In Fear of a Black Swan
Brands are struggling to keep up with rapidly changing culture, relying on nostalgia, standardization, and control to maintain relevance.
The Current Underneath the Headlines
Culture always moves faster than the people trying to market to it. You can feel brands straining to keep up, leaning harder on psychology to make sense of a world they no longer recognize. That pressure shows up in the small decisions, the big bets, and the stories worth paying attention to this week.
Here are five stories we’re following for patterns and trends:
- ’Tis the season for dubious TV adverts — The Guardian
A cultural autopsy of this year’s John Lewis Christmas ad, where readers accuse the retailer of sentiment-mining, gender-stereotyping, and using holiday nostalgia as a pressure tactic to push spending while ignoring worker concerns.
Holiday ads are starting to feel like emotional debt collectors. People sense the manipulation and push back because the sentiment no longer matches the reality they’re living.
When the cultural mood is uncertain, brands lean harder into nostalgia because it’s predictable. It’s not sentiment. It’s a safety rail.
- The Growth Factor Fueling Industry Behemoths — Kellogg Insight
New research shows mega-firms like IKEA and Starbucks grow not just through size but through extreme standardization, using reusable components, processes, and knowledge to capitalize on demand shocks and scale faster than smaller competitors.
Standardization looks like operational efficiency, but underneath it is an obsession with control. Big firms grow because the system rewards sameness, not originality.
This is the corporate version of “if we make everything identical, nothing can surprise us.” It’s not efficiency, it’s anxiety management at scale.
- Why Every Company Suddenly Wants to Become a Bank — The Wall Street Journal
Crypto companies, fintechs, and retailers such as Amazon and Walmart are pursuing trust-bank charters to issue stablecoins, offer fiduciary services, and compete with regulated banks, raising alarms about financial stability and regulatory arbitrage.
When brands chase bank charters, it isn’t innovation. It is a power grab for psychological real estate. Control the wallet and you shape the identity tied to it.
If you control the money layer, you control behavior upstream. You don’t need to predict consumer choices if you own the rails those choices run on.
A psychological and historical look at how society condemns individual greed while ignoring the systemic structures that reward it, often scapegoating marginalized groups instead of confronting the engines that produce inequality and exploitation.
The focus on individual villains distracts from the machinery that encourages the behavior. It is easier to blame a face than confront the incentives that keep the system running.
Systems rewrite narratives to protect themselves.
If the public blames villains, the structure remains untouched.
- Autodesk’s CMO breaks down the branding lessons from Sydney Sweeney’s jeans commercial and Cracker Barrel’s rebrand — Fast Company
Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder analyzes why some campaigns spark productive cultural tension and others alienate audiences, using Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle spot and Cracker Barrel’s reverted rebrand to show how identity, partnerships, and brand stewardship drive psychological resonance.
Brands are discovering that tension is not the risk. Misaligned tension is. The ones who win are learning to read identity fault lines before they step on them.
Marketers don’t want authenticity. They want authenticity with guard rails and a script. They want edge without risk.
The Through-Line Trend
Across all five stories, you can feel the same instinct rising. Brands are trying to tighten their grip at the exact moment the culture is slipping through their fingers. They want to play behavioral scientist, nudging and shaping and steering, as if people are still predictable and competitors aren’t pulling the same levers. It’s a control fantasy disguised as strategy. And here’s the punchline: the more they fear a black swan, the more likely they are to summon one. Trying to control what you don’t understand has never worked. It certainly won’t work now.
