Hi there,

Welcome back to another week of Brand Matters. This week, we’re diving into why the smartest marketers are thinking less about funnels and more about nervous systems — how emotion, biology, and attention shape every brand interaction.

Also in today’s issue:

• Brand Wars: Tinder and Hinge go head-to-head over what dating means; quick dopamine vs slow connection

• Brands get agentic this holiday as Walmart, Etsy, and Shopify weave AI into shopping journeys

• Gen Z and Millennials are splitting on brand trust, from condoms to Costco

• Nike “speaks fluent runner” in Chicago with its latest marathon campaign

Let’s get started.

Junk Dopamine Is the New Junk Food

I spent 10 days at a silent meditation retreat in Romania recently. No speaking. No phones. No eye contact. Just you and your mind, nowhere to hide.

By day three, I realized something unsettling: my brain was playing an endless highlight reel of internet garbage. Random TikToks. YouTube shorts I'd watched months ago. Songs from commercials. Football clips. Every scroll, every swipe, every mindless click had carved itself into my mental real estate, and I couldn't evict any of it.

Sitting there in silence, I couldn't help but think: if this is happening to me — someone who thinks about this stuff for a living — what's happening to everyone else?

Look around right now. Someone near you is probably staring at their phone like it owes them money. You've done it too. We all have.

So when I got back, I started digging into the neuroscience behind it all. Something fundamental has shifted in how brands connect with people — and most of us are still marketing like it's 2010.

From Persuasion to Dopamine

If you're old enough to remember Blockbuster, you probably learned the classic marketing funnel: Awareness → Interest → Desire → Action. Clean. Linear. Built on the assumption that people were rational actors who just needed the right information to make smart choices.

That model worked fine when media was simple. TV, radio, print, billboards. You made a compelling case, repeated it enough times, and people bought.

Then the internet showed up and broke everything.

Attention spans collapsed. Markets saturated. Ad blockers proliferated. The rational funnel stopped explaining how people actually behaved. People weren't making logical decisions anymore — they were responding to something deeper, more primal.

Your nervous system.

Specifically, dopamine — the neurotransmitter tied to motivation, habit, and anticipation. It gets you out of bed in the morning. It also keeps you scrolling TikTok at 3 a.m., knowing you'll hate yourself tomorrow.

In healthy doses, dopamine fuels learning and creativity. In excess, it hijacks your entire nervous system — not just your attention. It triggers your stress response: elevated cortisol, impulsivity, anxiety, addiction.

How Social Media Weaponized Your Brain

TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts — they've all cracked the same code. You know the feeling: you open your phone "just for a second," and an hour vanishes. Psychologists call it the variable-ratio schedule. Casinos call it profit.

Here's how it works: in behavioral psychology, reinforcement schedules control when rewards appear. Early on, you reward every desired behavior (think training a dog — every paw shake gets a treat). Later, you switch to partial reinforcement, where rewards arrive unpredictably.

Variable-ratio is the nuclear option. You never know when the next dopamine hit is coming — a viral video, a like notification, something actually funny, or complete garbage. That uncertainty spikes dopamine harder than a guaranteed reward ever could. Your brain becomes a rat hitting a lever, convinced the next click will deliver.

This isn't conspiracy theory. It's basic neuroscience, weaponized by algorithms that treat your nervous system like an API endpoint.

DemandSage estimates 210 million people worldwide are addicted to social media. Among Gen Z, 82% admit they're dependent on it. Thirty-six percent of teenagers report excessive use tied to anxiety, stress, and depression.

We're not users anymore. We're inventory.

Mental Protection as a Competitive Edge

Edelman's 2025 Trust Barometer reveals that economic fears have morphed into widespread grievance, with six in 10 people reporting distrust toward government, business, and media. People increasingly filter brands through a simple question: Does this make my life better or worse?

Right now, we're at the same inflection point sugar hit in the '90s. For decades, nobody questioned pumping high-fructose corn syrup into everything. Then nutrition labels appeared, public awareness shifted, and suddenly "junk food" became a liability.

The question isn't just "How do we sell?" anymore. It's "How do we serve people's minds while still building loyalty?"

Most brands haven't figured this out yet. But the ones that do will own the next decade.

The Future of Branding: Protecting and Stimulating the Brain

The future doesn't belong to whoever shouts loudest. It belongs to whoever cares most. After decades of hijacking attention, the real competitive advantage is protecting mental space.

1. Make it easy to think, not just easy to click.

Our brains consume 20% of the body's energy at rest — they're constantly hunting for shortcuts. Cluttered design triggers cortisol. Clarity calms.

Look at what Supergoop did in suncare. They entered a category dominated by clinical bottles and medical jargon, then built an entire brand around joyful simplicity. Clean visuals, straightforward info, zero fear-mongering. Just: "This protects you, it feels good, use it." By 2022, they hit $250M in sales — 65% growth — by making suncare feel less like homework.

2. Trigger real emotion, not manufactured urgency.

Younger generations are burned out on outrage and fear-mongering. We're acutely aware of how messages spike cortisol and drain energy. Positive emotions — joy, awe, belonging — activate healthier neurochemistry. Oxytocin over stress hormones. Research shows these emotions expand creativity and long-term receptivity. But it has to be genuine. People sniff out manufactured positivity instantly.

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Aesop 🤍 I recently visited their store in Westfield and still can’t get over what an incredible experience I had! I recommend everyone to... See more

3. Design sensory experiences that regulate.

Flashy visuals and harsh sounds trip the brain's threat response. People don't want Times Square minds anymore.

Aesop, the Australian skincare brand, built their entire retail experience around nervous system regulation. Natural materials. Calming scents. Soft lighting. Unhurried service. No harsh fluorescents screaming at you. No aggressive music. No pressure to buy quickly. Their stores feel like sanctuaries from typical retail chaos. They've grown to over 400 stores globally not despite this approach, but because of it. When your environment soothes, people linger, trust, and return.

4. Restore attention.

Calm's "Do Nothing" campaign understood this. In a world screaming for attention, they whispered. They built a brand around permission to stop, to finish, to be done. Finite sessions. Natural soundscapes. Intentional pauses that let people breathe, think, process. That restraint cuts through more than any growth hack — because it helps your message land in memory, not the subconscious trash bin. When you design for completion, you give users something more valuable than a click: control.

5. Create shared rituals, not addiction mechanics.

Communities aren't engagement metrics — they're the antidote to dopamine manipulation. They activate oxytocin, the neurochemical tied to trust and belonging, pulling people out of digital bubbles.

Tracksmith, a Boston-based running brand, built their entire business around this. While they maintain a social presence, their focus is decidedly offline: local run clubs where people actually talk to each other. They host weekly group workouts followed by recovery snacks on their roof deck. By focusing on community over clicks, and hiring athletes as full-time employees rather than traditional influencers, they've carved out a devoted following in a market dominated by billion-dollar brands. Their customers aren't just buying gear — they're opting into a shared ritual. When brand activity becomes community ritual, loyalty sustains without the crash.

Why Most Brands Won't Do This

The CMO who says "we're dialing back push notifications" gets a very specific look from the CFO. It's the look that says "are you insane?"

Calm doesn't scale like anxiety does. Not in next quarter's numbers.

The entire digital ad ecosystem runs on hijacking attention. Google's stock price. Meta's revenue. Every growth hacker's playbook. Take away the urgency tactics and most marketing teams don't know what to do. They've optimized for clicks so long, they've forgotten how to make something people actually return to.

So yeah. Most brands will keep doing what they're doing until it stops working. But the truth is that we as consumers are already becoming fatiged.

Attention keeps getting more expensive while becoming less effective. The brands winning right now aren't the loudest, they're the ones people actually want in their lives.

The smart money isn't asking "how do we get more attention?" They're asking "how do we become something people don't want to block?"

Most CMOs won't play that game until they have to. But the ones who start now will own the conversation when everyone else figures it out.

Where This Goes

Your brand doesn't need to look like a Zen garden. Not every category calls for whisper-soft aesthetics. But these principles matter if you want long-term trust and a community that grows instead of churns.

We're only beginning to understand how fragile our nervous systems are. As neuroscience reveals the toll of overstimulation, brands that design for mental protection and not exploitation will build loyalty that compounds.

I think about those 10 days in Romania sometimes. Sitting in silence, watching my brain replay an endless loop of content I never meant to remember. The scary part wasn't that I'd consumed all that garbage. It was realizing how little of it I'd actually chosen.

Your customers are sitting in that same silence right now, whether they know it or not. Their nervous systems are keeping score. The question is: when they look back, will your brand be noise they wish they could forget— or signal they're grateful they found?

Brand Wars: Dating Apps

Hinge

Hinge rebuilt their entire brand around three words: "Designed to be Deleted." Think about that. A tech company built a marketing campaign around the idea that if their product works, you stop using it. Their success metric isn't daily active users or session length — it's how many people found someone and got the hell off the app. The product design backs this up. You get a finite number of daily likes, forcing you to be thoughtful instead of mindless. Prompts replace endless swiping.

Their recent campaigns literally celebrate couples who met on Hinge and deleted it. The entire experience is built around completion. You're not a user to be retained — you're a person trying to meet someone, and when that happens, Hinge's job is done.

Tinder

Infinite swipes. Classic variable-ratio reward schedule — the same mechanism that keeps people pulling slot machine levers. Every swipe might be the one. Gamified matching that feels more like Candy Crush than actual human connection. Premium features designed to create FOMO by showing you "who already liked you" behind a paywall. Tinder's success is measured by how long you stay in the app, not whether you actually meet anyone. More engagement, more premium subscriptions, more time staring at faces and making split-second judgments.

The longer you're swiping, the better their quarterly earnings look. One app wants you to find someone and leave. The other profits from keeping you in an endless loop of maybe-this-time dopamine hits.

Ad of the Week: The Ordinary

The Periodic Fable

The Ordinary just did something most beauty brands would never dare: they made an ad that calls out their entire industry for lying.

Their new campaign, "The Periodic Fable," is a fake periodic table filled with 49 beauty buzzwords that don't actually mean anything. "Firming." "Brightening." "Age-defying." All the vague promises beauty brands hide behind because they sound scientific without having to prove anything.

The film shows students hypnotized, performing viral skincare rituals from TikTok like zombies. Then the Periodic Fable table appears, and they wake up.

What makes this work isn't just that it's calling out competitors. It's that The Ordinary built their entire brand on being the antidote to beauty industry bullshit. They put actual ingredients on the front of the bottle. They price things at cost. They don't promise miracles — they promise niacinamide.

Most beauty brands sell aspiration and insecurity in equal measure. The Ordinary sells transparency. And it works precisely because they're willing to say what everyone's thinking: "This is all kind of ridiculous, isn't it?"

Lento Vibes

A bit of random inspo from around the grounds:

• Brands Get Agentic This Holiday: 2025 may be the year AI stops being just a tool and starts acting—brands like Walmart, Etsy & Shopify are embedding agentic AI to surface themselves in AI-driven shopping journeys. 👉 Get into their strategy 

• Netflix + Spotify Go Video Pods: From early 2026, Netflix will stream select Spotify & The Ringer video podcasts—16 titles to kick off across sports, culture, true crime and more. 👉 See the slate 

• Meta Lets Brits Pay to Escape Ads: Facebook & Instagram will offer a paid, ad-free option in the UK—£3.99 p/month (mobile) or £2.99 (web)—letting users choose between tracking-based free or clean browsing. 👉 Read the plan 

• Gen Z & Millennials Don’t See Brands the Same: These two generations diverge hard in brand trust—from condoms to Costco, which brands resonate depends entirely on age. 👉 Explore the divide 

• Nike Speaks Runner’s Tongue in Chicago: Nike’s new Chicago Marathon campaign isn’t about slogans—it “speaks fluent runner,” capturing grit, stride, and that race heartbeat. 👉 Feel the run