Your best campaign was also the last campaign where your tactic fully worked.
You just didn’t know it yet.
Here’s what actually happens to every marketing tactic over time.
It starts working because there’s a gap: you know how the mechanism works, your audience doesn’t. That gap is the leverage. Scarcity feels real. Social proof feels organic. The offer feels urgent.
Then you scale it. More spend, more reach, more formats and here’s the part nobody talks about: the moment you reach maximum scale is also the moment your audience starts learning how the mechanism works. They’ve seen it too many times. They recognize it. The counter-reflex develops.
Peak performance and peak immunity growth are the same moment.
Your dashboard shows one of them.
It gets more specific than that. Your best customers — the ones who drive referrals, who pay premium, who tell others — they figure it out first. 12 to 24 months before everyone else. So the overall numbers still look fine. The tactic is still “working.”
Just not on the people who matter most.
Eventually the numbers drop. The team meets. Someone says the creative needs refreshing. Someone says the targeting has drifted. Someone says the channel is saturated.
None of that is why the numbers dropped.
The tactic expired. Not because it was executed badly. Because it was executed so well, for so long, that the audience learned what it was — and the mechanism stopped working.
The brief asks: how do we produce more motion?
The numbers are asking something different: why is motion costing more than it used to?
Those are different questions. Most teams keep answering the first one.
One practical test: graph efficiency — return per unit of spend, not total results — for any tactic you’ve been running more than 18 months. If the line peaked and then declined despite multiple rounds of optimisation, you didn’t have a creative problem.
You passed the inflection point during your best quarter.
That is the part most marketing teams still pretend isn’t true.
They know the gift is not just a gift.
They know the countdown timer probably resets.
They know the “people like you also bought” line is not innocent.
They know social proof can be bought, scarcity can be manufactured, authority can be borrowed, and “authenticity” can be briefed on a Tuesday.
Not perfectly.
Enough.
Enough to feel the mechanism before it finishes working.
That does not mean persuasion stopped working.
It means persuasion now arrives with friction built in.
Every tactic has to pass through a new question in the audience’s head:
“What are they trying to make me do?”
That question used to appear late.
Now it appears before the subject line finishes loading.
The old advantage was not creativity.
It was asymmetry.
You knew how the mechanism worked.
They didn’t.
That gap built an industry.
Now the gap has narrowed.
The audience learned the moves.
AI made the machinery easier to see.
The best frameworks became the defence manual.
Cialdini. Kahneman. Every principle precise enough to teach became precise enough to resist.
So if your best campaigns feel less powerful than they should…
maybe the work didn’t get worse.
Maybe the ground changed.
Maybe the mechanism didn’t fail.
Maybe it became visible.
That is what I tried to map in The Asymmetry Economy.
A short book about why persuasion lost its clean advantage, why audiences now detect the push faster, and what survives when the old playbook becomes public property.
If your marketing still depends on the audience not seeing how it works, the clock is already running.
Most brands are not growing. They are spending. The dashboard cannot tell the difference.
Hit the target. Close the quarter. Green arrows on the slide. And somewhere in the data nobody looks at, something moved the other way — the customers who used to return without prompting, the ones who paid full price because the brand had earned it, the audience that considered you without being reached first by a promotional incentive.
The brand has been spending trust faster than it has been building it.
Every campaign that hit volume through discount was a withdrawal recorded as a deposit. Every customer service decision that served the company at the customer’s expense was a withdrawal nobody put on the review. Every season the brand had nothing new to say and kept spending to be seen was a withdrawal in the form of silence.
Four years of this and the balance is gone. Not visibly. Structurally.
CAC rises. The team calls it platform pricing.
Retention declines. The team calls it a product problem.
Margin compresses. The team calls it a competitive market.
The competitive market is cheaper for your competitor than it is for you because their ledger is higher and every transaction they make costs less than yours does. That is not market pressure. That is trust debt and it has been accruing in decisions made years ago by competent people hitting reasonable targets in meetings where nobody had language for what was being spent.
JCPenney hit every quarterly target for years before Ron Johnson arrived and discovered the ledger was empty. Kraft Heinz managed its margins for four years before a $15.4 billion write-down made the depletion impossible to ignore. Bed Bath & Beyond sustained traffic on coupons for decades before filing for bankruptcy in April 2023.
None of those collapses were sudden. Every one of them was a sequence.
The crisis didn’t cause the collapse. The crisis made the collapse legible.
If your results disappear when spend stops, nothing you built actually belongs to you.
Each one sounded reasonable. None of them held for long.
Because the problem wasn’t inside the campaign.
It was inside the relationship between the campaign and the audience.
the shift no one named
For years, persuasion depended on a simple asymmetry.
The people designing the message understood how it worked. The people receiving it didn’t.
That gap was where influence lived.
Not in the message itself, but in the difference between what each side could see.
That gap is smaller now.
Not gone. But smaller in ways that matter.
Audiences have seen enough patterns to recognize structure. Enough repetition to detect intention. Enough exposure to feel when something is trying to move them.
They don’t need to articulate it.
They just respond differently.
what actually changed
The mechanism didn’t stop functioning.
It became visible and visibility changes behavior.
A tactic that works when it feels natural behaves differently when it feels constructed.
A message that feels like a signal behaves differently when it feels like a move.
The same inputs can produce different outputs depending on whether the audience registers the mechanism behind them.
This is where most organisations misread the situation.
They see declining efficiency and assume execution failure.
So they optimize.
Better targeting. Sharper creative. More iterations and for a while, it works.
Then it doesn’t.
Not because the work got worse.
Because the system they’re optimizing has already passed its peak.
the invisible loss
The most important shift doesn’t show up immediately in the data.
It shows up in who stops responding first.
The most attentive audience. The most connected. The most influential.
The ones who recognize patterns early.
They don’t leave dramatically.
They just stop engaging in the same way.
The rest of the audience continues to respond, masking the change.
So performance holds.
Until it doesn’t.
By the time the decline is visible, the most valuable part of the audience has already moved on.
what replaces persuasion
When the mechanism becomes visible, the game changes.
You can still generate response.
But it behaves differently.
More dependent on repetition. More dependent on spend. Less likely to compound.
That’s not influence.
That’s compliance and compliance doesn’t build anything that lasts.
What replaces it is harder to manufacture.
Not because it’s more complex, but because it doesn’t rely on a hidden advantage.
It relies on something that can survive being seen.
That’s where trust stops being a brand attribute and starts behaving like a system.
Something that accumulates. Something that depletes. Something that changes the cost of every future interaction.
why this matters now
There’s a moment every system goes through.
When it still functions on the surface but stops creating the same outcomes underneath.
That’s where marketing is now.
Still producing results. Quietly losing efficiency. Gradually changing shape.
Most teams are still solving for the visible layer.
Very few are adjusting for the structural one.
the book
This is what I tried to map in The Asymmetry Economy.
Not tactics. Not frameworks to apply.
A way to read what’s already happening.
Why it feels like things are working and not working at the same time. Why the people you most want are the first to disengage. Why more effort is producing less movement and what replaces a system once its core advantage disappears.
Because the system didn’t break.
It became visible and once you see it, you can’t go back to working the same way.
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The Candle, the Pumpkin, and Lucifer is a darkly whimsical short story that continues the fable of Lucifer, the tuxedo cat with world-domination in his eyes. When Halloween arrives, Michael ..his ever-devoted but oblivious human…discovers strange pumpkins on his doorstep, eerie gatherings of neighbourhood cats, and rituals flickering in candlelight.
As jack-o’-lanterns whisper, rooftops fill with a feline procession, and fear itself becomes a feast, Lucifer steps fully into his role as sovereign of shadows. Michael, caught between disbelief and dread, must decide whether to finally see his companion for what he truly is …or remain blind as the charming apocalypse curls into his lap, purring like thunder.
A gothic, satirical bedtime story for adults, this Halloween tale blends eerie humour with sinister charm. Grab it here
