Toniq

Too much of a good thing eventually stops being good. The same way one more spicy tuna roll can tip you from bliss to regret, one more tagline can push your brand from memorable to forgettable. It never happens in one big bite. It happens slowly, in tiny decisions that all feel right in the moment.

It fascinates me that we, as a collective species, can summon entire traditions out of thin air. Someone somewhere declares a date, gives it a name, and suddenly, people across the world are making cupcakes, creating hashtags, and designing commemorative t-shirts.

It does beg the question: why? Why does Coke advertise so much? Why does Coke do holiday bottles and spend millions of dollars on holiday commercials? For that matter, have you ever wondered why a brand like Coke, that is identifiable all over the world, still advertises so much and so often?

When I thought about it, I realized that churches understood branding long before marketing ever existed. They knew how to tell a story and keep it alive for generations. Every part of the experience was designed to make people feel something.

Those same golden arches, the ones we hardly notice, suddenly stood as an ambassador. A symbol powerful enough to draw thousands halfway across the world to stand in line for something they did not fully understand, but deeply felt.

Some brands seem too big to fail. Their names are stitched into culture, their logos stamped into memory. And yet, even giants fall. They go bankrupt, disappear from shelves, or fade quietly into nostalgia. But the interesting thing is that some of them don’t stay gone.

You can design a logo to mean strength, unity, or excellence, but meaning is a living thing. It grows, shifts, and mutates based on who uses it and how often it is seen.

And that’s the point of words. They are here to allow us to communicate, and yet, they are clever and silly, obscure and misleading. Words are living, breathing creatures that can be tamed or explored in their tameless moods.

Language functions in much the same way. The words we choose are shaped by who we are in that moment, who we are speaking to, and the context in which we speak. The same thought can be expressed in a thousand ways, each variant conveying subtle shades of meaning.

Most brands don’t get people. Not because they’re bad at what they do—but because they’re stuck in a cycle of performance.

Words communicate more than meaning—they communicate tone. Are you friendly? Approachable? Professional? Clever? Sophisticated? Or, heaven forbid, careless? A single word can convey warmth, confidence, humor, or, if mishandled, confusion and even embarrassment.

But why? Why are people, men and women, falling for an algorithm and hitching their lives to a chatbot? Why are people willing to bend reality to “be with” a machine?

They glow up like humans do—with messy, awkward adolescence, questionable decisions, a few cringe-worthy moments, and then a decade of slow, steady transformation that suddenly looks effortless from the outside.

A trademark isn’t just a name or a logo. It’s a symbol that connects your business to a promise in the customer’s mind. When people see it, they should think, “Ah, this comes from that company I trust—or at least, that company I recognize.”

But if you think it’s bad for normal people and clueless world leaders, what does this influx of AI slop do to brands? How do brands fight against the deepfake? And what if they don’t?