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Welcome to Shallow DeepDive, where we take
a deep-ish dive into the shallow world of
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branding, advertising and creative.
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I'm Joe Qualls.
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Today, we're covering the quiet cost of
building a brand that can't offend anyone.
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Somewhere in a marketing team right now, a
campaign is being run through a new kind
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of check.
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Not "is it on brief" or "is it any
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" A different question altogether: how
much backlash could this attract?
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There are now models for it — ways of
scoring a piece of work on how likely it
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draw a coordinated pile-on, an organised
wave of complaints, a spell of political
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heat.
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"Backlash exposure," people are calling
it.
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Anything that scores high gets softened,
or quietly shelved.
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It's a completely understandable thing to
build.
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It's also, we'd argue, reshaping brands in
a direction most of them would never
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choose on purpose.
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Let's be fair to it first, because the
fear behind it is real.
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The last few years handed everyone the
same cautionary tales.
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A brand makes one decision, some corner of
the internet decides to make an example
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of it, and weeks of a company's life
vanish into a crisis nobody planned for.
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You can still name the big one from three
years ago without trying.
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Pride this year made the pattern plain —
brands that had spent a decade being
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visible went quiet, trimmed the
merchandise, softened the language.
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Not because they'd changed their minds,
but because they'd run the numbers on
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exposure and didn't like what they saw.
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When the downside is that vivid, of course
you build a tool to spot it coming.
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Nobody wants to be the next case study.
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But here's the thing about a
backlash-exposure model.
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It is very good at pricing one kind of
cost — the loud, visible,
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kind.
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The hashtag.
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The angry thread.
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The phone that won't stop.
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What it cannot see, because nothing on the
dashboard is shaped like it, is the other
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cost.
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The slow one.
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The cost of saying nothing that anyone
remembers.
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There's no alert that fires when a brand
becomes forgettable.
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No spike, no thread, no emergency meeting.
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The brand just gradually stops mattering
to people, quietly, over years — and no
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model flags it, because the absence of a
reaction looks exactly like safety.
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And this is the part worth sitting with,
because it isn't obvious until you say it
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out loud.
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The thing the model scores as risk, and
the thing that makes a brand mean
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are the same substance.
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They're not neighbours.
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They're one thing, seen from two sides.
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A brand becomes memorable by choosing — a
point of view, an audience it's genuinely
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for, a way of seeing its own category that
not everyone will share.
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And choosing is precisely what registers
as exposure.
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The moment you stand somewhere, you become
visible from that somewhere, which means
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someone, somewhere, is now able to
disagree.
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So when you tune the exposure down toward
zero, you're not only removing the risk.
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You're removing the choosing.
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And the choosing was the brand.
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There's a useful distinction hiding in
here, between a position and a posture.
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A position is something you actually
believe — about your work, your customer,
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corner of the market — and it costs
something.
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It's for some people and, by honest
implication, a bit less for others.
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A posture is built to look like a position
while costing nothing: warm, agreeable,
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engineered to reach everyone and offend no
one.
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The trouble is that people can feel the
difference, even when they can't name it.
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A position lands, because someone clearly
meant it.
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A posture slides off, because underneath
the nice words there's no one home.
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And a brand made entirely of postures —
every edge sanded down, every claim
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every line made safe — reaches everyone
and moves no one.
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It's in the room.
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Nobody remembers it was there.
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What makes this genuinely tricky is that
the safe choice always looks correct in
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moment.
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Every single time, softening the line is
the
Load full transcript
lower-risk decision on the day you
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it.
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Nothing bad happens.
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The meeting ends well.
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And that's the trap — the cost never
arrives as an event, so it never gets
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attributed to the decision that caused it.
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A hundred small sandings, each sensible on
its own, add up to a brand that no one
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can quite describe.
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But you can't point to the Tuesday it went
wrong, because it didn't go wrong on a
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Tuesday.
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It went a little wrong on all of them.
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Now, we're not making the opposite
mistake, which is just as common and a
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embarrassing.
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Having a position is not the same as
picking a fight for attention.
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There's a whole genre of brand that goes
looking for controversy on purpose,
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a cause it hasn't earned, and calls the
resulting noise
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" That's not a position either.
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It's a posture in a leather jacket, and it
ages just as badly.
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The point was never to be provocative.
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It's to be genuine — to know what you
actually think about your customer and
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craft, and to say it plainly, edges and
all, whether or not it happens to be the
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safe thing to say this quarter.
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So what do you do with a backlash model,
if you've got one?
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Use it honestly.
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Let it tell you the thing it's good at
telling you — where the loud, near-term
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actually sits — and then make it earn its
keep by putting the other number next to
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it.
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Not just "how exposed are we if we say
this," but "what does it cost us, over
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to say nothing at
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" The second number is harder to
calculate, and it's usually the larger
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If a piece of work scores high on exposure
only because it genuinely stands for
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something, that is not, by itself, a
reason to kill it.
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Sometimes that reading is just confirming
you've finally got a point of view.
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The job was never to drive the exposure to
zero.
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Zero exposure and zero meaning have a
habit of arriving together.
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Because the safest brand in the room is a
real achievement, when you think about it.
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Nobody's angry at it.
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Nobody's threatening it.
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Nobody's writing threads about it.
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It has successfully avoided every downside
on the list.
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It has also, without anyone quite deciding
to, avoided being the reason a single
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person chose it over anything else.
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Safety, past a certain point, isn't the
absence of risk.
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It's the absence of a reason to care.
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And that's the one exposure no model on
the market is measuring.
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Thank you for indulging us in today's
Shallow DeepDive.
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We hope you'll join us for the next one.
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Until then, take care.