I stood in the deodorant aisle at the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne for about nine seconds on Sunday. I bought the one I always buy. I did not consider the brand's point of view on modern masculinity, its position on aluminum, or the ninety second film it made about becoming your fullest self.
Nine seconds, maybe three times a year. That is the entire relationship.
On my desk right now is a brief for a category almost exactly that involving, and it asks for an emotional territory, a purpose statement, and a ladder that climbs from functional benefit to human truth. I have written that ladder. I have watched it get approved from inside brand strategy rooms where everyone nodded and nobody asked who, precisely, was supposed to be climbing it.
Most categories earn about four seconds of thought a year, and a strategy written for a customer who thinks harder than that is a strategy for a person who does not exist.
The uncomfortable version of this has been sitting in the industry's peripheral vision for a decade, mostly out of Ehrenberg-Bass. Buyers are light, distracted, and disloyal by default. They buy your thing because it was there, because they recognized the pack, because the price was not annoying. Distinctiveness beats differentiation. Availability beats affinity.
That does not mean brand stops mattering. It means brand matters in a completely different way than the ladder implies. You are not building a relationship. You are building a shortcut.
So the work changes shape. One, own assets a distracted person can recognize at nine seconds and forty degrees off axis: a color, a silhouette, a sound, a name for the thing. Liquid Death sells water in a tallboy that reads as beer from across a room, and that is the whole strategic idea, executed with more discipline than most purpose platforms ever get. Two, show up everywhere the category actually gets bought, which is boring, expensive, and undefeated. Three, be pleasant to encounter. Not meaningful. Pleasant.
Purpose work is real for the narrow set of brands whose customers genuinely lean in. Patagonia earned that over forty years and a lot of decisions that cost real money. Your antiperspirant has not earned it, and pretending otherwise produces decks nobody can act on and sincere copy nobody reads.
You are not building a relationship. You are building a shortcut.
Truffles has a relationship with exactly one brand, the pouch food with the green label, and it is built entirely on the label being green and arriving at six. Barnaby holds no opinions whatsoever and eats the same amount. Between them they have modeled low involvement buying more honestly than my last four brand ladders, and they did it for free.