Another year, another reflection piece!

This year on the surface was a challenging one for lots of new reasons, specifically with time constraints and juggling a lot of commitments with work, travel, and school. But first, some highlights:

• Celebrated weddings (had 12 friends get married in 2022!), bachelor parties, and many, many birthdays
• Lots of growth in my personal relationships and with my partner
• Continued writing, growing my newsletter to almost 3k subscribers, and getting my first opportunity to write for a bigger publication with Sprout Social
• Traveled a lot including sixteen different cities and two countries with two firsts — the first time in Vancouver and in Puerto Vallarta
• Finished 1.5 years in the Berkeley Haas PTA MBA Program, including some of my first upper-level electives and favorite classes
• One year at Grammarly with a lot of expanded scope

As I did in 2019, 2020, and 2021, I wanted to take some time to share some nuggets that stuck with me throughout the year.

• It’s nice to put a value on time. One of my biggest shifts in the previous year has come from unlocking time. Not necessarily doing less, but spending money to do more things of value. Inspired by a tweet around giving yourself an aspirational hourly rate, I thought about all the things that could take me hours/days, becoming much more flexible with outsourcing those in the process. There are a few things that I regularly put in this bucket: TSA pre-check, getting a Keurig to save time on coffee, outsourcing my move, and even getting more expensive flights with less layovers/rental cars to save money on Ubers. This year, one of my biggest investments was a car membership, mostly from tallying up the inconveniences and scheduling delays that came from taking a bus to Berkeley last Fall. Even Grammarly is something that I put in that bucket — being able to get rid of small commas and fractal errors while working on big picture writing has paid dividends every time.
• Disappoint others before you disappoint yourself. I’ve gone in and out of my people-pleasing tendencies through the years but this year was extremely challenging in terms of trade-offs. With lots of weddings, birthdays, bachelor parties, and miscellaneous events scattered throughout the year, almost every decision came at the expense of saying no or disappointing someone. I ran into this quote from Glennon Doyle that sat with me for a long time: “Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else.” While it didn’t necessarily stop the disappointment, it made me more conscious internally about choosing environments that I liked, understanding outcomes, and focusing less on the idea that disappointment was something particularly caustic, but more of a normal occurrence.
• Most of the pleasure in a dessert comes in the first three bites. Writer David Perell has a great piece on life advice from his birthday, but this is one of my favorite tips that I’ve almost used as a personal mantra. As someone who has been largely sugar-avoidant and eaten much less dessert in the last three years, I love this philosophy as a way to exercise both control and joy when eating. No regrets now when eating a good Tiramisu or Tres Leches.
• Authenticity is a struggle. I joined the millions of people who downloaded BeReal this year and one of the most consistently odd realizations I had was how many questions went through my head when trying to post. Despite the app being the antithesis of Instagram and Twitter, where non-curated content was welcome, my brain was still stuck in curation mode. Retaking selfies with bad angles of my face, redirecting the camera to better lighting, waiting for exciting experiences. I wrote about this phenomenon back in June, how the app has almost made us reconcile with how awkward we are at being normal.
• Going viral sucks. I went mega-viral for the first time (16MM impressions) on Twitter and it was awful. Impossible to use the app. So many random lanes of conversation to track. Random DMs from people trying to get my feedback on their opinion. Even after muting the tweet, the quote tweets continued for days. Nothing made me yearn for peace faster than going viral. My new existential quandary is pure confusion. Are all content creators secretly masochists?
• You can’t force yourself to read the Economist. As part of a business school class this year, we were required to submit current trends in economics before every class. I decided I was going to make a big life change and read the Economist every day, even after the class was over. It lasted about a week. Beyond the Economist, it was a nice lesson on setting goals that had no basis in enthusiasm, interest, or personal advancement. I desperately wanted to learn about the world and knew that it still was a goal — but I knew I had to learn more about how I consumed information better before deciding on a solution.
• Integration is better than atomization. I did an annual reflection earlier this morning and exercise came up as a constant thorn this year. I couldn’t stick to an exercise routine, was constantly changing gyms, and even completely forgot about a month of Classpass I had signed up for. The one bright light in my 2022 was picking up Pickleball and playing that on a somewhat regular basis. When I thought back to why I enjoyed Pickleball, I reflected on how I didn’t see it as “working out”. Optimizing a workout could have meant for time for socializing and seeing friends but I saw Pickleball as an efficient way to do both. Nat Eliason touched on this on his blog post about de-atomization being the key to happiness. Instead of atomizing fitness — making it a very, small specific task — integrating it into socializing made it much easier to find time for it.
• Shifting biases is like uninstalling scripts. I started working with a therapist this year who gave a very compelling analogy when it came to rethinking concepts around self-image and self-esteem. He basically offered that our perspectives are like operating systems, built by certain moments in our life. Our self-beliefs are programs that became installed because we ran into them so consistently. He asked me if what would happen if I ever uninstalled a script that contributed to a self-belief and decided to error it out. It was weird and wacky at the time but it made me reflect a lot on the idea that nothing needs to be permanent when it comes to the way we perceive ourselves. We’re one drag and drop away from the trash to installing a new script.
• It’s never too late. This was the theme for my health this year, as I dramatically brought new habits into my life that have changed things for the better. I got my first full-scale facial, invested a lot more in my daily dental care, brought an oil diffuser to help with stress, experimented with new types of melatonin, and started using daily vitamins for my health. I often cursed myself for being stupid enough to not do it for so many years. But ultimately, welcomed the possibility that the ripe young age of thirty is a fine time to make drastic life changes.
• Always take off on your birthday. My friend told me last year she never works on her birthday and it inspired me this year to do the same. I spent the day getting a massage, watching Argentina win their game, going shopping, and getting a nice dinner. It doesn’t seem too profound in retrospect but I can tell you that I have no idea what I did for most of the day during my birthday for the past three years. Not a bad philosophy :)

Whatever this year brings you in reflection, I hope it’s equally nourishing. Happy New Year and see you in 2023!

Another year of “fun” comes to a close with more navigating an ongoing pandemic amidst huge life changes.

Some highlights of this year: Starting school with an amazing cohort of friends in the Berkeley Haas PT MBA Program, more than 50,000 words in the newsletter, an incredible new job with a great product and group of people at Grammarly, more travel and friendships and lots of smaller reminders of love on a regular basis that helped stem the burden of the lows.

As I did in 2019 and 2020, I wanted to take some time to reflect on some of the biggest things that stuck with me through the year.

1. There’s a certain folly in setting long-term goals. Almost every year before 2020, I set goals that were centered around things I wanted to accomplish at certain times of the year. Career goals, health goals, cooking goals, a list of random things that were compartmentalized to a neurotic perfection. At times, goal setting felt powerful, other times it just felt good to fit in. But as time went on, I accomplished little of what I set at the beginning of the year. There was a quote earlier this year I read from Jim Coudal that gave me pause: “The reason that most of us are unhappy most of the time is that we set our goals, not for the person we’re going to be when we reach them, but we set our goals for the person we are when we set them.” It made me see a beautiful new imperfection in goals and the malleability in the journey to accomplishing goals — this year, I’m much less concerned about setting longer-term ones and much more focused on the weeks and days ahead.
2. Perceptions can twist what we know of facts. I remember traveling to Kentucky for work where I had a client who refused to vote for Clinton. I learned that his daughter went through an acrimonious civil case that was stalled by a bureaucratic court system — a purely local issue. But this one experience influenced this man’s entire political philosophy of how government worked elsewhere. There’s a quote I read earlier this year from Morgan Housel that reminds me of this: “Your personal experiences makeup maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” In another year that was stemmed by disagreements on vaccines and COVID regulations, I think about this quote a lot — it’s a saddening epiphany that so much of a single experience can be extrapolated into fact. Maybe even a single clash with the healthcare system or government can drive someone reasonable to distrust vaccines. The crux of arguments I think often collapses on this.
3. Loss shouldn’t be feared in change. When I started school, I worried a lot about change. I didn’t want to lose friends in San Francisco. I was worried about pre-conceived notions people had of assholes in business school and whether my identity was at risk. I was nervous about even basic routine stuff, everything from balancing writing to dating with the new schedule. Some of my fears were definitely confirmed but the larger picture was inevitable: I lost a lot of my old life before business school. What I realized this year is that with any big change, the price to pay is your old life. The reward is that the person you become from your new one is going to come with its own rewards: The loss of friendships will bring you new friends. The people who no longer understand will be replaced by new people. As Briana Wiest says: “All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you no longer are.”
4. There is power in being a professional moron. When I started my new job at Grammarly, I came back to a familiar place: being the least knowledgeable in the room. It was nerve-wracking but also a bit fun being able to pause and be the person who had no qualms about questions. Molly Graham, Former COO of Lambda, has a great take on this: “The number 1 thing I’ve learned is that it is actually an extraordinarily powerful skill to ask the “stupid” questions that everyone else is afraid to ask. You create clarity in places where people didn’t even know there was confusion. There is power in being a professional moron.” I love the framing that it’s not just a new person to the job tendency, but a mindset we should adopt always.
5. People can die twice. My friend and fellow writer Lyle Mckeany wrote a piece about a eulogy for his father this year that touched me to the core. He included a Banksy quote I think about often: “They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.” When I think of people I’ve lost in the past that are important to me, I would often feel ashamed that I’m not “honoring” them in the right way — Lyle’s piece made me realize that simply telling stories sharing tweets, sometimes even sharing the mere existence in your life can be enough.
6. The best path to quality is time. Like many others on the internet, I used to love thinking about shortcuts and frameworks and hot sauce that can make you a brilliant and successful person. The more and more I’ve started writing and creating on my own, there’s a quote I find resonates by Sari Azout: “I almost feel what some people attribute to genius is actually just time.” Getting the 1,000th subscriber to my newsletter this year was fun but it came after years of writing, multiple pivots, lots of pieces that were read by maybe like 30 people, lots of luck, and lots of sleeping on bad first drafts before they became better ones. Now, when I read something that blows my mind on the internet, I remember that they may have gone through some convoluted version of the same journey.
7. Don’t charm who you don’t have to. It’s a hard-learned lesson anytime you start school, a new job, a new life — that ultimately being a different version of yourself is only a performance as long as you make it one. As Rumi says: “Half of life is lost in charming others. The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others. Leave this play. You have played enough.”
8. Following specific advice can be a blessing and a curse. There’s a fun thread that my friend Etienne wrote earlier this year on how following writing advice diligently can make your writing boring. It’s a fun read but carries what I think is an important lesson — that sometimes it’s fine to be inconsistent and chaotic on purpose. In writing and in life. Many companies we know and love today came from people who broke away from the norms. Lots of people who hit thousands of followers on Twitter do so through no specific playbook. You can’t build a course and teach people chaos — but chaos can be worth a salt in life.
9. It’s exhausting to be too good for effort. Remember back in high school when you were really excited about a class but wanted to make sure you didn’t raise your hand too much or try too hard on an assignment for fear of upsetting the natural equilibrium of your friendship with the cool kids? If the last decade since has taught me anything, it’s that this sucks. The whole charade of keeping up appearances to hide things that excite you and diminishing effort you put into things is exhausting. The best people in your life will love what you nerd out on. Even being back in school, it’s so much easier to be a cheerleader when you see the stars align for someone who is determined. Ava says it perfectly in her piece about effort: “I don’t want to pretend like I’m too good for ugliness, for effort, when I know very well that it’s the price that unlocks everything beautiful in the world.”
10. Being cheap is expensive. While frugality is good, you have to be comfortable spending money to make your life or work easier. Earlier this year, Ryan Holiday in his reflections on his birthday wrote a line that I think about a lot: “What I’ve found is that it is very expensive to be cheap. You just pay for it in the form of a frustrated spouse or a stressful life or with shit that never works and you have to end up replacing a bunch of times anyway.” For the first time, instead of agonizing hours on dismantling my bed, I hired a Taskrabbit to do it in 30 minutes. I bought nice shoes that can survive across terrains of SF hills, finally got good sunglasses, bought flights without layovers, paid for subscriptions, and even at one point got coffee that reduced my coffee-making time to seconds. None of it was particularly lavish but it’s definitely helped me build a new mindset with money.

Whatever this year brings you in reflection, I hope it’s equally nourishing. Happy New Year and see you in 2022!

Cheers,

Kushaan

Most of us probably overspend or have eaten “healthy” — what subconscious secrets drive our relationship with food?

Welcome to MIND MELD: Deep dives into the psychology and human behavior that drives products, brands, and marketing strategies.

It all starts with an innocent trip to Trader Joe’s.

You just need bread, milk, and dish soap.

In the blink of an eye, you escape into a vortex of impulse and suddenly you’re in the checkout line with $200 worth of things you never asked for.

That variety of cheese you’ll rarely eat. That sauce you’ll try once to say you’ve tried it. That one random item in the checkout line that casually seduced you as you were waiting for the person ahead to wrap up. It has the word cacao on it — could it be different than regular chocolate? You must know.

You might be a mess — but you’re far from the only one who has fallen into the trap of grocery store overspending.

In a survey from LendingTree, 30% of respondents said they “almost always” overspend at the grocery store, with an added increase of $100 per month during the pandemic.

While you might be surprised, grocery stores aren’t.

In fact, lots of levers exist within grocery store layouts purely to drive your overspending.

Consider the following:

• Essential items like bread and milk are stored in the back of the store. If you want to get your essential items, it almost always requires you to walk through one or two aisles.
• Baked goods, produce, the deli, and flowers are all located at the front of the store to introduce associations with freshness. There is no reason that the muffins next to the deli can’t be fresh — but all of you sudden, if you notice them right after the stimuli hits you, it doesn’t matter.
• Lots of items are priced at exactly 99 cents — this is actually called the left-digit effect, where humans are more likely to only register the number to the left of the decimal. $5.99 feels more like $5 than it does $6, right?

This is on top of the infamous candies and magazines we’re familiar with at the checkout line as well as the prominent tasting samples that reel us in.

Perhaps the most intense is the shelf layout strategy for stores.

Brands often covet something called the bulls-eye zone, the second and third shelves, to match your line of sight. This is traditionally where we see higher-priced items, with regional brands closer to the top. If you’re in a rush, you’re not tempted to look up or down. Disaster.

While I do think the marketing tricks used by grocery stores are fun to know, these do open up a larger conversation about humans and our relationship with food.

There used to be a few thousand items in a grocery store as late as the 1990s — now grocery stores carry more than 40,000 items. Brands have popped up, proliferated, and opened up widely new categories. E-commerce has been a forcing function for everything from upstart brands to some of the biggest names in the world, like J.M. Smucker and PepsiCo. We’ve never had so many options — both beneficial ones and harmful ones.

It’s brought up a question I’ve been sitting with for a few weeks: What motivates people to buy the food they buy?

Is it as simple as grocery store layouts and marketing? What role does psychology play in all of this? Moreover, as we move further from grocery stores into e-commerce, are we privy to the same traps?

Welcome to a fun deep dive into an area that we likely engage with every day: the psychology of food purchases.

How Much Does the Average Person Know About the Food They Eat?

To consider our purchasing motivations, it helps to start with a simpler question: Are all of our purchases educated purchases?

If you ask most people, they would be remiss to say no. Why would anyone admit they’re putting things in their body they don’t fully know? I would honestly say the same, even after years of eating Taco Bell.

A survey by the Food Literacy and Engagement Poll revealed some startling information from the sample: Nearly half of respondents say they never or rarely seek information about where their food was grown or how it was produced. Moreover, 46% of the sample said they either don’t know whether they consume GMOs or believe they rarely or never do.

It reminds me of a fun video from Jimmy Kimmel a while back where a reporter asked strangers on the street a simple question: What does GMO stand for?

Strangely enough, most people had a strong aversion to GMOs… but most had no idea what the letters even stood for.

Now the point is not to dunk on Americans — I admit as much that I fall into this same trap on many occasions. We do face the exhausting task of sifting through lots of noise for reliable and often competing sources of information. Google doesn’t make it any easier.

Do a quick test. Take your favorite food and do a quick Google search for “Why X is healthy for you” — you might find that someone has already done the legwork to confirm your bias!

This goes for any food. You can find sources that say pizza or even cake is healthy for you. It causes us to label anything we eat with a sense of optimism.

This largely stems from the optimistic bias, often known as unrealistic optimism. It’s a cognitive bias that causes us to believe that we are less likely to experience negative repercussions from most things we do. Most of us believe our diets are adequately healthy — god forbid anyone tells us Taco Bell is a bad life choice!

The optimistic bias is helpful for things we’ve tried for years — but what about new things?

We happen to have an irrational habit there too, known as the health halo effect.

By definition, it’s the idea that a particular food is good for you, even if there is little to no evidence to confirm it's true. This comes as a result of strong marketing, brands employing the right buzzwords to coax you: natural, gluten-free, low-fat, keto, or low cholesterol.

This often extends to brand associations as well. McDonald's is traditionally considered less healthy than Subway, but researchers found people buying from Subway were less accurate at estimating calories, underestimating their intake by an average of 151 calories.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has also been a prominent vehicle in the space of understanding food psychology.

fMRI looks at activations within the brain to compare what people say vs. how their brain reacts.

One such study at the University of Munich looked at exploring an interesting gap: they found that while four of five consumers were willing to pay more for organic food, the market share still remains small. The share of the market for organic food at the time was only 2.9% in all of Europe.

In this study, respondents were given the same descriptions of the food, with one group saying it was associated with a popular brand (i.e. McDonald's) and the other given the same description with no brand association.

The result was that neural data can indicate popular brands elicit a reward activation regardless of what type of food is labeled by this brand.

In essence, if you saw two plates of the same food and one of them was randomly labeled McDonald's, your brain will go with that one. Regardless of the actual difference in the health between the two.

The group found that brand not only plays a role in choosing healthy food, but it often overrides our desire for healthy food if our favorite brands come out with unhealthy food. This largely matches the somatic marker hypothesis: emotional associations with brands can often make us support them without any further questions.

It can make us skip even simple things — like reading nutritional labels.

Luckily, I think there is more energy than ever in today’s world of regular internet shaming (courtesy of Jimmy Kimmel) to start better understanding our food — but there is another macro-shift I think will play a huge role in coming years: the rise of e-commerce.

What Role Does E-Commerce Play Here?

I won’t go too much into why e-commerce is on the rise. We know digital natives are increasing in numbers, platforms have grown to accommodate digital retail, and half the country is at home. The transition to e-commerce and DTC (direct to consumer) models for food has become a quick imperative.

But there’s also another element that favors DTC: we’re tired of not knowing. Much of the research above was done in the past couple of decades but we’ve since seen a shift in consumer values. We want to be more educated about aspects of food that we eat. We want to better understand food additives and natural ingredients. We care about food safety.

Our growing frustration is the perfect storm for many DTC brands, who understand the value of the ambitious health zeitgeist and capitalize on what larger brands can’t do as effectively: a story and a meticulous investment into product quality.

Take Immi for example, a healthy ramen brand started by Kevin Lee and Kevin Chanthasiriphan, designed to add a healthier alternative to traditionally carb-heavy ramen. Immi uses this powerful graphic on their site to communicate their health benefits, very easily exposing ways in which it’s healthier.

One of my favorite shifting narratives is in the world of cereal.

Andrea Hernández, who writes the Snaxshot newsletter all about food and beverage trends, wrote a piece back in November unpacking the factors that have opened the door for new upstart cereal brands to challenge an institutionally untouched sub-sector of breakfast foods.

She cites cereals like Magic Spoon, Off Limits, and Three Wishes as brands that have risen in the cereal world for focus on reducing sugar, using ingredients like chickpeas, and maintaining the same taste as an empty carb snack.

But Andrea goes one step further: she talks about how they have encouraged the “snackification” of cereal to remove it from the confines of breakfast food and allow you to eat it at any time. She also talks about the aesthetics, how Magic Spoon in particular became a favorite because of its colorful Instagram.

Many of these brands are able to circumvent our instinctive skimming on nutrition labels simply by providing the most important information upfront.

But what’s interesting with all these DTC brands is another element: that all of them have a story. The story involves some tension — the founders getting frustrated by the existence of a certain paradigm in the world of food and choosing to shatter it. I talked in my Super Bowl piece about how some of the best Super Bowl ads contain some level of useful tension that people can relate to emotionally — it’s doubling down on the same formula.

Many of these brands are able to circumvent our instinctive skimming on nutrition labels simply by providing the most important information upfront.

It’s hard in a homogenous part of the industry to win on a story. Are Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes going to argue that one of them had a more inspiring raison d’être? They’re selling largely indiscrete versions of the same product.

But while e-commerce brands can compete on product quality, differentiation, aesthetics, and story — it’s hard to compete on price.

To serve a sophisticated market means serving sophisticated demands. It’s hard to do with cost containment. But it does mean that many of the people who could use it might be left out.

DTC is an exciting prospect for consumers but it leaves us in a bit of a bind: Do we opt to go to a grocery store where we know price and bulk are available? Or do we aim to follow the DTC brand craze and sacrifice price knowing we’re getting transactional health in return?

Moreover, does it actually stop the psychological blinders that lead us to buy institutionally unhealthy food? Is the average person with optimism bias going to admit that the food they’ve been eating is trash? Is the average person with the health halo effect going to discern the difference between marketing on a food package vs. marketing online?

This seems like a problem that DTC alone can’t solve — but simple awareness can certainly help us push the needle.

Final Thoughts

I do believe that removing environmental traps (like grocery store layouts) can be helpful with overspending to a certain degree: we can’t get everything we need online. The places that have somewhat maneuvered online grocery (i.e Amazon Fresh) are hard to compete with on logistics.

But while I can only speculate so much without knowing the average person’s dietary needs and preferences, I do think there is one thing we’ve found anecdotally that is helpful: stories.

I considered not writing this sentence because I still have PTSD from that terrible “Game of Thrones” finale — but in this case, it’s somewhat true.

We saw in the fMRI research that brand popularity and familiarity can often override choices we would otherwise make on health. We’ve seen stories like the ones from Immi and Magic Spoon inspire others. We even have a chance to see new brand identities at work.

Aja Singer, who writes the newsletter For The Love about DTC Brands, talks about the concept of bold identities when it comes to brands like Ugly Drinks, further stating that DTC has opened the door for brands to become more playful, and attract a new and vibrant consumer segment.

While the primary instinct here might just be to do more research and be vigilant about what’s in your food, it takes a lot of unlearning. Jesse Tilner, who works as a growth consultant for CPG brands, likens it to smoking campaigns.

“It took decades to solidify the narrative but people still smoke. The health and wellness movement is the same thing but with food. As more and more people begin to understand the importance and power of adaptogens, minerals, vitamins, etc., the more those products will become the norm, but you will always have people crushing candy and trans fats.”

Consider something more simple: find the food you don’t love or something you want a healthier alternative for. Pause before you get it again. Find a small online retailer that can win you over with their brand story. If you can’t spend the money, share the story. Read newsletters like Andrea’s and Aja’s to understand the upcoming trends.

While I don’t work for a food brand, I’ve had the pleasure of connecting with many over the pandemic. Many of them have won me over. While I do think a level of social currency is at play, there is a comfort in generosity to your own body.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too — but you can certainly have your cake and knock it right to the ground.

What Drives Our Food Purchases? was originally published in Better Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For a long time, I thought of the spectrum of burnout as a speedometer.

If you’re working long hours and going at 110%, you’ll feel the pain. You need to dial it back before it screws you. Looking back to college, I distinctly remember the first time I felt that same pain.

It was the middle of my sophomore year and I was stuck between two equally attractive desires: a major in Maryland’s Business School or majoring in psychology.

A bad accounting exam would prompt me to google clinical psychology doctorate programs. The cost of those same programs would spark a switch into googling consulting salaries. The next day would find me obsessed with a new concept in a social psychology class and the wheel would spin again.

It was a vicious cycle.

Inevitably, it began to take a physical toll on me. I was taking twice the amount of classes in an effort to bet on both careers. I was rarely sleeping. I was stress eating taquitos from the campus seven eleven.

The mutual exclusivity of the whole dilemma irked me. I felt all the pain of Hermione Granger with that godforsaken time turner, yearning to do and learn everything without acknowledging the impossibility of it.

With impending graduation as a forcing function, it ended.

I chose business, ended up getting an offer in strategy consulting and did a few years at IBM before I hit another wall.

But this time, it had nothing to do with the physical toll.

In fact, my last few months at IBM gave me the most freedom I’ve had in my career. I was leading my own team, working largely my own hours, and could even opt not to go into the office if I wanted to. I was making okay money. I had time. I was comfortable. Almost too comfortable. How do you even burn out in this case?

At first, I confronted the idea that I wasn’t finding “meaning” in my work, but that wasn’t right. It felt like a slap in the face to the thousands of people using the product we were working on and benefiting from it.

But I realized what I was missing was independent of meaning — it was the challenge. Even as I regained more and more control, the lack of challenge over time eventually led to its own state of burnout. A motivational burnout.

Is that an actual thing? Burnout from boredom?

Some brief research led me to a term: Boreout. In Diagnose Boreout, the authors describe a theory called Boredom boreout syndrome, a “psychological disorder caused by mental underload at the workplace due to lack of adequate quantitative or qualitative workload.”

It is a thing! The greater irony is that in some ways, we dig ourselves into this hole. The better we get at our job, the more inadequate the same job becomes for our liking.

It did cause me to rethink my philosophy on burnout a bit, specifically the metaphor. Now, instead of a speedometer, I think of it more as a pendulum.

On one side, you have challenge. On the other, you have comfort. Both are generally important ingredients of a job that doesn’t burn you out.

If you have too much challenge with no sense of comfort, the pendulum gets stuck. It will take a physical toll on you. You won’t be able to plan around the job. You’ll constantly feel stuck in a state of now knowing what you’re doing. You lose your agency, and with that, your voice.

But then there’s the flip side: if you have too much comfort with no challenge, you’ll deal with motivational burnout. The monotony may hit you to the point where it will have you questioning if you’re worth more than what you’re currently doing if you get too good at it.

Finding comfort means we need to find things we’re good at, have a sense of autonomy over, and also signal to management to help us find those things. If you’re constantly throwing someone into an ocean with no life jacket, it will only be a matter of time before a wave steals them away.

Challenge is similar: a level of self-awareness around boredom and finding opportunities to chase down that audacious new goal you know you’ll suck at the first time.

In a good job, it’s impossible to avoid either. Nor should it be desirable. You want to have a sprinkle of challenge and you want to have a sprinkle of control. You should want the good, at the expense of some of the bad.

One of the common adages I hear is that burnout can come when you no longer find meaning in your work. But even in that lens, there’s a meta layer: you could be working on things that matter but still burn out, if you’re not working on the right things for you.

If you’re working for a mission-driven company, but your exact work isn’t supporting the mission, it might not be helpful. If the tasks are too easy for you, same. Similarly, working on things that you find meaningful can only take you so far if you’re burning the candle at both ends. It’s why non-profit employees can still have some of the highest burn out rates, despite mission driven work.

It might seem the pendulum should always stay in the center, where our job is equally challenging and in our control. But the catch is that we all have different pendulums.

Some people prefer jobs with a bit more consistent comfort and stability. Some prefer jobs with a bit more continuous challenge. It’s the classic small startup vs. big company argument, and I’m not here to justify where a pendulum needs to be. Just that it exists inside of all of us!

One more caveat — your pendulum also doesn’t have to swing from your job. If you find a job with a sense of freedom that gives you more time to pursue some hobbies and you find your challenge and motivation from those hobbies, it’s a perfectly good reason to keep that job.

It’s a big reason why I keep writing my newsletter. On some boring days or weeks at work, I know it’s an outlet that exists and keeps me happy. (I sometimes joke about how the newsletter almost helped me find a footing in the world of psychology I once craved!)

Is it this simple? Just two variables that decide if you burn out? Absolutely not. It would be insulting to think a single Medium article can address the wider emotional and physiological causes of burnout. There are hundreds of reasons someone can burn out and I think there’s a world where balance isn’t always the right answer.

But if you’re at the point where you feel lost, soul sucked, or ready to quit, consider where you are on the pendulum.

Where should the ball tilt next?

I’m currently a growth marketer based out of the Bay Area. In addition to the piece you read, I like writing about marketing, meaningless controversies (i.e. ranking of the best fast food fries) and spending my days finding the best Super burrito in San Francisco. If you have any thoughts, get in touch here or via @kushaanshah on Twitter!

The Pendulum of Burnout was originally published in In The Trenches on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Maryland Terrapins, my beloved alma mater, had just suffered a soul crushing loss at the hands of the Alabama Crimson Tide in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

I finished my last bite of dinner staring longingly at the end of my two hour vigil, heartbroken.

No, they were absolutely not expected to win this game. They weren’t even expected to go to the second round of the tournament.

But the Terps, before this loss, were on the precipice of spinning a narrative that was commonly celebrated in the NCAA Tournament: The narrative of the underdog.

The NCAA Tournament happens every March, a single-elimination tournament designed to crown the champion in Men and Women’s college basketball. Teams are pre-seeded based on their performance in the regular season in four regions (1–16 each) where the seeding largely tilts the outcome of the earlier matchups.

Due to the fact that you only need one game to advance, the tournament’s appeal comes largely from its unpredictability, where lower-seeded teams can muster incredible single performances to knock out the top seeds. While people generally expect the top seeded teams to win, the adrenaline rush comes from the major upsets, also known as the “Cinderella stories”. In the early 1980s, it was given a moniker by sportscaster Brent Musberger that it’s often associated with today: March Madness.

The upsets were celebrated in my work Slack. Celebrated in my Twitter feed. People loved to see the powerful teams go down.

It got me more curious about our psychological attraction to the underdog.

Even looking beyond the NCAA Tournament, our love for the underdog is everywhere. A 1980 study showed that participants disproportionately rooted for Ronald Regan when Jimmy Carter had a lead in the pools and rooted for Carter when Reagan did. If you look up both Barack Obama and John McCain with the word “underdog” on Google, you’ll see both of them attempted to position themselves as underdogs in the election.

The biggest Silicon Valley companies we know today once also capitalized on their disruptive underdog status. Tesla positioned itself as the foil to GM and Ford. Airbnb branded itself as the alternative to the old-fashioned, resolute hotel giants. Shopify famously talks about “arming the rebels” against Amazon. Even Apple can attribute much of its initial rise to a well-publicized battle with computer behemoth IBM.

The Boston Beer Company, a billion dollar company known for its Samuel Adams beer, will never fail to remind you how small it is compared to Anheuser-Busch and Heineken.

While underdog status is inherently helpful, we can see with the Sam Adams example above that it can also be easily manipulated. It’s laughable to consider Sam Adams an underdog compared to the thousands of craft breweries competing against it.

But it does bring up a question: Is the mere perception of being an underdog beneficial to brands?

Why do we intrinsically love to root for the underdog? Why are we much less likely to root for a Facebook or Google to do something disruptive today than a new company or founder looking to shift the status quo?

It was a curious question around both branding and psychology … a chance to unpack the underdog effect.

What Causes The Underdog Effect?

While we’ve seen anecdotal examples of real brands benefiting from underdog status, studies show this sentiment persists even with totally random choices.

In one study, people were presented two fictional basketball teams playing each other in a seven-game series. The participants rooted for the team described as the underdog 88.1 percent of the time with a twist: When told that the favorite unexpectedly lost the first three games of the series, the allegiance changed.

Half of the participants suddenly found the losing team much more appealing.

In another study by Harvard and Georgetown Professors, the professors devised an experiment with chocolate. They gave one brand an underdog story — small and new, just entering the chocolate game. The other brand was characterized by experience and a big marketing budget — the “top dog” in this case.

As a result, 71% of subjects chose the underdog chocolate.

The researchers had an interesting hypothesis: A disadvantaged position, combined with passion and determination, could shift consumer preference.

In their research, they created the axis above with Nantucket Nectars, made in a blender and sold from recycled wine bottles in the late 1980s, juxtaposed with Apple and Microsoft.

One of the simplest explanations here is that we resent the top dogs simply as an expression of schadenfreude, an emotion describing the pleasure we get from watching someone’s misfortune. Derived from the compound of the German words Schaden (Damage) and Freude (Joy), it’s an odd emotion mainly because it sounds.. well, mean.

But in many cases, we can’t help it. It’s a natural reaction for our brain to choose pleasure over fear.

We recently saw schadenfreude play out with the demise of Quibi, with Wired even stating: “The schadenfreude of seeing the company stumble is the kind of relief people need right now.”

Many pointed to the audacity and ego of industry titans Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman as a factor for the ridicule. The stubborn nature of the leadership, in addition to the war chest of $1.75 billion, automatically positioned them as privileged achievers and made them a key example of business hubris gone wrong.

With all intents and purposes though, Quibi was at a disadvantaged position. It was competing against Youtube and Netflix at a particularly unique intersection of both. What it didn’t get right (outside of the bad product and marketing) was the perception that it was remotely disadvantaged, a clear miss for the founders.

But while schadenfreude is explainable for some cases, it doesn’t explain what happens when a certain situation changes or an entity becomes more disadvantaged over time.

Lebron James, for example, was reviled as a member of the star-studded Miami Heat teams. As soon as he moved to the Cavaliers and become the David to the powerful Goliath of the 2016 Golden State Warriors, he was an underdog again. Something to celebrate.

To explain this, another explanation comes from the theory of desirable difficulties, coined by psychologist Robert Bjork. The theory of desirable difficulties correlates both growth and effort with the difficulty of the adversity one has to overcome. In a sense, its perceived effort. We assume, because underdogs have more difficulties, that they work harder. The top dogs are simply lazy.

It still baffles me to this day that Kevin Durant became the most efficient scorer in NBA Finals history in the 2017 Finals, something largely overlooked because he went to a powerful team. He was criticized in the media as a traitor, as a snake, and as a cheat. The narrative maintained that he was someone who took the easy way out. Rest assured, it requires a tremendous amount of hard work to average 35 points on 56% shooting in an NBA Finals — but just by simple perception, people believed Kevin Durant was cakewalking his way to a ring.

In reality, with few exceptions, nobody that we might consider a low aspiration corporate sellout is particularly lazy. They have to work just as hard, whether they go to a hot new startup or to a large company like Microsoft or Google. But it’s an interesting bias that explains why we root for underdogs — we like the nature of having more barriers.

Then there is also the self-congruity hypothesis, the idea that consumers are more likely to be aligned to a brand personality that matches their conception of self.

In short, consumers will identify more with an underdog if they themselves feel like they are struggling.

Weinjie Li, CEO of online optical Firmoo says in this CIO Article:

It is not how the marketers perceive their audience — educated, living in above-average socio-economic conditions — but the internal selves that the consumers create for themselves that help them connect to the underdog narrative of the brand.

It’s important to note the distinction between the marketing data and the self-perception — even if you believe someone is well off, its the internal perception they have of themselves that matters.

If you are hellbent against power and corruption, regardless of how well off you are, you might support Shopify against Amazon.

In short, it doesn’t matter how much power you have. It just matters how much power you feel you have.

This is why startups have a historical appreciation of the underdog. People love startups started in garages, started by misfits, or grown by outsiders. We identify with the gravity of the story. We root for it.

In a world where little is in our control, it feels nice and comforting to have someone in a similar state of struggle be vindicated.

Final Thoughts

I recently finished Obsessed by Emily Heyward, a wonderful book about how brands can position themselves uniquely. She has a line in the book I find intriguing in the context of underdog psychology:

One of the greatest hurdles that a break-the-rules brand faces is how to stay rebellious as it grows.

It brings a lot of attention to the idea that the underdog status is essentially fleeting — when you’re small, scrappy, and reimagining outdated industries, you are beloved. Seen as the hero. Apple in 1984.

As you grow, there are many struggles you have to overcome — but one is certainly market perception. What happens when you’re the one with the target on your back? What happens when you’re no longer Jeff Bezos sitting at a desk but now Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world?

What the above tells us though, is that underdog is less about any sense of market reality, but merely a sense of perception.

Shopify is a billion dollar company arming the rebels against Amazon. Boston Beer Company is a billion dollar company distancing itself from Anheuser-Busch.

Even Twitter, a large social media conglomerate, has invited new excitement about positioning itself as an underdog to Substack and Clubhouse. Simply by being in a disadvantaged people, people are looking to Twitter for new answers.

Certainly, underdog narratives can be a strategy for brands. The fact that the mere perception of being undervalued is enough to stir excitement means brands can manipulate this and cause quite a market frenzy.

It’s also an interesting chance to reflect on ourselves.

Do people actually deserve the pain from our schadenfreude?

The heat of our mistrust?

I, myself, have called Kevin Durant a snake on multiple occasions. I cheerfully rooted against every Warriors Finals team he played on. Should I be ashamed of drinking the kool-aid of my own biases? (Maybe. But, I do like him now!)

https://twitter.com/kushaanshah/status/879824879637471232?s=20

But this doesn’t mean it’s all bad. It is fun to root for underdogs. It is fun to see them win. Just like any psychology, we just have to beware of when it’s manipulated.

In any case, the zeitgeist is never too bad for a good underdog story.

I’m currently a growth marketer at Livongo based out of the Bay Area and enjoy sharing insights around growth, careers, and personal anecdotes. I also like meaningless controversies (check out ranking of the best fast food fries) and spending my days finding the best Super burrito in San Francisco. All opinions are my own. Get in touch here or via @kushaanshah on Twitter!

Why Do We Root For The Underdogs? was originally published in An Idea (by Ingenious Piece) on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What does the NFT craze mean for marketers and brands?

Welcome to MIND MELD: Deep dives into the psychology and human behavior that drives products, brands, and marketing strategies.

A couple of weeks back, I was chatting with a friend and fellow NBA fan, who told me to check out this site called NBA Top Shot, a site that sells digital basketball highlights.

I scoffed at first. Why would I need to buy a highlight?

He insisted this was different. It was similar to a virtual trading card market. You could buy single players, packs, and everything in between.

I finally surrendered and swiped a highlight from Mavs superstar Luka Doncic and found the process to be simple — as easy as buying a product on eBay.

This was my first dive into something that I would become casually more curious about over the next week: the phenomenon of something called an NFT.

What the hell is an NFT? I’m glad you asked because for the longest time I had no idea.

At its most basic definition, NFT stands for non-fungible token.

In economics, fungibility describes goods that are able to replaced by identical items. The value is essentially indistinguishable.

Imagine you and I both had a $5 bill. We put both bills on a table and ask a third friend to choose between one or the other. There’s no way he can go wrong. Whatever bill he picks up, it’s $5. If he replaces it with the other, it’s still $5.

Most currency is similarly fungible. It’s an interchangeable asset class.

Non-fungible in this context refers to goods that can’t be substituted. There’s a unique attribute or characteristic that makes one good’s value different from a similar type of goods.

Imagine you and I both had Broadway tickets. I have Hamilton and you have Beetlejuice. If you asked me to exchange my Hamilton ticket for your Beetlejuice ticket, I would probably have some very harsh words for you in return. To point here is that they can’t be regularly substituted: Broadway tickets are largely non-fungible.

Now there’s a catch: these assets can be both physical and digital. While bills and broadway tickets are physical, there’s a whole class of digital assets. Bitcoin, for example, is a largely fungible digital asset.

Designer Rhett Dashwood has a phenomenal graph here that shows how these layout. NFTs are on the bottom right corner — non-fungible digital assets.

The token refers to a digital certificate, a record that identifies the asset and the movement of the asset in marketplaces.

So an NFT is effectively a digital asset that can be traded — but it’s non-fungible: 10 different NFTs will have 10 different values.

We’ve seen an example of one above, the Luka trading card. There are plenty of other examples: digital art, memes, games, domains, pieces of virtual worlds, and more.

Sites like OpenSea, Rarible, and Foundation have jumped into the NFT marketplace world, creating the framework for an Etsy and eBay type framework to exist for digital collectibles.

But the wildest part: the valuations. Logan Paul sold $3.5 million worth of NFTs within his first day of releasing his own branded trading cards. Surrealist artist FEWOCiOUS made $370,000 in one drop on his 18th birthday. Over the weekend, music artist 3LAU made $11.6 million on the sale of new tokens.

There’s a lot to unpack here: Why are NFTs suddenly taking off? Why these huge valuations? What is driving humans to buy these collections in hordes? Is this a larger movement in the making?

I talked to some artists, some enthusiasts and did some of my own digging to get some answers… the core reason why some people are obsessed.

What Sparked the Interest in NFTs?

There’s a lot of confusion as to when NFTs started or became popular. For a lot of people not already intertwined in the crypto world, it seems like a scary concept.

But here’s the fun part: You don’t need to own a lot of cryptos to buy-in. You don’t even need to know the ins and outs of the Bitcoin market.

What does help to know is the high-level: why there is such an overlap between the Bitcoin world and the NFT movement. The simplest answer is that they both are use cases that rely on a similar technology: the blockchain.

The blockchain is effectively a digital ledger consisting of blocks. No records can be modified, expunged, or censored. Imagine just a huge receipt essentially that extends for thousands of miles.

While Blockchain was largely conceptualized as a core component of Bitcoin in 2008, the first big NFT use case didn’t come until a few years later.

Canadian studio Dapper Labs developed a game in 2017 called CryptoKitties that was effectively like a Neopets of the new decade. You could buy, collect, and sell virtual cats — and it was all public record. Each kitty had its own code.

The site quickly went viral with more than 3.2 million transactions in October 2018 and became lauded as one of the first applications of a non-fungible token.

OpenSea and Rarebits, some of the first big NFT marketplaces, opened up as a response to the popularity of crypto kitties.

But today, as we learned, there are way more applications than just digital kitties. Some of the finest digital art and music can now be turned into NFTs.

What drives the interest from collectors?

At its core, a lot of the psychology around collecting is similar to the reasons humans have sought collections for years.

In his paper, psychologist Mark McKinley cites a number of reasons:

• Investment: Desire to find an asset that will appreciate in value
• Social Expansion: Desire to expand social lives and social signaling
• Sense of Self: Desire to create and maintain a sense of identity
• Regain Control: Desire to build a comfort zone through secure possessions

Another take I love is from Susan Barrett Price, who writes in her Medium piece The Spirit of Things about the idea that all inanimate objects have a life that comes from their owners. She writes:

“I operated an eBay store from 2005 to 2010 and sold thousands of small items from my husband’s collections. As I handled old postcards, photographs, and jewelry, I became convinced that each old thing had accumulated a certain ‘life energy’ from being handled and appreciated by its owners. Many owners over a long period of time create a wonderful aura of liveliness. It’s ‘the real thing,’ that air of authenticity that no screen image or reproduction can convey.”

When you see the Mona Lisa or Guernica or even a battered baseball card, you can see the energy of a great painter or the spirit of a little boy. That in itself is powerful — and “life energy” is actually a big reason why people personally love NFTs — you get the heart and soul of the creator as a reminder.

So why this particular NFT movement? Why now?

I spoke to a few enthusiasts in the space to get their thoughts and one of the biggest themes I heard was the parallel rise of creator platforms.

In his piece on Crypto Art, my friend Joey DeBruin talks about the rise of Foundation (one of the marketplaces we mentioned above) and why it’s so powerful. He touches on how creator-led platforms are changing the center of influence:

“Through Instagram, Substack, YouTube, TikTok, and so on we’re living in the world where personal brands can gain massive and lasting value. This is now one of the big topics in tech, and I think the pieces are coming together to power a massive breakthrough in the next few years, one that will marry the financial incentives for creatives and influencers with the impact they already have on society.”

Neer Sharma, who has minted his own NFTs, agrees that creator dynamics are changing, especially in the lens of creator monetization. He mentioned the idea that there is an “old world”, where you create content, try to build a following, and then try to monetize that following.

In the “new world”, where NFTs live, you create content, find the one person who cares enough to buy it, and wait for the asset to appreciate over time.

This boils down to a core tenet of the NFT movement that has little to do at the end of the day with any technology: It gives agency back to creators.

Without Substack and TikTok really driving the movement of influence, we may have seen less of an impact from NFTs.

My friend and creator James Halldon had another poetic thought behind this: There is a desire for lots of creators to support the next generation.

“People have been moved by the fact that they see kids younger than them profiting off of their art in a way that they would gladly would have had the opportunity to.”

James added one more point that I also think is incredibly important: the dynamics of digital markets.

The internet has historically never rewarded creators of digital goods in proportion to their impact — if a meme goes viral for example, there is little credit to the meme creator. Now, it’s different.

It explains why silly memes and highlights are worth thousands of dollars. The lowest asking price for an assist from NBA rookie Lamelo Ball is worth almost $4,900!

Not because it costs that much to watch Lamelo Ball — but because, as my friend Joey says, the future upside value of anything is basically capped at the internet’s nearly infinite scale of growth.

There is a sense of pride in investing in an artist early or getting in on the ground floor of a really cool piece of art. To date, there hasn’t really been any way to document that pride or the trajectory of that support. NFTs change that. You get their “life energy.”

Moreover, it’s a blessing for artists. Neer minted a hilarious song about investor Chamath Palihapitiya that sold well on Zora. James has minted some incredible art focused around nebulas on Foundation.

What Does This Mean for Brands?

While the focus on NFTs and their marketplaces has largely been on creators, one of the few areas I’ve seen less explored is the hype for brands.

Marketplaces like NBA Top Shot and Sorare (a fantasy soccer trading card platform) are some of the pioneers in increasing visibility and popularity for their respective brands.

It’s clear that there is an opportunity here for companies to essentially give customers and fans a piece of the pie, in a way that works alongside the marketplaces and incentives for individual creators.

There’s no small business vs. Amazon conundrum — you can buy highlights from Top Shot or Open Sea to your heart’s content.

I pinged my friend and fellow marketer Vincenzo Landino for his thoughts, who wrote recently about the renaissance parallel for NFTs and has been following the mechanics of marketplaces. I loved his philosophy around the idea of an NFT as an added incentive:

“I think we will see physical + NFT product drops, like ‘buy our NFT and instantly skip the line to buy the new Cosmograph Daytona’ or potentially even tie the physical product to the NFT. Purchase the watch and get access to digital art, stories, etc. There’s a lot of incentive and gamification that purchasing a physical product can unlock, especially in the luxury space where the unlockables can be rare, 1/1 type pieces.”

But the thought above made me mull on another concept: The value of incomplete products. Imagine the first prototype of a new Apple product, a trashed idea of a Rolex watch, or the initial concept art from a Pixar movie. Historically, these things just went in the trash. No one cares about unreleased products.

With the digitization of such goods, brands can reward their fans.

Imagine the boost you get at a party when you show up with the first concept art of Finding Nemo — literally impossible to be the worst person at that party.

Final Thoughts

As someone who has never really bought or sold art in my life, it’s hard to imagine the thousands someone would pay for a simple GIF or 3D rendering.

But, the more I think about it — it’s less about the transactional value. It’s more about a longer-term investment.

If you buy a Luka Doncic TopShot and Luka becomes a Hall of Famer in 15–20 years, that highlight has suddenly appreciated in value. If you invest in James or Neer’s art today and both of them continue creating art that boosts their reputation as creators, it’s suddenly a big deal to own.

So it really is, as James described above, betting on future returns — and in turn, building a relationship with a creator.

Another underrated reason why I think NFTs will be big actually has little to do with the returns, but a more obscure concept around psychological gravitation.

In his piece about NFTs, Alex Danco talks about the concept of “Schelling Points”, in essence, a focal point that describes where people naturally go in the absence of explicit communication.

Artists are slowly gravitating towards NFT marketplaces, experimenting with them, and buying into the movement. Some are doing it out of pure catharsis, others out of pure curiosity. But the outcome is powerful: There is now an unspoken meeting place for a generation of fragmented creator spaces.

In his piece, Danco cites the economic value of NFTs as slightly less important than their true value: as a Schelling Point for discussion:

“This current burst of speculative interest around owning LeBron dunks or whatever is really cool, don’t get me wrong. But it’ll conclude, at some point, in its current form. But something really important got created in the meantime, which is a shared understanding and a common gathering point for creatives and developers who want to creatively represent digital scarcity, for any use case now.”

Where will NFTs go from here? Will they become more popular over time? Will the current craze die out once the pandemic ceases to lock us all down?

Moreover, how many people actually care about digital authenticity? Will it extend to the average person?

Who knows. All I know is, for now, creators and consumers alike have skin in the game.

As Joey poignantly stated in his piece:

“That moment of ‘I knew Beyonce before she was famous’ always feels so tragic in a way; somehow you never feel like you get the credit you deserve.”

It may be only a matter of days before we find the next Beyonce.

Why Is Everyone Obsessed With NFTs? was originally published in Better Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Budweiser, McDonald’s and Apple are just some of the many brands that have nailed iconic Super Bowl Ads — what’s unique about their strategy?

Welcome to MIND MELD: Deep dives into the psychology and human behavior that drives products, brands, and marketing strategies.

Growing up in Massachusetts, I spent most of my Super Bowl evenings fairly stressed.

In the roughly twenty Super Bowls I’ve watched since 1999, my Patriots have played in nine of them. Those were nine evenings where I was frantic about the game, guzzling beer, annoyed at my friends, stress piling my face with pita chips, or usually some combination of all of the above.

This year, I was particularly excited.

While I’d been on an overnight flight sleeping through last year’s Super Bowl, this year was different. Not only could I get to watch Tom Brady play without the associated stress — it was my first year of watching as both a fan and a marketer.

Watching not just the magic of the Brady-Mahomes showdown, but the magic of all the ads in between.

The concept of a Super Bowl ad has always fascinated me.

Not only do they continue to be an outrageously expensive endeavor for most brands, but in many ways they defy the traditional rules of marketing.

For one, you learn very little about the actual product or pricing. Wondering how much to pay for an Audi? What makes a Budweiser better than a Bud Light? Where to buy Reebok shoes?

Good luck finding any of those answers in a Super Bowl spot.

Instead, Super Bowl ads aim for something more abstract. Mental real estate.

How do we capture someone’s momentary attention as one of eighty thirty second ads happening across a four hour long time period?

How do we stay original and true to ourselves, yet unique and completely different?

How do we manage to make a group of half-drunk, impatiently cranky, highfalutin football aficionados feel something deep in their heart?

It’s an ephemeral zeitgeist at best but one, if done well, can bring the brand popularity for years and years to come.

Even today, while I can’t promise you I would ever buy a Volkswagan Passat or a Hyundai Sonata, those brands regularly come to mind just by virtue of their excellent Superbowl execution.

While the abstract element does open up a brand’s ceiling for creativity, few brands come out of a Superbowl with a memorable ad, let alone one that lasts beyond the collective consciousness of the year.

It got me curious — when people think of the best Super Bowl ads of all time, what does come to mind?

What patterns connect some of the best Super Bowl ads in history?

Similar to my research for the Top Jingles of All Time, I needed a general consensus to start. I asked my Twitter followers, perused Youtube, and churned through list after list on Google of the best ads.

These were the ones I found that were repeated on most lists:

• Betty White Plays Football (2010 — Snickers)
• 1984 (1984 — Apple)
• The Showdown (1993 — Mcdonald’s)
• The Force (2011 — Volkswagen)
• Hey Kid, Catch! (1979 — Coca Cola)
• Frogs (1995 — Budweiser)
• The Baby (2008 — E-Trade)
• The Man Your Man Could Smell Like (2010 — Old Spice)
• Cindy Crawford Drinks Pepsi (1992 — Pepsi)
• Where’s The Beef? (1984 — Wendy’s)
• Puppy Love (2014 — Budweiser)

At first glance, most of these ads are from many different time periods and from different brands — it’s hard to say that there was a golden age of Super Bowl ads or even that one brand consistently nailed the Super Bowl spot every single year.

How do these ads, quick spots amongst thousands, endure the test of time?

As expected, there isn’t one thing that unites them all and it’s not as straightforward as just ads being funny and emotional — but these ads do tell us what humans flock to when it comes to short spots.

Let’s explore the world… of Super Bowl ad psychology.

What Do Sticky Super Bowl Ads Have In Common?

If you watch the Super Bowl enough, you might find the ads a bit formulaic.

There is always an ad that attempts to capture the current moment (like Chrysler did in 2012 with its Halftime America ad), usually a goofy ad with a celebrity (the awkward Bar Rafaeli GoDaddy Kiss Ad) and always a handful of beer and car commercials with baritone voiceovers and patriotic melodies dancing across the screen.

Of course, there’s the patently awful (SaleGenie’s racist ad in the 2008 Superbowl) and the atonement brands like Robinhood that could’ve totally kept quiet.

But most ads happen to be in the middle — they don’t hurt your feelings, but they also don’t command your attention well after the game is over.

When I started to search for the psychology of ads that broke through the mold, I found some interesting overall insights from those who had studied brands for years.

In an AdWeek article on the Formula for an Effective Super Bowl Ad, Creative and Innovation Editor David Griner mentions the value of consistency:

“A Super Bowl ad needs to stand out with creative impact in a crowded ad break — but it also needs to remind viewers of ads they’ve seen before for the same brand.”

We’ve actually seen this work fairly well over the course of time, even with the commercials on the list above.

The Clydesdales used in the Puppy Love commercial for Budweiser ended up becoming a mainstay in many of their spots with different storylines. The Adult Baby (E-Trade) and the Frogs (Budweiser) become regular characters in their spots over the years with variants that largely kept the same overall characters.

Some commercials are even pure remakes. Mcdonald’s remade its famous Showdown commercial from the list above, where Larry Bird and Michael Jordan were having a shooting contest for a Big Mac, with Lebron James and Dwight Howard in 2010. It was the perfect mix — a nostalgic lookback for those who remembered the Jordan-Bird commercial, a relevant add for current fans of the NBA, and a variant of a similar storyline that resonated wide with audiences in 1993.

While this makes sense for brands who have been doing it for years or brands that have had a hit in the past, how did the brands above get their first hit?

What I found is that the ads above all fell into three large categories:

• Quick Primer: A spot with a memorable catchphrase, tagline, mascot or slogan that begins to priming our brain for a brand association
• Affective Narrative: A spot with a storyline or narrative that immediately impacts our moods or emotions in a significant way
• Creative Juxtaposition: A spot that takes two things that don’t belong together and putting them together in a way that makes it over the top

Let’s go through each.

Quick Primer

In the Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” ad and “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ad from Old Spice, we found cues that became regular associations with those brands.

Even ten years from the original airing, you can probably visualize the spot perfectly. Isaiah Mustafa in a bath towel and eventually on a horse. Even when Terry Crews stepped in as a spokesperson, he dressed in the same attire to keep the cues intact.

With Wendy’s, while there aren’t any deliberate visual cues, the simple “Where’s The Beef?” line shouted by actress Clara Peller made the slogan a household name.

Not only was it just a slogan for Wendy’s that made its way into country songs, bumper stickers, frisbees and more, it entered the lexicon as an all-purpose phrase questioning the substance of an idea. Walter Mondale even began to use it during his 1984 Presidential Election to sum up policies by his rival, Senator Gary Hart.

Not bad for a single Super Bowl spot.

According to VeryWellMind, Priming is defined as “a technique in which the introduction of one stimulus influences how people respond to a subsequent stimulus. Priming works by activating an association or representation in memory just before another stimulus or task is introduced.”

It’s the reason why good slogans stick (Can anyone hear “Just Do It” without thinking of Nike?) but it also extends beyond simple memory — it can impact our day to day decisions. We might be less inclined to go to a Mcdonald’s by recalling the irate woman from the Wendy’s commercial or more inclined to get Old Spice at Walgreens to make women swoon.

But it’s also illogical — as the Budweiser ad grew in popularity, frogs made people think of Budweiser. If you weren’t thinking of a beer, now you were. Maybe not a win for your memory in the long-run, but certainly a win for Budweiser.

Effective Narrative

In my article on Tik-Tok, I shared my thoughts on the power of effective content, content that is evocative and designed to strike an emotion.

Super Bowl ads that are sentimental and include a nostalgic touch are certainly loved — but the best Super Bowl ads do something additionally clever: they create a quick storyline.

One of the most fascinating articles I’ve read on the power of storytelling in marketing comes from neuroeconomist Paul Zak, where he talks about the importance of developing tension during a narrative.

If the story is able to create useful tension, it is likely that the watchers will share the emotions of the people in the story. If we extend this to Super Bowl spots, we’ll see that a lot of the best ones contain some level of tension.

• The Volkswagen Passat ad with the little kid dressed as Darth Vader shows us a kid who can’t use the force for anything until his dad makes his dream come true by turning on the Passat from afar
• The Budweiser Puppy Love ad shows a Clydesdale horse and a puppy becoming best friends until the puppy has to move and the Clydesdale horse has to chase after it
• The Apple Ad shows a white heroine saving humanity from conformity (Big Brother, which was meant to be IBM)
• The Mean Joe Greene commercial shows a tired and irritated Joe Greene walking to the locker room until his mood is magically lifted by a kid offering him a free Coke
• The Showdown above with Larry Bird and Michael Jordan, where we’re presumably captivated by this contest by two of the greatest contemporary shooters.

In all of those, we are sharing in the wins and losses.

We’re excited for the kid when he sees the car fire up. We’re excited for the kid when he gets the towel from Joe Greene. We feel the warmth when the puppy and horse reunite. We’re motivated to see the heroine defeat Big Brother and for Apple to introduce Macintosh. We’re excited to see who will hit the next shot in the showdown.

It’s the entire trajectory of the story that captives and engages us — and why we remember these ads years after.

Creative Juxtaposition

I mentioned above that celebrities aren’t always a golden key to Super Bowl creative stardom — there has to be a layer of twist that makes the ad memorable.

In the Power of Creative Juxtaposition, author Mark Peters interviews humorist Chuck Sambuchino who talks about his love for creative juxtaposition. A pope on a skateboard. Outtakes from Pixar movies. Things that don’t belong together but become humorous when we put them together.

This is where we can round out the goofy ads. They’re not just traditional slapstick or a celebrity telling standup jokes — they’re goofy precisely because they employ this creative juxtaposition.

Take Betty White in the Snickers commercial. She’s an 88-year-old woman playing football with the boys. MJ and Bird in the Showdown commercial. Two ruthless competitors fighting over a silly thing like a Big Mac. Even the Cindy Crawford Pepsi Commercial — she’s one of the top supermodels in the world but the little boys ogling at her drinking a Pepsi don’t care as much about supermodels as they do about the new Pepsi logo.

The best example: E-Trade Baby. Financial advice from a literal freaking baby. (I will confess that I almost didn’t include this ad on here because this baby gave me nightmares, but it was, unfortunately, a crucial part of the research.)

Sambuchino adds that the psychology of humor resides in two things:

• Pointing out the unspoken truths of life
• Things that purposefully introduce nonsense

The latter is where the ads with creative juxtaposition thrive.

Final Thoughts

If we think about the 2021 SuperBowl, we can likely root out similar reasons why we loved the ads we did.

One of my favorite ads came from Cheetos, where Ashton Kutcher was attempting to accuse Mila Kunis of eating Cheetos, with some help from Shaggy. There was an element of nostalgia with the Shaggy intervention and an element of light tension. Same with the Bud Light Lemons Ad that showed lemons falling and left us with both schadenfreude and relief. Affective Narrative.

The winner of the Quick Primer award has to go to Michael B. Jordan and Alexa — who seemed to make everyone on Twitter want their Alexa to sound a certain way.

I would even throw in the Lil Nas X Logitech Ad as a bit of a stretch but a good primer — trying to use the words “Defy Logic” on repeat to store it on our brains as an association with Logitech.

The Creative Juxtaposition award gave us lots of fun wins — Maya Rudolph in the Old Wild West for Klarna, Drake as the awkward stand in for Jake from State Farm, and my personal favorite — Daveed Diggs laying out down a hard rap on Sesame Street.

But you might be saying — will the future be limited to these categories?

In a Super Bowl Ad Nerd Clubhouse chat I attended on Monday, the panelists were asked to name their favorite ad: many pointed to the Reddit Ad that lasted for only five seconds as a creative ad spot.

It was way too quick to be a primer. Not nearly long enough to have a dramatic narrative. No creative juxtaposition. So how do we classify Reddit?

That’s where I’m stuck. We’ll have to wait to see if this actual Reddit ad has any legs in human recall ten years from row, but I expect we’ll see lots of similar ads in the future.

Do short sweets deserve their own category? Do ads that primarily resonate through digital deserve a place in Super Bowl lore? Will we see some ads skip the television spot altogether? What about the weird Oatly content play that fit into almost no category?

While it’s fun to look back on the best of Super Bowl history, the future will be a battle of consumer evolution and tradition. While I imagine the large brands will continue doing spots, the smaller brands can focus more on where consumer attention actually is during the game.

The only certainty we have is that there is a future of ads we haven’t yet explored.

What Makes a Super Bowl Ad Stick? was originally published in Better Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was eight years old at Universal Studios when I first learned about the existence of ET, Steven Spielberg’s mini extraterrestrial masterpiece.

I was enamored by its concept: I wanted to believe ET was not just a fabric of our imagination, that aliens had a high probability of greeting us and helping us fly bicycles into the sky.

As childhood passed and I watched UFO documentaries, my conviction became stronger that aliens not only existed but that a UFO likely had visited Earth.

I didn’t think there was anything strange about this conviction. After all, about half of Americans believe there is life on other planets and also believe the government knows more than it leads on.

But I hesitated to consider myself a conspiracy theorist.

When I thought of conspiracy theorists, I thought of the crazies and the cranks. The people who believed in lizard people taking over the world or that the moon landing was a hoax to win the Space Race. When I asked friends if they believed in conspiracies, I found I wasn’t alone.

There were people who believed in entertaining conspiracies (i.e. the theory that Paul McCartney died in 1966 or that the close density of Mattress Firm stores in Chicago might suggest a larger money laundering scheme), but these were mostly harmless. Few believed in anything more nefarious.

The pattern I found was representative of a stigma.

Widely accepted theories can swing political activity, familial relationships, and even lead to stark violence. We want none of this.

We like to set ourselves outside of conspiracy culture, marveling at conspiracism as though it’s some sort of foreign disease that only foams about at the fringes of modern society.

But, this doesn’t mean we can ignore them.

While many of them are largely based on no evidence, they seem to catch on like wildfire. With the amount of information we have to consume, it’s increasingly harder to separate fact from fiction. In this reality, fiction can tend to win.

With the recent deplatforming of the President after weeks of election fraud theories that led to attempted insurrection, it begs the question: is deplatforming going to stop conspiracy theories?

Is this actually going to make information sharing easier?

My curiosity led me to a core question: What is it about humans that makes conspiracy theories stick in the first place?

Let’s take a deeper look under the hood … of conspiracy theories.

What is a Conspiracy Theory?

So what is the sandbox we’re playing in?

What is the definition of a conspiracy theory?

I opted to go with the definition researchers Oliver and Wood gave in the Washington Post on conspiracy theories: “An explanation that makes reference to hidden, malevolent forces seeking to advance some nefarious aim.”

While this does remove legends like Bigfoot and Loch Ness (fun, not but necessarily nefarious) from the realm of conspiracy theories, it does help us better define the intent of such theories.

Once a theory becomes an accepted explanation, it disappears. Many thought Watergate was outlandish in 1972, but few would hesitate to describe it as a theory today.

So why do they start?

This is where psychology gets interesting.

Why Do We Believe in Conspiracy Theories?

The increase in spread and concern of conspiracy theories has led many behavioral scientists in the past two decades to look at them more closely, trying to better understand the exact predictors of conspiracism.

Are they products of circumstance? Emotion? Core belief systems?

It turns out, all of them.

One of the largest hypotheses around predicting conspiracy acceptance is anxiety or a lack of control.

In her piece “Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories” in the Scientific American journal, author Melinda Wenner Mayer suggests elements of emotion play a role in getting people to believe in conspiracy theories. Mayer finds that feelings of anxiety, along with disenfranchisement, are “comforted by identifying scapegoats and making the world seem more straightforward.”

While this may seem obvious, the experiments she cites illuminate the unique role of stressors in conspiratorial beliefs.

In one experiment, a 2015 study in the Netherlands, college students were split up into multiple groups. One group was told to write about a time they felt they were not in control, another to talk about a time they felt in control.

When the larger group was asked to comment on how they felt about the construction of a new subway line that had been plagued by problems, those primed to feel a lack of control were much more likely to believe in an unlikely conspiracy to the problem.

If we look at this study as a microcosm of the human experience that leads to conspiracism, you can imagine that most people are primed to feel this way through a string of experiences — foreclosures, lost jobs, and crumbling relationships that need an answer.

A general belief that someone else is responsible for your misery vs. random chance.

Meyer suggests that this can be compounded by another hypothesis: the feeling of alienation or being unwanted.

In a 2017 Princeton study, participants were requested to write an essay about themselves, which they were told would be shared with another participant to see if the other participant wanted to work together.

Some were randomly accepted, some randomly rejected. Those rejected were quick to assume that their rejection was the product of a larger conspiracy.

This can make sense for a lot of political conspiracies that come from a disenfranchised demographic or ignored class of America — indeed, a number of theories are strongly aligned to socioeconomic classes, including presidential birtherism.

But to suggest that all conspiracists are paranoid loners might not paint the full picture.

This is the image we usually have. The reality is a bit different.

In their research on “Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion”, Oliver and Wood draw larger correlations between innate psychological tendencies and how they influence acceptance of conspiracy theories, adding yet another hypothesis: Normal, everyday people with no emotional vacuums are just as likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

They specifically call out two factors:

• Tendency to attribute the source of unexplained or extraordinary events to unseen, intentional forces (i.e. attributing events to god or unexplainable noises to ghosts)
• Natural attraction towards melodramatic narratives as explanations for prominent events, (i.e. narratives that break everything into good or evil or black and white)

This is where it gets easier to explain why many otherwise ordinary people may embrace conspiracy theories.

Believing in unseen forces or liking narratives of duality is not irregular and would not otherwise impact other routines. We see these cognitive tendencies all the time in situations that are perfectly appropriate — something like saying “Bless You” during a sneeze or knocking on wood for good luck. Basic heuristics we adopt over time.

The researchers suspected that tendencies with such normal occurrence meant they would find uniform acceptance across political affiliation, political interest, race, gender, and education for conspiracy theories.

To test this out, they gave a large group of people the following measures and statements and told them to rank each from 1–5.

About a quarter of respondents believed in the end times statement, over a third agreed with the Manichean worldview, and more than half the sample believed there was a case for believing in a secret cabal, supernatural phenomena, or paranormal phenomena.

When these same respondents were given seven conspiracy theories, ranging from 9/11 Truthers and the Iraq War being an inside job, to Soros, birtherism and a plot by the U.S. government to switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs to make people more obedient, these respondents had strong opinions about all of them.

They found that those with strong measures on Manichean and End Times were likely to believe in all the conspiracy theories, while strong Paranormal and Secret Cabal measures believed in almost all but the birther conspiracy.

What they ultimately couldn’t find was a single demographic or segment that was more susceptible to conspiracy theories than others.

While some patterns existed amongst the less educated, acceptance was ubiquitous. Women and men believed in a number of conspiracy theories, as did both liberals and conservatives. The researchers even later lamented that their research was a disheartening blow to the political pundits who claimed their side was above conspiracism.

This makes it hard to retain a lot of our initial bias that conspiracy theories somehow come from paranoid extremists or are products of gross misinformation.

Just because we read a lot or adopt a political ideology, it doesn’t mean we to make attributions to unseen forces or find dramatic narratives less compelling.

A commitment to some of the absurdity that comes with conspiracy theories is something all humans are capable of.

So the golden question: what can we actually do?

Can We Stop Conspiracy Theories?

As I searched for answers behind the psychology of these theories, I was hoping for a clear answer to curb them — something more concrete around how to use this information to stop their spread.

Overall, the findings give us unfortunately more cause for concern.

One, it generally proves the theory that humans act more through emotional instinct and subconscious bias than logic. This is something we’ve seen through the research on somatic markers and studies on scarcity, but those implications are less worrisome. Humans reacting quickly to decide on a brand of beer is different than humans fueled by anger about a completely illegitimate narrative on the president.

Two, stopping the spread of a single theory or filtering the distribution channel doesn’t address the root of the problem. When the Washington Post shared how misinformation had dropped dramatically the week after Trump was banned, people rejoiced.

The research by Zignal Labs in the Post article dissected apart the misinformation ecosystem, sharing how the President’s tweets were retweeted by supporters at a fast rate, giving him a huge influence over conversation. Once that channel was removed, information spread more slowly.

But while the channel was curbed, I thought about the views of those engaged in this misinformation — the closing of the channel did nothing to change the alienation, anxiety, or natural belief system of those people. It simply changed their ability to spread it their beliefs at the speed they desired.

The easy answer is that we want to make people feel more secure and included. We want to get out of this spiral where there is less disruption and anger in society. We want to enhance value systems.

But we’re at a precipice where none of this is easy to do — people are angry, there is good reason not to engage with those who once sent you death threats, and many politicians have given up on considering bipartisanship a try.

On top of that, even some scientists are skeptical. Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist at VU Amsterdam, is working on research to see whether false conspiracy beliefs can be corrected by giving participants power and control over their own lives.

But, as Maggie Korerth suggests in this piece, this is much harder to do in the real world than outside of laboratory experiments. Sure, controlled environments can sow change — but in the real world, the ability to empower and give people control over their lives comes from the very people they trust — leaders and government officials.

Maybe we’re meant to live the concept of these forever? Who knows.

So here’s a new idea: If we know that people are going to believe in conspiracy theories regardless, could we just feed them better theories to believe in?

What if there was a coordinated effort by the government to share theories that agencies were baking cookies underground and waiting until the right time to share them? Or that the chemtrails thought to be brainwashing gases were actually gifts from other planets?

I’m still on the lookout for better ways to curb misinformation that addresses the psychological root of why people go out of their way to search for it — but until that, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to just make the misinformation healthier to believe.

I’m currently a growth marketer based out of the Bay Area and enjoy sharing insights around growth, careers, and personal anecdotes. I also like meaningless controversies (check out ranking of the best fast food fries) and spending my days finding the best Super burrito in San Francisco. All opinions are my own. Get in touch here or via @kushaanshah on Twitter!

An analysis of the categories of memes: topical, social, reactionary, nostalgic, utilitarian

Welcome to MIND MELD: Deep dives into the psychology and human behavior that drives products, brands, and marketing strategies.

Last Wednesday was the U.S. inauguration, a day typically reserved for surprising celebrity appearances, bold platitudes from the new president, and general atmospheric optimism for the incoming political party.

But if you hopped on the internet to find any big takeaways from the presidential speech or the event, you may have been curious to find another image trending instead — one that had little to do with the president.

A cold man with crossed arms, a brown coat, kaleidoscopic brown mittens, and a stoic, impatient impression took the internet by storm.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who is no stranger to the American politiverse, become a viral sensation — everything from his unbothered outfit choices at one of the country’s premier events to his relatable annoyance at waiting in the cold sparked curiosity and became a point of adoration. As quickly as the image appeared, it went viral.

The senator quickly became a meme. Thousands of photos popped up across Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram, superimposing the senator on top of movie scenes, world events, paintings, cartoons, and even a slightly meta situation where his likeness made its way into other memes. There were Bernie mugs, a crocheted Bernie doll, and Bernie stickers. It even sparked an NYU grad student to create a Bernie website using Heroku and the Google Street View API to put Sanders anywhere in the country.

The meme seemed invincible and continued to dominate the internet until the very next evening, when momentum finally stalled. Amazon hijacked the image of Sanders into an Amazon Pay ad, sparking tone-deaf backlash based on previous views Sanders had of Amazon. Journalists and other internet personalities jumped onto the meme as well, sparking a slew of think pieces and psychological deconstructions of the meme. This all but ensured its plateau: the basic equivalent of a joke being funny until your school teachers embrace it.

The jump into the mainstream, exhaustion of places to put Sanders, and distance from the inauguration saw the spread of the meme begin to slow down. As of this morning, it feels appropriate to roll your eyes if your marketing team asks you to put a Sanders meme on the brand account.

The entire Sanders phenomenon got me thinking a bit deeper about the rise and fall of internet memes.

Point to any year after 2012, there have likely been at least 50 to 100 memes with little sprints of popularity throughout the year. But few of them endure beyond their 15 minutes. Few last through the year. Even fewer last through the decade.

We all remember when Salt Bae, Grumpy Cat, and Damn Daniel were popular. We all remember the summer of Harambe. We all recognize the Philosoraptor, Bad Luck Brian, and the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World memes in the wild. All of these once high-octane memes are now close to dead.

Despite this, we still have Condescending Wonka, The Gunshow This Is Fine dog, and the Crying Jordan meme alive and well today.

Based on what we know, should meme endurance matter to marketers?

As we’ve seen from the scramble for brands to find their own take on the Sanders meme, relevance is still a critical anchor for top-of-funnel awareness. Brands want to strike while the iron is hot.

But it got me thinking: Is there a good predictor for which memes will last and which will fizzle? Is there an ideal way to test the lifecycle of a meme?

It turns out there is no clear answer, but many hypotheses from culture authors and behavioral scientists alike. Time to explore the science of meme virality.

Why Do Memes Exist?

To understand the endurance of memes, it might help to ask a more simple question first: What is the purpose of one?

If you’ve gotten this far, you likely know what a meme is.

Coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, it is a shortened form of the word mimeme, an Ancient Greek term that means “imitated thing.”

Dawkins refers to memes as “units of cultural transmission,” phenomena that can be easily spread around. What we know today as an internet meme was nowhere close to how Dawkins envisioned the word — in fact, his original examples were simple things like fashion trends, melodies, and movie quotes.

In his book Contagious, Professor Jonah Berger defines the concept of social currency as a sense of pull or influence that a consumer has once they find something interesting. We desire to have something others find valuable, in order to feel gratified or included. The crux of a meme is based on this same concept — even before the internet, people wanted to go to dinner parties and ponder conversations about Casablanca, laugh at lines from the Fonz, and join in on the harmony of Frank Sinatra tunes.

The value in social currency hasn’t gone away — but the internet introduced a new complication into the value of memes: speed.

With the growth of YouTube, 4Chan, and Reddit in the mid-2000s, the internet meme was born. In a world where the growth of memetic ideas was once owned by writers, TV actors, and artists, the internet democratized meme generation. Anyone who had access to an internet forum could now be a meme creator. The popular meme format became a simple 300 x 300 image with dynamic text and jokes based around some thematic idea.

The Philosoraptor, which rose to popularity in 2008, was an early example of a simple idea that meme creators would harness over the next decade: different life questions just superimposed on a static picture of a dinosaur.

It could take a lot of deconstruction to understand the timeline of internet memes, but it largely is anchored to three big developments:

• Consumption: Sites like Google and YouTube, combined with forums like College Humor, 4Chan, and Reddit, made the transmission of funny concepts quick, catapulting videos like Charlie Bit My Finger to virality.
• Creation: Sites like ImgFlip and Canva gave power to more users to create memes at a time when participatory memes with unique jokes became mainstream.
• Reaction: Sites like Giphy allowed for memes to take a more dynamic meaning with GIF reactions, coupled with Twitter adding GIF search to make these reactions appear at the click of a button.

You might recognize some of the memes summed up below as ones we consumed from 2003–2010 and during the transition into more creative memes in the mid-2010s. (I was a big Drunk Baby fan.) Towards the later 2010s, the growth of every social tool made it almost impossible to not know which meme was trending.

We know that memes have social currency, and certain ideas have had that value-add for decades before the internet arrived. We also know that the internet made it quicker for ideas to spread and allowed for average people to actually generate the content that could be a fulcrum of cultural transmission.

Psychologist Madeleine Pownall suggests another cultural shift brought on by memes — that there is value in the way they have changed the threshold for communication:

“In essence, memes have granted internet users a shorthand way of communicating…. The idea is that this co-creation of content allows internet consumers to actively engage in an online media dialogue, allowing the previously voiceless members of online society to participate in new forms of humor.”

What scientists generally agree predicts a meme’s life expectancy is the emotional appeal and physiological reaction it provides. The veracity of a meme is often overridden by any extremes in emotional cadence. If it elicits high-arousal emotion, it will spread.

This helps explain why Sanders was popular — the juxtaposition between his pose and his different environments led to some casual absurdity, laughter, and a sense of collective enjoyment at the end of a bitterly partisan election season.

But like everything on the internet, there are winners and losers.

What Makes a Meme Last?

The generally straightforward answer of “It’s funny!” or “Everyone is doing it!” is not enough to explain the general cadence of a good meme.

In “A Unified Theory of Meme Death,” author Lauren Michelle Jackson tries to dissect what makes a meme stick. She makes an assertion that memes “uniquely and deliberately make depth inconsequential to their appreciation” — thus, over-analysis ends up being one of the first factors that kill a meme.

“There’s an obligatory defense embedded in most meme coverage, as if writers sense they must keep the analysis at a minimum lest they spoil the fun.”

These thoughts were echoed by Elena Cresci, whom Jackson cites in her article: “When it comes to memes, there’s a rule: It is dead as soon as the think pieces come out.”

Even while studying the Sanders meme for this article, I was more entertained by the variety of ludicrous images than the psychoanalyses in Psychology Today explaining why the meme was a sign of optimism for the country.

But Jackson’s piece brings up a key reason why memes never last: As soon as they go mainstream, they lose their luster. For the internet meme, speed is critical. Being late to the show is almost more embarrassing than missing the show altogether.

As you wonder whether a meme will have legs, you can consider the following categories:

Topical and social memes tend to have the highest chance of going immediately viral. Mittens Bernie is largely an example of both — immediately potent after the inauguration and largely grown with the amount of creativity involved in custom-generated memes.

But both of these have time-bound anchors. For a topical meme, the anchor is an event or period of time. Nobody would make a 2016 election meme today similar to the one above. Similarly, if someone made a covfefe, Rebecca Black, or Harambe joke in January 2021, you’d probably look at them as if they lived under a rock. Topical memes are subject to newsjacking and, from Jackson’s analysis above, subject to a quick death. As soon as Harambe was brought into the mainstream for animal cruelty, the “Pour one out for Harambe” jokes got less serious.

Social memes have an extra anchor beyond just a period of time — they beget social participation. The Harlem Dance, Gangnam Style, and even the static ImgFlip memes of the early 2010s all fall under this category. Incentivized by social proof and in-group validation, you want to participate. It flexes your creativity and unique value. But the social currency is a double-edged sword: What was once crown-jewel valuable dilutes as more and more people participate. All of a sudden, Amazon, Jake Tapper, and that annoying guy from your high school are sharing Bernie memes, and that’s when you know the end is near.

For topical and social memes, brands need to act fast. Topical memes usually reward creators within the first 48 hours, and most social challenges last about two weeks. Beyond that, the threshold of creativity necessary for the meme to stay alive rises.

Then you get to the reaction, nostalgic, and utilitarian memes.

These are the ones that don’t die as easily.

Reaction memes survive beyond the classic topical and social into their own category because the anchor here is emotion, it isn’t stalled by time. Crying Jordan, Evil Kermit, Distracted Boyfriend, Condescending Wonka, and Blinking White Man are all alive and well in 2021 — they may last beyond the current year simply because they are category-defining within their emotion. Crying Jordan is the poster child of a sports loss and Blinking White Man the poster child for bewilderment. You don’t get faulted for using a reaction meme when the timing is right, regardless of how old the meme is.

Nostalgic memes go a step further. They typically have the same spirit as reaction memes but add an element of nostalgia that brings out a larger in-group. Take the SpongeBob memes for example. In another piece for Vulture called “How Did SpongeBob SquarePants Become the Most Meme-able TV Show?” Lauren Michele Jackson cites the profundity, oddities, and spectacular realism of SpongeBob for its popularity in the meme world. It’s easy to recall characters, memories, and moments from the show, along with its treatises of optimism and nihilism. This combined with general familiarity makes SpongeBob reaction memes all the more appetizing to use.

Utilitarian memes are usually the memes that will never die. They’re memes you almost need to know in order to survive on a day-to-day basis. One of the clearest instances of this comes from internet lingo: lol, brb, omg all started as unique units of cultural transmission. Despite the fact that photo memes grew in rapid popularity, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single individual who doesn’t know the meaning of lol. Utilitarian memes also align more closely to the initial Dawkins definition: If any meme can be considered a cultural mainstay, it will never die.

Final Thoughts

The question of whether or not a brand should use memes is one that frustrates and agonizes even the best of brand managers. Part of the reason meme execution is so frustrating is that they can’t fully be predicted — no social team in December 2019 knew that they would have to add Bernie Sanders mittens memes to the content calendar. Nobody in early 2013 knew that they would have to learn the art and science of the Harlem Shake.

In essence, a growing meme really forces you to get into an uncomfortable place. You have to force yourself to embrace speed and creativity of execution before the meme goes mainstream. If the Bernie Sanders phenomenon has affirmed anything, it’s that topical and social memes need a better home in modern marketing plans. For the right timing, it’s a gift to the top of the funnel that keeps giving.

It also paints an interesting picture of where the consumer world is going when it comes to communication. Gone are the worlds of press releases and billboards that will drive traffic. In their stead, a solid meme gives you a virtually non-existent CAC.

In her piece, Jackson ends with a compelling message:

“The pace of life online tests the durability of culture like nothing else before, but it is still ultimately culture. The memes we forget say as much about us as the memes that hold our attention.”

While we may forget the memes, we’ll never forget the moments when some brands sat on the bench while others were hitting it out of the park.

What Makes a Good Meme Last? was originally published in Better Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.