Have a backbone. Especially a strong one in marketing
When I went through Jasmine Bina’s report, I felt that marketing, as we know it, had just been reborn. Not by swapping out a few features, but by redefining its very purpose. Bina states bluntly that in an era where products and services are interchangeable and AI is blurring the lines between them, we don’t start with what a thing does, but with what it stands for. The way I understand it, people don’t buy performance—they buy identity; the product is merely a delivery service for the sense of “who I am.”
This leads to an unpleasant but liberating obligation: to stop chasing audiences and start building a sense of belonging. Not to ask, “Who is the ICP?” but “To what faith are we inviting them?” Here, ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile—a set of characteristics of the most suitable customer, for whom our offering is most likely to align with their needs, motivations, and context. The community ceases to be a channel; it becomes a social layer of the product. And according to Bina, a brand’s story needs a backbone. “Have a backbone,” she says literally, and I’d add: it’s a sharply defined opinion that attracts the right people just as much as it deters the wrong ones. A strong story also makes a moral claim—the assertion that “this is the right way to view the world”—and then shows how our product puts it into practice.
What resonates with me most is working with symbols, rituals, and sacred values. Symbols are codes through which we recognize one another on the inside. Rituals are repeatable steps through which faith takes tangible form. And sacred values are lines that cannot be crossed. Suddenly, it makes sense to leave a slight “restraining friction” in the experience, because it serves as a sign of commitment. Superhuman does this straightforwardly: it won’t let you proceed unless you master the keyboard shortcuts—a minor hurdle that turns the user into an initiate. Duolingo has transformed learning into a ritual of daily progress: one dose each day, the flame of the series serving as a small totem of perseverance. And then there are the sacred values that can’t be sold: For years, Patagonia has been countering fast consumption with its own “non-offer” (“Don’t buy this jacket”) and its Worn Wear repair program; in doing so, it clearly defines the boundaries of its beliefs.
At the messaging level, we reframe the promise of performance into a promise of transformation. Not “we help teams collaborate better,” but “we transform fragmented teams into a self-assured operating system.” Slack embodies this transformation from the very first minute: create a channel, invite the first people, set a status—a subtle choreography that turns a broadcast into a shared rhythm. The structure is clear: a desire for a new self, a named adversary, a path marked by rituals, and real-world evidence. The antagonist doesn’t have to be a competitor; for Strava, it’s passivity and unconscious training. The path? Segments, leaderboards, and applause from the community. Rewards aren’t just points, but status—the KOM/QOM (“King/Queen of the Mountain”) crown as a sign of acceptance.
Research must reflect this. It’s not enough to ask about features and benefits. Bina leads us to questions about status, taboos, and small symbolic victories. What does using a brand signify? What loss of identity does it help prevent? Nike Run Club interpreted this in its own way: digital badges aren’t just cosmetic—they’re a language of belonging; those who collect them “belong.” GitHub understands this, too—a maintainer of an open-source repository isn’t just a role, but a social title.
Surprisingly, the roles of price and development plans are also changing. Price isn’t just a number; it’s a signal of belonging. Substack introduced “Founding Member” as a patronage tier—it’s not about extra features, but about a place in the story. And the roadmap here isn’t just a simple list of features on a calendar. It’s a script for transformation—a sequence of decisions that reinforce our moral claim and guide the customer through stages of identity. Milestones don’t mark “version 2.3,” but rather the moments when a person goes from being a novice to a practitioner, and from a practitioner to a steward. With CrossFit, this is almost literal: from the first WOD—“Workout of the Day”—through mastering techniques to the role of coach and host of rituals for others. Such a roadmap also includes rules about what we will never do, even if it were popular—Apple has long refused to compromise on privacy and prefers to shut the door on the surveillance ecosystem.
What can I take away from this for my communication practice? To acknowledge that persuasion has its limits and that initiation is more powerful. Instead of distracting attention, focus it; identify the enemy; create a few symbols that people can carry with them; and design simple rituals that people will adopt. Then measure not only CAC (customer acquisition cost) and CLV (customer lifetime value), but also the adoption of language, the frequency of recommendations, and the depth of rituals in real-world behavior. “Stop persuading, start initiating,” says Jasmine. In my view, this is the future of marketing, communication, and human behavior. Thanks to Jasmine Bina for her ideas and the courage to voice them; any clumsy paraphrasing is mine, but those sharp insights are hers.