Strategic Digest #33
Strategic ideas, laid out for you.
Once a month, I share what has caught our attention and opened our eyes here at KONTRA. Marketing strategy and communication, psychology, behavioral sciences, UX, and design. Ideas and data in a few sentences. A strategic digest.
Passive-Aggressive Reception
“Passive income” has become the bane of younger generations. Its most recent embodiment is National Bank Governor Michl, who, in response to the housing affordability crisis, advises young people to “start a business and sell it at a profit” so they can buy an apartment. Whether he is delusional himself or has been part of this whole mistake from the start, his behavior as a representative of a major institution is dangerous.
What’s this all about? The internet is full of courses and paid e-books on how to build passive income—in other words, money flowing in without you having to lift a finger. Yes, it’s the holy grail of business—having your business make money even while you sleep. But even the best entrepreneurs devote themselves to their businesses from morning till night. Where does passivity lead?
First and foremost, let’s talk about aggressiveness. An aggressive brand—because you’re certainly not going to explain the product’s benefits to customers. You’re just reselling it from Temu with a 90% markup anyway. Aggressive—because the founder’s name will usually be part of the brand name. Aggressive—because you won’t respond to complaints—they won’t catch up with you. After all, that business will be out of the game within a year.
Between 2019 and 2021, roughly 700,000 new Shopify stores were launched. Over the course of two years, the number of merchants on the platform increased from approximately one million to 1.7 million. Approximately 90% of these stores closed (or went out of business) within the first year. As with online business mentors, the e-commerce platform provider is the one that profits the most from this business.
We’re drowning in a flood of businesses that nobody cares about. And yet their founders are simply deluded by the lure of “passive income” and “lounging on the beach.” Have you ever tried sitting on the beach? What are they going to do for the next fifty years? Entrepreneurship has always been—and always will be—about added value, and that means having at least a little bit of ingenuity that sets you apart from the competition. Be real.
Don't skip the first question: Why?
We’ve moved from command-based interaction—where the user tells the computer how to do something—to intent-based specification of results—where the user tells the computer what they want. This shift doesn’t just change the interface; it also changes what the product needs to be.
In August 2024, Satya Nadella sent an internal memo to Microsoft. He focused directly on the founding vision of the company he leads and wrote:
“When Bill founded Microsoft, he envisioned not just a software company, but a software factory, unrestricted by any single product or category. This idea has guided us for decades. Today, that’s no longer enough.”
And here’s the tension that the memorandum doesn’t address: Copilot, as it exists today, is built on the same legacy. Intelligence has been added. The purpose hasn’t been reevaluated. Word still simulates a typewriter. Excel still simulates an accounting ledger. PowerPoint still simulates a slide projector. Extraordinary simulations—refined over decades, loved by hundreds of millions. But they are simulations of tools designed for a world before artificial intelligence. And as Nadella himself has publicly admitted, he is not satisfied with where Copilot has ended up.
Google’s main product has never been the answer—it has been access to the answer. In 2025, AI Overviews appeared in 60% of U.S. search queries, zero-click searches rose to 69%, and the organic click-through rate fell by 61%. The product that provided you with a map to the answer is now forced to become the answer itself. This isn’t a feature update. It’s an existential redefinition.
Meanwhile, Anthropic has taken a completely different approach. Instead of creating a product that competes with Word, Gmail, or Notion, they’ve built a layer of intelligence that these products connect to. The intelligence itself is the interface. Everything else revolves around it. It’s the same structural logic as when Airbnb doesn’t own the homes or Uber doesn’t own the cars—the business isn’t an asset; it’s the connection between the user and what they need.
Everyone should be asking their developers right now: Why was this product created? — and is this work still the right one to be doing, now that AI can handle part of it?
You Are What You Eat
Bodybuilders have a really interesting approach to nutrition, don't they? They're really aggressive about what they eat. They're very mindful. In many ways, a bodybuilder is a strategist of the mind. And I think this metaphor—the information that food carries—carries a lot of meaning.
We understand when content is toxic or repulsive to us. But I don’t think we think about what good information should feel like. I don’t think we bring metaphors into the equation. So what makes for a healthy information diet? Hi everyone, welcome back to The Invisible Unknown.
Today we’re going to talk about a topic that’s really close to our hearts and that we’re constantly exploring: how to maintain professional curiosity. It’s a truly important topic for us as strategists. I know plenty of creative directors, psychologists, students, and all sorts of people who listen to this podcast, but we want to talk about it specifically in terms of how to gather insights from the fringes of culture and understanding that fuel your creativity, so you can make connections that other people don’t usually make—which is the essence of strategy.
Vitamin C Capsules to Enhance Shine
According to research cited by The Ordinary, 20% of British consumers say they would pay up to 20 pounds more for a product described as “magical,” while American customers are willing to spend 45% more on identical products if their packaging looks more premium. Markup Marché transforms these statistics into a physical metaphor with shelves, signs, and installations that reveal the pricing psychology behind beauty marketing.
Skincare ads are full of products promising “magical” results and “medical-grade” formulas, often wrapped in glossy branding designed to boost their perceived value. The Ordinary, however, has been doing the exact opposite for the past few years, dismantling the industry’s marketing machines right before the public’s eyes.
The brand’s recent collaboration with Uncommon Creative Studio continually challenges the notion that beauty depends on pseudoscience and celebrity culture. Last year’s “The Periodic Fable” campaign transformed fashion-forward skincare slogans into a fake periodic table of “elements with zero scientific value,” while another initiative mocked the economics of celebrity endorsements by revealing how much consumers actually pay for famous faces in beauty ads.
Sex and violence grab people's attention, but that's exactly the problem
The widely held belief that “sex and violence sell” is not supported by evidence. In 53 experiments involving 8,489 participants, sexual and violent media or advertising content had no positive effect or, conversely, undermined the effectiveness of the advertisement. The most pronounced negative effects were on brand recall, brand attitudes, and purchase intentions.
Sex and violence divert cognitive attention toward themselves and away from the brand. In other words: people may remember a violent scene, a sexual stimulus, or an emotional stimulus—but not the product, the message, or the association with the brand.
For marketers, this means that attention is not the same as effectiveness. High-intensity content may generate views, but it still undermines memorability, brand perception, or the goal of conversion.
One exception occurs when advertising and media content are similar. For example, violent ads in violent media or sexual ads in sexual media have, in some cases, performed better than mismatched pairs. The likely reason is that the surrounding content “prepares” the audience for the ad.
Weak brands preach; strong ones ask questions
If you ever want to know who’s setting the narrative in a given field, just look at who’s asking the questions. Pantone is asking questions of the entire design industry.
Every Pantone chip, mug, makeup palette, and Color of the Year announcement poses the question: “What can color mean to us?”
Asking questions leads the way forward. Answering questions leads to a dead end. Crayola, perhaps the only other ubiquitous color brand, has decided to answer rather than ask. Its recent moves, including the launch of an iPad app and the announcement of new crayon colors, are part of an effort to remain relevant to tech-savvy children.
Their answer is: “This is what this color should mean to you.” Like Pantone, they, too, have a limited set of colors on which all their products are based. Like Pantone, they’ve experienced an influx of new competitors, lower barriers to entry, and rapidly changing user needs. Unlike Pantone, however, they’ve gone down the path of narrative dead ends.