The New Competitive Edge: Why Emotional Connections Are the Last Moat Brands Can Build in an AI World
Why well-run shops still close, and why emotional connection may be the one advantage brands can build when AI makes everything else easy to copy.
Borrowed Glory in the Digital Age: From Movie Stars to Digital Twins and the Persistence of Parasocial Connection
How we borrow emotional lift from people we never meet, from film stars to digital twins, and why parasocial connection persists as technology changes.
Borrowed Glory: How We Steal Effort from Others to Feel Better About Ourselves
How we quietly take emotional lifts from other people’s success, confidence or resilience without making the effort ourselves, and what that does to us.
The Relational Gap: The Hidden Developmental Law That Separates Enduring Brands from Everything Else
An imagined 2034 where brands speak as companions who remember you: an essay on the relational gap between brands that endure and everything else.
The 120-Year Spiral How Marketing Is Re-enacting Human Development in Fast-Forward
How the history of marketing seems to retrace the stages of human development in fast-forward, from mythic billboards to brands that know you personally.
The Reciprocal Decade: Why Marketing in 2034 Will Be Won by Brands That Remember You
A proposal imagining marketing in 2034, when brands speak as long-term companions with perfect memory, and what that would mean for loyalty and trust.
From Sales Echo to Tribal Pulse: Personas as the Heartbeat of Post-Scarcity Commerce
When goods become cheap and endless, business shifts from making things to holding attention through real ties: personas and tribes in an age of plenty.
The Primal Engine: Belonging’s Grief and the Rise of Post-Industrial Network Tribes
Why one-way online communities leave us scrolling for more: the old need to belong, the grief of losing close groups, and the rise of network tribes.
Facades to Futures: The Star Illusion and AI’s Path to Real Tribes
Why a pop star’s vlog can feel like friendship: parasocial bonds compared with the close tribes of our past, and whether AI could help rebuild real ones.
The Market of Meaning: When Identity Is Bought
The final ‘We’ to ‘I’ essay: from the shared meaning of ancient labour to buying identity online, and how consumerism may shape the self in years ahead.
Fight to Be Seen: Identity’s Survival in the Digital Age
Part four of the ‘We’ to ‘I’ essays: from surviving as a group on the ancient plains to the lone digital cry of ‘I’, and why being seen now feels essential.
Why Identity Sits at the Centre of Modern Life
Part three of the ‘We’ to ‘I’ essays: how meaning moved from the collective to the individual, and why identity now sits at the centre of modern life.