Strands of Genius: The Magic of Magic, The Business Case for Being Funny, Silk Roads

Guest curated by Adam Morgan, Founding Partner, eatbigfish

Feb 25, 2025

:: A BIT MORE ABOUT GUEST CURATOR, ADAM MORGAN ::

LOCATION: London, UK

I had the huge pleasure of recording an episode of the eatbigfish podcast Let's Make This More Interesting with Faris recently - about his thinking on Attention (I loved Paid Attention) - and he was kind enough to invite me to be part of this again.

FARIS: As I may have mentioned last time Adam is one of a handful of strategy legends who continue to inspire me on the regular. It’s not just the smart, unobvious, interesting thinking that is always on the edge of now, it’s that’s he really nice. I aspire to both.

:: WE ASKED ADAM FOR HIS HOT TAKES ON BRAND LOVE::

How do you build brand love when competing in a commoditized category?

Well, the marketing scientists will tell you there’s no such thing as brand love, of course. And then you read that one of the reasons that David Lynch agreed to appear at the end of The Fabelmans was because they promised to put a bag of Cheetos in his dressing room after every take on set, and you think ‘Well, maybe the data isn’t telling the whole picture here…’
So three thoughts on how to build brand engagement and preference in a commoditised category.
Use humour to create connection. In researching how people make potentially dull subjects interesting, one of the common foundations everyone talks about it is the need to make a real connection with your audience. Humour can have many values, but one of them is simple affiliation: feeling that this product is made by people who get me, and perhaps are like me themselves. I went into a bookshop last year, and asked for the Crime section; they pointed me to a set of shelves titled ‘Bad people, doing bad things’. It made me laugh. The books they were selling were just the same as every other bookshops, but I’ll go back there again because their sense of humour appeals to me.
And humour can also make your audience more open to then considering other forms of differentiation you might want to try, of course.
Have a simple point of difference, even if it’s an apparently cosmetic one. Loft insulation is not only a commoditised category, but an invisible one – you can’t even see it once you’ve put it in. Yet there’s a legendary South African loft insulation brand that dyed all their material pink, and advertised it enormously successfully around the idea ‘Think Pink’. Does it make any functional difference what colour your loft material is? Of course not. And perhaps it was partly the fact that it introduced colour into a bland category that helped it capture South Africans’ imagination.
Be the brand that makes the category more interesting by taking a stimulating point of view on it. Ordinary table salt is one of dullest commodities one can imagine, but if I tell you that salt is the only edible rock, you may just sit up and rethink something you’ve been taking for granted for a long time. In schools, lunchtime clubs are two a penny. So when one UK school’s maths department advertised a Lunchtime Maths Club they got no takers. They took the sign down, and put another one up, advertising a lunchtime puzzle club – and filled the room. Exactly the same product, exactly the same competition, but a completely different way of framing their offer.

:: THE LINKS ::

THE MAGIC OF MAGIC

I’ve recently rebalanced my working week to allow me to focus two days a week writing children’s books. I have been cautious about reading too many other children’s books while I'm writing my own, but I am listening to children’s authors talking about what they love about them. And I really loved Katherine Rundell's five beautifully written 15 minute essays on the joy, magic and importance of children's fiction. (BBC)

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR BEING FUNNY

Bridget Angear has long been one of the smartest strategic thinkers in London advertising agencies and consultancies. And I really liked her work with the IPA last year for Cannes on 'The Business Case for Being Funny'. The writer and cultural critic Ted Gioia last year wrote a piece on Substack called 'Is there a crisis of seriousness?' His point was, echoing an essay by Susan Sontag in the 90s, that we have lost the ability to be serious and genuinely substantive in public discourse, because we are now all children of the entertainment industry, and the rules of entertainment - he cites throwing soup at paintings as a poor substitute for the much more profound argument of the US Civil RIghts Movement. And yet within our - obviously shallower and less important - world, as Bridget shows in this presentation we have arguably the opposite kind of crisis of seriousness: brands and businesses are being too serious, and failing to understand the power of humour to be a significant multiplier in commercially growing their business. We are entirely failing to understanding the level at which we need to entertain and engage to really connect. Bridget will be a fellow guest to Faris on the podcast (which launches on February 11th this year) talking about her findings.(IPA Cannes)

SILK ROADS

I loved the current exhibition about the Silk Roads at the British Museum, an exhibition as much about the extraordinary power of networks to cross fertilise and enrich as it is about the history of the legendary trading route. And the curators chose a fascinating first exhibit - a copper alloy Buddha made in Pakistan, and found in Sweden 1200 years ago. Their point was that right from the beginning they wanted to challenge the assumptions we all have about the Silk Roads: from their geographical scope to what they were used for. A brilliant introduction to perhaps the most important axis of ideas, objects and people in world history. (YouTube; The British Museum)

:: AND NOW… SOME FAST FAVORITES ::

Game :: Monument Valley
City :: Brighton
Book :: How Tom beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen, by Russel Hoban and Quentin Blake
Podcast :: The Lion, the Witch and the Wonder
Song :: South Texas Girl, by Lyle Lovett

:: COPPER ALLOY BUDDHA ::

:: ‘TIL NEXT TIME ::

This edition was guest curated by Adam Morgan, who you can connect with via LinkedIn. Your regularly scheduled hosts, Rosie & Faris Yakob, will be back next week!

Hit reply if you’ve got a guest curator that we should highlight - There’s no fancy application process, we just want a few sentences as to why they (or you!) would be a good fit. (Because yes, self-nominations are always accepted!)

Strands of Genius is currently read by more than 15,000 subscribers. Support us by sponsoring an issue, encouraging friends or colleagues to subscribe.

It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.

Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.

Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)

Strands of Genius