We make brands more human.

Everything is changing. As it turns out, brands don't "own" market segments. They are simply nodes in complicated human networks. And they're either influential in their networks, or they're not. To have influence, brands must become knowledge brokers. And they need to learn how from the ultimate brokers: humans. Your brand needs to learn to be more human.

“just”

In the graceful, brutal arc of a doomed relationship (romantic, professional, abstract, etc.), there may not be a staccato thunderclap signaling that Things Just Went ‘Round The Bend. Most often, evidence of the downward spiral comes in the aggregate, the result of a slow leak from pressurized discontents. What starts with an uncompromised disagreement evolves into militant passive-aggression and thereafter degrades to bitter nothingness. This has been well chronicled in the Cure’s old stuff.


Similarly, bigwideskyvites (alas mere mortals) have experienced threatened relationships with the incredible idea. These ideas, befouled by the clumsy mitts of mankind, likewise protest as the life is squeezed out of them. And whether their aggressor is chronic inflexibility, hyperpragmatism, or cultural suffocation, fate signals their endangered status with a common portent: … “just”.
It might go down like this:

Yaaysayer: “… then this part of the experience will be dynamically generated based on real-time user feedback.”

Naysayer: “That sounds amazing, but let’s just make it static.”

Yaaysayer: “Well, we could pre-develop several outcomes and deliver one based upon the actions of the specific user.”

Naysayer: “Oooh, I like that too! But let’s just have one outcome: ‘DRINK MORE OVALTINE.’”

“Just,” in the pursuit of the incredible idea, is no mere word. It is a premature tourniquet. It dishonorably acknowledges the spectinuum of All Possible Outcomes and presumes the locus of “good enough”. When spoken aloud, it confirms a battle is underway for the integrity and very livelihood of an innovation. “Just” is the clang of the ringside bell: time to put up your dukes and fight.