There are perfectly legitimate reasons for a blog to exist. It brings people to the website. It gives us something to share. It helps with search. It demonstrates expertise. It keeps the content calendar from developing abandonment issues. All good reasons. None of them explains why I write this the way I do.
There are many days as a writer when I stare at the blank screen, curse it, wander the apartment, open the refrigerator and stare at the contents, return, and do it again and again. I avoid, I struggle, and then, eventually, if the planets align and my neighbors aren’t having really loud, aggressive sex, I am able to put something on the screen that will eventually shake off its noxious afterbirth and be a ThoughtLab blog.
I have been at this for ten years now, and after all that time and all those words, after slamming my head off the wall, literally and figuratively, I have come to a place of rest and reflection, and I have discovered that all this work has led me to THE question: Why am I still doing this?
Especially now, in the age of AI, where I could set my agent to write “5 Ways to Strengthen Your Brand,” while I wander to the kitchen, make coffee, maybe a Denver omelet, some toast, and the chosen breakfast meat of the day- Lord, how I love me some breakfast meats- all the while the AI agent is cranking out five blogs to appease the open palm of the content calendar.
So why am I still sitting down and writing about my mother teaching me to sew, an English muffin, a whale, a diner from The Brink’s Job, a grocery cart, Ted Kazanoff, the brilliant acting teacher, or whatever strange thing has lodged itself in my head? Well, for one, because that’s part of my job description: Write copy, muck the stalls, make the stew, write the blog, and show up to Zoom meetings not dressed as one of the Salem witches. So, I do, and I do.
It’s Not Because We Need a Blog
Of course, ThoughtLab needs a blog. We’re a marketing agency. Having a blog is one of those things marketing agencies are supposed to do, along with having strong opinions about fonts and occasionally using the word “strategy” in a room full of people who all have different definitions of it. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for a blog to exist. It brings people to the website. It gives us something to share. It helps with search. It demonstrates expertise. It keeps the content calendar from developing abandonment issues. All good reasons. None of them explains why I write this the way I do.
And technically, we don’t even call it a blog. We call it Toniq. That wasn’t an accidental bit of branding or an attempt to make an ordinary blog sound more interesting than it is. A tonic is supposed to do something to you. Wake you up a little. Make you feel better. Put some fizz back into the system. We changed the spelling because we’re a branding agency and apparently incapable of leaving perfectly serviceable words alone. But the idea stuck. Toniq wasn’t supposed to be another shelf where we stacked marketing articles. It was supposed to have a little bite to it. Something you might actually want to consume rather than something you felt professionally obligated to read because the title contained the phrase “key insights.”
If Toniq’s only purpose were to keep the marketing machine fed, I could make my life considerably easier. I wouldn’t need to spend half a morning trying to figure out why an English muffin irritated me enough to deserve 1,800 words. I wouldn’t have to wonder what three humpback whales appearing beside a boat in Alaska might have to say about attention. I could stop thinking about grocery carts, old diners, acting teachers, words we’ve beaten senseless through overuse, and all the other things that somehow find their way into these pieces. I could choose a useful topic, make five points about it, slap a takeaway on the bottom, and call it a day. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that kind of writing. Plenty of it is out there, and some of it is very good. I just don’t know why I would add another piece to the pile.
Because somewhere along the way, Toniq became something other than a place for ThoughtLab to publish what we know. It became a place to show how we think.
That difference matters to me. Most of these pieces don’t begin with marketing. They begin because something has gotten stuck in my head. Something bothers me, makes me laugh, pisses me off, reminds me of something that happened thirty years ago, or simply refuses to leave. I start poking at it to see why it’s still there. Sometimes I know where I’m going. More often, I have no damn idea. I follow it for a while, turn it over, argue with it, write something I hate, delete it, wander back to the refrigerator, and eventually discover there’s an idea hiding underneath.
That idea may lead to branding or marketing, but it might take a while to get there. I’m fine with that. In fact, I think the wandering is part of the point. We spend a lot of time in this business trying to convince people that creativity can be turned into a predictable process, that if we put the right people in the right room with enough Post-it notes, the brilliant idea will obediently arrive at 2:45, just before the meeting ends. Sometimes it does. But sometimes you have to follow an English muffin around for a while.
And maybe that’s the first real reason I still write Toniq. I’m not particularly interested in using it to prove that ThoughtLab has answers. I’m interested in showing that we’re still asking questions.
The Voice Is the Point
If you’ve read more than a few Toniq pieces, you’ve probably figured out that I’m not particularly interested in sounding like an agency. I’m not entirely sure what an agency is supposed to sound like, but I’ve read enough agency websites to recognize the dialect. It’s confident, polished, relentlessly knowledgeable, and somehow capable of using four hundred words without revealing whether an actual human being was involved.
That voice exists for a reason. Businesses want to sound credible. Agencies especially want to sound like they know what they’re doing because, presumably, you’re considering giving them money to know what they’re doing on your behalf. So we polish the language. We remove the oddities. We sand down the jokes that might not land. We take out anything too personal, too strange, too opinionated, or too human, and eventually we arrive at something professional enough that it could have been written by almost anyone.
I don’t want Toniq to sound like almost anyone.
I want it to sound like someone is actually talking to you. Someone who gets distracted, remembers things, changes his mind, makes questionable jokes, occasionally wanders down a road that turns out to be a dead end, and has to back up and find another way through. That means the voice can be messy. It means I’ll occasionally use a word someone might suggest removing from a corporate website. It means I may spend several paragraphs telling you about something that happened when I was seven before I explain what the hell any of it has to do with branding. That isn’t me forgetting where I am. Most of the time, anyway. It’s the way I get there.
Because voice isn’t something you sprinkle over an idea after the thinking is finished. It comes from the thinking. It’s in what you notice, what you find funny, what irritates you, what you’re willing to admit, and which connections you make that someone else might not. Strip all of that away in the name of professionalism, and you may end up with cleaner copy, but you’ve also removed the fingerprints.
That would be a particularly strange thing for ThoughtLab to do. We spend a good portion of our working lives telling brands that distinction matters, that sounding like everyone else is a lousy way to be remembered, and that people respond to something recognizable and real. We also talk a lot about risk, because the good stuff tends to live there. Not stupid risk for the sake of getting attention, but the risk that comes from making an actual choice. Say this, not that. Stand here, not there. Sound like yourself even when sounding like everyone else would be considerably safer.
Toniq gives us a place to live by that ourselves. If I’m going to tell a client that playing it safe can make a brand disappear, I can’t come back here and hide behind language designed to offend absolutely nobody. The jokes are a risk. The opinions are a risk. Writing about aggressive sex next door, breakfast meats, my mother teaching me to sew, or an English muffin that sent me into a minor existential crisis carries some risk. Someone may think it’s ridiculous. Someone else may think I take too damn long to get to the point. Fine. The risk isn’t a side effect of having a voice. It’s part of having one.
Because the safest voice is no voice at all. Remove everything peculiar enough to bother somebody, and you’ll eventually remove everything interesting enough to matter. You may end up with perfectly professional copy. Nobody will complain. Nobody will remember it either.
And if ThoughtLab believes the good stuff lives somewhere beyond safe, Toniq ought to be willing to go looking for it.
Nobody Talks Like That
There’s a peculiar thing that happens when people sit down to write on behalf of a company. They stop talking like themselves. Perfectly normal human beings who, five minutes earlier, were discussing lunch, complaining about traffic, or telling a filthy joke suddenly put their hands on a keyboard and become Executive Vice President of Language Nobody Has Ever Spoken Aloud.
Suddenly, everything is innovative. Every solution is robust. Every approach is strategic. Nothing is simply useful when it can be transformative. Nobody helps anybody when they can empower them instead. And somewhere, right now, somebody is typing “in today’s rapidly evolving landscape” without a hint of irony.
I understand why it happens. There’s safety in that language. Nobody gets called into a meeting because they described the company as a trusted partner committed to delivering innovative solutions. You can read that sentence aloud in front of the CEO, the board, your mother, your priest, and a busload of nervous investors without breaking a sweat. The problem is that you could probably put it on the websites of fifty thousand other companies and nobody would notice.
That’s the bargain we make when we remove risk from language. We gain safety and lose identity.
Toniq has always tried to make the opposite trade. I’d rather write something that makes you stop for a second, laugh, disagree, remember something from your own life, or wonder where in God’s name I’m going with this than give you another article constructed entirely from sentences you’ve already read somewhere else. That doesn’t mean being strange simply for the pleasure of being strange. Weird is just another costume if there’s nothing underneath it. The idea still has to hold up. The story still has to earn its place. Eventually, I still have to get somewhere.
But I don’t think getting somewhere requires taking the shortest route, and I’ve developed one rule over the years, though I’m not sure I ever consciously made it a rule: I don’t go looking for a story to illustrate a marketing point. I go looking for the point inside the story.
That distinction matters. If I decide I want to write about customer experience and then rummage around in my past for something amusing that will get me there, you’ll probably feel the machinery working. The story becomes an anecdote, a clever little opening before we get down to business. I’m not interested in that. If I’m going to tell you about my mother teaching me to sew, Ted Kazanoff driving me crazy in acting school, or three whales appearing beside me in Alaska, those things have to matter before ThoughtLab ever enters the picture.
Usually, I don’t know what they mean when I start. I know only that something has stayed with me. That’s enough to begin pulling at the thread. Somewhere in the writing, I start to understand why I remembered it, and very often that understanding bumps into the work we do at ThoughtLab. It turns out brands aren’t separate from life because people make them and people experience them. The same things that make us laugh, pay attention, trust someone, remember something, get irritated, feel understood, or change our minds don’t suddenly disappear because somebody scheduled a marketing meeting.
That’s where most of Toniq comes from. Not from sitting down and asking what ThoughtLab should say this week, but from noticing something and asking why it matters. The story comes first. The question follows. And if I already knew the answer before I started writing, I’m not sure there’d be much reason to write it.
The Takeaway
So why am I still doing this?
Ten years later, I think the answer is that I still don’t know what I’m going to find when I sit down. If I did, I’m not sure I’d bother. There are faster ways to produce content, easier ways to fill a calendar, and certainly more efficient ways to tell people that ThoughtLab knows a thing or two about branding and marketing. Efficiency just isn’t the reason Toniq exists.
I write it because the search is interesting. Because some ridiculous thing that happened at Walmart can turn into a thought about customer experience, or an English muffin can expose something about expectations, or a memory I haven’t visited in forty years can suddenly explain something I’ve been trying to understand about the work we do today. I write because following those connections forces me to think, not simply report what I already believe.
And I write it because ThoughtLab asks its clients to take risks, find what makes them different, speak like themselves, and resist the gravitational pull toward everything safe and familiar. Toniq gives us nowhere to hide from that advice. If we believe the good stuff lives in the risk, then occasionally we have to risk looking ridiculous ourselves.
Maybe that’s what a voice really is. Not something you manufacture in a workshop or define on page seventeen of a brand guide, but something that becomes recognizable after you’ve used it long enough. You say what you mean, tell the stories that matter to you, follow the questions wherever they lead, and eventually people begin to recognize who’s speaking.
Tomorrow I’ll probably stare at the blank screen again. I’ll curse it, walk into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, stare hopefully into its familiar depths, and discover that no new ideas have materialized beside the mustard.
Then I’ll come back and start writing.
That’s Toniq.
