weird, radical, or sophisticated to reach wide distribution?

But then, is authenticity a moving target, linked to subcultures and counterculture, in a constant process of dilution?

This is the premise that gave rise to the very idea of coolhunting, which is fundamentally infiltrating subcultures hunting for emerging aesthetics, symbols, behaviors, and values that can be appropriated by brands and commercialized for larger audiences. Similarly, numerous brands have built broad audiences on top of smaller communities using authentic originating stories to deliver symbolic value, identity, belonging, and status, for example:

• Dr. Martens - punks, skinheads (the originals, not the racists that came later), British working class

• Carhartt and Stanley - American blue collar workers

• Patagonia, North Face, Arcteryx - from outdoor sports enthusiasts and hikers to streetwear, to high fashion, and to people who spend more time in office air conditioning than on trails and walk on asphalt way more than on mud

• Havaianas - the pioneering blue and white ones are still known today as "bricklayer's flip-flops"

• Adidas - from Run DMC onwards, associated with various subcultures: hip hop, Britpop, nu metal, acid jazz, techno... perhaps one of the major brands that works these relationships with the most intentionality.

But why is it a moving target and constant dilution? Because...

Broadening commercial appeal often dilutes perceived authenticity and consequently reduces the delivery of belonging, status, and symbolic value

Capitalism invariably appropriates and transforms everything into a market, including its harshest criticisms. The financial incentive to expand audience and revenue is in a constant tug of war with commitment to values beyond making money.

From Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, the pig tattooed with the Louis Vuitton pattern was very controversial, led Wim to be pursued by the brand's legal team, but ended up exhibited in an art exhibition sponsored by LV itself years ago

Expanding depends on who we're willing to alienate. This movement is clear even in politics: various candidates seen as radical are pressured to moderate their discourse (i.e., make it palatable to the majority) to get elected. Without making occasional nods to their bases, they can quickly be considered "sellouts" or "traitors" - a type of authenticity bankruptcy.

Can you expand without alienating? Yes, but not always.

Many creative professionals hated when Apple started using Intel processors and working better on interoperability with Windows to broaden its appeal to the general public. It was this move that took Mac from a niche place to enormous growth in laptops and desktops in the second half of the '00s - many people bought their first Mac during this time and were "converted." The result is that in richer countries (Western Europe, North America, rich countries in Asia and Oceania), they hold 10% or more share in various markets, securing fourth place in laptops with much better margins than competitors.

Going back to the music parallel, at the turn of the '90s, when heavy metal was beginning to leave the top of the charts, the pressure for mainstream success and selling more in the US made some of the biggest bands of the time change strategy, which generated revolt in some more ardent fans. Metallica put two ballads on the Black Album (1991), Iron Maiden put "Wasting Love" on Fear of the Dark (1992), Judas Priest, arguably more authentic, went in the opposite direction (they must like Al Ries!) and made their heaviest album up to that point with no ballads at all, Painkiller (1990). The Black Album sold 15 times more than the other two, but people are still discussing this move today. Metallica is widely considered the most commercially successful metal band in history.

But it doesn't always work out. Fred Perry, the men's fashion brand historically linked to tennis, ska, and mods in the UK, had to remove one of its most recognized shirt models from the market due to its association with violent and authoritarian groups - and it wasn't the first time this happened. The meltdown of share value and brutal drop in sales in Europe strongly suggest that expanding Tesla's audience from those interested in technology, integrated service, and electrification to those who share the leadership's values may be an impossible battle to win - even with the product remaining exactly the same!

Some time ago: The alternative and independent as mass-produced "counterculture"

There's a wonderful book from 2010, The Authenticity Hoax, by journalist and philosopher Andrew Potter, which was very visionary for the time it was written. He explores the origins of the idea of authenticity and evaluates the impact of digital culture on it.

If Simon Sinek is the Rousseau of the corporate world, who says those cute things that we find lovely to hear and warm our hearts but that deep down we know are more ideals to be pursued than how things really work, Andrew Potter is more like Nietzsche or Schopenhauer: a revealer of uncomfortable truths, a Band-Aid ripper. Some excerpts:

From the digitization of media onwards, the attitude of rejecting the popular (and building identity, belonging, and status with it) is so mainstream and dominant that it creates and feeds gigantic parallel markets:

• The entire indie cultural industry (music, cinema, etc.) is built on the old and tired opposition between high and low culture. And at least in the case of music, it's more discourse and aesthetics than practice

• The wellness industry, which moves 4x more money than pharmaceuticals, and alternative medicine, are fundamentally built as criticism of the industrialized and synthetic. "Working" is secondary, belonging comes first - this explains a lot of what happens today. Here’s a great watch for context.

The very idea of the hipster (another category that nobody admitted to belonging to, but visible everywhere!), much discussed in the past decade, was the last visible bastion of a supposed "global counterculture," reducing the idea of authenticity to a socially acceptable rebellion primarily expressed through consumption. Ten years ago, bearded men in plaid shirts were the majority in advertising agencies, as uniformed as the fleece-vested Wall Street types they love to mock. In the end, we are all cosplayers of the groups we aspire to belong to at some level, but blind to our own adaptation strategies.

us, seen from outside - from the wonderful Brazilian animation series “Jorel’s Brother”

We find it funny to see teenagers walking in groups dressed alike at the mall, but we don't see the uniforms we ourselves wear.

Today: the "commoditizing ray" of algorithms and sameness

Our taste formation nowadays has machine intermediaries in countless instances, which is very different from the arbiters of "good taste" of the past such as record executives, magazine editors, professional critics, and other gatekeepers.

With this, the idea of “selling out" or "betraying the movement" no longer makes sense for artists and creatives, because in a context where the intermediaries are primarily algorithms and platforms, the overwhelming responsibility of promoting one's own ideas and works falls directly on those who produce them - we even celebrate this capacity more than artistic merit in the corporate world (e.g., Arctic Monkeys, Anitta). The problem is that if everyone is indie but what succeeds in the algorithm is just patterns and formulas, the incentive for sameness is tremendous.

In various different markets, one can observe a sameness (inauthenticity?), which suggests both risk aversion and that it's being commercially rewarded:

• design and color palettes in the automotive world (although one could also argue that the car has lost prestige as a symbolic object of belonging and is in a more functional phase in some cultures)

• the endless wave of sequels, prequels, reboots, and remakes in cinema and TV

If sameness and predictability sell well, what incentive exists to produce more authentic things? If the authentic sells less, who the hell "wants authenticity" from brands?

Tomorrow: will we be able to break from algorithms and go more offline?

Perhaps we've been hearing so much talk about community, clubs for this and that, newsletters, and offline life lately because in smaller social circles we can be, besides more present, a bit more truthful and less performative.

Constantly seen as long as he’s using it. Is the One Ring the smartphone of Middle Earth?

If the algorithm is increasingly perceived as the "system" and dominant force, are these unintermediated and eventually analog spaces the new fanzines?

Always: Belonging and status are the hole, authenticity is the drill

The classic Jobs to be Done analogy applies perfectly here. We don't want authenticity directly, we want the belonging and status that being associated with things we see as authentic delivers to us. If we are ants, authenticity is the aphid (something we cultivate) and not the sugar (something we consume). The individual cost of real authenticity is high: isolation, loneliness, among others. If there's one point of agreement in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience, it's that we are deeply tribal animals and this affects an enormous amount of our consumption and life choices.

This also happens through rejection: we don't want to be associated with things we perceive as inauthentic or that burn our reputation. That's why, for example, there's "private listening" on Spotify - so that all those things you're embarrassed to listen to won't appear in your yearly Spotify Wrapped. What we really avoid is the erosion of our social capital - if what I use to represent myself socially loses value, my value falls with it!

Is there a more practical example than this one?

To truly understand how the minds work of those we want to win over as an audience, first we need to recognize the lies we tell ourselves.

Gif by streamonmax on Giphy

If the search for authenticity is, as Andrew Potter argues, an egoic defense that comes from our inability to see and accept how much we sacrifice of ourselves as individuals for the approval of others, for belonging, and for status, isn't it time we saw things as they are and delivered what our clients are really looking for? And if instead of offering them something that is relative and transitory, we built on firmer ground? To close this edition, one last recommendation: Seth Godin on Tim Ferriss's podcast talking about (ta-da!) belonging, status, and strategy. Thank you for reading to the end and until the next edition!

Many recent news stories make you wonder if we're on a path to total and irredeemable moral bankruptcy.

• Digital and banking scams are impacting a quarter of all Brazilians. How many times have you received fake calls from the "bank" about suspicious charges on your account or card? Has anyone impersonated you on WhatsApp?

• The "Narco-believers" - In Brazil, we have a strong history of syncretism in beliefs, but the merging of these two worlds is one of the most bizarre. And we thought the Dark Ages were behind us!

• Some politicians and business people are behaving more and more like cult leaders. They act like they are divine and play down every fault. And they control the narrative relentlessly, especially when things aren't going well. Have you seen the Netflix documentary "How to Become a Cult Leader?" If didn’t, you should!

• The perverse incentives for exaggerated promises in the tech world. It seems that inflated stories of billions of dollars (or trillions!) are almost necessary to justify the amount of capital raised. What happens to this game now that there's a larger injection of public money?

• A shift towards the law of the jungle in geopolitics, and braggadocio as the standard winning modus operandi in elections around the world - I don't think I need to link to that, right?

• One of The Economist's covers this month - with everything happening in the world, this issue being central enough for a cover story says something about the state of things. The article is about how the scam industry may be surpassing drug trafficking in market value.

Some of these are specifically related to social media dynamics:

• Some of the most followed local influencers are paid for people's betting losses (mostly poor people, nearly half of them in debt) who believe in them. Large brands are fully aware and continue to pay for campaigns with these same influencers.

• People are doing increasingly questionable things for engagement, which suggests that even factoring in the reputational damage, the increased cash flow still makes it worth it.

• Figures like Raiam Santos (multiple convictions, not imprisoned only because he cut a deal) and Andrew Tate (convicted criminal, imprisoned for human trafficking) are celebrated on social media.

• Influencers for illegal mining in the Amazon are teaching followers how to produce and use liquid mercury – it got so bad that the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) is investigating.

• Coaches are recruiting armies of editors to work for free with the promise of future visibility.

“We’ll not be able to pay you, but this work will give you long term visibility.” Apparently, the oldest trick in the world still works.

In our world of research, strategy, and insights, there's also trickery going on...

• Social listening studies present numbers and percentages of mentions as if they were directly asked and statistically representative, misleading the reader. Quantitative studies from the same period tell a very different story.

  

  Study universe: the bubble that spontaneously mentioned their goals on social media in this specific time frame. "It's no longer a priority" for whom?

• Trend studies interview trendy friends and generalize to all of humanity, or assume that because something happens in NY, it will happen everywhere. It is as if the chasm of innovation weren’t a reality for so many products and behaviors, as if anecdotal evidence and faint signals were the same thing.

Sounds familiar? Via Edmond Lau

• Surveys distributed using social media where the universe should be "people who saw the post asking for help filling out the survey" and not any audience they are trying to understand. If you're doing commercial market research and not university homework, have the dignity to organize or hire professional data collection instead of letting an opaque algorithm define your sample.

• Brazilian specialized media outlets talking about a new generation that hasn't even been born yet, claiming it was defined with "broad consensus." Meanwhile, the organization that's perhaps the biggest global authority on the subject has already said it will almost completely abandon generations as a cohort. This came after receiving an open letter signed by 150 demographers and social scientists giving them a major dressing-down (essential reading for marketers, as is this other article!) stating that these groupings suggest similarities that don't exist and are anti-scientific. Is broad consensus just you and the voices in your head, buddy? What else needs to happen before it clicks that generations are the apple cider vinegar of cohorts?

If you want to protect yourself from these, you'll have to learn more about research methodology and biases instead of just buying a brand at face value or blindly accepting a colleague's recommendation. Maybe the people saying that critical thinking will be the most fundamental skill post-AI are right…

Four vectors heading in the wrong direction: expanded self-comparison, the power of bad examples, visibility at all costs, and impunity.

Could being constantly exposed to the success of others, whether fictional or real, from people who were completely off our radar before, be pushing more people towards "anything goes”?

These mood swings have such a practical effect on markets like finance that there are indices like the CNN Business Fear and Greed Index, which exist precisely to try to measure herd behavior guided by both emotions. As Warren Buffett wisely said, when we see people we consider less intelligent than us making more money, it causes behavioral contagion and irrationality, and even enlightened people end up doing stupid things.

Could the promise of easy and fast money from markets like bets, dropshipping, affiliate marketing, and some varieties of infoproducts and cryptocurrencies be making us more greedy? It's already impacting popular culture at some level. (don't open this link at the office!).

The problem with the amplified visibility of scams and supposedly easy money is that it can generate a feeling in those who are honest or outside this game of being left behind or not doing enough.

One of the things that characterizes the times we live in is the confusion of visibility with authority. Could some highly visible people be becoming "too big to fail" like the banks in 2008, because at some level visibility is always monetizable regardless of the controversies and atrocities they're involved in? Impunity is also a powerful incentive for bad behavior, both for those who are already doing it and for those who are thinking about doing it.

Could it be that, as a result, pursuing visibility at all costs has become part of the spirit of our times because it's increasingly seen as the fastest way to manufacture credibility and turn it into money?...

The nostalgia for the 2000s is hot right now. Would the 2025 version would be “get followers…?”

One of the most interesting ways to map trends is to see if new behaviors are nurturing markets that support these behaviors, measuring by proxy, as statisticians say. An example that fits here: luxury car rentals, with a complete filming and photography package, are swimming in money - is that a sign that the search for social proof using fancy watches, square houses in gated communities, and these types of cars is on the rise?

Now taking a step back, is this true if we look at the grand arcs of history and the data?

What is the moral compass of Brazilians like, historically?

I've written before about interpersonal trust in Brazil being among the lowest in the world consistently - with several practical implications, all undesirable. There's a very interesting IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) paper about how this affects business and public management, and it certainly affects our relationships.

Our trust in the political class is consistently among the lowest in the world, and that's not news to anyone. The problem is that "as above, so below" as Jorge Ben Jor said and, before him, the hermetics. There are studies that shows, albeit in other countries, that lower trust in institutions leads to a greater tolerance for corruption, and these two things have mutual causality, that is, one thing feeds the other.

There are a lot of things that we consider within a moral gray area or things that "everyone" does that would be absolutely unacceptable in other countries:

• Pricing things differently with or without a receipt, a naturalization of tax evasion.

• Making a fake student ID to pay half price at concerts, a falsification of personal documents that is socially accepted.

• Paying a "flanelinha" (street parking attendant), which is being complicit with a very poorly disguised type of extortion.

All these things, among several other similar behaviors, suggest that we are moral relativists and not moral absolutists. There is always someone else that we see as having unfair advantages against us that we use to justify our worst acts: the State that takes so much from us while giving so little in return, the employer who demands more than agreed even while paying us so poorly, the evil gigantic company that screws over its customers - a cumulative effect of low interpersonal and institutional trust. No one is the villain in their own narrative, but at the same time the feeling of dishonesty is omnipresent - what kind of math is that? Not to mention the figure of the malandro (hustler), which is kind of a foundational myth of Brazil.

Us and the others. Via Tom Gauld

Besides these things, regarding values, Brazilians are reasonably consistent in a few things:

• We are altruistic, but punitive: we want others to be helped and have opportunities, but if they make mistakes or commit crimes, we want harsh punishments. What’s implicit is that we don't believe in second chances.

• At the same time that we are very distrustful of the political class, we expect the State to solve a lot of problems. How do we reconcile that?

We also seem to be in a long transition from a Catholic morality based in part on "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven" to a different path, guided by the theology of prosperity and the growing number of evangelicals, and also by the increasing number of people who are not religiously affiliated. This is a hot topic in the Humanities and affects things like how we deal with success, money, and public policies.

Are we moving towards a new "Brazilian Protestant ethic," more adapted to a cultural context that is more every person for themselves and individualistic than in other predominantly Protestant, but developed countries?

A strong counterpoint: the idea of moral decline is recurrent and doesn't seem to hold up.

It turns out that this idea of moral decline, which is understanding that our collective moral values are getting worse, is recurrent over decades and may be a collective illusion, another subject that I have already mentioned here.

Two researchers from Harvard and Columbia did a large study based on the analysis of 177 opinion surveys in the US (done since the 40s!) and 58 around the world, including in Brazil, and discovered that this feeling of worsening is constant since the 60s without clear signs of a real worsening.

But it's not that simple - another researcher of collective illusions who conducted several studies, Todd Rose, states that the illusions of a certain group become the private opinions of the next generation.

But is it really happening now?

There are many factors here that may indeed be pushing us in this direction, but the counterpoints are also very strong, in a subject that is particularly difficult to measure, even because getting people to admit their own dishonesty publicly and the effect of others on them is not simple at all. It is very difficult to have a definitive answer and often, studying humans is like that.

But the real learning here is, if we judge ourselves using easy and cheap behavioral data (social media) but with a gigantic sampling bias, we run an enormous risk of taking the part for the whole and making silly decisions as a result, an increasingly common mistake in many companies - the trickery with social listening that I pointed out earlier in the text has everything to do with that.

What is certain is that we need, as executives and strategists, to stop treating what happens on social media as representative of our collective reality, no matter how much it is in fact capable of influencing us. And understand that many of us in marketing and communications are part of a "chronically online" bubble totally disconnected from the rest of the country, which makes hearing the silent majority increasingly important.

This same dynamic of visibility at all costs creates perverse incentives for publishing very impactful but extremely poorly substantiated things, like "Generation Z doesn't drink anymore" or "Generation Z traded Google search for TikTok." It's not just about having access to research, but knowing how to evaluate the origin and quality of these data and processes and doing what we researchers already do (or should do) all the time - imagining the countless ways we could be wrong before opening our mouths.

“Brain rot” as 2024’s word of the year is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are countless reports of people struggling to focus, read longer or more complex texts, or even sit through movies. In Brazil, we’re reading less - recent research shows that the proportion of readers last year was the lowest since 2007, when the survey began. In classrooms, these concerns are echoed with even greater frequency.

As it becomes increasingly difficult to capture and retain attention, we are resorting to ever more desperate measures to achieve it - whether through an escalating intensity of simultaneous stimuli (the origin of the term brain rot in the digital context), triggering strong emotions, or appealing to our basest instincts. Clickbait, ragebait, and the ever-classic overblown promises of empowerment and wealth dominate, to the point that even the most analog purveyors of such promises are feeling the heat.

On the other hand, the quest for algorithmic success has grown so pervasive that it is speculated to be a significant factor in a widespread aesthetic and creative homogenization across interior design, retail, and music (which is becoming more formulaic, repetitive, and increasingly relegated to ambient soundtracks). From blanding to even physical appearances, some are painting this as a creativity crisis.

Unlike past moral panics surrounding video games, disco music, or heavy metal - comparisons often made by those dismissing concerns about the collective harm caused by social media - there is a growing body of evidence linking today’s environment to worsening mental health, misinformation, focus, learning ability, and other severe issues.

It’s not just children and young people suffering. The BBC recently discussed how problematic screen and media usage is also affecting older adults, intersecting with issues like loneliness and ageism.

The attention economy - a hallmark of our times - is showing clear signs of the human toll it exacts.

The expectation that improvements and adjustments will occur voluntarily is, at best, naive. The intentional degradation of platforms to serve their own interests - often contrary to user preferences and encapsulated in the concept of ensh*ttification (our most-read article last year) - is simply the status quo today.

I’ve got the poison, I’ve got the remedy

In the midst of all this, what was Meta’s latest “brilliant” idea? Developing a tool for creating “virtual users” - people who don’t actually exist but populate the company’s platforms and post autonomously. When this tool was reported on in a recent Financial Times article, the profiles went viral (predictably sparking concerns about spam and impersonation), and public backlash was so severe that they pulled the experiments almost immediately.

via 404media

The masses are increasingly aware

It’s not just societal transformation scholars who are casting a critical eye on what’s happening. A few signs:

• The Anxious Generation became a bestseller in multiple countries, including Brazil. It even made Bill Gates’ reading list, complete with a review. Jonathan Haidt was interviewed on Roda Viva. The speed at which schools worldwide changed their cell phone policies and governments joined the conversation was striking.

• 47% of American Gen Zers wish TikTok had never been invented.

• A 2024 study across 30 countries, including Brazil, found that 65% of respondents aged 18+ supported banning social media for those under 14.

• Another global study revealed that between a quarter and a third of people, depending on age group, experience negative aspects on their mental health due to social media, with higher daily usage correlating to increased negative perceptions.

Communications and marketing are still in denial

Parts of the communication and marketing industries remain in denial, partially by emphasizing the positive aspects of social media (which undoubtedly exist and are significant!) as though they somehow negate or erase the negatives.

There are still many clinging to clichéd deflections.

The tired line, “It’s not about technology; it’s about people,” doesn’t hold up. For comparison, any physical product causing problems for its consumers - even a small segment - ends up altered or withdrawn from the market. Remember the IKEA dressers? Keeping people scrolling as long as possible is a well-known key metric for platforms that benefits only them.

Holding individuals solely responsible for their use has its limits, especially when not everyone has the same maturity or judgment, and when problematic relationships with platforms are demonstrably possible.

Haven’t we been through this before?

No growth lasts forever

It's a given that media won't keep growing indefinitely. Looking at not only global growth data but also penetration rates, it's clear that the bulk of this growth is being driven by developing countries. Numbers are already quite high in developed nations, and we might be nearing the ceiling, assuming that anyone who wants to use these platforms is probably already using them - this doesn’t seem to be an issue of financial or technical access.

Even the much-praised creator economy will hit a ceiling eventually. We’ve previously discussed how transformative it has been for today’s youth to have lucrative and glamorous career paths that are far more accessible than sports or professional music, aspirational fields for past generations.

The issue is that access to these opportunities, contrary to what the cheerleaders of this economy proclaim, is a zero-sum game: if everyone wants to become a creator (and in Brazil and the US, a lot of people do), there won’t be enough audience or money to sustain viable careers for everyone chasing this path. What happens to gold rush towns when the veins run dry? Could the sheer number of shovel sellers (in this case, those teaching how to produce content/engage/etc.) already be a clue?

Are we heading toward a situation comparable to day trading, where it’s well known that most individuals lose money or make very little, yet the belief in being above average (hello, Dunning-Kruger!) and the allure of “easy money” continues to draw more and more people in?

In physical markets, it’s easier to spot saturation as it happens. In digital spaces, it’s trickier, but some subtle signs are emerging:

• Usage time is (slowly) declining globally.

• Organic engagement is dropping, while CPMs keep rising. The past decade’s increases have crippled or heavily altered business models like those of direct-to-consumer brands. In the US, sensitivity to cost (and ROI!) has already shifted dynamics - there, spending on social media was the lowest in seven years, and HBR explores some of the reasons here.

The Rebels Strike Back

via Giphy

A countercurrent is consolidating. Various initiatives are emerging in favor of more offline time, a rediscovery or reimagining of analog approaches, encouraging people to be more present in the moment and less focused on documenting it, and even explicitly anti-social media movements rejecting the dynamics these platforms foster. Examples include:

• The dating app burnout (also experiencing ensh*ttification!) and a search for alternative ways to meet people and nurture romantic lives.

• Services like Timeleft, which organizes curated dinners for strangers using algorithmic matchmaking, and others creating physical-world experiences or entirely disconnected spaces like Amsterdam’s Offline Club, which has expanded globally.

• Anti-camera nightlife policies: spreading beyond initial hotspots.

• The print magazine comeback, seen with titles like Life, Elle, and NME in the U.S., and Capricho in Brazil.

• Growing interest in non-connected devices: early 2000s digital cameras, vinyl, dumbphones, etc.

• In response to opportunists and charlatans spreading misinformation, more scientists and subject-matter experts are stepping into content creation to reclaim control of the narrative.

If today’s dominant culture is digital and heavily shaped by social media, could we be witnessing the birth of a counterculture rooted in opposing values?

Gif by jay_nelles on Giphy

Signals of future directions and potential outcomes: broad impacts

Politics and Legislation

The movement to by protect children and teenagers by restricting social media usage is surprisingly bipartisan, even in these polarized times. Issues such as individual identification, age verification, and criminal accountability are also under discussion. Many regions worldwide have already reached critical legislative mass. The ripple effects of regulations in one country influencing others are clear - GDPR's influence on Brazil's LGPD is a prime example.

• In November last year, Australia banned social media participation for minors under 16.

• That same month, France restricted usage for those under 15 and is urging the EU to extend the rule across the bloc.

• Ireland increased fines and penalties for platforms that fail to comply with local laws, especially regarding age verification and harmful content like bullying. Penalties can reach up to 10% of company revenue. While Ireland is a small country, it wields influence due to its role as a tax haven for many tech companies, making it difficult for them to threaten exit strategies, unlike in other markets.

• In California, a federal judge upheld the state’s law banning “addictive feeds” for minors.

• In Romania, the first round of elections was annulled over suspected Russian social media interference, particularly through TikTok. The situation is still unfolding and serves as the first real test of the Digital Services Act, the EU’s new digital platform legislation.

• In India, where TikTok is already banned, the government has implemented rules for content creator registration and platform accountability for defamatory content.

Economy and business environment

• An opportunity exists for platforms offering alternatives to today’s models. Bluesky has already gained traction by promoting decentralization, customizable algorithms, and chronological feeds. In the U.S., Frank McCourt, a potential buyer for TikTok’s local operations, is involved in Project Liberty, which aims to decentralize social networks, giving users more control over shared data and consumed content. McCourt’s plan for TikTok involves keeping the users and infrastructure but discarding the original algorithm, shifting the focus from attention to intention - a change that could benefit both users and brands. While the network effect poses a challenge, the rapid adoption of platforms like TikTok suggests it may not be insurmountable. Even Reddit’s growth, which relies on anonymous profiles and text-based discussions in niche groups, highlights space for alternatives to infinite algorithm-driven video feeds.

• Media and communication strategies not solely or mostly reliant on social media are likely to grow in importance. The increasing presence of digital-native brands like Airbnb, Google, and Netflix on TV and outdoor media - channels once declared "dead" - illustrates this shift. With digital media costs rising and older, wealthier audiences less active on social platforms, achieving broad coverage will require diversification. Are we witnessing the revival of true cross-media strategies, updated for today’s landscape?

• The newsletter economy and other formats bypassing opaque algorithmic tolls, often more in-depth and community-driven than typical Reels, are expected to gain traction. These formats foster connections around specific interests, offering both depth and engagement.

Culture and society

Public opinion on platforms is growing increasingly critical, according to various studies, even as most people acknowledge their benefits. With a broad awareness of the negatives, we can anticipate a shift toward more intentional, pragmatic, and moderated usage.

When reevaluating our relationship with anything we recognize as both pleasurable and harmful (e.g., sweets, alcohol, caffeine, or psychoactives), common strategies emerge. Similar approaches could reshape social media consumption:

• Harm reduction: Continue usage but adopt strategies to minimize negative impacts, such as unfollowing accounts that provoke harmful emotions.

• "A bit of salad, a bit of chocolate": Balance hedonistic, less healthy behaviors with (over)compensatory efforts in other areas, like consuming more constructive content or engaging in productive, healthy activities.

• Less quantity, more quality, a 30-somethings favorite: Shift consumption to a ritual, reducing or eliminating perceived harmful content and replacing it with higher-value, quality material.

• Complete abstinence: An extreme choice often driven by ideology or by individuals unable to maintain a balanced relationship with the habit.

Technology

• The "AI Slop" problem and the real risk of a dramatic decline in content quality: Removing barriers to producing low-effort content - like virtual avatars, AI clones, or mass messaging without recipient limits - creates incentives to flood digital spaces with low effort content. To glimpse the near future, look at Spotify, a pioneer in cutting out intermediaries: well-known artists are being replaced by “AI covers” so the company can avoid paying royalties, and the platform is actively promoting these “AIrtists” in playlists. If junk content overwhelms the quality content that draws us in, what do we tend to do?

What now?

Especially after Zuck’s latest announcement, both the level of uncertainty and the risks to brand safety are alarmingly high. Betting on the status quo, amid rapid transformations and a deteriorating context, seems like a poor strategy.

It’s time to balance the pursuit of attention at all costs with greater care for how that attention is rewarded. These challenges also offer an opportunity: to build a healthier digital landscape for everyone. Let’s seize it.

At Zeitgeist, we often conduct studies for international clients. As a result, discussing and explaining Brazil - its culture and peculiarities - to people who are almost always from the developed world has become routine. It’s a fantastic opportunity to understand how others see us and to learn more about their cultures. Building bridges between cultures and subcultures has always been part of our DNA, and it’s one of the most enjoyable aspects of the work we do.

It’s always frustrating (and unfortunately common) when the people receiving these projects pay little attention to our local and regional characteristics - especially when these elements are often the key to understanding the results. For example, they may explain why a specific product is perceived in a certain way. Without understanding the culture, you risk missing things that are obvious to those who live within it.

The U.S. and the U.K., originators of so many global studies, see themselves as complex and diverse markets (and they are!) that are impenetrable to outsiders (but are they really?). Meanwhile, Brazil is often seen - through ignorance or disinterest - as a cohesive and homogeneous whole. One of the barriers to giving proper importance to Brazil’s nuances is that, for many multinational companies, Brazil represents a relatively small revenue line. As a result, the effort required to dive deeper into these intricacies may seem unjustifiable. But isn’t this a self-fulfilling prophecy - or worse, a costly mistake? If the market offerings were more tailored, wouldn’t results improve?

Beyond the usual ethnocentrism, this worldview shapes discussions about behavior and trends even within Brazil. Some of the better known names in the field, both inside and outside the country, continue to treat highly specific circumstances of affluent nations as if they were “global.” Do they really think that quiet quitting is relevant in a country where the constant struggle for survival that involves entrepreneurship, improvisation, communal connections and dealing with very limited resources, popularly known as “o corre”, defines peripheral existence and where the purchasing power of a fast-food employee in the developed world can rival that of our corporate middle management, depending on exchange rates?

On the other hand, there is greater recognition for brands that understand and respect local cultural adaptations, such what happened with Lacoste here or McDonald’s, which officially incorporates its local nicknames in various countries worldwide. This is a reflection not only of increased autonomy in decision-making among local marketing and insights teams (something to celebrate and encourage) but also of a more democratic, two-way approach to brand management that values context.

Neither a colony nor an impenetrable cultural island

Two overly simplistic views persist about Brazil’s place in the flow of emerging consumer behaviors. One, archaic and elitist, assumes that the cultural metropolis-colony axis remains intact and, deep down, that we all aspire to be Londoners or New Yorkers. The other, a mix of inflated pride and wishful thinking, imagines Brazil as impermeable to outside influences, a country that sets its own rules - a sort of continental-scale blend of Wakanda and North Korea. While Brazil produces amazing, often underappreciated things of all kinds, no culture exists in a vacuum. Understanding the mechanics of cultural exchange remains a significant competitive advantage.

The more accurate - and less marketable - answer is that reality is always more complex than theoretical models that fit neatly into a slide or the promises of a magical AI that scours the public internet, interviews people who don’t exist, and learns everything. In the rush to turn the understanding of human behavior into frameworks (or, to use plain English, an assembly line) and slap a proprietary process™ label on it, nuance and rigor are often lost along the way.

Besides the original sin of marketers - taking one’s own taste as a reference, rather than the target audiences’s-two other factors often sabotage this sensemaking process: viewing other cultures through a tourist’s lens and making overly broad generalizations. More about them below:

"Tourists" from other cultures may have a greater chance of stumbling across something novel but are far more likely to misunderstand it without local support.

Even renowned professionals in our field make glaring errors when analyzing foreign cultures without proper context. Martin Lindstrom, the author of Buyology, Small Data, and other celebrated marketing books, once claimed that “pharmacies and healthcare organizations in Brazil used the Swiss flag (!!) to convey trust and order.” In fact, the cross became a medical symbol after the Geneva Convention to facilitate identification, even in war zones. In Brazil, the Red Cross is linked to the early days of nursing education, which is why it appears so frequently. The international standard of the green cross never caught on here, and using the Red Cross symbol is illegal, so the white cross on a red background circumvents that while preserving its meaning.

What about rigor, Martin? Would it have been so hard to ask a Brazilian? From “Small Data”

Similarly, a Brazilian expert once claimed that “vintage and second-hand products are a trend in Japan,” ignoring that Shimokitazawa, a Tokyo neighborhood known for its countless thrift and vintage shops, began becoming what it is today after World War II during a time of poverty, when second-hand items were all people could afford. Add to that a culture that values repairs and imperfection, with a well-established ecosystem of second-hand stores across all categories for decades. Is a 70-year-old “trend” still a trend?

The (stereo)typical marketer’s fascination with novelty works much better when filtered through the critical lens of someone who questions their perceptions and social bubbles, much like an academic or journalist. It also requires constant effort to understand both one’s own culture and others’, closing gaps with local expertise. The sensitivity to novelty that comes from an outsider’s perspective must be paired with rigor and local context.

One-Size-Fits-Nobody

Trend reports that come free in exchange for your email try to be everything to everyone but end up being nothing to anyone. This category has lost value due to over-simplification and an influx of people and companies-often without real expertise-trying to cash in on the constant interest in the topic. This is one of the side effects of treating data and insights as entertainment or a pause in our exhausting corporate grinds and of the freemium model. The result? Some professionals in our field resort to summarizing or conducting “meta-analyses” or roundups of these reports, hoping to find something truly generalizable or relevant.

There are plenty of pattern switches emerging far from Fashion Weeks, color-of-the-year announcements, youth hangout spots, or international innovation festivals-and often in ways that diverge from what decision-makers might expect. We need to better differentiate between what aligns with decision-makers' aspirations and what genuinely resonates with the brand’s audience. After all, the bait needs to attract the fish, not the fisherman.

Certain topics and industries indeed tend to stand out in specific parts of the world. Take diets, for example: of all the trends popularized over the past few decades (Keto, carnivore, low carb, slow carb, Atkins, intermittent fasting, etc.), many trace their origins or gained traction directly through California. Discussions about home and interior design inevitably feature countless Italian and Nordic influences. This kind of leadership and visibility in certain fields is so significant that some countries turn it into a matter of state policy - think of gastronomy and idols in South Korea or design in Denmark, for instance. But that's not the whole story…

It’s (far) less simple than it seems

Beyond that, some places in the world, either because they are emerging powerhouses in a specific area or have a unique relationship with something, deserve more attention as sources of inspiration or study. Sometimes, markets themselves reinterpret or adapt elements from one culture to another-like what happened here with Taiwanese bubble tea, Mexican paletas (which are quite different from the originals in Mexico), or the current ongoing pistachio craze, likely tied to the traditional ice cream culture of Middle Eastern countries like Syria and Lebanon. These are all examples that originated outside the usual go-to references.

And sometimes, it’s not even about a physical place - it could be a community of like-minded people, globally connected but more concentrated in a specific region. No one is an early adopter of everything. Science has already debunked the myth of alpha wolves, so why are people still clinging to the idea that these classifications apply to humans?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to first embrace the complexity and then try to systematize it within the specific context of your category or brand? Could this be yet another case where the attempt to oversimplify leads people to mistake the map for the territory?

This is why we argue that the best way to study these transformations is through customized, case-by-case approaches.

There’s another way!

It starts by embracing complexity. By recognizing that Brazil isn’t São Paulo and São Paulo isn’t Pinheiros. That treating a small slice of a generational group as representative of the whole is a collective delusion. That we have a wealth of new cultural references and old traditions that are still little known within the São Paulo-Rio upper SEG axis but are immensely relevant to many people and deserve more recognition. At the same time, there’s a vast world out there full of fascinating things happening-often far from the big stages and mainstream media-that can present huge market opportunities when we contextualize and adapt them to our multifaceted reality here.

Another helpful mindset is not being personally invested in appearing "cool." When our identity is tied to projecting a certain image, we tend to gravitate toward topics that reinforce that image - fashion, youth culture, the entertainment industry, and so on. Being free of that concern brings clarity, because even technical subjects (B2B insurance, neurological medications, trade fairs, animal health - we’ve tackled all of these!) or decidedly "uncool" ones, like payroll loans or adult diapers, become equally fascinating. The rewards are discovery and learning, not being perceived a certain way.

Curiosity and the ability to envision the future - while keeping your feet firmly grounded in evidence - are mental states that don’t require a circus ringmaster’s mustache, multicolored hair, bold-rimmed glasses, appearing (or being) under 35, or any other signifier of modernity or “coolness.”

For some context, here’s a bit about how we work at Zeitgeist: when it comes to understanding the flow of innovations and hunting for opportunities abroad, our role with the Trend Scouts isn’t just about avoiding cultural misinterpretation. It’s also about identifying which places are most influential for specific topics and categories, so we know where to look for the ideas with the greatest potential. Deciding where to focus is already part of the investigative process.

In 2011, we conducted a proprietary study on healthy eating across 25 cities worldwide, identifying emerging value propositions that have since become industry mainstays and the foundation of highly successful products. These included an emphasis on protein content (a key driver for YoPro, one of the sector’s biggest recent success stories), clean labels and minimalist ingredient lists (central to RXBar, founded in 2012 and sold to Kellogg in 2017 for $600 million, with a similar Brazilian counterpart), artisanal bakeries, and more. In 2014, this study was presented at an event held by a global leader in the food industry, and much of it was still novel to the audience at the time.

Using the same methodology with clients, we’ve conducted studies on airlines (which generated a revenue stream that’s still active today and has certainly paid back the study thousands of times over), as well as the beauty market, foodservice, retail, and many others. In many cases, this was done alongside traditional qualitative and quantitative methods-sometimes with our own twist-because diving deep into the local reality is essential, not optional. Often, we conclude with workshops and other hands-on deliverables to help our clients prioritize opportunities and take action. After all, bringing a bunch of ideas and innovations without aligning them with a business understanding and brand possibilities isn’t strategy; it’s entertainment.

So, as the year ends and we’re inundated with the same old trend reports (“authenticity,” yet another “first native digital generation”), ditch the generic and the buzzword bingos. If you truly want to explore scenarios that can benefit your brand, make it custom.

This month, the Nobel Prize in Economics went to the authors of Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. They argue that the role of institutions - whether inclusive or extractive - is critical to a country's economic success. According to them, a key factor that distinguishes these institutions is trust, both among the institutions themselves and between individuals. So what does this have to do with understanding people, brands, and customer experience? Everything. Let’s dive in!

Brazil is one of the world’s most distrustful countries

This is a recurring finding across multiple studies, including one that shows Brazil as the country with the lowest interpersonal trust in Latin America - a region that already scores below the world average. This low level of trust is a significant barrier to collective interests like citizenship and civility. It becomes easier to justify highly individualistic attitudes by pointing to others’ behavior (“But everyone does it!”), and even initiatives aimed at collective benefit are often met with cynicism - for instance, the idea of a “traffic fine industry” reflects our default to expect the worst from others.

While cultural factors contribute to this characteristic, treating it as unchangeable risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, allowing the same persistent issues to continue. The most constructive interpretation of this generalized lack of trust is to see it as a huge opportunity - especially for brands - because what is scarce is always more valuable. Having someone you can count on holds enormous value when the general expectation is that everyone is out to take advantage.

Game Theory teaches us that trust is the foundation of mutually beneficial relationships. Change begins when we take the calculated risk of sometimes losing in order to create a win-win relationship - the courage to be vulnerable, as Brené Brown would say. The best outcome is only possible through mutually beneficial actions - it’s pure math!

The good news: It seems we're reevaluating the “way it’s always been done”

In the business world, several unilateral practices (which undermine trust!) are now facing major scrutiny. Advertising as interruption rather than entertainment, for instance, is increasingly challenged in terms of effectiveness. Likewise, complicated, obstacle-filled service cancellations are likely seeing their last days, even in the U.S., where mass lawsuits are more common than regulation.

Many of these practices persist because we only measure outcomes that benefit us, overlooking how they impact the other party. Those conducting generic, mass outbound campaigns look at response and open rates but miss executives’ daily complaints on LinkedIn and ignore the silence from those who didn’t respond - a silence that might say a lot! Making cancellations hard temporarily lowers churn but treats customers as hostages, which is a costly strategy in the long run.

The obstacle: loss aversion

In low-trust environments, our natural tendency toward loss aversion - the inclination to fear losses more than to value equivalent gains - becomes heightened. The urge to "secure what’s ours" blinds us to opportunities for mutual gain, especially when those gains are harder to quantify and make bold moves seem like a poor choice. If this is the dominant strategy, could a different approach actually be more rewarding?

How to yield smartly?

Return policies are a great example of balancing collaboration and competition. If they’re too restricted, they stifle purchases; if too open, there’s a risk of abuse by a small minority, which can worsen the experience for everyone. In the U.S., where these policies are generally more open than in Brazil, Walmart recently made a smart adjustment, involving an external partner to track frequent or problematic returners and limit policies only for them. This approach preserves the open policy for everyone else. This principle - avoiding punishing the majority for the actions of a few - can be applied in many other situations.

Trust is built by giving, not by asking

This doesn’t mean saying yes to everything or giving the benefit of the doubt where it isn’t deserved. Trust varies across markets and cultures (each case must be understood!), but certain Game Theory principles apply to nearly all relationships, such as:

• Starting with Collaboration: The best way to start a relationship is by signaling a willingness to collaborate, offering help, showing kindness, and giving before asking.

• Transparency and Direct Communication: Building trust requires clarity and ensuring the other party fully understands without over-promising. Forget the fine print and benefit embellishments.

• Costly Signaling: To convince others of your trustworthiness, show that you’re invested in the relationship with something that matters to them. Lifetime product guarantees or above-market warranties (such as those offered by Korean car manufacturers in their earlier, challenger brand days and now done by Chinese automakers) are classic examples.

• Focus on Reputation and the Long Term: Trust is a repeated game; beyond delighting customers, avoiding actions that undermine trust is essential.

A Brazilian example that checks all these boxes? Nubank.

They started by collaborating with 24/7 customer support via asynchronous chat with no waiting, staffed by people who could genuinely solve clients’ issues. Their communication was clear, without phone trees, hold music, “we’ll be checking on that,” or product-pushing by sales reps. The more informal and fun service style has a charm that made it shareable and has plenty of copycats nowadays. They signaled a costly commitment by eliminating maintenance fees on credit cards and accounts - an innovation that became industry standard for fintechs and something that traditional banks always relied heavily on. Nubank maintained remarkable consistency, never introducing changes too quickly or adding fees that could harm their customer experience or delivery quality, even when the market criticized their post-IPO financial performance.

The result? A user base that grew exponentially through referrals, saving millions on marketing, the highest NPS globally in consumer products & services, and the fourth-largest customer base for banks in Brazil. They shook up a concentrated, closed sector that assumed customer trust was built on lofty branches, assets under management, and legacy - forcing competitors to rethink their approach. Their next step? Helping other companies win clients. Now that they’ve earned trust, they can extend it to others - having a trusted third party can be a valuable Game Theory strategy for signaling reliability. They are an excellent example that betting on the long term and strategically yielding in a low-trust environment is a highly successful strategy.

It’s not just about walking in the other’s shoes - We need to see ourselves from the outside

Customers are friends, not food. | via https://aminoapps.com/

Empathy is often highlighted as the keyword for customer experience. It’s crucial but not enough.

Firstly, because the power imbalance between a brand and an individual is significant, and when we’re on the inside, we tend to overlook this. Secondly, because our biases and internal assumptions make us the easiest people to fool by ourselves - it’s very challenging to clearly see how we’re perceived by others (that’s why we go to therapy!) This is also why a trusted intermediary, capable of earning both sides' trust and deeply understanding both sides is essential for clarity and bursting internal bubbles.

Do you really know what trust means in your market? How would the game change if your clients had greater confidence in what you offer?

If, like us, you believe that happy and satisfied people are the most sustainable growth engine, and you want to explore ways to make that happen, reach out to us - we’re like couples therapy for brands and people!

How did we get here?

Once upon a time, there was an era on the internet where we followed our friends and acquaintances and posted little snippets of our daily lives, sometimes with cute filters for flair.

Since then, things have changed a lot. The introduction of concepts like followers (replacing contacts or friends, hinting at hierarchy) and likes (quantifying external validation) made some people realize how much they loved these little numbers and that they’d be willing to invest significant amounts of time, money, and eventually, do horrible things to increase them. Platforms then decided to show more of these people and organizations to everyone, making them increasingly visible and well-known, with several consequences that brought us to where we are today.

Zuckerberg introduces the “like”. March 10th, 2009. Artistic representation. Via Quora

When we started calling "social networks" "social media" back in the 2010s, we were visionaries. "Networks" were about community, exchange, interconnected individuals, and communication from everyone to everyone - more "peer-to-peer" connections. This still exists but is no longer the dominant dynamic. "Media" suggests a context where few produce and many consume (more "point-to-multipoint", in telecom jargon), and lately, that’s what’s happening - especially considering that the consumption model increasingly leans, on virtually all platforms, toward what is recommended by algorithms rather than being based on who you actually follow. According to a study conducted over 10 years, 85% of YouTube views go to just 3% of channels. A widening gap separates creators from consumers.

Adam, will you please tell folks where is the content from friends and people they follow?

Does that explain why Instagram started showing sharing numbers on posts recently?

Public personas are no one's true self; we are all our own infomercial hosts

As this shift from the "network" phase to the "media" phase was gradual, many people haven’t realized it yet. There are many explanations for this emptying of the digital public space, already discussed in previous editions, but in short: for many people, platforms are increasingly like a huge designated smokers area where many of us, though intoxicated, cannot afford to leave because we need to socialize, be seen, and do business.

It’s safe to assume that most public, non-restricted (to followers) and permanent (not disappearing after a while like Stories) content today is directly or indirectly commercial - it either sells something or seeks to build an audience to eventually sell something. As a result, it’s inherently performative and focused on simulating closeness or spontaneity, much like parasocial interactions from much older channels. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

The real issue is believing that analyzing public data from platforms can deliver spectacular insights like the "pulse of culture" (as if culture didn’t exist outside the platforms!) or a "deep understanding of human beings" (as if our existence were reduced to our public online presence!). Using such analyses as a primary (or worse, the only) decision-making information on customers, with a shrinking (as platforms prevent scraping and fewer people post publicly), dirty (bots, fakes, and AI-produced content), and increasingly performative (driven by commercial interests and parasocial relationship creation) data pool is the digital equivalent of reading tea leaves. There’s no magical AI that will make the raw data overcome inherent limitations. Does this happen because the large numbers of posts, likes, and mentions create an illusion of representativity and relevance? Or because it's easier to measure than things that are actually more important?

A reminder that the world of marketing is a bubble that needs to be intentionally burst. We must be careful with what we believe is "everyone's" opinion.

Our most authentic selves are in private messages, incognito tabs, and personal conversations - not in our feeds.

After countless public statements, including from Brazilian CEOs, rightly condemning yet another provocation from a corporate “agent of chaos” in recent weeks, some reflections remain:

• How much approval and back-patting did this person receive from like-minded individuals in private channels and behind closed doors?

• How many of those who publicly condemned the behavior (signaling virtue and/or self-promoting) don’t actually think the same or exhibit identical behaviors in their private lives?

• When will we collectively understand that, especially on digital platforms, the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference? What makes this kind of revolting strategy work is that a large number of people react as predictably as lab rats being shocked, allowing outrage to be used as a weapon and a growth lever.

The tension between our public and private selves has also moved into the digital space to some extent. And, as it has always been, it’s in the private world where we show who we truly are and feel freer from the judgment of others or what is considered socially acceptable.

Pedro de Santi, an incredible psychology professor that taught during my undergraduate years, used Dangerous Liaisons to explain our public and private selves - I never forgot the richness of this analogy, and I’ll appropriate it here. If public posts are like the opera for the European aristocrats of old, as shown in the film - a place to display social standing, virtue, and power, highly edited versions of ourselves - closed channels are our alcoves, the most intimate room in the house, where life is much more real and uncensored.

Dark social and anonymous public communities = digital alcoves?

An enormous number of movements that seem to have suddenly grown large started in closed or anonymous channels - from anti-vaccination movements to red pills. A particular characteristic of these mediums is that groupthink gains an impressive force, for better or for worse, because of their ability to gather people who already think alike, intensifying confirmation bias and tribalism (something worth keeping in mind if you have or are thinking of creating a longterm community of consumers/users for your brand).

WhatsApp groups have become so influential as a form of private dissemination that the platform was forced to restrict both the maximum number of participants and the sharing limits, playing a critical role in key moments of Brazil's recent history. Email, a channel that numerous gurus have tried to declare dead over the past two decades, is perhaps in its best phase with the growing popularity of newsletters. In anonymous spaces, the influence of chans in meme production and political discourse is notorious, and subreddits like r/WallStreetBets have already sparked significant movements.

In a context where many people hesitate to post publicly due to fear of judgment from others, and where the fear of cancelation shapes much of public opinion, it's reasonable to expect an even greater migration to these channels.

This is why, more than ever, in a context of false consensuses, collective illusions, and with more and more people reevaluating their relationship with or even abandoning social media, and with a rapidly advancing agenda of restricting or banning its use by children and teenagers, we must go beyond the surface level and low hanging fruits.

What lies behind the mask is far more revealing. (via Lionsgate | Columbia Pictures)

Much of what’s relevant to brands already happens far from the surface. If you really want to know how people think and act, you need methods that allow you to peek into the facets of private life, contrast discourse with behavior, understand tacit rituals and rules, symbolic value, and a lot of other fundamental things that don’t appear on your dashboard and can’t always be measured. And even in this highly digital era we live in, some big brands have understood this movement and made it to HBR.

Bonus: Anatomy of a made up trend

The next time you stumble upon a grand “discovery” about the human species where the best evidence is viral posts, activate your critical thinking.

“Tradwives” have been mentioned in the press and on social media as “a wave” of wives defending traditional gender roles, which for them means returning to the 1950s in the Anglo-Saxon world. The truth is, they are literally a handful of “practitioners” of this lifestyle in the US and the UK, including Ballerina Farm (who comes from a Mormon family and therefore didn’t “invent” this lifestyle), Alena Kate Pettitt, and Estee Williams. The three, in their time, enjoyed both temporary fame from press coverage and relentless online criticism that makes all digital metrics skyrocket - just like the case of the “agent of chaos” mentioned earlier in this text.

There are multiple layers of perverse incentives amplifying the reach of these factoids. The creators use the predictable identification on one side and outrage on the other as a form of self-promotion (whether intentionally or not, we can discuss!). Not coincidentally, Ballerina Farm sells products from her farm, and Alena sells etiquette books and courses. Estee Williams seems content with the visibility - for now! If there’s commercial interest involved, it’s safe to assume it’s performative. The media, as always, gives them a platform thinking mostly about views and clicks, not so much about veracity or relevance, publishing articles talking about “movements” with a sample size of 1, using hashtags as evidence.

The real novelty here is that some “insights” providers are calling tradwives a “trend” (out of ignorance or to boost engagement? You decide). It starts with a complete lack of cultural context: being a “tradwife” is still the norm, not the exception, in many places and communities worldwide, particularly in religious ones, even in the West—in some cases by choice, but not in others. No one bothered to check YouTube or TikTok, where much of the highly viewed content consists of criticisms made by Western women, who also benefit directly from the outrage-driven engagement, inflating the numbers on this topic. The comments on the most-watched videos are mostly from people who also think it’s insane or outrageous, so in the end, what generated views, likes, comments, and so on, outside of the creators’ content themselves, were people criticizing, not people wanting to be part of this, which could suggest a trend. Nothing suggests, either among followers of the three or in critics' comments, that anyone was persuaded to adopt this lifestyle because of what they saw!

“But Rodrigo, they have a lot of followers and engagement; it’s impossible they don’t influence anyone!” 

Sure, Dr. Pimple Popper has over 8 million followers just on YouTube, and yet, no one’s saying popping pimples is a trend.

Marketers and insights teams may not have time for fact-checking, but they can always choose better sources and providers.

“Caturra” organic bananas - grown to the sound of classical music

Outside mass retail (farmers’ markets, supermarkets, lower end clothing retailers, etc.), it seems that Brazilian entrepreneurs and brands have a tendency to justify higher prices rather than focus on volume and value. Of course, a history of constant economic instability and one of the highest income concentrations in the world certainly have a role, but since this behavior isn't exclusive to companies, it warrants reflection on what cultural traits of ours might be related to this.

"Let's see if it sticks" might be a cultural norm, but it's not a good pricing or positioning strategy.

A recent study by Quinto Andar (Brazil’s largest proptech) shows that 54% of properties for sale and 37% of those for rent are priced above market level, and the result is that, in addition to taking longer to sell or rent, these properties are more heavily discounted the longer they stay on the platform. This suggests that these owners' strategies have a very different effect than expected. Is it a case of "let's see if it sticks"? Is it trying to pass the bag to a greater fool? Is it an overly dramatic loss aversion? Is sentimental value being factored into the price?

“Hey bro, how much for the bananas?” “DM me”

Another bad pricing practice, so universal that it has become a meme, is "price through inbox," (asking the seller privately) which is even prohibited by the Brazilian Consumer Defense Code. Could it be a way to protect the desired price from public negotiation? To inhibit comparison? To price differently based on the seller's affinity with the buyer or to maintain margins when selling to a stranger?

Both in the case of real estate and sales through inboxes, there are traces of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda's (one of the most important Brazilian historians and a cornerstone in understanding Brazilian identity) "cordial man": personalism, emotion over reason, and irreverence. From a more strategic point of view, there is also a somewhat impractical individualism and an inability to see the offer from the buyer's perspective.

The very idea of "gourmetization," which became popular about ten years ago (perhaps as a consequence of our 2014-16 crisis?), has a negative connotation and is linked to price - costs and pretentious discourse rise (which is what would justify the spending), but not necessarily the perceived value of what is being delivered. This is another sign, in business and not just in individuals, of how common this disconnect is, and how overpromising invariably leads to disappointment. Even the idea of a "marketing play," as it is popularly used, suggests a well-told lie and that marketing is more about the promise than the delivery - does it have to be that way?

Nowadays in marketing, where so many people are looking for "triggers" and "hacks" (often euphemisms for ways to deceive others, magical thinking disguised as shortcuts, or both), proposing something that seems fair and has credible appeal to buyers almost seems revolutionary.

On the other hand, there are extremely successful and long-lasting value propositions that go in the opposite direction, such as Costco - there, the offers are so well-evalued that what actually pays the company's bills are the memberships paid by customers, who feel they are making an excellent deal to have access to them.

What if we consider promising less and delivering more?

A value proposition that is only credible within the business itself is a huge risk because the moment it is communicated directly or indirectly, it sets an expectation that is either met or frustrated by the customer's experience, the famous "moment of truth." This is the mental calculation that determines recurrence and recommendation. Every marketer worth their salt should always remember that satisfaction is expectations minus reality.

Nash won a Nobel Prize by mathematically demonstrating that pursuing self-interest alone rewards less than negotiating a win-win. The problem is that reaching a mutually beneficial outcome is more work because it's not about telling others what is good for them, but about understanding exactly (not assuming!) what they truly value. This involves being willing to be wrong, not underestimating the other person's intelligence, and creating contexts that give people space to make sincere and direct criticisms in their own words - somewhat like couples therapy. If this sounds like qualitative research conducted by a neutral and experienced external partner, instead of echoing the false consensus of corporate corridors or performative opinions on social media, it's not by chance.

Long story short, if you're working on something with a premium value proposition or where price is not the main attraction, perhaps the most important thing to do is to ensure it stands up as an offer in the mind of the target audience, not just in your own, especially in a culture where "let's see if it sticks" is so prevalent and giving harsh and direct criticism in person is uncommon or frowned upon. Many customers simply don't provide feedback on frustrating experiences. Like in other types of relationships, those who complain or argue still have hope of resolving or improving things - the disillusioned just take their stuff and leave.

We urgently need to change the way we think and act about an issue that affects all of us and is advancing at an impressive speed, visibly changing the landscape of Brazil. Am I talking about climate change? No. Although I could be, the subject of this column is something else.

The speed of the aging population in Brazil has surprised even the researchers at IBGE involved in the last Census. Although the proportion of people over 65 is growing rapidly, demanding many adjustments both in the private sector and in public policies, the big news that isn't being reported enough is that in a few years, Brazil will be predominantly a middle-aged country.

By 2040, 60% of the country's workforce will be 45 years or older.

Women over 40 are the only age group where the number of children is increasing. These are two signs indicating the urgency of changing how we view this stage of life.

Overlooked and undervalued in the job market, with consequences that affect the entire society.

Despite this reality approaching inevitably and rapidly, the job market is not responding. Reaching 40, or even less in some sectors, sets off the alarm about the risk of replacement and much greater difficulties in re-entering the workforce, sometimes due to pure prejudice, other times due to companies' unwillingness to pay for more experienced professionals.

The economic impact of this is already severe today - Brazilians aged 41 to 60 are the largest group when it comes to credit restrictions due to debt. They are also often financially responsible for both their children, who are also in a tough situation (as one-fifth of young Brazilians are "neither studying nor working"), and increasingly for their older parents. And when this group becomes the majority, what then?

Perhaps this age-based exclusion would make some sense if we were talking about jobs requiring significant physical exertion or some Olympic sports. But in intellectual or creative work, where many reach their peak later in life?

Representation in advertising - non-existent or based on outdated or imported clichés.

Advertising, with rare exceptions, is a hostile place for middle-aged individuals, under the guise of being "in tune with the culture," based on the absurd premise that older adults are not part of the culture, do not have or participate in their own culture, or necessarily want to participate in the culture as younger people do, or consider what younger people consume to be aspirational in some way, or that culture and trending topics are the same thing, none of which is supported by any evidence. PowerPoint slides really accept anything.

An idea of a midlife crisis imported from the developed world, particularly from the U.S., still serves as the backdrop for understanding this stage of life, with little or no connection to the financial possibilities and what is actually happening in people's lives here, exacerbating this detachment from reality.

The clichés in portraying middle-aged adults, when it happens, are very common: out-of-touch, dated, falling behind in technology, ridiculous, uninteresting, limited to parental roles, rarely protagonists, and often asexual. Normal and biological things like baldness and perimenopause are frequently ridiculed or stigmatized, rather than embraced.

Wouldn't a more honest and truthful representation of these individuals show them as more concerned with family and professional responsibilities than with the insecurities of youth, more pragmatic in their relationships with new trends, more self-assured in their style and way of presenting themselves to the world, and therefore less interested in fleeting fads? How did we get here?

The root of the problem: the place of middle age in culture.

In a country that has been predominantly young for much of its recent history, the dominant narrative about middle age is marked by a perspective coming from the worst of the stereotypical teenager or young person: arrogant, condescending, and full of judgments - almost everything associated with youth and almost nothing associated with maturity is good.

Perhaps that's why we've accepted crude ideas like "we all want to be young" as if they were brilliant insights. In reality, what we want is not to be social outcasts and stigmatized after a certain age, to not have our behaviors judged and constrained by arbitrary and stifling tacit rules about what is acceptable at a certain age, and also to maintain our vitality and health for as long as possible. Facing numerous professional, personal, and financial challenges, already dealing with some of life's imposed frustrations (unlike the young who inhabit a world of infinite potential), having to deal with others' condescending attitudes is too much to ask.

The curious thing is that the semantic associations with maturity are so negative that even younger people are affected - evidenced by the increasingly early start of "rejuvenating" and preventive surgeries and treatments.

To make matters worse, part of the contemporary discourse vilifies older adults as bearers of power and makers of the really important decisions, and although this is somewhat true (yes, a large number of political and business leaders are middle-aged) - most people in this stage of life in Brazil do not hold this kind of power and are merely juggling many responsibilities and trying to do their best for their families, in all their various definitions and arrangements.

But there are other possible paths. The contrast with other cultures with larger older populations, such as in Asia and parts of Italy, is striking - the experience and social role of older adults are reasons for reverence, not ridicule, and this different perspective positively impacts the quality of life for everyone.

From a certain angle, being middle-aged is more "revolutionary" or countercultural than youth itself, with so many codes of belonging and so much insecurity about one's place in the world. Caring less about others' opinions as a sign of maturity is a common theme among older adults, and few things can be more authentic and genuinely rebellious than that.

But what can we do about this NOW?

It's time to reflect more on the tired jokes and clichés we ourselves replicate. It's time to stop trying to explain the complexity and richness of the human experience through reductionist ideas that lump billions of individuals together. It's time to abandon the view of mature life from the narcissistic and self-referential perspective of the stereotypical young person. It's time to question the unproven idea of the aspirationality of youth consumption. It's time to understand, with data and research and not with clichés and unfounded theories, the pains and pleasures of a stage of life that we will all go through, in unique circumstances due to all the major transformations we are experiencing.

Some of our habits and worldviews are immediately impacted by technology. Babies trying to use books and magazines as if they were touchscreens and the introduction of the internet to the Marubo people, an indigenous ethnic group in the deep Amazon (a great read!) are excellent examples. Others, less visible to the naked eye but even more impactful, manifest in ways that we do not always quickly notice. One of the latter is explored by Jonathan Haidt's latest book, The Anxious Generation, which quickly became a bestseller because it really touched a nerve, in spite of legitimate criticism. Another, which seems to be little discussed, is how the role of silence, especially in instant messaging, has changed our way of communicating.

From synchronous conversations with beginning, middle, and end to chronic connection and unexpected silences

Instant messaging conversations on mobile platforms, particularly in a country like Brazil where WhatsApp dominance is absolute (on 98% of phones!), are continuous, almost always with no closure. Often there's "hi," but very rarely a "goodbye" or "we'll talk later" - silence, for an indefinite period, can come at any moment. This is in stark contrast to other types of social contact. People generally do not leave social situations without saying goodbye - and leaving silently is often seen as rude. In phone conversations, people say goodbye - and hanging up abruptly is openly hostile. Even in instant messaging via PC from the youth of today's thirty and forty-somethings, being offline meant being unavailable and it was common to say goodbye at the end of a conversation. Silence was predictable and agreed upon; conversations had an end.

Unlike other means, there is no universal etiquette 

Brazilians were recently mentioned by Mark Zuckerberg as the most frequent users of WhatsApp audio messages in the world, four times more than in other countries. An empathetic view would emphasize accessibility issues (physical difficulty in reading or typing) and educational issues (functional illiteracy, low writing fluency, and text interpretation ability). While this view is legitimate, these are characteristics we share with many other developing countries with similar problems, where this heavy use of audio does not happen. A more cynical but not untruthful view would emphasize prioritizing one's own convenience, and in turn, signaling the recipient's convenience matters less ("I'll send a voice note because it's easier" - easier for whom?), reinforcing the lack of civility that unfortunately characterizes us as a culture. What seems certain is that the absence of universal etiquette in this type of communication creates tension and frustrates both senders and receivers - the latter seemingly more so.

This absence of etiquette seems to be problematic not only in Brazil and it’s clear relying on common sense is not enough. Several countries around the world, including many in the European Union and Latin America, such as Germany, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, and Chile, prohibit bosses from sending messages to their employees outside of working hours or exempt the employees from responding without any type of punishment, in what is called the "right to disconnect."

There are also no explicit or implicit codes about response time or about whom we actually need to respond to. Basic rules of human courtesy simply have not translated to instant messaging. Dealing with the other people’s unexpected silence without explanation or any expectation management has become routine.

The absence of norms amplifies passive aggression and the tactical use of silence on one side and makes us more prone to take things personally on the other

When silence becomes unexpected, it is easily used as a weapon or misinterpreted.

The very wave of terms to describe problematic online behaviors has unwanted or unexpected silence as a central theme. Ghosting (leaving the other in permanent silence suddenly, disappearing like a ghost), orbiting (those who signal interest with online interactions but instead of getting closer, remain silent - i.e. "sends fire emojis on my stories but makes no concrete move"), breadcrumbing (keeping the other interested with as little effort as possible, using silence tactically) - are fundamentally about silence.

Many of these terms appeared in the context of romantic relationships but also apply to family and friends or even professional relationships. You know that friend who likes every one of your posts but never invites you for anything? Or the one who takes weeks to respond to a message? And that client who never gets back to you about the proposal you spent the entire week working on?

From the silence of others comes uncertainty, lack of closure, and different interpretations of the situation of a relationship - From the recipient’s perspective, silence is a Rorschach test (you know, the one where you say what you see in inkblots?) - it reflects our fears and expectations more than the actual meaning and does not necessarily express the senders' intention. "No" or an open rejection often feel better - at least we’re rid from doubt.

In a way, the unpredictable silence of others is the price we pay as individuals for the right to be unavailable whenever we want since perpetual connection is the rule. Was that worth it?

Silence and power asymmetry - a long-standing relationship 

In relationship games, those who intentionally make themselves less available inflate their perceived value. The timing and circumstances of this availability is a powerful non-verbal language, depending on the maturity and interest of those involved. Being able to afford not to respond to a particular person also has an aspect of power asymmetry and hierarchy. A candidate not responding to a company during a selection process is disqualifying, the company not responding to a candidate is practically standard. A client not responding to a supplier may be okay circumstantially, but how do we treat a supplier not responding to a client?

The problem with indefinite silence being the new standard is that it is harder to give others benefit of the doubt. The way we interpret silence shapes our expectations and reactions. Are they playing us? Are they treating us as inferior? Are they still invested in the relationship? Is this making us more paranoid, insecure, and anxious? And on the other hand, how do we signal others that we are just silent or temporarily unavailable but we care?

A UX problem and a problem of empathy coherence 

WhatsApp has allowed marking messages as unread since 2016, but the feature to filter unread messages was only introduced this year. Gmail sometimes highlights messages you received or sent that have not been responded to. LinkedIn recently started showing reminders about unanswered private messages, certainly for improving response rates for B2B outreaches, a fundamental part of its business. These features make failing to respond to others due to disorganization or accident harder, but much more can be done in user experience to prevent unintentional "ghosting." It is incredible how small adjustments like these change social dynamics and the lives of billions of people and the weight of the responsibility of taking care of such widely used products.

At work, it’s a good time to reflect on coherence and treat others as we would like to be treated, sending or receiving. You should not complain about being approached too much on LinkedIn and approve telemarketing campaigns that call people multiple times a day or at very inconvenient hours. You should not complain about the silence of other people if you send generic outreach messages and follow up in 2-3 days, with the terrible subtext for your recipients that your time is more valuable than theirs - the truth is quite the opposite. It is another effect of the McNamara fallacy in action - these are things that seem reasonable just looking at the numbers because we do not measure how they make people feel.

On a more individual front, we need to reflect on the impact our silence has on others, assuming it is easier to be misinterpreted. In a context of increasing loneliness, fewer close friends and deteriorating mental health, communication that is more mindful of the expectations of others can make silence what white space is to design - the frame that provides contrast and allows the content to shine, not a source of anxiety and insecurity.

For much of what we consume, the increasing number of possible choices can bring more anxiety or paralysis than pleasure.

What am I going to do with all this freedom?

On streaming services, many of us spend more time searching for what to watch than actually watching something. On food delivery apps, the most indecisive users are weak from hunger by the time their food arrives because they are paralyzed by so many options. On dating apps, perhaps the most emblematic example of how more choices don’t necessarily bring more fulfillment or the perfect match, frustration is so widespread (hello, ensh*ttification) that many people are looking for other ways to meet new people.

This is despite the fact that in all three cases, powerful recommendation algorithms are essential parts of the product. However, there are many purchasing contexts where such resources cannot be used, whether due to very infrequent purchases or third-party controlled non-digital channels.

We think we want abundance - until the excess of alternatives leaves us paralyzed or constantly dissatisfied, thinking we could have made better choices. "The Paradox of Choice," written in 2004 by Barry Schwartz, explains that while autonomy and freedom of choice are critical to our well-being, having too many options is more of a problem than a solution and dives deeply into this topic.

With the abundance of choices becoming more the rule than the exception in consumption, the consequence is that helping people choose is a fundamental task that many brands still underestimate. Shall we discuss some possible paths?

Curation can help, but those doing it must deeply understand their users

The obvious answer is curation, but the challenge lies in execution. The digital influence market itself was built around the idea of recommendations from someone who seems close and trustworthy. But as the market grows, the biggest influencers are increasingly relegated to brand awareness roles, speaking to audiences too broad to create closeness or identification. In other words, they are increasingly similar to the old and familiar celebrity endorsements, which have their own limitations - does anyone believe Cristiano Ronaldo uses Herbalife? Some suggest the solution is to work with smaller-scale content creators to foster proximity and trust, but the truth is that in most cases, the recommendations that matter most come from people who truly know us. The legitimacy of a recommendation is proportional to how well the context of the recipient is understood.

Streamlining portfolios

At the height of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) era, radical streamlining or simplification of portfolios took off as a strategy in categories where the pain of choice is one of the biggest challenges of the journey, such as mattresses.

Emma, Zissou, and Casper all have much leaner portfolios with less technical descriptions than the old school brands. In consumer electronics, Apple still stands out for the simplicity of its lines in a sea of products with alphabet soup names forcing buyers to read and understand specifications to know how they differ.

This path makes sense particularly in categories where buyers are forced to learn technical aspects they may not necessarily be interested in and in products with higher spending and risk of regret (consumer electronics, major appliances, custom furniture, etc.).

In categories where the decision process is complicated and time-consuming, word of mouth and, consequently, recommendations from friends and acquaintances carry even more weight. Investing in not frustrating the expectations of potential recommenders is possibly one of the most effective communication investments you can make. This brings us to…

Managing expectations

If satisfaction is the distance between expectation and reality, our ability to set expectations before the sale is directly related to how our delivery will be received by the customer.

The Japanese are masters at this. Besides the legal obligation to represent products proportionally and truthfully on packaging, it’s very common for restaurants to have mockups of dishes and detailed photo menus, eliminating classic frustrations about portion size or not matching customer expectations.

In products involving taste, it’s common to use radar charts with flavor characteristics - everything to ensure buyers know what to expect.

Tangibilizing benefits from their perspective and selling the result, not the feature

This image has gone viral on LinkedIn numerous times and is already a cliché in some circles, particularly B2B and SaaS - for a good reason.

One problem with selling features instead of results is that we assume the buyer understands the feature, cares about it, and believes it will make a difference in the outcome they are seeking.

Building on the idea that selling is not about pushing the product but helping interested buyers choose, if you don’t truly know where your customer wants to go, why do you think they will let your brand guide them there?

Presenting your own offer comparatively

You know those feature matrices with different plans that SaaS companies always use on their pricing pages? They apply to many other circumstances. Below, Western Rise, a menswear brand specializing in travelers, explains the differences between their pants in a way that would be impossible to understand just from photos or individual descriptions:

If a doubt or question derails the journey, forcing the person to search on YouTube, TikTok, or another channel to see a third-party opinion, the brand has already lost control of the narrative and risks being compared with others— why leave this flank open?

In broader product lines or those that might compete with each other, these comparisons should be the norm, at least to avoid doubts within a brand’s offerings. Not explaining characteristics clearly is a missed upsell opportunity and, online, without salespeople and with limited sensory experience, everything that tangibilizes physical and sensory aspects is welcome. Want to reduce returns and exchanges, increase satisfaction, and amplify recommendations? This could be a path.

Your customers should not be forced to know how to evaluate technical qualities (and if they know, chances are your brand is already being directly compared with others). Speaking of technical attributes…

The obvious often needs to be said

One of the most common misunderstandings companies have about the humans on the outside is overestimating both the interest and repertoire regarding categories and brands. Those who work with paints know the exact difference between satin, matte, and semi-matte and the ideal uses for each. Those who work in textiles know the difference between French terry and flannel. It’s understandable - if we spend all day talking about the same subject, we end up taking our own reference as a rule.

The problem is assuming that potential buyers, possibly first-timers, already know the technicalities or letting them discover through a random third party, or worse, through a competitor. Teaching can be a fundamental part of building trust.

Is the way your offer is presented today helping or hindering your buyers’ choices?

At Zeitgeist, we have worked with all kinds of complex products and services, from neurological medications to highly specialized B2B services, and we have extensive experience in creating bridges between people's needs and expectations and what your brand can offer. Have a similar challenge? Talk to us.

Many businesses, in their search for profitability, seek efficiency. For some, this means reducing their products or services to the bare minimum acceptable to their customers. For online platforms in particular, this phenomenon has a name: "ensh*ttification" — a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow in 2022 to describe the lifecycle of these platforms. Initially, they are useful and beneficial to users, but eventually, they start exploiting these same users, favoring corporate clients and shareholders, and gradually deteriorate in quality, leaving people without alternatives until they become completely irrelevant and die. This concept became so prominent online that it was selected as the Word of the Year in 2023 by the American Dialect Dictionary.

In some ways, this idea isn't entirely new - consumer goods companies have replaced ingredients for cheaper versions in their products to improve margins for decades. This is how we got beer made out of corn and chocolate that is essentially hydrogenated fat. The difference is that when the perception of quality loss becomes widespread, the market self-regulates in various ways: internally (by making the previous quality a premium segment, using "100% malt" as a claim, or bean-to-bar chocolates as a fast-growing niche, etc.), or externally (through regulation or mass migration to other competitors).

However, things are more complicated now: we are essentially discussing monopolies or products without alternatives, or services where the loss of quality is only noticed when it's too late, given the speed at which this is happening.

More becomes less

There has been a noticeable drop in the quality of Google's search results, partially due to a flood of content produced by LLMs. Google has acknowledged this and is trying to address it in various ways.

"Books" entirely written by generative AI are being sold on Amazon. In some cases, fraudsters attribute the work to well-known authors, with little or no response from the company.

Similarly, the press has also succumbed to the “more, faster” syndrome, with quality as an afterthought. Edward Zitron went through this in detail and eloquently summarized it:

As a consequence, it happened to trends — Matt Klein was the first to raise the alarm. There’s an alignment of perverse incentives for more and more data-poor hogwash disguised as "trends" to be published because it is known that its a hot subject for attention. Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf?

On a broader interpretation of this concept, it has also come for apparel. The average American buys 68 pieces a year (2018), five times more than in the 1980s. The forces that have pushed the market in this direction have redefined expectations of price, quality, and durability - this is one of the major risks of an "enshittified" sector: lowering the bar. Patagonia understands this and is attempting to address it.

The bad news is, as some of the examples above illustrate, AI has shown that its downside emerges much sooner than other very impactful technologies like social media. Also noteworthy is how (the misuse of) AI plays a key role in replacing quality with volume.

The good news is that when this deterioration occurs, there is room for someone to occupy the diametrically opposite space (as the brilliant Al Ries once said), if the barriers of entry are not insurmountable - a big IF.

What About Insights and Understanding People?

In the business of understanding people, regardless of the discipline - be it UX, CX, or market research — the same pattern of uncritical acceptance of one-sided opportunism is already unfolding, with several platforms promising miraculous solutions. This field is particularly vulnerable to ensh*ttification because the consequences of poor decisions only become apparent after the damage has already been done, and unfortunately, there are many uninformed buyers out there. It's very telling that many promise "faster and cheaper," but few promise "better." Seth Godin has a brilliant quote on this.

Some platforms, with promises clearly detached from reality, have already angered professionals in research, UX, and CX across the internet. What this anger overlooks is the most problematic part: the target audience for these businesses are those who think they already understand, who cannot assess quality, those who think it takes too long, those who think it's unnecessary, those who do not understand how this work is done, or generally, amateurs with an unjustifiable excess of self-esteem, not the experts who should (or supposedly do) know better. Herein lies the danger - what happens if we “ensh*ttify” the people and the departments who ensure connection with the needs and expectations of those paying the bills, and as a result, protect the company from ensh*ttification? We have a huge collective responsibility here.

The outcome of using any platform depends on prior knowledge, meaning if you're not an expert, don't expect any tool to make you one. Perhaps the best practical example is generative image tools — designers, photographers, artists, and those with a solid repertoire of illustration techniques, camera angles, and photographic styles achieve much better results than the generic robot images and blue-tinted dashboards that have flooded LinkedIn recently (apparently, nobody read about distinctive assets), often accompanied by posts that seem to have been written by Mojo Jojo. Similarly, a better repertoire implies a much greater ability to assess quality and know what is "good enough."

And now what? 

Messiah-like promises and hyperbolic speech are red flags in almost everything - this subject should be no different.

Critical thinking and parsimony are much more reliable guides for dealing with new technological possibilities than the amygdala and euphoria - as the dot com era investors can attest. Common sense suggests controlled experiments and circumstances where inputs and outcomes can be compared and focusing on improving efficiency in operational aspects rather than intellectual ones until quality is benchmarked. An objective evaluation is only possible when you know exactly what you're sacrificing.

When budgets are tight, there are multiple alternatives to consider: hiring part-time professionals, freelancers, converting certain deliverables into an "as a service" model, among others. Relying on unprepared individuals supported by tools or completely delegating the work to platforms are the worst possible alternatives - even worse than doing nothing. If the result of our work is to make better decisions, doing nothing and assuming ignorance is much better than relying on synthetic evidence and dubious data - this holds true for qualitative as well.

It's also important to consider the flip side of the democratization discourse — the populist tone masks that expertise and experience become worthless, quality doesn't matter, and radically underestimates the complexity of things - "it's simple, you can do it too." Even though commercial aircraft spend over 90% of flight time on autopilot, pilot training takes about 1500 hours. Why would a critical function like connecting people's needs with business objectives be okay to delegate to laypeople?

There is a potential wonderful future with a lot less operational work, more complete views of the people we need to understand, and possibly better discoveries, but its arrival depends on us not believing in magical solutions. Stopping the ensh*ittification depends a lot on these choices—and there's a lot at stake!

5 Questions for… Els Dragt

Els Dragt is an Amsterdam based independent trend researcher with over twenty years of experience in spotting and analysing seeds of change. 

At , she currently focuses on training people how to research trend themselves. Some of clients include Harbour of Antwerp, Swinkels Family Brewers, Manchester City Football Group and the Dutch government. As a guest lecturer Els shares her expertise at various universities worldwide where they use her 3-phased trend method in their study programs.

Els is an author of several research publications, such as ‘How to Research Trends’ and ‘Dare to Ask’ (BIS Publishers).  She’s recently revised “How to research trends” with new sections focused on people working in companies (vs. agencies or researchers) and how they can integrate trend capabilities and trend skills in their businesses - so more focus on team activities and on setting up a trend department or community of practice from within.

There's been some discussion particularly among strategists on how trending is often mistaken for trends nowadays. How and where do you draw the line?

ELS: Yeah, I think that's always a balancing act in because in the media a lot of people of course hear the word trend often in a different context than we as trend researchers use it.

I think we use it in a more wider, with a more wider meaning. So for instance, when I use the word trend, I mean like shifting values and needs, whereas in the media they are often talking about trends in a more micro way. So that would be maybe my line drawing, whereas I don't like to focus only on the micro trends, the hypes, the fads, whatever core hashtag is trending.

So it's not about trend or trending, but about shifting values and needs, which moves more, evolves more slowly than hypes and fads, but also stays on for a longer time.

How would you define rigor in trend research in your investigation practice? 

ELS: I think that by triangulating your methods, so working in a mixed method way, so doing field research, doing desk research, and also using a lot of different sources across industries, that really helps to have rigor in your trend research than just having three signals that are very micro and just following whatever they are saying. So yeah, I think this combination of expanding your sources, really trying to get information from all kinds of different places about emerging signs of change, and also showing how you've done the research, so be very transparent in your research methods, will help to create more rigor and more richness in your trend research.

What would you consider the most transformative or influential non-tech trends at the moment? 

ELS: I’m always kind of wary about questions where people ask me about the most influential trends, because then my worry is always that people will just want to hear about one or two trends, and then, you know, miss out on everything else. I think the goal of doing trend research is to show you all the different types of directions the future might go into, and that it's not just one linear direction with just one trend leading the way, but of course I understand why you ask, and especially the non-tech trend part I find interesting, because when you do trend research where you focus on shifts in values and needs, the focus also lies on, you know, values and needs, and not so much on what can help you to fulfill these needs, like technology is just more a means  to fulfill a need, than that it's the core of the way that I would do trend research, so I never have like specific tech trends in my overview. Of course there are signals that relate to technology or like megatrends in there, but at the core I never really have like tech driven trends.

But to give an example, so when we talk about AI for instance, or what's happening in the metaverse, or this kind of stuff, I would call it more like people seeking for enriched sensory experiences, or more of hybrid reality kind of experiences, where they can have seamless interactions with each other in a more enriched way, than that I would say like the core is, the trend is the metaphors, if you catch my drift. Okay this is maybe a bit of a fake answer, or not very concrete, but I hope you can do something with it.

What sort of advice and tips would you give to people that are end users of trend research like marketers, strategists and others in the business world? How can they separate the wheat from the chaff? 

ELS: I think what I said with question one is that it's better not to just follow whatever it is being hyped on socials or in the media. At least when you are an organization that wants to work more long term and take the long view, then it's better not to focus too much on these hypes and just look beyond all the shiny things that are dubbed as trends. The focus more on what kind of cultural shifts are beneath all these new behaviors, styles, gadgets, mindsets, so to really understand what's going on.

So I think and what I propagate is: please have some people with trend related skills in your company. They don't have to be like 24-7 trend watchers, but like a marketing person that also knows about trends or strategies, that also knows about trend theory, because these types of capabilities will help your company to understand better what to do with trends, that's in the end the goal: how to use trend insights in the best way. Yeah, so my advice would be, in your hiring process, to also include these kind of capabilities.

What's something that's going on at your particular place in the world right now that you think could or should become relevant trends?

ELS: I'm located in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and I think a lot of things going on right here are focused, of course, on very political things going on, in the sense of war and power dynamics and also about emergence of right wing politics, because people are looking for guidance in this very complex world. So I can also feel that over here, and also because of the cost of living is getting higher. So I'm a bit wary about this movement going on, because when you look into history, you know, not a lot of good things came out of depression… economy, depression combined with complexity in the world and people's feelings about it.

So, yeah, what can become relevant trends? That's a hard question, I think, to answer when you're in the midst of it. But I also maybe I like to focus on the hopeful thing. So I also see a lot of initiatives emerging that are actually like countering polarization here, you know, kind of more focusing on empathy, exchange between people, listening to others, and also maybe more conscious about like data and data tracking and how it can be used in more aware and conscious ways.