Hi there,

Most brands today are that safe, boring person you got stuck talking to at your last dinner party.

You know the one.

They spoke in corporate buzzwords, had zero controversial opinions, and somehow managed to make even the weather sound lifeless.

By the time they finished explaining their "measured approach" to literally everything, you were scanning the room for literally anyone else to talk to.

Unfortunately, this is human nature. Just like in life where society pushes us to make safe choices and live in comfort, the same thing happens to brands.

Because somewhere in a boardroom, someone said "Let's not be too aggressive" and everyone nodded. Someone worried about "alienating potential customers" and the room agreed. Someone suggested "keeping it professional" and suddenly the brand's personality got committee'd to death.

They took everything interesting about the company—the quirks, the strong opinions, the reason they started this thing in the first place—and focus-grouped it into oblivion.

And just like at that party, customers are scanning the room for literally anyone else to talk to.

Why Smart People Make Dumb Choices

Let's be honest about why brands play it safe. It's not because marketers lack creativity or vision. It's because the system rewards conformity and punishes failure with career preservation instincts kicking in.

The problem though is that while you're avoiding the risk of looking like a muppet, you're guaranteeing the risk of looking forgettable.

Kodak didn't die because they made terrible cameras. They died because they played it safe when the market was ready for disruption. While they protected their film business with incremental improvements and safe messaging, digital disruptors redefined what photography could be. Their "safe" strategy led to bankruptcy in 2012—proof that safety isn't actually safe when your entire category is shifting.

This raises the obvious question: what does successful category disruption actually look like? And more importantly, how do you convince a risk-averse organization to take the leap?

What Category Disruption Actually Looks Like

Category disruption doesn't happen by accident. It follows patterns that smart brands can study and replicate, though the execution is always messier than the case studies make it seem.

Graza: Reframing the problem

While every other olive oil brand performed the same tired sophistication theater—glass bottles catching light like liquid gold, heritage stories about Italian nonnas, packaging that whispered "this costs more than your lunch"—Graza asked a different question: "What if olive oil worked like ketchup?"

Their insight was that people don't want to perform luxury when they're cooking dinner on a Tuesday. They want oil that works. So they created a squeeze bottle that looked like it belonged in a gym bag, not a gourmet kitchen, with just two simple products: Sizzle for cooking and Drizzle for finishing.

No confusion, no paralysis, no PhD in olive varieties required. They didn't just change the packaging—they changed the job the product was hired to do, from "elevate your cooking" to "make cooking easier."

Liquid Death: Targeting the ignored

Mike Cessario looked at the water aisle, row after row of plastic bottles designed by committee and noticed who wasn't being served: people who wanted to stay hydrated without feeling like they were at a wellness retreat.

His insight was simple but powerful: why should all the cool marketing go to products that are bad for you? So he packaged water in tallboy cans that looked like they belonged at a punk show, not a yoga class, and "Murder Your Thirst" became their battle cry.

The result? A $1.4 billion valuation by 2024, not because their H2O molecules are different, but because they served an audience everyone else ignored.

Dr. Squatch: Making the category look ridiculous

Jack Haldrup started Dr. Squatch because men's skincare was trapped in a weird triangle: "crunchy granola hippie," "suspiciously floral," or "aggressively boring hospital soap."

His insight was simple: men want to smell good without shopping in their girlfriend's section. So he created soap that looked like it could survive a zombie apocalypse and ads that made hygiene feel like entertainment.

Their Super Bowl spot "You're Not a Dish" drove a 200% market share increase because it dared to make hygiene hilarious. By 2025, they were dropping limited-edition soap made from Sydney Sweeney's bathwater and recruiting Mike Tyson as their hype man. They made the existing category look absurd and it was absolutely brilliant.

These three brands share a common thread: they all spotted opportunities hiding in plain sight, then had the courage to act on them.

The Three Fears that Kill Bold Ideas

After analyzing hundreds of brand decisions, three fears consistently kill bold ideas before they reach market:

1. "What if it doesn't work?"

Here's the reality: safe strategies fail too—they just fail slowly and quietly. The better question is "What if it does work?" Liquid Death could have been a spectacular failure. Instead, it's worth more than many traditional beverage companies.

2. "What if we look unprofessional?"

Boring looks far more unprofessional than bold. When Graza launched their squeeze bottle, traditionalists called it "cheap" and "gimmicky." Now those same traditionalists are scrambling to make their own products more accessible.

3. "What if we alienate customers?"

You're already alienating customers—the ones who could love you but can't find you in the crowd. Mass appeal is mass forgetting. Better to be passionately loved by 30% of the market than politely tolerated by 100%.

When "Different" Goes Wrong

Not every attempt at differentiation succeeds, and the failures teach us just as much as the wins.

Gap tried to rebrand in 2010 with a controversial new logo that looked more like a startup than a retail institution. The backlash was swift and brutal—they reverted to their original logo is less than a week. The same spokesperson who announced it as sexy and cool had to backtrack… how embarrassing. Their mistake? They changed their identity without changing their substance. Different visuals with the same boring product don't create differentiation—they create confusion. True differentiation must run deeper than cosmetics.

And we all know what happened to Jaguar last year….

In 1985, Coca-Cola changed their formula to taste more like Pepsi with New Coke. Technically, it tested better in focus groups. Practically, it nearly destroyed the brand because they underestimated the emotional connection people had with the original product. Some things are different for good reasons—you need to understand what you're disrupting before you disrupt it.

The Segway was certainly different—nothing like it existed. But it solved a problem most people didn't have (walking is too slow) while creating new problems (where do you park it?). Different for different's sake, without clear consumer benefit, is just expensive noise. Real disruption must make life genuinely better, not just more interesting.

Before you get too excited about disruption, let's be honest: not every attempt at differentiation succeeds, and the failures teach us just as much as the wins.

Making It Work in Different Industries

"But our industry is different!"

Every marketer's favorite excuse. Healthcare is too regulated. Finance is too serious. B2B buyers are too conservative. Traditional retail is too entrenched.

I call bullshit.

Oscar Health operates in one of the most regulated industries on the planet—health insurance—and they still managed to make their competitors look like they were communicating in ancient hieroglyphics. They didn't break any rules; they just refused to hide behind jargon and confusion like everyone else.

Warby Parker entered one of the most entrenched retail categories imaginable - eyewear and is dominated by a literal monopoly. They didn't try to out-manufacture Luxottica; they just noticed that buying glasses was a miserable experience and fixed it.

The constraint isn't your industry. The constraint is your imagination.

Getting Your Organization to Say Yes

Start small and think big.

Launch limited editions or test markets before full rollouts. Create "innovation labs" with different success metrics. Use A/B testing to prove concepts before big investments. Most breakthrough ideas start as side projects that prove themselves before earning full company backing.

Use data, not just intuition.

Show market research that supports your hypothesis. Calculate the cost of commoditization versus the risk of differentiation. Find proof points from adjacent categories. The more concrete evidence you provide, the easier it becomes for risk-averse executives to say yes.

Build coalition, not consensus.

Get one influential champion who believes in the vision. Create small wins that build momentum. Show customer enthusiasm, not just internal approval. You don't need everyone to love the idea—you just need the right people to believe in it enough to let you try.

Make safe feel dangerous.

Document market share loss from playing it safe. Show how competitors gain ground with bold moves. Calculate the cost of being ignored versus the cost of being criticized. Sometimes the best way to sell bold moves is to make cautious feel reckless.

The Real Cost of Conformity

When you look like everyone else, you are often lead to competing just on price, a race to the bottom where the winner gets forgotten next quarter. When you sound like everyone else, you compete on features, a specs war where innovation becomes commoditization. When you act like everyone else, you disappear entirely, death by a thousand tiny compromises.

The brands that break through aren't just different; they're strategically, systematically, unapologetically different. They've done the hard work of understanding their category's orthodoxies and found ways to challenge them that create real value for real people.

Category disruption isn't about being weird for weird's sake, it's about being smart enough to see opportunities that others miss and brave enough to act on them.

The question isn't whether your category can be disrupted. The question is whether you'll be the disruptor or the disrupted.

Here's your assignment:

Every category has its sacred cows. Every market has its unquestioned assumptions. Every industry has its "this is just how things work" moments.

Look around your category right now. What's the one thing everyone accepts as unchangeable? What's the orthodoxy everyone's too scared to challenge?

That's not just an opportunity—that's your starting point.

The brands that will win tomorrow are the ones brave enough to question their assumptions today. Not because they're reckless risk-takers, but because they recognize that the greatest risk of all is becoming irrelevant.

What assumption will you challenge first?

Brand Wars: Battle of the Workspaces

Slack

Understood something simple: work communication doesn't have to feel like work. While everyone else was building "enterprise collaboration platforms," Slack built something that actually felt good to use. Custom emoji, GIFs, channels named after inside jokes—they made the workplace feel less corporate and more human. The result? Teams actually wanted to use it.

Microsoft Teams 

Built to solve IT problems, not people problems. It integrates perfectly with Office 365. It meets security requirements. It handles enterprise-scale deployments without breaking a sweat. But it never asked whether people would actually enjoy using it. Teams works exactly like you'd expect Microsoft software to work—efficiently, predictably, and with all the personality of a conference room.

Ad Vault: Oatly

If you have read this newsletter before. You would know I love a good jingle.

Oatly's CEO stood in a field, played a keyboard, and sang a homemade jingle about oat milk. The tagline? "It's like milk but for humans." Most CMOs would've killed this idea in the first meeting. Too weird. Too risky. What will people think?

But Oatly ran it anyway.

The internet's reaction was split. Some people thought it was brilliant. Others thought it was the worst thing they'd ever seen. But at least everyone had an opinion.

This YouTube comment captures it perfectly: "Me listening to it for the first time: oh that is so horrible. Me listening to it for the second time: I mean, it's not that bad. Me listening to it for the third time: It's kinda cool. Me listening to it for the fourth time: Can you make that into a full song please?"

Lento Vibes

A bit of random inspo from around the grounds:

• “Best Place to Have Herpes” Wins Gold: New Zealand’s bold STI campaign — “Herpes? Might as well get it over with here” — took home gold at Cannes. Unfiltered copy that makes you squirm... and remember it. 👉 Read the BBC article

• The Insurance Ad You Can Smell: Hiscox mailed wine-stained letters to show how underinsurance can ruin more than your carpet. A clever, tactile reminder that chaos costs. 👉 See the stains

• Heinz Wants You to Say Sorry: Their new PSA teaches you how to apologise — for stealing someone’s chips. It's oddly polite and unmistakably Heinz. 👉 Watch the spot

• X Without a CEO? Execs are out, confusion is in. Adweek asks the big question: does X need a CEO at all, or is the chaos the strategy? 👉 Read the piece

• Stracciatella, but Make It Fashion A gelato ball in a chocolate-flecked suit takes on sustainability in this bizarre stop-motion ad. Messy, stylish, and strangely satisfying. 👉 Watch the madness