The (Un)branded: Issue #006

The (Un)branded is a newsletter at the intersection of business, culture and brand. It’s where business meets culture, both are brand, and all three pretend they aren’t constantly influencing each other.

OpenAI Gets Serious

OpenAI has officially traded its lab coat for a suit by hiring a former Slack CEO as its first CRO. This thrilling development signals the end of the "let's change the world for free" phase and the beginning of the "please pay us $20,000 annually per seat" era. Investors can finally relax, as the brand narrative shifts from confusing, world-ending genius to predictable, scalable enterprise software vendor. Our strategic mandate is clear: ditch the utopian white papers and start crafting relentless sales pipelines focused on sticky, high-margin corporate subscriptions. The founder’s dream of AGI is now politely waiting behind the CRO's need for a flawless quarterly earnings report. Update all visuals to feature smiling, diverse professionals shaking hands.

Ring Wants to Know Your Face

Ring, seemingly bored with mere surveillance, has launched "Familiar Faces," a feature guaranteed to push the privacy boundary right off a cliff in the name of marginal convenience. This strategic genius forces the brand to immediately pivot into an unconvincing display of "radical transparency" to manage the entirely predictable public scrutiny. Strategically, we must now pretend we care deeply about data ethics while simultaneously collecting everyone’s biometric geometry. The risk of user trust erosion is severe, but the lure of making our cameras even more like state security is apparently irresistible. The takeaway is: maximize utility until users realize they are fully integrated into the Amazon surveillance ecosystem, then apologize and offer a slightly better privacy control setting.

PepsiCo Plans Price Cuts 

PepsiCo, at the behest of financial busybodies, has discovered the radical concept of "selling less stuff for less money." This portfolio reduction (cutting the 20% of products nobody remembers buying anyway) is an ingenious way to rebrand PepsiCo as the proletariat’s friend, fighting the "affordability crunch" while simultaneously making its internal logistics easier. Our strategy is to loudly praise the focus on "core hero brands" while quietly burying the failure of those twenty flavor extensions. This move conveniently aligns the brand with the demands of major retailers, allowing PepsiCo to act like a virtuous partner instead of just a commodity supplier. Essentially, they are streamlining their product failure rate for maximum stock performance.

McDonald's Pulls AI Christmas Ad

McDonald's learned that while consumers tolerate highly processed food, they refuse to tolerate highly processed holiday sentiment. The AI Christmas ad was a flop because the algorithm failed to capture the genuine, messy heartbreak required for emotional holiday storytelling. The brand takeaway is a critical one: AI is great for optimizing the drive-thru schedule but disastrous for generating authentic emotional connection. The strategic pivot requires an immediate, visible return to human creatives, who will be paid a fraction of the ad budget but whose visible effort will soothe the crowd. Never underestimate the consumer's deep-seated need to believe that human soul, not code, went into their commercial break propaganda.

Hinge CEO Steps Down

The founder of Hinge, who famously designed the app to be deleted, has successfully deleted himself from the CEO role. Poetic. The brand now moves into the hands of the former CMO, signaling a decisive shift from idealistic, relationship-focused missionary work to aggressive, metrics-driven scale-up. The new leadership's immediate strategic challenge is the cognitive dissonance required to maintain the "designed to be deleted" brand promise while simultaneously maximizing user engagement and, crucially, subscription revenue for Match Group. Expect the brand narrative to gently evolve: Hinge is still designed to be deleted, but only after you’ve explored all the compelling new paid features. Execution over ethos is now the primary directive.