I was on a status call Thursday when the news came through from Balmoral, and by the time the call ended my feed had turned into a wall of black squares with small white sans serif condolences centered inside them.
A bank. A protein bar. A software company in Ohio that sells scheduling tools. A hot sauce.
None of them knew her.
Some brands had standing. The BBC had standing. Fortnum & Mason holds a royal warrant and seventy years of actual commercial relationship. Commonwealth institutions had standing. Everyone else was doing something different, and it is worth naming what.
Grief is not a content category, and your social calendar does not get a vote on it.
The condolence post is almost never addressed to the deceased or to the mourning. It is addressed sideways, to competitors and to the brand's own staff, and the message is that we are the kind of company that noticed. It is a check in. Look, we saw. We were appropriate about it.
Everyone can feel this, which is why the mockery started within the hour and why several of those posts were quietly gone by Friday morning. Audiences are extremely good at detecting sincerity being performed at them. They cannot always articulate the tell, but they clock it in under a second, and the tell is usually that the brand has no reason to be in the room.
Here is the test I gave a client on Friday. It takes four seconds. Would your company have appeared in this person's obituary? Not the one you would write. The one the wire services actually filed. If the answer is no, you were a stranger, and strangers do not send flowers to the front of the church.
The alternative is not coldness. Silence is a legitimate response to a death, arguably the most common one in human history. You can also do the thing the moment actually calls for, which is operational rather than expressive. Close the London office early. Tell your UK staff to take the day. Pause the scheduled promotional posts, which almost nobody remembered to do, so half of these tributes ran directly above a discount code.
Strangers do not send flowers to the front of the church.
What I keep returning to is that the instinct is trained. Somewhere in the last decade we taught marketing teams that any cultural moment with enough volume is a moment the brand is obligated to join, and now the reflex fires whether or not there is any connection to justify it.
At karaoke on Saturday nobody mentioned any of it. A guy in a Blazers jersey sang Bon Jovi badly, the host called him baby, the room clapped. It was the most appropriate response to the week I saw anywhere.