Trust is a Flaming Hot Cheeto

Issue 75: Trust is a Flaming Hot Cheeto

When CEOs don’t know what to do, they sell Cheetos. Or the entire catalog of some of the greatest films ever made to the highest bidder. In this week’s Forward, we follow the red thread between a fake Cheeto story, the demise of Warner Brothers, and how to recognize when how you got here is keeping you from where you're going. All in a 5 minute read. We'll laugh, we'll cry, we'll learn a few things along the way.

Worth your time?

Let’s ride.

Nostalgia porn rages through our mediated lives these days. The auction our phantom feelings about the way things always were is up for sale everywhere. Our memories of better days, ghosts of lives we may not have even lived.

We are in the liquidation sale age. And it’s coming for everybody.

To understand why nostalgia sells, and what it has to do with you, we first need a quick primer on how we got here.

When Facebook and Google collab-ed in the mid 2000s to hock the personal information of everyone you’ve ever met and put it up for auction, attention was for sale. But not just attention, human behavior. For the first time in human history, they could sell your every move. And marketers bought this dystopia hook line and sinker.

They could use the coercive power of 1s and 0s to move people around the internet at the bidding of a dozen or so oligarchs running the world from Silicon Valley.

Today those oligarchs will suggest to you that the greatest human achievement is a machine that can average out the everything that’s ever been said and tell you exactly what you want to hear. Imagine Rosie, the Jetson’s maid, except codependent, coercive, and with a direct line to Voldemort. Generative AI like ChatGPT is not offering us progress, but the blandified averages of our nostalgia. 30 years of the internet, sold back to us as if it was insight.

The tech world had us all in its hands for the first 15 years of the 21st century. And since that time, no reasonable innovation has emerged that actually improves human life. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy… accelerating that speed and mendacity at which our digital lives are being commoditized against us. AI is just one more iteration around Palo Alto’s nostalgia curve.

But Palo Alto is not what this week’s Forward is about, it is just the scenery.

The Flamin' Hot Cheeto of It All

Marketing’s role in selling short human intelligence is the landscape for the rise of “brand as hero” in our media, a narrative that is both killing brands and killing heroes. Deader than Iron Man at the Endgame (spoiler alert).

On Friday, Disney+ and Hulu brought you the not-terribly true story of Richard Monta?ez, a janitor who by his own declaration, invented the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto.

Except he didn’t.

In an in-depth piece of field journalism, the LA Times (god, what a glorious age we live in) unearthed a catalog of inconsistencies in Monta?ez’ story. First-time director, Eva Longoria, claims that they never set out to tell the true story of the spiced cheese puffs, but rather “telling [Monta?ez’] truth.”

Of course, stories sell better when they are human stories. But we haven’t been getting much of that as of late. Our media world is trying to sell the brands of our past lives back to us:

Air Jordans.

Tetris.

Blackberry.

Barbie.

You don’t run a media company, and probably for good reason. If you did you’d have to be pulling a David Zaslav—CEO of Warner Bros—and sell your back catalog for half a tril just to keep the cash flowing.

Everything is for sale now. Even, and perhaps most perniciously, our best memories of ourselves—eating Cheetos, playing Tetris, sporting our Air Jordans.

Nostalgia Will Not Save You

Nostalgia is toxic for brands that command trust. It implies that you can only be seen as trustworthy in the rearview mirror. It plays into the conditioned fears of what’s in the windshield.

Trust, in both a business and a personal sense, must propel us forward. And businesses like wealth management, tech, and education must do just that work. It’s convenient to lean into the “what’s always been” of it all to try and hold on to the credibility of the past. Certainly, we see examples of that in our media landscape everywhere. From sequels that never end to nostalgia films where the only hero taking a journey is a brand… we are thrown back, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “ceaselessly into the past.”

But let the media be a cautionary tale for you: If all we have is stakeless sequels to our greatest hits and vaguely warm feelings about memories of things that didn’t actually happen, then the returns are diminishing by law.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

At some point your business went to market with scrap, with white knuckles, with that resilient strength of a founder or founders that would do anything to see their vision come to life in the world. The business attracted people—both team members and clients—who resonated with that leader and how they went to market.

Founders are Pied Pipers, natural magnets of possibility that draw like-minded people to their path.

And then at some point it stopped working. Because of how business cycles go, there was a time delay between when it stopped working and when you REALIZED it stopped working. That realization, the moment you see that “what got us here won’t get us where we’re going,” sends you back to the marketplace searching for new breakthrough. Ideally something that looks like the past, but spiffed up the future.

The search for vendors who can take the past magic and make it new jumps into gear. Many of these vendors trained on the algorithms of 2015, now trying to hold onto a digital marketing world that should never have worked in the first place.

• You add an all-in-one marketing agency. It works for a while. Until it doesn’t.
• You go all in on PR or niche marketing. It works for a while. Until it doesn’t.

And all of these “works for a while” time segments are shorter than the one before. And the impact to your capacity to grow more limited than the time before. Like Batman remakes, each one a worser copy of the one before.

You may not think you’re running on nostalgia, but you are. You are still making decisions about growth the way you’ve always made them. And what you really need is not a new growth tactic, but a new way to decide how to decide.

And unlike the last time you faced this dilemma (when you started the business) there is so much more at stake.

When CEOs don’t know what to do, they sell Cheetos. Or more accurately, the memory of them, entering slowly into an era of cyclical decline fed by cynicism about your customer, your options, and the future.

My guess is you’re not there… yet. You’re at the Notice Point. That place where question arises:

“Have we outgrown our ability to grow?”

Seven Signs of a Notice Point.

I want you to be a better noticer. And in doing so, get better and deciding how to decide. The average CEO of a trust-based firm is untrained in how to decide about go-to-market broadly, and marketing specifically. They were trained by how they came up, which was in the one or two tactics that worked to build a business from nothing. A heroic effort, no doubt, but not good training once you've got to select from an ever expanding menu of tactics and gimmicks.

To break the decline inherent in the rise of every “how we got here,” you’ve got to have eyes to see what’s happening. While not an exhaustive list, here are seven ways you can recognize a Notice Point.

1. Cost of acquiring a new client is hiring than ever with no reasonable sign of relief.
2. You are ready to “outsource marketing.” This is the white flag of any go-to-market strategy.
3. You can’t figure out who should own go-to-market strategy in the firm.
4. Inorganic growth is more tantalizing than organic. (You’d rather buy than build.)
5. Clients see you as the same as everyone else in your field.
6. Marketing is seen as a production team to deliver stuff to every other department.
7. Your growth model is dependent on the founder’s ability to sell.

Notice Points beg you to ask a better question. You may not know the question, but we do. And if you’re noticing it’s time to notice, it may be time for us to have a chat.

Forward, forward,

Nick Richtsmeier