Stunt Rebranding Still Works!

In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. — Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Welcome to Wednesday, futurists. 

Agentic this, tariffs that; oh and postal holds from China. If you’re in eCom or retail right now there’s plenty to be worried about: past, present, and future.

In a conversation I had with Future Commerce community member Doz Anyaegbunam this past week, he reminded me of a beautiful book, The Artist’s Way. I remember first picking up a copy as a musician traveling across the USA in a tour bus in the early aughts; and a ritual that I had.

Being on the road can be a blur. After years, the experiences start to smear together; and to manage the monotony everyone develops their own way of finding a sense of space and grounding. Before GPS we had Rand McNally. Before IG memories and location pins I had rest stop bathrooms and McDonalds washrooms. 

My sense of physical grounding was the World Dryer Corporation Model A, which could be found in every Waffle House, outhouse, hen house, Huddle House along the I95 corridor. I took to cataloging their serial numbers in a notebook, referring back to it at times to see if I had encountered them before.

This is the highest-resolution picture I could find in the public domain. Thank you, Wikipedia. 

The World Dyer Corporation Model A featured a rotating nozzle, which allowed you to tilt the air stream up to dry your face, something welcome when you spent most of your time in a bus or a van commuting from one tour date to the next. 

I formed an authentic brand relationship with the World Dryer Corporation. And I have developed a loathe for the obnoxious XCELERATORS of modernity, which simultaneously offend all of the senses (and feature no easily-cataloged serial numbers).

This week on the podcast, we’ll spend a lot of time talking about the AGENTIC AI scale of human attention, which Julia Cameron talks about at length in The Artist’s Way (attention, not agentic AI). “The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight,” she says. “The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.” Our ability to pay attention to the mundane in the world around us is slipping away as it becomes more slick, more branded, cleaner, more ‘aesthetic.’ 

My ritual of cataloging hand dryer serial numbers was an act of attention, a way of carving out meaning in the blur of travel. 

My challenge to the futurists in the FC ecosystem in this time of accelerated change is not to fear the future, but to pay closer attention and to carve out deeper meaning.

Notice the mundane. Catalog the ordinary. 

Because the best brands aren’t the loudest—they’re the ones that help us notice what we’ve been missing all along. Like World Dryer Corporation? Yeah.

The future belongs to those who notice.

— Phillip

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