Late night and I was pasta-filled, eyes drooping, barely staying awake in front of the TV, trying to muster the energy to get off the couch and resume being supine in my bed. The T-Mobile ad flashed by quickly, the way ads do now. A map of the United States, filled in with pink dots. Pink dots in the cities, pink dots in the plains, pink dots reaching into the kind of country where you assume the signal dies and the bears take over. The voiceover said something about super broadband. I didn’t catch most of it. What I caught was the visual. Every inch of the country, pink. Conquered. Owned. Done.

I don’t know if the map is literally accurate. Coverage maps rarely are. T-Mobile’s signal has gaps, as every carrier’s does, and “covered” means a lot of different things depending on whether you’re standing in a parking lot or trying to download a movie in your basement next to the furnace. But that wasn’t the point of the ad. The point of the ad was the flag. The pink dots were planting a flag. They were saying, “We already won; you just haven’t caught up yet.”

And that’s what stopped me. Well, that and a fart that rocked the house. Because once you plant that flag, once you say we already won, you’ve got a new problem. A bigger one than the problem you spent fifteen years solving. Because somewhere along the way, the underdog became the dinosaur. 

What happens to a brand when it wins the category?

Stay with me, because this is where it gets interesting. T-Mobile didn’t get where it is by being good. I mean, sure, the network got better. But that’s not the story. The story is that T-Mobile spent the last fifteen years being the Un-carrier. The whole personality of the brand. The magenta. The swagger. The John Legere t-shirts. The relentless trolling of AT&T and Verizon. All of it was built in opposition. They had a villain. The villain was the two big carriers and their customer-hostile contracts, their bait-and-switch pricing, and their cheerful corporate condescension. T-Mobile got famous for pointing at the villain and saying, “Those guys are the problem, and we’re the answer.”

It worked because the villain was real. Anyone who’d spent twenty minutes on the phone with AT&T trying to figure out why their bill went up forty dollars knew the villain. The villain was lived experience. T-Mobile didn’t have to invent the bad guy. They just had to be sharper, faster, and louder about pointing at him.

But here’s the thing about villain stories. They don’t survive their own success.

You can be the underdog for a long time. You can be the underdog for fifteen years. You can be the underdog right up until the moment you’ve covered the whole country in pink dots, and your subscriber count is shoulder-to-shoulder with the giants you spent your life fighting. And then, very quietly, the underdog story stops working. Not because you’ve changed. Because the position has changed. You can’t be the scrappy alternative to the dinosaurs when you are a dinosaur. You can wear the magenta t-shirt all you want, but you’re standing on the same hill as the people you used to throw rocks at. Worse, you’re now the thing somebody else is throwing rocks at, and you haven’t noticed yet because you’re still admiring your own t-shirt.

This is the trap. And it’s not just T-Mobile’s trap. It’s the trap every brand that wins by being a challenger eventually walks into.

Villains Don’t Survive Success

Think about Amazon. Amazon’s first villain was the bookstore. The inefficient, limited, overpriced bookstore where you couldn’t find anything past the bestseller table without flagging down a teenager in an apron. The villain story was your time is too valuable to shop like this. That worked. Amazon won. So they moved the villain. The new villain became anything you have to leave your house to buy. That worked too. Amazon won again. And then they moved it again, this time to commerce infrastructure, to physical retail itself, to the idea that the whole internet should be running on Amazon Web Services. Each time they won, they redesigned the villain before the old one ran out of gas.

That’s the part most brands miss. They wait until the villain stops working, and by then it’s too late, because they’ve already started to feel like the villain themselves.

Tesla is in this exact spot right now. Tesla won by being the company that proved electric cars weren’t dorky. But in reality, if you look at the Tesla truck, goodness, that is one ugly vehicle. The villain was fossil fuels, lazy automakers, and the cultural assumption that anything good for the planet had to look like a refrigerator on wheels. Tesla beat that villain so thoroughly that every major automaker now makes electric cars. Which means Tesla’s original villain is gone.

Tesla now competes with Ford, Hyundai, BMW, and a dozen Chinese brands you’ve never heard of, and the “we’re different” energy that powered the brand for a decade is leaking out fast. Tesla still behaves culturally like a challenger while operating economically like a dominant manufacturer. The original story frame no longer matches the position the company actually occupies. The challenger has won, and nobody’s redesigned the story.

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What Category Drift Actually Looks Like

That, by the way, is what category drift looks like from the outside. It doesn’t show up as a single bad decision. It shows up as a slow softening of the edges.

The ads get more generic. The brand stops picking fights. The founder starts giving the same interviews everyone else is giving. The press releases sound corporate. None of it is a disaster on its own, but stack a year of it together, and the brand has lost the thing that made it worth caring about. It still works. It just doesn’t matter the way it used to.

And mattering, as anyone who’s run a brand knows, is the part you can’t buy back once you’ve lost it.

The Brands That Keep Moving

The brands that get through this moment, the ones that don’t slide into being the boring giant they replaced, do something specific. They redesign the POV at the moment of the win, not after. New villain. New tension. New category frame.

They don’t pretend they’re still the underdog, because that gets pathetic fast, like watchingme fit into my high school prom dress, many levels of pathetic in that scenario. But they also don’t just settle into being the new establishment. They find something bigger to push against.

Apple has done this its whole life. Apple’s villain has been, in order: IBM (the suits), Microsoft (the bores), the music industry (the gatekeepers), the phone carriers (the captors), and now, increasingly, surveillance capitalism itself (the watchers). Each time the old villain became unviable, usually because Apple won, they reached for a bigger one. The brand stayed sharp because the opposition stayed sharp.

It wasn’t the same opposition, but it was always there, doing the work of giving the brand something to push against.

I don’t know what T-Mobile’s next villain is. I’m not sure they know either. The easy move would be to pivot to AI, and 5G applications and “the network of the future,” but everyone’s saying that, and saying what everyone else is saying isn’t a POV. It’s a press release.

The harder move, and the better one, would be to look at what people actually hate about being constantly connected right now, and decide T-Mobile is going to be the company that pushes against that.

Maybe the villain is data harvesting. Maybe it’s the way every carrier wants to become a content company and shove you into a walled garden. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re all paying for a thousand subscriptions we don’t remember signing up for, and the phone company is the worst offender. (I am, at this very moment, paying $4.99 a month for something called “Premium Visual Voicemail,” and I don’t know what that is, and I am afraid to ask. Who am I kidding? I’m just afraid.)

I don’t know. But the point isn’t that I should know. The point is that they should know, and the window to figure it out is now, while the pink dots still feel like a win and not yet like a ceiling.

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The Most Dangerous Moment in a Brand’s Life

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss. The win is the most dangerous moment in a brand’s life. It feels like the end of the story, but it’s actually the start of the next one.

The hard part isn’t getting to the top of the hill. The hard part is what you do once you’re up there, and the people who used to cheer for you start looking around and asking, okay, now what?

Most brands answer that question badly. They settle in. They put on the suit. They start running ads that look like the ads their old villains used to run. They become beloved by the people who liked them when they were scrappy, and indistinguishable from the giants to the people meeting them for the first time.

Within ten years, they’re the company somebody else builds their underdog story against, and they never see it coming, because they still think they’re the rebels.

The brands that don’t go that way understand something most don’t. They understand that a category-of-one position isn’t a place you arrive at. It’s a thing you have to keep redesigning. The villain that made you sharp at year five won’t make you sharp at year fifteen. The frame that built the category isn’t the frame that holds the category. And the day you cover the whole country in pink dots is the day you have to start over. Not on the network, not on the product, but on the story.

The Morning After the Pink Dots

I keep thinking about that map. The pink dots. The visual knee-jerk of total coverage. It’s a beautiful piece of marketing, honestly. It does its job. It lands the punch. But I also keep thinking about what happens the morning after.

The marketing team comes in. The map is up on the wall. Somebody says, what’s next? And there’s a long pause. The kind of pause where you can hear the air conditioner or Lester from the intern poll sweat. Because the answer isn’t a campaign.

The answer is a category redesign, and most brands aren’t built for that conversation. They’re built for the conversation about creative refreshes, platform launches, and updated brand books. The conversation that ends with a deck.

The hard conversation, the one about who is the next villain, and whether our worldview is still sharp enough to point at it, usually doesn’t happen. Or it happens too late, after the brand has already started to feel like the dinosaur it used to make fun of.

If you’re building a brand right now, and your POV is built around being the alternative to the bad guys, take the win seriously before you get there. Start designing the next position before you need it. Ask yourself what the brand stands for once the original villain is gone.

Because the villain will be gone. Either you’ll beat them, or the world will move past them, or the category will shift, and the answer your brand had for the last decade won’t be the answer anymore.

You see this outside telecom and tech all the time. Clients usually don’t describe it this way. They say things like:

Almost always, what’s actually happening is that the villain they were built against has either lost or left the field, and nobody noticed the change in position. The brand kept doing what it used to do. The world stopped responding the way it used to respond. And the gap between those two things, between the old position and the new reality, is where brands die slowly without ever knowing they’re dying.

The pink dots are pretty. They’re a great ad. They’re also a warning shot. The map is filled in.

Now what?

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The Takeaway

Most challenger brands think the hard part is winning. It isn’t. The hard part is staying strategically sharp after the win.

Brands built in opposition eventually run into the same structural problem: the villain that made them culturally magnetic disappears. Sometimes, because they defeated it, or because the market moved on. Either way, the original tension that gave the brand its energy starts to collapse.

That’s when category drift begins.

Not all at once, and usually not through some catastrophic mistake. The brand simply starts to sound more corporate, behave more cautiously, and lose the sharpness that once made people care. The original positioning still exists, but it no longer aligns with the company’s role in the market.

The brands that survive this transition don’t pretend they’re still underdogs. They redesign the story before the old one stops working. They find a new tension, a new worldview, a new enemy worth pushing against.

At ThoughtLab, we see this pattern repeatedly: the companies that sustain category leadership are rarely the ones that cling to the narrative that made them famous. They’re the ones willing to reframe their role in the market before the market does it for them.

Because category leadership isn’t a permanent position. It’s a narrative problem that has to be solved again and again.

And the moment your map is covered in pink dots is usually the moment the old story expires.

Last night, in a lot by the sea, I went to the circus. A huge red-and-white tent was set up on the lot, the ocean air filling it with a sweet combination of brine and possibility. I had a great seat, close enough to see the expressions on the performers’ faces, yet far enough away to get the whole picture. I love the circus. Where else can you see clowns, acrobats, contortionists, and jugglers in one spot and not worry about catching an STD? We don’t have vaudeville any longer, but the circus is working hard to keep that tradition alive.

I was a clown. Not a class clown, an actual performing clown. I worked under a tent. I did bits. I made people laugh and rarely made a kid cry. Because I had good teachers, I understood the purpose and meaning of being a clown. I loved it and, you know, I was good at it. So when I go to the circus, and I go whenever I see an ad for one, I’m watching with a love of the craft and a memory of what it was like.

Sitting there last night, watching the tent breathe and the audience lean forward, I felt that old recognition. Not nostalgia exactly. More like remembering a language I used to speak with my whole body. There are some forms of imagination that don’t ask permission before entering the room. They arrive painted, sweating, grinning, already in motion.

After the show, as I walked home, I bumped into a friend of mine who is an artist. A real, working, pieces in a gallery, artist. He said I seemed excited, and I congratulated him on his keen observation skills. “I am excited,” I told him, “I’ve just been to the circus.” With that, I let loose all the thrills of the acts, the fun, the excitement, the danger, and how it all brought back memories of my clown days. “And now,” he said, “What are you doing now?” I was thrown by the question. I knew he didn’t mean at that moment. I was heading home; he knew that, but his question was more all-encompassing. Not what are you doing this moment, but what are you doing with these feelings, memories, and emotions. What will you create? is what he was asking. I don’t know, was all I could say to him. He smiled, put his hand on my shoulder, and said,  “Your muse is out of focus.” And then he walked off toward his usual bar, leaving me on the street, alone, wondering what the hell he meant and if I could get a muse on DoorDash.

The thing is, I’ve never had a muse. I’ve met women who inspired me, but usually they inspired me to act like an idiot and put notes and flowers on their cars. But I never considered any woman as a muse. Mostly because the idea of a muse seems old-fashioned, out of date, and it’s hard to have a muse when said muse has a restraining order out on you. But the women in the diaphonous dress, lying about on couches, teasing me, looking at me with smoky eyes and inspiring me into writing more, better, deeper, that has never been a part of my process. I know only a few folks who’ve had muses, and they mostly turned out to be dysfunctional relationships, and no writing was done. 

So, my friend’s comment about my muse being out of focus was interesting, and it started me thinking about muses, what is a muse, why is a muse, and, as is always the case, how it connects to my work with ThoughtLab. And this brought up the question: if you’re a brand, do you have a muse?

What a brand muse actually is

I don’t think a brand muse is mystical. I don’t think she floats into a quarterly planning meeting wearing a sheer robe, taps the CMO on the forehead, and whispers the next campaign platform into existence. Though, honestly, I would attend that meeting.

A brand muse is less dramatic than that, and probably more useful. It’s the instinct underneath the work. The thing a brand keeps returning to when it has to make a choice. It’s the pressure that says, ” This sounds like us, this doesn’t, this is alive, this is just approved.”

That matters because brands make decisions all day long. Brands make choices all day long, from campaigns to product names to the weird little customer emails nobody thinks matter until they sound like they were written by a haunted compliance department.  written by someone who has clearly been trapped in a compliance basement since 2009. Every one of those choices either sharpens the brand or blurs it a little more.

When the muse is in focus, the brand knows what kind of world it belongs to. Not in a precious way. Not in a “we are a movement” way, unless the brand has earned that, and very few have. I mean, it has a kind of weather, a sense of humor, and enough nerve to know what belongs to it and what doesn’t.  The difference between a sentence that would be said and a sentence that only exists because sixteen people survived a meeting and nobody had the strength to fight anymore.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. A muse is not the work itself. She’s what helps the work know where to go.

For a clown, maybe that’s timing. For a writer, maybe it’s the little internal shiver that tells you a line is either honest or trying too hard. For a brand, it’s the creative instinct that gives everything a center. Without it, the work can still be clean. It can still be strategic. It can still be very pleased with itself in a deck.

But it won’t have a pulse.

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When the muse is in focus

You can feel it when a brand knows what it is doing.

Not everything is loud. Not everything has to juggle fire while riding a horse. Sometimes the work is quiet and exact. Sometimes it’s strange enough to make someone in the room nervous. The point is not volume. The point is focus.

Old Spice knew. At some point, somebody looked at a men’s body wash brand and decided the answer was not more steam, more abs, or another man staring into a mirror as if soap had finally solved his childhood trauma. The answer was absurdity with a straight face. A man on a horse. A voice that moved faster than logic. A whole little universe where confidence had become unhinged, but somehow still smelled good.

That is a muse in focus. You may not like the work. You may be tired of the work. But you know, immediately, that it belongs to Old Spice.

Liberty Mutual has it too, even though I still can’t fully explain why. LiMu Emu and Doug should probably not work. An emu and a man in a little insurance sitcom sounds like the result of a whiteboard session that went unattended for too long. But there they are, year after year, living inside this odd little world the brand keeps choosing on purpose. That “on purpose” matters.

A lot of brands stumble into something interesting once, then spend the next three years sanding it down so nobody gets blamed for liking it. The braver thing is to keep going. To protect the strange little door once it opens. To say, yes, this is ours, even if someone in a conference room has questions.

That’s what focus looks like. The work has a center. It can bend without becoming someone else. It can change campaigns, change formats, change the joke, and still carry the same charge.

The muse is not there to make the brand pretty. She is there to make the brand recognizable in its bones.

When the muse gets blurred

You can feel that too, though it doesn’t always announce itself as failure. The work still looks professional. That’s the dangerous part. Nothing is broken in an obvious way. The lighting is good, the voiceover is warm, and the message has been tested until everyone who needed to feel safe could feel safe before lunch. Then the thing arrives in the world with no pulse.

This is why so many car commercials feel like they were all raised in the same extremely clean suburb. There is always a road and a view, always someone driving as if changing lanes has revealed something tender and enormous about the human condition. And, they never use their directional.

Nobody sets out to make forgettable work. I don’t believe that. Somewhere early on, the idea probably had teeth. It might have let the car behave strangely, or given the driver something more interesting than a smoother commute. It might even have come close to telling the truth, which in advertising can be treated like finding a raccoon in the nursery. Then the idea entered the room, which is usually where the blur begins. Not because the people there are stupid. Most of them are smart, and many of them have good taste. But a clear instinct is hard to defend when everyone else is holding a spreadsheet. The unusual thing has to explain itself. The safe thing just has to sit there looking responsible.

So the edge comes off. The joke gets smaller. The line that made everyone nervous becomes a line that makes no one feel anything. By the time the work is finished, it has survived the process, but survival is not the same as life.

That’s the blurred muse. You can still see the outline of what might have been there, something with shape, something with nerve, something that once knew where it wanted to go. But now it’s just another car on another beautiful road, heading nowhere in particular.

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The people who blur her

The easy version of this argument is that boring work comes from boring people. I don’t buy that.

Some of the people in those rooms are talented. The boring work is not proof that everyone involved is boring. A person can have taste, nerve, and a half-finished screenplay in a drawer, then still spend Tuesday afternoon asking whether the strange idea might make legal uncomfortable. That’s not a lack of imagination. That’s fear with a calendar invite. They didn’t enter the room, hoping to sand the life out of something. They entered the room responsible for money, reputation, timelines, jobs, and the terrible little weather system known as approval.

That kind of pressure changes people. A strange idea can be thrilling when it’s still in someone’s head, but once it has to survive a meeting, thrill starts looking like risk. Risk needs a defense. Defense needs numbers. Numbers have a way of making instinct seem childish, even when instinct is the only reason the work was alive in the first place.

So people get careful. They ask for the line to be softened. They wonder if the joke will land. They say the concept is interesting, which is often where interesting concepts go to hear the bad news. Nobody thinks they’re killing anything. They’re just making the work easier to approve.

That’s how the muse gets blurred. Not by one villain with a red pen, but by good people trying not to be wrong in public.

And I get it. Being wrong in public is awful. Being the person who approved the weird thing is even worse if the weird thing fails. But there’s a cost to making everything defensible before it’s allowed to breathe. After a while, the work no longer feels created. It feels managed.

That may be the real danger. Not failure. Not even bad taste. The real danger is a room full of smart people slowly teaching each other to distrust the first living thing that walks in.

How to know she’s gone

You can usually tell when the muse has left the building because the work starts sounding perfectly reasonable.

That’s the curse of it. Dead work rarely announces itself by being terrible. Terrible would almost be a mercy. Terrible has a smell. What usually shows up is something clean, balanced, approved, and impossible to remember five minutes later. The sentences behave. The visuals behave. The whole thing behaves itself right into the grave.

This is where brand work gets tricky, because everyone can point to the parts that are technically working. The message is clear. The audience is defined. The strategy has a nice little sentence at the top of the deck, wearing the shoes it bought for a conference. On paper, nothing looks wrong. But the work could belong to anyone.

That’s the giveaway. Swap the logo, and the body doesn’t reject the transplant. The voice has no fingerprints. The idea has no strange little scar that makes it unmistakable. It may be professional, but professional is not the same as alive.

A brand with no muse can still produce a lot of work. It can fill the calendar, feed the campaign, and keep the machine warm. What it can’t do is make people feel that someone with a point of view was in the room. There’s no sense of choice. No pressure. No odd little angle that tells you a human being fought for something.

And maybe that’s what my friend meant when he said my muse was out of focus. Maybe he wasn’t accusing me of having no imagination. Maybe he was telling me the signal had gotten soft. The thing I used to recognize under the tent, the thing that arrived painted and sweating and already in motion, was still there somewhere. I just wasn’t looking at it clearly enough.

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The Takeaway

I keep thinking back to that tent by the sea.

The performers knew where the edge was. You could feel it. Not because everything was dangerous, though some of it was, but because the whole thing had a pulse. Clowning, when it’s done well, is not just falling down in large pants. It’s timing, taste, nerve, and a deep respect for the audience. You have to know what you’re serving. You have to know what kind of foolishness belongs to you.

Maybe that’s true for brands too.

A brand without a muse can still function. It can sell things, run meetings, make ads, send emails that begin with “We’re excited to announce.” The machine can keep moving for a long time without anyone asking whether the work still has a soul. But when the muse is out of focus, everything gets a little softer. The voice loses its shape. The strange parts get explained away. The work becomes easier to approve and harder to care about.

At ThoughtLab, that’s often where the real work begins. Not with making a brand louder or prettier, but helping it see what’s already trying to come through. The instinct. The nerve. The thing under the makeup.

I don’t know if I have a muse. I still think she sounds like trouble, and I have enough of that without inviting a woman in a diaphanous dress to start making notes in the margins. But I know what it feels like when something comes into focus. I felt it under the tent. I felt it walking home. I felt it when my friend put a hand on my shoulder and said the thing I didn’t want to hear.

Your muse is out of focus.

Maybe that’s not an insult. Maybe it’s an invitation to look harder.

My father had this little quirk. Whenever we kids did something wrong, he would pull us aside and say, “Let me tell you a story.” Then he’d basically say, if you do that again, I’m gonna kick your ass. Simple, clear, to the point. However, as I got older, I began to realize he wasn’t really telling us a story. A story has a hero, a journey, guides, and lessons. My father’s stories had him kicking our asses.

Did we go on a journey? Nope. Did we have guides in these stories? No. It was Dad kicking the asses of his kids. Not a story, well certainly not a good story. There were never any surprises. A mean character never had a change of heart. A main character never discovered their purpose. His stories could be boiled down to seven words: “Do it again, I’ll kick your ass.” But no matter what happened, Dad would always start with, “Let me tell you a story.”

Storytelling is really big in branding. Everything has a story, an arc, a main character, and on and on. Brands don’t say to customers, “Here’s a story, buy this product or service, or you’ll get your ass kicked.” Why? Two reasons. One, that’s not something you say to a customer. Threatening has never been a good sales technique. Two, because it’s not really a story. “Once upon a time, I got my ass kicked, so I bought a jet ski” is not a good story.

As a copywriter, I find story important. Finding a brand’s story, the story of a logo, and all sorts of storytelling go into branding and marketing. But from time to time, I have to wonder whether storytelling is really the be-all and end-all I was taught to believe. Does everything need a story, or have we started calling everything a story because it makes the work sound deeper than it is?

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Not Everything Is a Story

That’s the thing about the word story. It can make almost anything sound more important than it is. A company history becomes a story. A mission statement becomes a story. A homepage becomes a story. Suddenly, every piece of brand communication is being treated as if it needs a main character, an emotional arc, and a little music swelling beneath it.

But sometimes a thing is just a thing. A product description is there to describe the product. An About page is there to tell people who you are, what you do, and why you exist. A service page needs to explain the service before it takes anyone on a journey. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, there’s something kind of refreshing about it. 

The problem is not storytelling. The problem is calling everything storytelling because the word makes the work feel deeper. Story sounds warm, human, and meaningful, so we keep reaching for it, even when what we actually have is a message, a claim, a promise, an explanation, or a perfectly useful bit of information.

And those things matter too. A message can be powerful. A promise can mean something. An explanation can be generous. Information can be exactly what someone needs. Not every sentence has to carry the burden of myth.

A real story has movement. Something changes. Someone wants something. Something gets in the way. There’s pressure, consequence, discovery, or at least some kind of shift from where we began. Without that, you may have good copy. You may have smart positioning. You may have a clean paragraph that does its job beautifully. But you probably don’t have a story.

Why Brands Love the Word So Much

There’s a reason storytelling became such a big word in branding. It sounds warmer than strategy, deeper than messaging, and more human than content. Nobody wants to sit in a room and say, “Let’s organize some useful information in a way people can understand.” That may be the right thing to do, but it doesn’t exactly make the lights flicker. 

Story gives the work a little glow. A product can start to feel like part of something bigger. A company history can become more than a timeline. An About page can carry emotional weight rather than just listing names, dates, values, and a polished team photo. 

And honestly, some of that is good. Story helps people care. It gives a brand shape. A founder’s frustration becomes a reason for being. A customer senses there’s a human mind behind the business, not just a group of people trapped forever inside a slide deck. 

The trouble starts when the word becomes automatic. Suddenly, brand exercises have to uncover the story, copy has to tell the story, and presentations promise a narrative arc even when the real job is much simpler than that. At a certain point, story stops being a useful tool and becomes a fancy label we slap on anything that has more than two paragraphs. 

That’s when the word begins to blur. Story starts to mean message, positioning, brand platform, or whatever happens to be on the screen when someone says, “What’s the story here?” 

And maybe that’s the real problem. Not that brands care about story too much, but that we’ve made the word so large it can barely do its job anymore.

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A Real Story Needs Tension

A real story needs something to push against. It doesn’t have to be dramatic in the movie trailer sense. Nobody needs to be running through an airport, chasing a stolen briefcase, or standing in the rain realizing they’ve misunderstood love for the last twenty years. But something has to be unsettled. Someone has to want something, and it has to be difficult enough to make us care what happens next. This is also where my father’s stories fell a little short. There was tension, technically. I’ll give him that. But tension is more than when, where, and how I might get my ass kicked if I did the thing again. That was more of a warning with stage direction. It had stakes, sure, but not much discovery. There was no mystery, no turn, no deeper meaning hiding under the threat. The whole thing started with “let me tell you a story” and ended exactly where you knew it would end.

That’s where a lot of brand storytelling gets thin. The language says story, but the actual material says summary. A company was founded. A product was created. A team believed in quality. A service was built to help people. All of that may be true, and some of it may even be useful, but it doesn’t become a story just because we put it in chronological order and add a few warm adjectives.

The tension is usually hiding somewhere else. It’s in the thing the founder couldn’t stop noticing. It’s in the problem everyone else had learned to tolerate. It’s in the frustration that kept showing up until someone finally said, there has to be a better way to do this. That’s where the story begins to breathe a little. Not in the date the company opened its doors, but in the reason those doors needed to open in the first place.

This matters because people can feel the difference. They may not sit there analyzing structure or asking where the inciting incident is, because thankfully, most people have better things to do. But they can tell when something has weight. They can tell when a brand is circling something real instead of decorating a timeline. They can tell when the words are pointing to actual human pressure, not just arranging facts into a prettier shape.

That’s why tension matters. Without it, you may have a nice origin paragraph. You may have a polished About page. You may have a neat little sequence of events that moves from “we saw a need” to “we built a solution” to “now we’re passionate about helping customers.” But story needs more than movement from one sentence to the next. It needs a reason to keep listening.

Sometimes Clarity Beats Storytelling

This is where brands can get themselves into trouble. They take something that needs to be clear and try to make it feel profound. A simple point gets wrapped in a journey. A useful answer gets buried under so much atmosphere that the customer has to dig through the story just to figure out what’s being offered. Not every brand moment needs that. A product page may just need to explain the product. A service page may need to say what the service is, who it helps, and why it matters. A pricing page may need to be a pricing page, where the real hero isn’t the founder or the bold new future of the industry. It’s the price being easy to find. There’s nothing small about clarity. In fact, clarity can be one of the most generous things a brand offers. It respects the person on the other side. It says, ” We know you’re busy. We know you came here for a reason. We’re not going to make you wander through our emotional landscape before we tell you what we do.”

That doesn’t mean the writing has to be dry. It doesn’t mean the brand has to become a vending machine with a logo. Clear doesn’t have to mean flat. It can still have voice, warmth, and a point of view. It can still feel human. It just doesn’t have to pretend every sentence is part of some grand narrative arc.

Sometimes the strongest copy is not the copy that tells the biggest story. It’s the copy that knows exactly what job it has, does that job well, and gets out of the way before it starts wearing a cape.

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The Danger of Story-Shaped Fog

When brands force story where it doesn’t belong, the writing starts to get foggy. Simple ideas stretch into big emotional claims. Clear points become soft and rounded. Everything starts to sound important, but not always useful. You can feel the copy trying very hard to mean something, even when the thing underneath it might have been stronger if someone had just said it plainly.

That’s how you end up with brand language that sounds good until you ask what it actually means. “Our journey began with a simple belief.” “We’re redefining what’s possible.” “We exist to empower people to live better.” None of these are automatically bad, but they become a problem when they float above the real thing. What belief? What possibility? Better how? For whom? In what actual way?

Story-shaped fog happens when brands confuse emotional language with emotional truth. Instead of making the idea more specific, they make the language bigger. The message gets dressed up, but it doesn’t get clearer. 

And people feel that too. Maybe they don’t stop and think, this brand has confused narrative framing with strategic clarity. That would be a strange thing to think while shopping for socks or looking for a dentist. But they can feel when the words are doing too much. They can feel when a brand is asking for emotional investment it hasn’t earned yet.

A real story reveals something. Fog hides something. And if the audience has to keep pushing through all that mood just to understand what the brand actually does, the story is not helping. It’s getting in the way.

The Better Question

Maybe the better question is not always, “What’s the story?” Maybe the better question is, “What is this really?”

Because once you ask that, the work gets more honest. Maybe there really is a story. Maybe there’s a real tension, a meaningful shift, and a reason to care. But at least now the story has to prove it belongs there. 

But maybe it’s not a story. Maybe it’s just a message, a promise, or one clean sentence that tells people what they need to know. 

That doesn’t make it less valuable. It might make it more valuable. The job is not to turn everything into a story. The job is to understand what each piece of communication needs to do, then let it do that thing as clearly and honestly as possible.

The answer might be story, strategy, or plain language with a little life in it. The real skill is knowing the difference. 

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The Takeaway

Storytelling still matters. I believe that. This isn’t an argument against story, and I don’t want it to be. Stories help people understand. They help people remember. They give shape to things that might otherwise feel scattered or flat. A good brand story can carry belief, tension, purpose, personality, and a reason to care all at once.

But not everything is a story. Some things are messages, promises, or useful pieces of information standing there, doing honest work, asking not to be dragged into a hero’s journey against their will. 

That’s where brands need to be more careful. When story is real, use it. When the tension is there, shape it. When there’s a human reason behind the brand, bring it forward and let people feel it. But when clarity would serve the audience better, don’t bury it under narrative just because “storytelling” sounds more important in the meeting.

At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time helping brands find the difference. Sometimes there’s a story worth uncovering. Other times, the better work is sharpening the message and stripping away the fog until the idea is clear enough to use. 

Because the goal is not to call everything a story. The goal is to say the thing in the way it deserves to be said.

I recall saving up money from my job as a bagger at a grocery store, getting on the bus with some friends, heading to Beverly, Massachusetts, and walking to the Cabot Street Theater to see Le Grand David and His Own Spectacular Magic Company. The longest-running live stage magic show in one theater in history. It was spectacular. All your classic magic tricks: sawing a woman in half, the metamorphosis, one man is put in a bag, the bag is sealed with chains and locks, and he’s dropped into a chest. The chest is then chained and padlocked, and another man stands on top of the chest, pulls a curtain up around himself, drops it in two seconds, and the guy in the chest is now on top of the chest, and the guy in the bag in the chest is the guy who was on top. And it happened in the blink of an eye.

I have a friend who is a magician, and I used to go see this show with him. He knew how to do the illusions, but he still studied every moment like he was finding the secret to life. I loved the show: classic Auguste clowns, beautiful women, live music, and just the most mind-blowing illusions. My friend would say, “I know how to do that one,” but he’d never tell me, and I was so happy. One of my favorite moments in the show was when an older magician would come right to the lip of the stage wearing a cape. He’d take the cape off, spin it in the air, and pass it over the ground, and as he pulled it away, there was a bunny. It was the moment of pure magic to me. All the other illusions had boxes, ropes, and stuff. This was a man, a cape, and a bunny. I loved it.

Now, I could have asked my friend how it was done, and with enough hounding, he would have told me. I could probably look it up online. I mean, magicians have to learn how to do this stuff, so there must be information on it, right? I never did. The other stuff I could figure out if I thought about it enough, but the bunny and the cape, no idea, and I liked it that way. My friend said to me once, “Be careful. You can learn how all the tricks are done, but that will ruin the magic.” And he was right. For me, and for most of us, we may wonder, “How did he do that?” but we don’t really want to know. There’s an understanding between performer and audience. We each know there is a practical answer to how the woman levitates, but we let the moment go undiscovered so we can feel the magic. We want to believe for a few hours that the laws of physics can be broken, that a woman can fly, that a man can cut a woman in half and she’ll live. Or, even simpler, that a man with a cape can make bunnies appear out of thin air.

I’m thinking about this today because I fear there is a lack of magic in our lives. Maybe it’s not magic. Maybe it’s wonder. There is a lack of something that allows for magic and wonder to be part of our lives. This became crushingly clear when I read a BBC article saying that Banksy’s identity has been discovered. Following that, there were stories asking whether the person they identified is really Banksy, with more speculation and on and on. Instead of just appreciating his work, his cleverness, and the mystery around him, people had to know. They had to know who this guy is and how he does his work. They all wanted to know how the bunny appeared. And my question is, why?

Why do we need to know his identity? Why do we need to know how the bunny appears? To know is to, well, know, I guess, but in some situations, to know is also the end of it. Once you know the trick, why bother seeing the show? Once you know who Banksy is, he’s just a guy. The mystique of the guy who painted the revolutionary throwing a sandwich is just another graffiti artist. Part of what makes Banksy Banksy is the mystery. One day, a wall is just a wall, but overnight it’s transformed by the artist’s skill and vision into a political statement, a rallying point, a social commentary that’s speaking to a huge swath of the population. Knowing who he is actually diminishes the message, because now it’s about the man, not the art. So I ask again, why?

This movement away from mystery and toward we need to know how it’s done has fed a weird style of advertising. You know the one where a stern and knowledgeable voice says, “Big hardware doesn’t want you to know about this,” and then there’s an ad for a hose or a water cooler. They’re claiming to expose the secret, a secret, some secret that some nameless, faceless group is hiding from the public, and now, late at night on basic cable, the answers are being given. And we need those answers, right? But do we?

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What Explanation Takes With It

We tend to assume explanation makes things better. More context, more access, more information. We talk about all of that like it’s automatically a gain, as if knowing how something works always deepens our experience of it. But that isn’t always true. Sometimes explanation enters the room, and something else leaves.

What leaves is often the part that made us care in the first place. Tension leaves. Anticipation leaves. That strange little gap between what we’ve seen and what we can account for leaves too, and that gap matters more than we admit. It’s often where wonder lives. Once everything gets reduced to process, identity, method, and mechanics, the experience changes. We may know more, but we feel less. We’re no longer inside the moment. We’re outside it, studying how it was built.

That’s true of magic, obviously, but it’s true of much more than magic. It happens in art. It happens in performance. It happens in culture. There are some things that want to be experienced before they’re dissected, and sometimes the dissection is the thing that drains them. You get the answer, sure, but the feeling that sent you searching in the first place starts to thin out.

Maybe that’s the trade we keep making without fully noticing it. We satisfy curiosity, but we flatten the experience. We get access, but lose awe. We get the mechanism, but lose the moment. And once that happens, it’s hard to recover what was alive in it before.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. Knowing is not always the same as seeing, and explanation is not always the same as understanding.

Clarity Is Not the Same as Exposure

None of this is an argument for vagueness, and it’s not an argument for hiding things that matter. People deserve honesty. They deserve clarity. If something affects trust, safety, money, or truth, then yes, say it plainly. Be clear. Be direct. Don’t hide behind mystique and call it depth.

But that’s not really what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the strange modern belief that everything becomes better once it’s fully explained, fully exposed, fully dragged into the light. That belief sounds smart, maybe even virtuous, but it misses something basic about how people actually experience the world. Not every meaningful thing arrives as information. Some things arrive as feeling first. Some things work because they leave room. Room to wonder, room to interpret, room to lean in.

That’s the difference. Clarity helps us understand what something is. Overexposure can strip away how it feels. One creates orientation. The other can collapse tension. And tension, in the right places, isn’t a flaw. It’s part of the experience. It’s what keeps us engaged. It’s what gives certain things their charge.

You can see this all over the place now. The endless behind-the-scenes footage. The constant decoding. The insistence that every artist, every idea, every piece of work needs to come with a full explanation attached to it, as if the audience can’t be trusted to meet it halfway. As if the work itself isn’t enough. As if interpretation is somehow inferior to disclosure.

Maybe that’s what feels off. We’ve started treating total exposure as a kind of virtue, even in places where it leaves the experience thinner than it was before.

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We’ve Turned Revelation Into a Reflex

Somewhere along the way, revelation stopped being an occasional pleasure and became a reflex. We don’t just encounter things now. We decode them. We explain them, expose them, reduce them, package them, and pass them around as if the highest form of engagement is to strip away whatever made the thing shimmer in the first place.

You can see it in the way people talk about artists, ideas, and even experiences now. Everything comes with a demand for the backstory, the process, the identity, the hidden meaning, the trick behind the trick. The work is no longer enough. It has to be opened up and accounted for. It has to be made legible from every angle, even if that legibility drains some of the life out of it.

That instinct has shaped advertising, too. So much of it now is built around the promise of revelation. The secret they don’t want you to know. The thing hiding in plain sight. The truth finally exposed. It’s all framed as access, as if access itself were the prize. But access is not the same thing as depth, and exposure is not the same thing as meaning. Sometimes it’s just more information wrapped in urgency.

What gets lost in all of this is the audience’s role in the experience. If everything is explained, there’s nothing left to feel your way toward. Nothing left to interpret. Nothing left to discover in your own time. The whole thing arrives already flattened, already solved, already dead on the table.

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The Takeaway

Maybe that’s what I’m really arguing for here. Not secrecy. Not confusion. Just a little restraint. A little respect for the fact that not everything meaningful needs to be pulled apart the moment it appears.

We’ve gotten very used to the idea that more explanation is always better. More access, more context, more exposure, more reveal. But there are parts of life that don’t improve under that kind of light. They shrink. They lose air. They stop moving. What once felt alive starts to feel handled.

Maybe that’s because some things need space to work on us. A magic trick. A piece of art. A public mystery. Even a person. Not everything has to arrive with an answer attached to it. Not everything gets deeper once the mechanism is exposed. Sometimes the experience is the meaning. Sometimes the wonder is the point.

I still think about that bunny. Not because I solved it, and not because I ever wanted to. I think about it because for a moment it let me feel something clean and impossible, and I was smart enough, or lucky enough, to leave it alone.

Maybe we’d all be better off if we left a few more things alone. Not out of ignorance, but out of respect for what mystery makes possible.