Nobody Is Fooling Anybody

Oren John (@orenmeetsworld) has been documenting something worth paying attention to. Kids buying twenty-eight dollar Lamborghini key fobs to leave on the coffee shop table. Empty designer bags off Etsy. Day passes posted from the locker room. His read is that they're performing a life they don't have, openly, as a game, and that the joke is on whoever paid retail.

He's right about the behavior. I read the motive differently.

Because the same person leaving that key fob on the table is also posting the dollar fifty Costco hot dog, and not ironically. They're hunting the black Kirkland crew neck, the plain one with the embroidered logo, which resells for a hundred and fifty dollars on eBay. Same account. Same week. And if Costco put Nikes on a pallet next to the paper towels, they would buy those too and post that.

That is not aspiration. Aspiration only points up. This points in both directions at once, which means it was never about wealth.

What's actually happened is that price stopped carrying the signal. For most of commercial history, the number told you what something meant. Expensive meant scarce, or difficult, or protected. That was the whole contract. Now the number tells you almost nothing, because the signal detached from the transaction. It costs twenty-eight dollars to borrow a hundred years of Lamborghini equity, and it costs four dollars to hold something Costco spent decades making trustworthy. Both work. Both get the same reaction in the comments.

So the flex moved. It isn't what you can afford anymore. It's whether you can tell what's good.

That's a literacy flex, and it's brutal for brands, because you can't buy your way out of it. You can discount, seed, gift, and code your way to volume, and none of it makes you legible. Meanwhile Kirkland, which has no story, no campaign, and deliberately unremarkable packaging, produces a hundred and fifty dollar resale market on a sweatshirt. Nobody was tricked into that. People know exactly what it is. That's the point. They know, and they want the thing they can vouch for.

Which reframes the whole panic about the death of luxury. Luxury isn't dying. It just lost its monopoly on meaning something. A hot dog and a Birkin now compete in the same category, and the category is not price, it's confidence.

And the people who understand this best are the ones the industry keeps describing as fooling themselves. They're not confused. They're the most fluent consumers who have ever existed. They can read a signal in either direction and they'll take whichever one lands hardest that day.

The brands in trouble are the ones still asking to be trusted because of what they charge.

Costco: The New Middle Class

Eugene Healey, who writes as @eugbrandstrat, made a case recently that I haven't been able to put down. He calls it the death of the middle. As the economy stratifies and rewards the top ten percent, then the top five, the middle stops being a place you can stand. Mid-market brands, middle-of-the-road ideas, middle-of-the-road positioning. All of it thins out until you're either speaking to luxury beliefs or speaking to the mass. The line that stuck with me: there's no such thing as not in the budget, there's only not in the budget for you.

He's right. I want to add the part nobody says out loud, which is what you do about it on Monday morning when you still have to sell something.

Because the death of the middle reads like an instruction to pick a side. Go up or go wide. There's a third position and Costco has been sitting in it for years while everyone else wrote decks about it.

Costco sells a twelve hundred dollar mattress about forty feet from a four dollar rotisserie chicken and nobody walking that aisle finds it strange. That should be impossible. Those are two different customers in every segmentation model I've ever been handed. They're not two customers at Costco, because the store isn't sorted by what you can afford. It's sorted by whether you believe them.

That's the thing worth stealing. Costco didn't pick a tier. It built a trust position, and trust is the only asset that lets one brand hold both ends of a stratified market without tearing itself in half.

Kirkland is the proof. It outsells national brands sitting in the same aisle, at a lower price, in worse packaging. That is not volume. Volume gets you distribution, it does not get you chosen. What Kirkland has is permission, and permission is exactly what the middle class went looking for when the middle disappeared. Not cheap. Not premium. Just somebody they didn't have to research at ten at night on their phone.

So if you're mid-market and Eugene's piece read like a death notice, here's my version. Nobody is asking you to become luxury or become mass. They're asking you to become legible. The brands that die in a stratified market are the ones nobody can describe. The ones that live are the ones a customer can explain to a friend in one sentence without mentioning the price.

Same problem from both ends. He's telling you the middle of the market is gone. I'm telling you the middle of your positioning was killing you the whole time, and the market just stopped covering for you.

You Got Bored Before It Started Working

Brand is not the logo, the colors, or the typography. Those are representations. Brand is the sum of what people think and feel about you, sitting in memory, waiting to be retrieved on the day they're finally ready to buy. That's the whole job. Not being seen. Being remembered for the right reason at the right moment.

Memory doesn't work on novelty. It works on repetition. Which means the single most valuable thing a brand owns is the part it refuses to change, and the industry has built an entire economy around convincing you to change it.

Eugene Healey (@eugbrandstrat) gave the cleanest demonstration of this I've seen. When he leaves his face out of a video, the views drop by a factor of ten. Nothing else changed. Same person, same thinking, same quality. The cue broke, so the audience didn't recognize the experience they came for, and they left. That's not a content lesson. That's every brand that redesigned its packaging and watched sales fall and blamed the market.

The prevailing belief is that audiences tire of you. Creative burnout, wear-out, time for a refresh. The opposite is true. Audiences in a state of permanent distraction are scanning for cues that tell them this is the thing they already like. You're not boring them. You're barely registering. And the exact moment a brand feels most tired of itself internally is usually the moment it's just starting to become recognizable externally.

This is why nobody wants to hear that the work is repetition. Repetition doesn't win awards, doesn't justify a rebrand budget, and doesn't make anyone on the team feel like they did something. Compounding is invisible while it's happening and obvious afterward, so it never gets credit in the room where the decision is made.

And it has to compound across everything, not just the ads. The onboarding, the retail environment, the product itself, the way support answers the phone. Those shape what people think and feel about you as much as anything you say. Marketing doesn't invent that. Good marketing serves what's already true about the business, instead of compensating for what isn't there. When the two split, customers believe the experience and ignore the message, every time.

Which is where consistency stops being a creative problem and becomes an organizational one. Not every team is a brand team, but every team makes brand decisions, in hiring, in procurement, in supply chain. A strategy document nobody has internalized loses to a shared instinct every single time. That's the real content of culture eats strategy for breakfast, a phrase I otherwise can't stand.

So the discipline isn't inventing. It's holding. Pick the idea, encode it so people across functions can act on it without asking, and then keep doing it long past the point where you personally are sick of it. Your customers are not sick of it. Most of them haven't noticed it yet.