The Problem With Racing to the Bottom?

 

You might win. Then what?

 

” We need to be more competitive on price “, is a common refrain heard in brand and board rooms. Most people in the room nod, effectively paving the way for what I call long polite brand suicide.

 

Discounting Is Not A Strategy. It Is An Apology

 

Very few will admit that they are running this race-where the prize is margin destruction, commoditization, and the haunting sound of customers who only show up when you’re desperate enough to go lower.

 

Look at what happened to Kodak. Not the camera story — the other one. In the 1980s, they quietly crushed their film margins trying to out price Fuji on retail shelves. They won the price war. They lost the brand. When digital arrived, there was nothing left to defend. No premium, no loyalty, no fortress. Just a company that had trained its customers to see it as cheap.

 

Or consider Spirit Airlines in the USA. — the poster child of the race to the absolute bottom. Zero frills. Zero loyalty. Operationally brilliant. Strategically catastrophic. Passengers didn’t love Spirit. They used Spirit the way you use a gas station bathroom — reluctantly, never returning unless completely desperate. In 2024, they filed for bankruptcy. The bottom had a floor. They found it.

 

Truth Be Told

When you compete on price, you hand your competitors a weapon. Every time you drop yours, you tell the market your value isn’t real — it was just a number you made up and now you’re taking it back.

 

Meanwhile, Liquid Death — canned water, aggressively priced at premium — turned H₂O into a $700M brand by refusing to race anyone anywhere except up. They didn’t have a better product. They had a better story, better attitude, better audacity. They made water feel like rebellion.

 

That’s the game worth playing.

 

The Market Will Always Find Someone Willing To Go Lower Than You

 

Your job is to make price irrelevant. The brands that outlast market chaos aren’t the cheapest. They’re the most believed in. They’ve built something competitors can’t photocopy: meaning, mythology, a reason to exist beyond the transaction. Harley-Davidson doesn’t sell motorcycles. It sells the last legally acceptable form of rebellion for middle-aged accountants. Try undercutting that.

 

So what do you do instead of racing? You build altitude. You make your brand the one people seek out, aspire to, defend in conversations they didn’t start. You stop chasing the bottom and start owning a summit nobody else is climbing.

 

The Most Dangerous Trophy In Business? The First Place At The Bottom

 

Welcome to the slowest suicide in business: winning the race to the bottom. No spreadsheet will tell you:

 

When price becomes your story, you become forgettable. When you become forgettable, you become replaceable.

 

And replaceable things don’t get chosen.
They get swapped.

 

The Seduction of Cheap

 

Cheap feels like a shortcut.
Fast traction. Quick wins. Volume spikes that look like victory.

 

Until the day you realise you’ve trained your customer to never love you… only tolerate you.

 

Airlines did it. Then had to invent “priority boarding” just to sell dignity back to people.

 

Streaming platforms did it. Then bundled, unbundled, rebundled like confused DJs remixing their own funeral.

 

Every time you drop your price, you’re not just shaving margin.
You are shaving meaning.

 

The Physics of the Bottom

At the bottom, three laws apply:

  1. Gravity wins. There’s always someone willing to go cheaper. Usually with less to lose.
  2. Differentiation dies. You can’t out-story a discount.
  3. Loyalty evaporates. Deal-seekers don’t stay. They migrate.

 

So yes, you can win the race. You just inherit a finish line where no one claps.

 

We’ve All Guzzled The Gospel

 

“Compete on cost! Undercut the competition!” It’s the siren’s song of desperate boardrooms and spreadsheet jockeys. But here’s the gut-punch wisdom: The problem with racing to the bottom is that you might win. And victory? It’s a trapdoor to commoditized hell—where margins evaporate, loyalty’s a myth, and you’re just another faceless widget in the bargain bin.

 

Ever seen airlines turn cabin into a cattle class? Ryanair strips seats to skeletons, charges for air. Passengers cheer the “deal,” then rage at the regret. Offbeat benchmark: Compare that to Singapore Airlines’ suites—pricey, yes, but they own the sky because they race to the top of desire. Or take Zomato vs. the roadside dabba: One feeds hunger; the other feeds souls with stories, quirks, and that viral biryani flex.

 

Have you considered this? Why do 90% of “budget” brands vanish in 5 years? Because cheap erodes soul. Wisdom weighs in: True brands build moats of meaning—wit that winks, wisdom that whispers, weight that anchors.

 

The SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story Reframe: Don’t Compete Down. Design Up

If your strategy can be undercut overnight, it’s not a strategy. It’s a placeholder. Really, I mean it.

Here’s what can be the sharper playbook:

  • Move from Price to Proof
    Make your value visible. Demonstrable. Unignorable.
  • Engineer Emotional Moats
    Utility gets you trials. Meaning gets you tribes.
  • Create Asymmetric Advantages
    Own something competitors can’t copy at speed: a ritual, a worldview, a signature experience.
  • Redefine the Category Math
    Don’t be cheaper toothpaste. Be oral wellness. Don’t be budget stay. Be mindful escape.
  • Audit Your Discounts Like Debt
    Every discount you give, ask: what long-term perception did we just borrow against?

 

Examine The Brands That Refused the Slide

 

The most enduring brands don’t fight on price.
They fight on perception.

They charge for:

  • Certainty in a chaotic world
  • Identity in a commoditised category
  • Belonging in a lonely marketplace

They don’t sell cheaper. They sell clearer.

 

And clarity commands a premium.

 

And For All The 25 to 70% Off Brigade 14 Months In A Year

 

The bottom is crowded. The top is quiet. And weirdly, it’s cheaper to get there than you think—just not in the way spreadsheets measure.

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

Your biggest breakthrough is currently filed under ‘didn’t work’

 

This is a love letter to side effects, happy accidents and the universe’s finest screw ups. BY design, NOT by accident. I dare add.

 

Side Effects Are The Main Event

 

Circa 1989. Pfizer’s lab technicians were hunting for a heart drug. What they got instead was a global cultural phenomenon, four-letter word jokes, and an industry worth $5 billion. The original compound — Sildenafil — was a disappointing chest pain treatment. It barely moved the needle on angina. What it moved, however, was everything else. The clinical trial patients, when asked to return their unused pills, reportedly refused.

 

Read that again. They refused.

 

Pfizer wasn’t trying to fix bedrooms. They were chasing blood pressure. Then boom—Sildenafil blushes its way into history as Viagra. Little wonder patients refused to return the pills.

 

That’s not a side effect. That’s the universe writing you a Post-it Note in capital letters saying: Hey genius, you’re looking at the wrong problem.

 

The prognosis: the “error” got the applause. The obstacle was never the obstacle. The wrong door was always the right hallway.

 

Speaking of Post-it Notes — Dr Spencer Silver at 3M in 1968 was trying to create the world’s strongest adhesive. He made the world’s weakest one instead. An adhesive that stuck gently and peeled off cleanly. For six years, nobody cared. Then Art Fry, a fellow 3M researcher, got annoyed that his church choir bookmarks kept falling out of his hymnal. He remembered Silver’s “failed” glue. Stuck it to paper. Stuck that paper to his hymnal. Discovered that 50 billion Post-it Notes would eventually be sold every year.

 

Six years. The answer sat in the drawer for six years waiting for the right question to show up. Its now iconic Canary Yellow color was chosen by happenstance — a lab next door only had scrap yellow paper on hand.

 

The computer mouse(the device that changed how humans interact with machines) is something that millions of us use every day. So, I reckon it would be interesting to understand how this invention of a gadget that we are hand-in-glove with came about. The mouse was inspired by a roll on deodorant. Douglas Engelbart was staring at a butter dish with a rolling ball mechanism, cross-referencing his memory of a roll-on deodorant applicator, and thought: what if I could roll that on a desk and track coordinates? 1968. Almost the same time as the Post-it glue. A phenomenal year for things being used for the wrong reason.

 

What connects Viagra, the Post-it, and the mouse?

 

None of them were invented. They were noticed. Someone looked at a failure, a peculiarity, an anomaly — and instead of filing it under “didn’t work,” they filed it under “works differently than expected.” That is the entire gap between a discoverer and a discarded researcher.

 

It is unfortunate that we are trained — obsessively, institutionally, pathologically — to optimise for the original goal. Hit the target. Solve the brief. Ship the feature. Side effects are noise. Anomalies are bugs. Deviations are failure. We have built entire corporate cultures around the disciplined suppression of accidental discovery.

 

The most expensive thing in any organisation isn’t failure. It’s the failure you dismiss without examining.

 

The question to carry like a loaded gun

 

What unexpected thing happened today that I labelled irrelevant? Because Pfizer’s patients didn’t volunteer information. Someone noticed. 3M’s Silver didn’t quit. Someone listened. Engelbart didn’t see a butter dish. He saw a translation problem with an existing solution.

 

Side effects are first drafts of the next big thing. You just have to be the kind of person who reads the margins.

 

Some more absolute gems for the taking

 

WD-40 — The name is the failure count. Water Displacement, 40th attempt. Thirty-nine times it didn’t work. On the 40th, they got a rust-prevention spray used in nuclear missiles. Today it’s in 4 out of 5 American homes. The failures weren’t the story. They were the address.

 

Corn Flakes — John Harvey Kellogg left cooked wheat sitting out by accident. It went stale. He rolled it anyway. Crispy flakes fell out. He served it to sanitarium patients who were supposed to be eating bland food to suppress “excitement.” It accidentally launched the entire global breakfast cereal industry. A $40 billion market born from forgotten leftovers and a Victorian-era theory about human temperament that we’d rather not discuss at breakfast.

 

Brandy — A 16th-century Dutch shipmaster was concentrating wine to reduce shipping bulk, planning to add water back at destination. Forgot. The concentrated wine tasted extraordinary. He called it brandewijn — burnt wine. The accident that launched an entire category of fine spirits, connoisseurship, and a thousand pretentious tasting notes.

 

Coca-Cola– A pharmacist wanted a headache tonic. Accidentally mixed carbonated water with syrup. Oops. Became the world’s most famous soft drink. No headache cured. Thirst invented.

 

Teflon — Roy Plunkett in 1938 opened a cylinder of refrigerant gas he’d been experimenting with. Nothing came out — seemingly empty. Curiosity made him cut the cylinder open instead of discarding it. The gas had polymerized into a white waxy solid coating the inside. Spectacularly slippery. Chemically inert. Completely useless for refrigerators. Absolutely perfect for every pan your scrambled eggs have never stuck to since.

 

Microwave Ovens — Percy Spencer was testing radar magnetrons for Raytheon in 1945. Walked past the active equipment. Noticed the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Most people would’ve been annoyed about the chocolate. Spencer was curious about why. Stuck popcorn kernels in front of the magnetron next. Then an egg (which exploded, because of course it did). Six months later: the first commercial microwave. Born from a melted Hershey bar and a man who asked the right question about his ruined snack.

 

The pattern that emerges when you line them up is almost comedic in its consistency: the discoverer and the dismisser were standing in the exact same spot. One filed it under anomaly. The other filed it under announcement.

 

To Note: Side effects are not bugs. They’re beta releases of the future.

 

What if we flipped the script?

  • Treat anomalies like VIP guests. When something behaves oddly, don’t fix it. Follow it.
  • Run “side-effect sprints.” Allocate time to explore outcomes you didn’t plan for. Curiosity with a calendar.
  • Reward accidents. Not just outcomes. Build cultures where “I found this weird thing” gets applause, not eye-rolls.
  • Document serendipity. Most teams track KPIs. Few track “WTFs.” That’s where the gold hides.
  • Ask a better question: not “Did it work?” but “What else did it do?”

 

Because the next Viagra is currently being dismissed as a distraction.
The next Post-it is being labelled “not scalable.”
The next mouse is sitting in a metaphorical butter dish, waiting to be noticed.

 

We don’t need more control. We need better curiosity.
And the courage to admit that sometimes, the plan is just the decoy.

 

Side effects don’t derail progress. They are progress—wearing a disguise.

 

Ditch the sell-by-date dogma. Side effects are your rebel R&D lab—embrace the chaos, or stay chained.

 

Provoke Point: What “side effect” in your life is screaming blockbuster?

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

 

Suresh Dinakaran | Chief Storyteller | ISD Global

Your brand is the conflict you resolve that no one else can

 

STOP. Selling Products. Selling Promises.

 

START. Owning a War.

 

Panadol didn’t sell pills. It sold the end of pain-as-default.

Fevicol didn’t sell adhesive. It sold the end of things that fall apart — at a civilization level.

Nike didn’t sell shoes. It sold the end of ordinary people believing athletic greatness wasn’t for them.

 

If you look back, every powerful brand in history didn’t launch a product.
It declared war on a problem the world had quietly accepted as permanent. Almost deja vu.

 

You would have noticed the pattern from the above examples. The conflict precedes the category. The enemy is always a belief — an inconvenience, a compromise, an injustice — that the market has normalized. The brand is simply the world’s most credible answer to that conflict.

 

That said, if five other brands could resolve your conflict just as well,
you don’t have a brand. You have a SKU.

 

And, it is an irony that most brand owners spend their lives building SKUs while calling them brands. They glorify features. They obsess over fonts. They A/B test taglines. All while the real question goes unasked: What is the one human conflict that this brand — and only this brand — is built to end?

 

Look At The Conflict Map

 

Conflicts aren’t just functional. They’re emotional, cultural, even existential.

HARLEY-DAVIDSON
Resolves the conflict between the life you were told to live and the one
that’s screaming inside you. Not a motorcycle brand — a permission brand.

DUOLINGO
Resolves the conflict between wanting to grow and the guilt of not having
time. Turns learning into a game you can win in seven minutes on a toilet.

AMUL
Resolves the conflict between being a small farmer in a large, indifferent
market. The butter is almost irrelevant. The power shift is everything.

 

From the SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story Podcast Floor

 

Some of the most incisive questions in these conversations cut right to the
heart of this conflict idea — they just weren’t framed that way at the time.

WITH LULU RAGHAVAN — LANDOR
“What is the one thing a brand does that makes its absence genuinely painful to people — not just inconvenient?” That’s a conflict question in disguise.

WITH SONAL DABRAL — CREATIVE SAGE
“Is the idea brave enough to make the client uncomfortable?”
Because real conflicts are uncomfortable. Safe brands resolve nothing.

WITH MAHESH NARAYANAN — BUSINESS LEADER
“Where does the human truth live in this category?”
The human truth IS the conflict. The creative is just the resolution
in beautiful clothes.

WITH RAMESH NARAYANAN — AFAA
“How do you keep a 100-year-old brand relevant without losing its soul?”
Answer: make sure the conflict it was built to resolve still exists —
or find the evolved version of it.

WITH SHUBHRANSHU SINGH — EFFY’s
“What does Royal Enfield stand for that no other bike can claim?”
Stand for = the conflict only you can resolve. For Enfield, it’s the
conflict between modernity’s speed and the human need to feel time slow down.

 

Your Brand Is Not Your Story. It’s The Fight You Finish.

 

The Invisible Battlefield

Every market is a war zone disguised as a category.

  • Food delivery isn’t about food. It’s about “I’m exhausted but I still want control.”
  • Luxury isn’t about price. It’s about “See me the way I see myself.”
  • Edtech isn’t about learning. It’s about “Don’t let me fall behind quietly.”

 

The winners don’t solve problems. They resolve tensions people are too tired to articulate.

 

Thinking Offbeat

 

  • The most powerful fitness brand isn’t selling workouts. It’s resolving guilt vs discipline.
  • The smartest fintech brand isn’t selling convenience. It’s dissolving fear vs aspiration.
  • The boldest hospitality brand isn’t selling rooms. It’s orchestrating escape vs identity.

 

If your brand isn’t sitting inside a human contradiction, it’s sitting outside relevance.

 

The New Brand Playbook (You Are Permitted To Burn The Old One)

  1. Hunt the Tension, Not the Trend
    Trends expire. Tensions endure.
  2. Name the Conflict Ruthlessly
    If you can’t articulate it in one sharp sentence, you don’t own it.
  3. Design for Resolution, Not Attention
    Attention is rented. Resolution is remembered.
  4. Be Uncomfortably Specific
    Vague brands get polite applause. Specific brands get chosen.
  5. Build Rituals Around Resolution
    Make your solution repeatable, addictive, identity-shaping.

 

The SOHB Story Callout : Brands don’t solve problems. They assassinate them.

 

The world doesn’t need another nice brand. It needs a necessary, an other one. Necessary only comes from resolving what others find too ugly, too small, or too scary.

 

Your brand isn’t weak. Your conflict is. Relevance lives inside unresolved tension. Because, you’re not in a category. You’re in a conflict. And, mind you, the sharpest brands don’t attract. They settle something unfinished.

 

Positioning is where you sit in the market. Conflict is why the market can’t sit without you. 

 

Here is the real question that we need to ask: What conflict does your brand have the courage to own…and the capability to resolve?

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

 

RIP Branding(As We Knew It. Good Riddance?)!

 

Caveat: This is a loooong post. So, in case you feel like saying ‘ so long ‘, I will understand.

 

This is a SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story. Not a eulogy. A wake-up call. Handle with irreverence.

 

Though the obituary was not formally written, it was on the cards. And everyone felt it.

 

So, What Does The Crime Scene Look Like?

 

Most brands aren’t facing a strategy problem. They’re facing a mindset fossilisation problem. It suffers from a thinking issue that has gone well past its sell by date. Where 1990s thinking is expected to solve 2026 problems. I am afraid that is not strategy. That is archaeology, willy nilly, re-visited with a magnifying lens. And some marketing budget for company.

 

So, what does the first radical act of future branding? Mindset re-engineering. Burn the mental debris. Or at least Hoover it — the logic behind it.

 

Brands that will survive 2030 won’t just be customer-centric. They’ll be customer-obsessed psychics — anticipating desires before the customer has Googled them, let alone articulated them.

 

Don’t find customers for your products. Find products for your customers

 

This is classic Seth Godin. This is the one sentence that should be tattooed on every brand owner’s forearm. Revolutionary? Not exactly. The only disappointment is that most brands are not venturing into that territory.

 

“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in & be what people are interested in.” ~ Craig Davis, Founder of Brandkarma and former Chief Creative Officer of J. Walter Thompson.

 

What Universities Should Be Teaching (But Aren’t)

Dear academia, kindly retire nostalgia. Branding students don’t need more case studies. They need:

  • Context agility: The ability to reframe problems in real time
  • Behavioral fluency: Understanding humans beyond data dashboards
  • Experimentation stamina: Build. Break. Rebuild. Repeat.
  • Ethical imagination: Because manipulation scales faster than trust
  • Unlearning as a core competency — because the half-life of a marketing framework is now shorter than a TikTok trend cycle.
  • And crucially — how to build communities, not campaigns. 90% of Gen Z say social media ads, influencer posts, and organic brand content have inspired some percentage of their purchases in the past six months. The classroom should smell less like brand strategy and more like cultural anthropology.

Teach them to think like anthropologists with entrepreneurial ADHD.

 

The Loyalty Contradiction

 

Loyalty in 2030 isn’t repeat purchase. It’s “I’ll forgive your screw-up because you saw my chaos coming.”

Example? Patagonia didn’t sell jackets. They sold permission to feel righteous about spending too much.

 

But the offbeat one: Liquid Death. They took tap water, put it in a tallboy can, and sold rebellion. No new product. Just a new product for an existing customer’s inner punk. That’s not marketing. That’s ventriloquism.

 

True loyalty — the deep, trust-based connection that brands aspire to — fell to 29% in 2025, a 5% drop from 2024. This shift reflects how fragile brand devotion has become in an era of endless choice, rising costs, and viral-driven alternatives.

 

In automotive — an industry that literally had families passing down brand allegiance like heirlooms — brand loyalty has dropped below 50% for the first time in modern measurement history, falling to 49% across all nameplates. The entire economics of customer acquisition and retention must be reconsidered.

 

And the consumers you’re counting on to carry your brand forward into 2030? 43% of U.S. Gen Zers have abandoned a brand they were once loyal to because they “grew bored” with it. Boredom. Not betrayal. Not price. Boredom. Your brand didn’t lose to a competitor. It lost to ennui(pronounced ahn-WEE).

 

The New Loyalty Runs on Completely Different Fuel

 

If you think that loyalty is still points and redemption, you are not only way behind the curve, but going downhill as well.

 

45% of consumers are more likely to trust a product if it goes viral. 33% trust TikTok and social media trends more than ads or brand websites. 41% have bought products promoted by influencers — almost double the overall average. Welcome to Trend Loyalty — an emotionally charged, fast-moving allegiance driven by viral moments rather than long-term relationships.

 

But here’s the double edged sword- where it gets genuinely fascinating and genuinely terrifying for traditional brand thinking: 40% of teens consider themselves loyal to a brand they have never purchased from. 54% say loyalty means telling friends about a brand. 40% say it means simply loving a brand, with no intent to buy.

 

Loyalty has decoupled from purchase. Your most powerful brand advocates may never spend a rupee with you. And your loyalty programme? It’s measuring the wrong thing entirely.

 

The brands winning this game understand this viscerally. E.l.f. Cosmetics didn’t run a single celebrity Super Bowl campaign in the traditional sense — it leaned into transparency, formulation honesty, and let Gen Z validate it themselves on TikTok. The brand now ranks as the #1 favourite beauty brand among Gen Z, with net sales exceeding $1 billion and 28 consecutive quarters of sales growth.

 

Now, you decide if thats that’s a marketing story or a mindset story.

 

Contrary to the general perception, the future isn’t tech. It’s mindset agility.

When Nike started selling connected fitness not sneakers, they stopped being a shoe company. When KFC sold chicken-scented fire logs(yes, really), they stopped selling food—they sold absurdist comfort.

That’s the arsenal: Radical empathy + cheerful self-cannibalism.

Your perspective handcuffs? “But we’ve always done it this way.”
The key? “What if we burned the playbook and asked strangers on Reddit?”

 

The C-Suite Has Lost Faith

NielsenIQ’s “CMO Outlook: Guide to 2026“ report shows only 69% of marketing leaders believe their CEOs and CFOs support long-term brand investment—an 11 percentage-point drop from 2024 .

Here’s the kicker: 84% of CMOs now view ROI as their primary metric for budget allocation.

Let me repeat that: Return on investment is now the primary metric.

Not brand love. Not emotional connection. Not cultural relevance. ROI.

We’ve reduced the most human discipline in business to a spreadsheet. And then we wonder why trust is hemorrhaging.

 

The Attention Economy Has Collapsed

The IPA’s January 2026 research dropped a bomb the industry is still picking shrapnel from. Charlie Ebdy from Omnicom introduced the concept of “advertising secular stagnation“—borrowing from Depression-era economics to describe environmental factors that cap returns regardless of how brilliant your creative is.

Translation? It’s not you. It’s the environment. Smartphone adoption since 2015 has layered incremental media consumption onto existing habits. You’re not competing with other brands anymore. You’re competing with everything—TikTok, doomscrolling, group chats, and the existential dread of 2026.

The data shows: individual advertising exposures now occupy progressively smaller fractions of any person’s total media time. Your million-dollar campaign? It’s fighting for a sliver of attention that gets thinner every quarter .

 

The ONE Actionable Wisdom: Stop Defending. Start Evolving

 

Across every industry vertical — FMCG, automotive, luxury, fintech, healthcare — the single most dangerous person in any brand organisation is the guardian who has confused protection with preservation.

 

The brand book is not a scripture. It is a living document. Treat it accordingly.

 

Gen Z consumers are five times more likely than older generations to believe newer brands are better or more innovative — which makes the switching cost for disappointing them close to zero. Five times. The loyalty is genuine, but it evaporates the moment you stop being interesting, honest, or useful.

 

New Balance understood this. The brand reached $9.2 billion in revenue in 2025, growing 180% since 2020 — built on a shift from transaction-based marketing to athlete storytelling and creator-first content. They didn’t reinvent their logo. They reinvented their relationship with culture.

 

That is the work. Not the tagline. Not the guidelines. The relationship.

 

The SOHB Story To-Do: Stick Your Neck Out

 

-Run a “What Would We Do If We Started Today?” board session. This quarter. With people who are allowed to say the uncomfortable things.

-Kill one sacred brand assumption before the year ends. Just one. You’ll survive. The brand might not if you don’t.

-Find three customers whose unmet problem you’ve been ignoring because it didn’t fit your product range. Now redesign backwards from their need.

-Stop measuring loyalty by purchase frequency alone. Start measuring advocacy, trust, and cultural resonance. The old dashboard is lying to you.

– Delete the “customer journey maps.” Archive the “brand voice guidelines“. Instead, sit with one customer who left. Not a loyalist. Not a promoter. A leaver. Don’t ask why they left. They’ll lie. Or worse, they’ll tell you the truth you can’t handle.

Ask this instead: “What did you wish we’d build, but never did?” Then build that.

Even if it cannibalizes your cash cow. Especially if it cannibalizes your cash cow.

Because the alternative is watching someone else build it—and take your customers with them.

 

The Resurrection: What Replaces Branding

So if branding is dead, what takes its place?

The New Trinity: Usefulness + Trust + Cultural Agility

Not “brand voice.” Not “visual identity.” Not “positioning statements.”

Usefulness: Are you solving a problem today? Not the problem from your 2019 strategy deck. The problem your customer woke up with this morning.

Trust: Would your brand pass the “bank loan” test? If your brand walked into a bank, would they approve the loan?

Cultural Agility: Can you pivot faster than the algorithm changes? The now, next generation doesn’t reward consistency. They reward relevance.

 

RIP BRANDING (AS WE ONCE KNEW IT)

Not a provocation. A post-mortem.

Let’s not romanticize it.
Branding didn’t evolve. It got outpaced.

While we were polishing taglines, the market rewired itself. Quietly. Ruthlessly. Irreversibly.

So here lies “Branding as we knew it.”
Cause of death? A mismatch with reality.

 

Let’s examine the landscape that has caused this to happen:-

 

A. Attention Has Atomised

The average human attention span didn’t just shrink. It fragmented.

Google’s Zero Moment of Truth collapsed decision cycles into seconds.

    • Short-form video turned storytelling into a thumb war.
    • Multi-screen behavior means your “campaign” is now competing with WhatsApp, cricket scores, and a meme about office chai… simultaneously.

Implication: Brand recall has been replaced by momentary relevance.

You are not remembered. You are rediscovered…every single time.

 

B. Trust Has Been Decentralised

Once upon a time, brands built trust through repetition.

Today, trust is outsourced.

  • Over 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations over advertising.
  • Reviews, Reddit threads, creator opinions have more sway than your biggest media burst.
  • A single viral customer complaint can outgun a ₹50 crore campaign.

Implication: The brand is no longer the storyteller. The customer is.

And customers don’t follow scripts.

 

C.Choice Has Exploded

Globalization + D2C + digital rails = infinite shelf space.

  • Categories that once had 5 players now have 500.
  • Switching costs are near zero. Loyalty is one click away from abandonment.
  • Discovery algorithms constantly tempt consumers with “something better.”

Implication: Differentiation has a half-life. Relevance doesn’t.

You are not competing with your category.
You are competing with everything that solves the same tension differently.

 

D.Data Has Flipped the Power Equation

Earlier, brands guessed. Consumers adapted.

Now:

  • Brands track behavior in real time.
  • Consumers expect hyper-personalized experiences in return.
  • If Netflix can recommend perfectly, why can’t your brand even remember me?

Implication: Generic branding feels like incompetence.

Personalisation is no longer a feature. It’s hygiene.

 

E.Purpose Is Under Surveillance

Purpose used to be a brand garnish. Now it’s under a microscope.

  • Consumers fact-check claims instantly.
  • ESG, sustainability, ethics are not PR levers, they are purchase drivers.
  • “Woke-washing” gets called out within hours.

Implication: You don’t own your purpose. Your behavior does.

Consistency between what you say and what you do is now audited…publicly.

 

F.The Funnel Has Collapsed

The neat funnel we worshipped has turned into a chaotic web.

  • Awareness, consideration, purchase, advocacy… now happen in loops.
  • A TikTok video can trigger discovery, validation, and purchase in under 3 minutes.
  • Post-purchase experience is often more influential than pre-purchase advertising.

Implication:Branding is no longer a top-of-funnel activity. It is the entire experience.

Every touchpoint is branding. Every failure is branding.

 

So What Actually Died?

Not branding.
The illusion of control.

  • Control over narrative? Gone.
  • Control over timing? Gone.
  • Control over perception? Negotiated in real time.

What replaces it? Adaptive relevance.

 

The New Laws of Branding (May I Recommend That You Write These in Permanent Ink?)

  1. From Identity to Utility
    If your brand doesn’t do, it doesn’t matter what it says.
  2. From Consistency to Context
    Same message everywhere is lazy.
    Contextual intelligence is the new craft.
  3. From Campaigns to Systems
    Campaigns spike. Systems sustain.
    Build engines, not fireworks.
  4. From Ownership to Participation
    You don’t own your brand.
    You co-create it with your ecosystem.

 

Final Word( I See You Breathing A Sigh Of Relief?)

 

“RIP Branding” is not a eulogy. It’s a reset button.

 

The old playbook optimized for stability.
The new one thrives on flux.

 

So don’t defend your brand.

 

Rebuild it.
Continuously.
Relentlessly.
Publicly.

 

Because the market isn’t asking, “What do you stand for?”

 

It’s asking, “How fast can you evolve… before I move on?”

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

Beginners rush forward. Masters come back

 

The Learning Curve is not a curve, but a full circle- Not trying to throw a curve ball here!

 

Some food for thought to begin with.

 

Michael Jordan, basketball god, gets cut from his high school varsity team. Fast-forward: Six rings, GOAT status. Retirement? He circles back to baseball (because why not?), bombs spectacularly, then reboots with the Chicago Bulls for three more titles. Learning loop: Humiliation → Domination → Humble Pie → Dynasty.

 

Or take J.K. Rowling—rejections piling like unread mail, Harry Potter rejected 12 times, then wizard billions. Post-fame? She dives into crime novels as Robert Galbraith, circles back incognito, rediscovers the raw thrill of the unknown.

 

Imagine: The chef who masters Michelin stars, quits to sling street tacos in Mexico City, only to reinvent fine dining upon return. Circle complete.

 

Mastery is not about adding layers.It’s about shedding them

 

The beginner and the master often look suspiciously similar.
The difference? The beginner doesn’t know.
The master doesn’t need to prove.

 

A child picks up a crayon and draws without permission.
An adult picks up the same crayon and asks, “What’s the brief?”

 

That’s not evolution. That’s erosion.

 

Learning, in its truest form, is less like upgrading software and more like recovering lost firmware.

 

The Learning Curve is not a curve, but a full circle

( The caption of this paragraph is a line that I read in the book ‘ One Minute Wisdom ” by Dr Debashis Chatterjee, Director, IIM, Kozhikode).

 

Let’s distill the wit in the wisdom: That “curve” is a lie peddled by the linear brained. Real growth is circular—peak performance births complacency, which demands reinvention. It’s not ascent; it’s orbit. Einstein nailed it: “Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.” But geniuses know prevention loops back to new problems. Weight hits when you realize: Mastery without the circle is stagnation in disguise.

 

We’ve built entire education systems on the myth of linear ascent.
Grades. Levels. Certifications.

A staircase with no permission to spiral.

But the most dangerous learners? They don’t climb.

They orbit.

 

So how do you learn in circles (without losing your mind)?

1. Revisit what you think you’ve “outgrown.”
Go back to first principles. Not to repeat—but to reinterpret.

2. Chase confusion, not clarity.
Clarity is often borrowed. Confusion is deeply original.

3. Unlearn publicly.
There is power in saying, “I was wrong.” It resets the loop.

4. Rotate contexts.
Apply the same idea in wildly different arenas. Watch it mutate.

5. Protect your beginner’s mind like it’s IP.
Curiosity without ego is your unfair advantage.

 

A musician starts raw, becomes technical, then transcends both.
An entrepreneur begins naive, becomes strategic, then returns to instinct.
A teacher starts with answers, gathers frameworks, and ends with better questions.

 

Circle.

 

Here’s a thought that might be worth pondering over

 

What if everything you’re learning right now, you already knew? Not déjà vu. Not mysticism. Just the maddening, magnificent truth that learning doesn’t go forward — it comes around.

The curve lied to us(We are all prudent in hindsight, hence recognising).

We were sold a clean, confident arc — you start ignorant, you end expert, you retire with a plaque. School. College. Career. Mastery. Done. Linear. Lovely. Wrong.

Ask a jazz musician what they’re doing at 60. Relearning scales. Ask a Nobel laureate what humbles them. What they don’t know. Ask a monk with 40 years of practice what they’re working on. Beginner mind.

 

The experts keep circling back. Because wisdom isn’t a summit. It’s a return.

Consider the caterpillar — which doesn’t become a butterfly so much as it dissolves into biological soup inside the cocoon before anything new forms. It doesn’t build on what it was. It erases it. Then rebuilds from the undone. That’s not a curve. That’s a full, violent, gorgeous circle.

 

Or look at Pixar. Every film begins with the director’s “worst version” of the idea. They call it “embracing the ugly baby.” Years of production. Millions of dollars. And they always — always — return to the original messy instinct they started with. The circle validates the beginning.

 

Or this: Andy Warhol spent his most celebrated period painting soup cans — the most basic, mass-produced objects on earth. He went from fine art training back to the ordinary. The circle made him legendary.

 

You don’t arrive at knowledge. You orbit it

Each revolution — tighter, richer, closer to the core.

The learning curve? Full circle.

Which means the most dangerous question isn’t “What do I still need to learn?”

It’s “What have I forgotten to keep learning?”

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

 

You were born loaded. This is the formula to stop acting broke

 

Writer Isabel’s formula is ten words that will quietly rearrange your entire life — if you’re brave enough to let it. Isabel didn’t write a 400-page manifesto. She wrote one sentence. Sit with it:

 

“Figure out what you’re good at without trying, then try.”

 

It’s the most elegant takedown of the “Hustle Porn” industry ever written. Because the tragedy of modern ambition isn’t that we don’t work hard enough. It’s that we spend 90% of our energy trying to become mediocre at things we suck at, while ignoring the one thing we do better than breathing. It’s not “follow your passion” fluff; it’s predatory precision.

The Dangerous Romance With Struggle

We’ve fetishized the hard.

If it’s not painful, it’s not progress. If it’s not complex, it’s not credible.

So the natural storyteller forces themselves into spreadsheets.
The intuitive strategist buries instinct under frameworks.
The born teacher chases titles instead of tribes.

We don’t fail because we lack talent.
We fail because we misallocate it.

Effortless Is Not Effort-Free

Let’s not confuse the equation. “Without trying” doesn’t mean “without effort.”

It means low friction entry, high ceiling mastery.

The swimmer doesn’t fight water. They still train like hell.

The writer doesn’t struggle for voice. They still rewrite like a maniac.

The strategist doesn’t hunt for insight. They still sharpen it till it cuts clean.

The sequence matters:

Discover ease.Then apply intensity.

Not the other way around.

The Autopilot Audit

Look at your childhood report cards. Look at the arguments you win without preparing. Look at the thing you do where you look up and three hours have vanished like a magic trick, while everyone else is checking their watch wondering when the torture will end.

That’s your cheat code.

Isabel’s formula separates the world into two camps. The Struggle Bunnies—who believe suffering is a virtue, grinding themselves into dust trying to fix their weaknesses. And the Cheaters—who look at their natural gifts, shrug, and say, “Right. Now I’ll actually apply pressure here.”

 

The Offbeat Benchmark: Mozart vs. The Accountant

We fetishize the myth of the tortured genius. But Mozart wasn’t good at music because he tried hard. He was good at music the way fish are good at swimming. It was his operating system. The trying came later, in the refinement.

Compare that to the corporate warrior spending 80 hours a week trying to be “a people person” when their superpower is actually deep, obsessive focus. That’s not grit. That’s self-sabotage.

 

The Quiet Rebellion

In a world obsessed with becoming more, the real flex is becoming more of what you already are.

Not louder. Not busier. Just…sharper.

Because the shortest path to extraordinary is not adding layers.

It’s removing resistance.

And then trying like it matters.

Roger Federer wasn’t good at tennis because he worked hard. He worked hard because he was already inexplicably, unfairly, cosmically good. The effort was jet fuel poured into an engine that already existed. Without the engine, it’s just a puddle of wasted fuel on the tarmac.

Jazz musician Marcus Roberts was blind from age five. What he had — rhythm, memory, an ear that processed music like a second heartbeat — he had without a single lesson. When the trying came, it landed on bedrock. Bedrock, not quicksand.

Most people never pause long enough to find their bedrock. They’re too busy performing busyness. Too scared that if they stop running, they’ll have to actually look at what they’re running toward.

 

Isabel’s not peddling ease; she’s arming rebels. Ditch the try-hard Olympics. Hunt your effortless edge. Then? Dominate.

 

The Provocation

 

Go back. Not to your resume. To the last time someone said, “How did you just do that?” and you had no good answer because it didn’t feel like doing anything. That shrug? That’s the signal. Chase the shrug.

 

The formula isn’t permission to coast. It’s precision targeting before you fire. Why spend your one ridiculous life shooting in all directions when you were handed a laser?

 

Figure out what you’re good at without trying. Then try like your life depends on it. Because it does. The “without trying” part isn’t about laziness. It’s about identifying your factory settings. Then you upgrade the software.

 

Try This. No, Seriously

  1. Audit Your Effortless Wins
    List 5 things people thank you for that you barely notice doing.

  2. Follow the Energy, Not the Applause
    What leaves you strangely charged instead of drained?

  3. Prototype, Don’t Philosophize
    Take one “easy strength” and push it 10x harder for 30 days.

  4. Stop Outsourcing Your Identity
    If your talent doesn’t fit a job description, redesign the job.

  5. Commit to Mastery, Not Variety
    Depth compounds. Dabbling doesn’t.

 

“Your hidden gift is screaming. Ignore it? Grind forever. Listen? Game over.”

Provoke that, world.

 

PS: On a completely different note,I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

The brand that kills you won’t come from your industry. Rethinking Competitive Intelligence for the Abnormal

 

Stop looking in the rearview mirror. The road doesn’t exist anymore.For the last three decades, “Competitive Intelligence” has been a polite game of corporate espionage lite. You hired a consultant. They built a SWOT matrix. You found out the competitor lowered their price by 5%. You nodded sagely.That is the intellectual equivalent of bringing a sundial to a quantum physics fight.

We are not living through turbulence. We are living through a complete rewiring of the atmosphere. The “Next, New, Abnormal” doesn’t reward the brand that knows what the other guy is doing. It rewards the brand that senses a shift in gravity before the floor falls out.

The Offbeat Benchmark

The Octopus-Stop studying the shark. The shark swims in a straight line eating what is in front of it. Study the octopus. It has three hearts, blue blood, and a nervous system distributed across its arms. Each arm thinks independently while the central brain maintains the mission. When a predator comes, it doesn’t fight; it reconfigures—changing shape, texture, and color in real-time.That is the new arsenal. Distributed cognition. Not a centralized “strategy department” guarding spreadsheets, but a brand where every limb senses the environment and adapts instantly.

Your Rivals Are Not Your Competition Anymore

What if everything you know about watching your competition is precisely why you’re losing? The old CI (Competitive Intelligence) playbook reads like a museum exhibit. Track the rival’s ad spend. Shadow their pricing. Clone their features six months later. Call it “strategy.” Meanwhile, the actual disruption walked in through a door you weren’t watching — because it wasn’t even in your industry.

Netflix didn’t fear Blockbuster. It feared sleep. Reed Hastings literally said their competition is sleep. That’s not a cute soundbite. That’s the whole new religion of CI.

Patagonia isn’t benchmarking North Face. They’re benchmarking their customers’ guilt — and weaponising it as loyalty. Liquid Death doesn’t compete with water brands; it competes with the idea that hydration has to be boring. Duolingo’s biggest competitor isn’t Babbel — it’s the first five minutes of mindless doom scrolling.

“In the Next New Abnormal, your fiercest rival isn’t a company. It’s a behaviour, a belief, a distraction, or a collective mood shift.”

Let’s redraw the map?

In the old world, you tracked competitors. In the new world, you track behavioural mutations.

Example? A skincare brand isn’t competing with other creams anymore. It’s competing with sleep apps, gut health, and self-worth narratives. Glow is no longer topical. It’s existential.

A furniture brand? Not fighting other chairs. It’s up against remote work culture, real estate shrinkage, and the psychology of comfort-as-productivity.

The competition isn’t visible. It’s invisible, interdisciplinary, and impatient.

So what replaces traditional competitive intelligence?

Call it Competitive Imagination.

A living, breathing radar system that doesn’t just scan markets…it senses shifts.

Here’s the new arsenal:

1. Pattern Hunting > Competitor Tracking: Don’t ask “What are they doing?” Ask “What’s changing in human behaviour that nobody is owning yet?”

2. Edge Watching > Category Watching: Your next threat lives at the edges. Subcultures. Creators. Fringe communities. Memes today. Movements tomorrow.

3. Speed of Sensing > Depth of Reporting: A 40-slide deck delivered late is theatre. A raw signal caught early is power.

4. Narrative Intelligence > Data Intelligence:Data tells you what happened. Narratives tell you what will spread.

5. Internal Disruption Drills: If your team isn’t actively imagining how to kill your own brand, someone else is drafting that blueprint.

The brands that will win next aren’t the best informed

They’re the most awake. To signals. To shifts. To strange,

 

seemingly irrelevant sparks that others dismiss.

Because in the Next, New, Abnormal…Relevance doesn’t arrive announced. It arrives disguised.

And only the brands that learn to see early…get to stay.

Your biggest competitor doesn’t exist yet. That’s the problem.

The Next, New, Abnormal—where AI hallucinates futures, memes mutate markets, and your rival’s next move is scripted by quantum chaos

Forget dusty SWOT spreadsheets and quarterly spy reports that read like expired yogurt labels. Established thinking? It’s the Blockbuster execs laughing at streaming. Radical reimagining demands an arsenal that’s alive, predatory, perpetual. Enter HeartBeat Hunting: Competitive intelligence re-forged as a living pulse-check on human desires, not just balance sheets.

The Radical Reframe

Map attention ecosystems, not market shares. Who or what is stealing the 11 seconds your audience was supposed to give you? That’s your real competition. A meme page. A WhatsApp forward. A Netflix autoplay. A cat with existential dread.

The brands winning in the Abnormal aren’t the ones with the fattest CI budget — they’re the ones running Anthropological Listening Sessions in their customer’s actual living rooms, Reddit rabbit holes, and late night Twitter spirals. They’re hiring futurists, semioticians, and ex-journalists alongside their strategists — because the signal is always hiding in the cultural noise, three years before it becomes obvious.

Legacy CI was a rearview mirror. What brands need now is peripheral vision + seismic sensing + cultural sonar — all running simultaneously. Think less SWOT, more WOKE (Watch Out for Kulturquakes Everywhere).

ARSENAL — Five Moves for Perpetual Readiness

-Map your attention rivals, not just category rivals — who else wants the same 8 seconds? –

-Run quarterly Behaviour Audits:which customer habits are quietly making your brand irrelevant?

-Hire one Cultural Translator — someone fluent in subcultures, not just spreadsheets.

– Build a Weak Signals Dashboard: track fringe forums, micro-trends, and category outsiders monthly.

-Ask this quarterly: “What is our brand competing with that we haven’t named yet?”

Perpetual readiness isn’t paranoia. It’s the new strategic posture — loose, alert, curious, unafraid to make the competition irrelevant by rewriting the game entirely.

The Abnormal rewards brands that watch everything. And fear nothing.

Build a Department of Mischief

Stop centralizing CI in the C-Suite. Create a “Red Team” that doesn’t just analyze the market but tries to break your own business model. If you aren’t disrupting yourself, the abnormal will do it for you—without the courtesy of a warning shot.

The Takeaway

The brands that win the next decade won’t be the ones with the biggest data rooms. They’ll be the ones with the fastest reflexes. Stop trying to predict the future. Build the capacity to react to the future you didn’t see coming—before the others even realize it’s here.

 

Don’t be the firm with the thickest report.

 

Be the brand with the shortest lag time between shift and action.

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

 

Will This Be On The Test?…

 

…And Other Ways We Murdered Imagination

 

The question that killed a thousand ideas. “Will this be on the test?” — six words that turned classrooms into compliance factories and curiosity into a commodity nobody wanted to stock.

 

Something worth noting here

Einstein failed his entrance exam. Picasso called school a prison. Tagore dropped out entirely. The pattern isn’t coincidence — it’s a curriculum indictment.

 

What if your best idea never survived the rubric?

We didn’t lose imagination. We graded it out of existence. The moment we attached scores to wonder, wonder quietly resigned and filed for bankruptcy.

 

Imagination has a dropout rate. School designed it.

 

The dangerous comfort of the answer key. We grew up rewarded for retrieval, not reinvention. No wonder adults reach for Google before they reach for imagination.

A NASA study found 98% of kindergartners score “genius” on creative thinking. By age 31? 2%. The school system didn’t fail the test. It was the test.

 

Imagination isn’t a gift. It’s a practice — which means it’s also work. 

And here’s what never makes it to everyday conversations: work is exactly why most people abandon it.

 

If a chef only cooked recipes they were taught, we’d never have fusion food. If a jazz musician only played sheet music, we’d never have jazz. So what “sheet music” are you still following?

 

Your imagination isn’t blocked. It’s just undertrained

 

Imagination needs a workout routine, not a waiting room. Most people treat it like inspiration — something that arrives. The ones who build things treat it like a gym membership they show up to, even on bad days.

 

A sanitised meeting room version of “Will this be on the test?” is: “Has this been done before?“ Same fear. Different font.

 

Work = the bridge between a wild idea and a world-changing one. 

Without the sweat, imagination is just daydreaming with better PR.

 

Kids dream up portals to Narnia. Adults? We blueprint spreadsheets. What flipped the switch?

 

Picasso didn’t ace geometry—yet cubed the world. Test scores? Zero. Revolution? Priceless. Imagination isn’t gifted; it’s wrestled.

 

“Will this be on the test?” is imagination’s kryptonite—it turns creators into calculators.

 

JK Rowling scribbled Harry Potter on napkins amid welfare checks. Not test-approved. Now? Wizard billions. Feynman diagrammed ants’ chaos theory on napkins, ignoring Nobel checklists. Messy magic wins.

 

“Will this be on the test?” is a survival reflex. But imagination doesn’t survive. It ventures.

 

Imagination: The Job Description

If imagination had a job description, it would read: “ambiguity tolerated, failure expected, wonder required.”

 

The Pivot We Need to Knead

Imagine grading the quality of questions instead of answers. Watch the room change temperature.

 

” Will this be on the test?”. It is the most dangerous question ever invented. It didn’t start in a classroom. It started the moment we traded curiosity for compliance.

 

Exemplary References

 

The Pixar Braintrust. They don’t ask, “Does this scene pass?” They ask, “What’s the deeper story we’re afraid to tell?”No test. Just relentless, collective imagination. That’s the factory floor.

 

Elon Musk didn’t ask “Will this be on the physics test?”He asked, “What if the test itself is wrong?” First principles isn’t intelligence; it’s imagination doing the heavy lifting.

 

The Japanese concept of Kintsugi—repairing broken pottery with gold—didn’t come from a rubric. It came from asking,“What if the flaw is the feature?”. Try putting that on a multiple-choice sheet.

 

Cricketer MS Dhoni– His helicopter shot wasn’t in the coaching manual (the “test”). It was imagination under pressure, practised 3,000 times in the nets. Work disguised as wizardry.

 

The test rewards certainty. Imagination rewards the courage to be uncertain—for longer than anyone else is comfortable.  The person who sits with ambiguity usually builds what others can’t yet see.

 

Schools ask, “What do you want to be?”
Imagination asks, “What problems do you want to live inside?”
One gives you a career. The other gives you a calling.

 

We glorify the “Eureka” moment but ignore the 10,000 failures that preceded it. Imagination’s dirty secret:It looks like play but sweats like labour.

 

Imagination is not a rebellion.  It is the grittiest, most unglamorous, high-stakes work. The kind that doesn’t give you a grade—it gives you a trajectory. So, stop studying for the exam. Start studying for possibility.

 

When everything must be measurable, only the measurable gets imagined. The rest goes extinct quietly. The phrase “extra-curricular” quietly tells imagination where it belongs: outside the curriculum. The real test is life. It is open book, open web, open-ended. Imagination is the only invigilator that helps.

 

Some (purposeful) Provocations | Takeaways

-Ditch “test prep” for “test igniting.” Work your whimsy, or watch it wilt.

–Treat daydreams like deadlines. Clock in, or clock out of relevance.

-Next “test?” question, flip it: “Will this test ME?” Spark the fire.

-A design class replaced exams with “make something useful for a stranger.” Outcomes beat outcomes.

–Treat imagination as work, not a weekend hobby. Put it on the calendar, not the margins.

-Build “no-brief briefs” where the problem itself is to be discovered.

–Reward questions that bend the frame, not just answers that fit it.

– Audit your week: how many hours fed imagination vs compliance?

-Replace one test a term with a “make / solve / reframe” challenge.

 

Make imagination billable again.

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

Lights, Camera, Biopic!

Welcome to the era where Bollywood’s favorite genre isn’t romance, action, or comedy—it’s biopics. Yes, you heard it right. If it breathes, walks, or even existed in a parallel universe, it’s getting the biopic treatment!

 

Bollywood has officially entered its “If It Exists, It’s Getting a Biopic” era. We’ve had biopics on athletes, singers, mathematicians, kings, soldiers, criminals, and even samosa sellers (no hate, samosas deserve the Oscars). Take your (bio)pic. So, in true Bollywood fashion, I’m pitching my own life’s biopic:

 

” The Unseen Struggle: How I Survived 37 Unanswered LinkedIn DMs & Lived To Post About It “( Starring: Me, obviously. Cameo by my must do away with immediately laptop).

 

But until some big producer green lights this masterpiece, I’ll keep hustling—because if ” Gutka King:The Chewing Tobacco Chronicles “, can get funding, so can my dreams.

 

Director’s Statement: “Every story deserves to be told through 3 hours of dramatic background music, 17 costume changes, and at least one unnecessary item number.”

 

Coming Next: A biopic about the person reading this post right now. Working title: “Scroll: The Social Media Warrior’s Journey”.

 

Remember: If you’ve ever done literally anything in your life, congratulations! You’re now biopic material.

 

Casting directors are standing by. Terms and conditions apply. Side effects may include sudden urges to deliver powerful monologues while staring into the distance.

 

PS: On a completely different note, I am taking the liberty to share here that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below:

The most powerful thing you said today was what you didn’t

 

Let’s cut to the chase. You are not a courtroom prosecutor. You are not a Wikipedia editor. And yet, every time you walk away from a conversation—be it with a toxic colleague, a passive-aggressive relative, or a lover who just doesn’t get it—you are sweating bullets because you didn’t get to land that final punchline.

 

The hidden currency of restraint is so under utilised. In a world that rewards loudness, restraint feels like rebellion.

But it’s also leverage. Consider:

A negotiator who doesn’t rush to counter. Or, a teacher who lets the question hang. Or, a leader who doesn’t close every loop.

They create something rare: Cognitive space.

 

And space is where ownership is born.
When you don’t finish the thought, others step in to complete it.
When you don’t dominate the ending, others invest in it.

Silence, used well, is not absence. It’s invitation.

 

The Generosity of Leaving It There

There’s a quiet kindness in not having the last word.

 

You’re saying:
“I trust you to think.”
“I don’t need to win this.”
“This doesn’t have to end with me.”

 

In personal relationships, this can de-escalate what logic never could.
In leadership, it builds psychological safety without a single policy document.

 

In branding, it creates intrigue rather than information overload.

 

Because generosity isn’t always about giving more.
Sometimes, it’s about taking less space.

 

The smartest person in the room isn’t the one with the last word. It’s the one who knows when to leave.

 

The Hemingway Iceberg Effect (Applied to Life)

Writers like Ernest Hemingway built entire emotional worlds by leaving things unsaid. The famous iceberg theory — only a fraction visible, the rest submerged. Now imagine applying that to conversations. What if:

  • You didn’t respond to every provocation?
  • You didn’t correct every inaccuracy?
  • You didn’t need to wrap every discussion in a neat intellectual bow?

What if your restraint became your signature? Because when you say less, people lean in more.

 

The Japanese Art of the Unfinished Sentence

In Japan, there’s an aesthetic philosophy called Ma — the power of the pause, the meaning in the gap.

A conversation isn’t just what is spoken. It’s what is allowed to breathe.

Think of the tea masters who would end a gathering not with a closing statement, but with a bow and a lingering stillness. No summary. No flourish. Just space.

In that space, meaning multiplies.

Contrast this with our world of WhatsApp blue ticks and LinkedIn mic drops.

We’re addicted to closure. To punctuation. To the final word as a full stop.

But some of the most powerful exchanges in history have ended…mid-air.

 

Silence isn’t empty. It’s full of answers you were too kind to say out loud. If you need the last word, you’re begging for validation. If you can walk away without it, you are the validation.

 

The Rajasthan Royalty Rule: Generosity as Dominance

In the royal courts of Mewar, there was a practice: When a king was insulted by a lesser noble, the king would not issue a counter-insult. Instead, he would send a gift.

Sounds counterintuitive? It was psychological warfare.

By leaving the insult unanswered, the king signaled that the other person’s words were so insignificant they didn’t even register as a threat. By sending a gift, he signaled, “I am so secure in my power that I can afford to be generous to my detractors.”

 

Leaving something unsaid is the ultimate flex.It tells the other person:

 

Your opinion doesn’t hold enough weight for me to rearrange my schedule to refute it.

 

The Final Provocation: Silence is a Gift

We treat conversations like tennis matches—we have to return every ball. But life is actually a game of curation. You curate what you let into your soul.

When you leave something unsaid, you are giving a gift:

– To the other person:The dignity of saving face.
– To yourself:The freedom of not being chained to a petty argument.
– To the relationship:Space for it to grow without the scar tissue of a final, hurtful jab.

The Law of The Last Word

If you have to fight for the last word, you’ve already lost the plot. If you can give it away and feel lighter, you’ve mastered the game.

 

We think the person who speaks last wins. But in the arena of human dynamics, the person who can speak last but chooses not to? That person is royalty.

 

PS: On a completely different note,I am delighted to share that my other blog SOHB(State Of The Heart Branding) Story is now a Podcast as well. You can access it on these links below: