Turn insights into solutions

The original clip was already a flex — a single continuous loop shot in the streets of Boulogne-Billancourt, choreographed to the frame. Gondry had to rehearse it extensively to pull off in one take. Twenty-four years later, he was called back to do it again. Gondry directs. Kylie re-records. The original artefact is intact, and the new film is positioned as its continuation, not its pastiche.

The casting does something more precise than star power. Margot Robbie has become the industry's most reliable vehicle for this kind of campaign — Barbie, Chanel, a series of roles that position her as simultaneously ironic and sincere, contemporary and classically beautiful. Robbie's specific value is that she can occupy both registers at once, which is exactly what the Kylie-to-Margot handover requires: one is the original, one is the continuation, and the transition feels inevitable.

Kylie's participation is what makes the whole construction hold. Without her, the recreation risks feeling like replacement — Chanel borrowing a memory it doesn't own. With her blessing, it becomes licensed continuation. The singer authenticates the songwriter's return. That's a model luxury is quietly developing: you can reuse cultural material if the original creator endorses the reuse, because participation converts homage into collaboration.

The deeper strategic admission is in what the campaign reveals about the Chanel 25 itself. The bag doesn't have a legend yet. Rather than build one from scratch — which takes decades and cannot be rushed — Chanel borrowed a memory from pop culture. Heritage alone no longer launches a new object to a new generation. Pop nostalgia travels faster and further than brand mythology. The classic flap got Brad Pitt, Penélope Cruz, and a 1960s French film, because a bag with sixty years of history needs that gravity.

Not every bag needs a legend. Some just need a good chorus.

Convenience used to be the cheap option. Fast food over home cooking. Instant coffee over ground. The trade was legible: you paid less, got something faster, accepted lower quality. That logic has inverted. Meal kits, same-day delivery, AI-driven replenishment, Deliveroo at the door in twenty minutes — the most convenient options are now among the most expensive. Convenience has moved up the value chain and become a premium product. The people buying back their time can afford to. The people who can't are still doing the friction themselves. What was once a budget category has become a class marker running in the opposite direction.

Mintel is right that convenience has stopped being a differentiator and become a baseline expectation — cognitive offloading, the quiet business of removing decisions and effort from the consumer's plate, is now the whole product in category after category. But the mechanism that delivers frictionlessness is worth examining more carefully. Once you are inside an Amazon Subscribe & Save loop, a Nespresso capsule subscription, a Deliveroo default order — you often stop choosing. Convenience as entry strategy, lock-in as the business model. The consumer who wanted less friction ends up with less agency.

Which brings the uncomfortable conclusion: the friction that convenience removed was also doing something. The effort of choosing, comparing, waiting — browsing a bookshop, wandering a market, discovering something you hadn't searched for — was the mechanism through which preferences were built, taste was developed, and unexpected things were found. Frictionless commerce doesn't just save time. It narrows the world to what the algorithm already knows you'll accept. Convenience optimises for satisfaction. It does not optimise for surprise. The places most associated with genuine discovery — the independent bookshop, the concept store, the farmers market — are high-friction by design and growing precisely among the consumers who can already afford to outsource everything else. Inconvenience, it turns out, is also becoming a luxury product.

The tulips last eight weeks. The logo lasts decades. That asymmetry is the most interesting thing about this brief. The digital identity Thonik designed will be seen by vastly more people than will ever walk through the gates: it lives permanently on Google image results, on Instagram grids, on every travel article written about the Netherlands between now and whenever someone commissions the next rebrand. For a destination that physically exists for two months a year, the visual system is not dressing up an experience. It is building the primary reality of a place most of those contacting it will never visit in person. The brand has become more permanent — and for most people, more real — than the garden itself.

Thonik's solution is characteristically Dutch — direct, graphic, unfussy. A stylised tulip for the garden, a coat-of-arms shield for the castle, colour palettes pulled from the physical environments themselves. Nothing that screams "look how clever we were." The system is flexible enough to travel across formats and contexts without a permanent home to anchor it, which is exactly what a brand with annual spikes and zero continuity requires. The identity has to work before people arrive and long after they leave, in places the institution doesn't control.

The question the rebrand doesn't answer — and perhaps doesn't need to — is whether design is the right lever. Keukenhof had 1.4 million visitors before the new logo. Nobody was confused about what it was. The audience already coming doesn't need a new visual system. The audience that hasn't heard of it won't be converted by one. What institutions like Keukenhof increasingly face is not a branding problem but an experience problem: the pressure of condensed demand, the gap between the image circulating online and the reality of sharing a tulip field with a hundred thousand other people. A refined logo won't close that gap. It will, however, make the Instagram grid look better.

Everyone's been arguing about whether AI will take your job. Turns out most people are just using it to fix their emails.

Anthropic's dataset is rare because it shows behaviour, not intentions. No surveys, no "how do you feel about AI at work" but 81,000 conversations. What people report to the AI bot they do, overwhelmingly, is ask for help with writing, coding, and summarising things. Not autonomous agents running entire workflows.

Every technology that eventually rewired how we work entered through the same door: low-risk, easy-to-reverse tasks. The spreadsheet didn't arrive as a strategic transformation — it arrived as a slightly better way to do what accountants were already doing. Then it quietly changed what was expected of every accountant.

The more structurally telling finding is how uneven adoption is. Knowledge workers are being reshaped first — and fast. Everyone else, largely untouched. The "AI revolution" isn't sweeping through organisations; it's pooling in specific roles and functions, accumulating quietly.

But once enough micro-uses stack up, they shift the baseline. What used to take a day takes an hour. And suddenly the expectation recalibrates, but because enough small recalibrations already happened. First quietly, then all at once.

For twenty years, brand strategy was basically a funnel with good typography. Search → click → experience → convert. You owned the journey. You designed the touchpoints. You A/B tested the button colour.

That sequence is quietly being replaced by: prompt → summary → selection. And the brand experience — the thing you spent years crafting — gets compressed into a sentence an AI generates about you. You don't write it. You don't design it. You just hope the training data was kind.

When an agent decides which product to recommend, what it's drawing on isn't brand perception — it's whatever is verifiable, structured, and consistently present across the sources it was trained on. Trust shifts from feeling to data integrity. Not what your brand says, but what systems can confirm. Which means the brief for brand content quietly changes: you're no longer writing for humans discovering you — you're writing for machines that will summarise you to humans.

The SEO-to-GEO shift Bain describes is real, but the deeper implication is more unsettling than it first appears. Brands never fully controlled how they were perceived, summarised, or recommended. Word of mouth, editorial coverage, retailer placement — these were all mediating layers brands influenced but didn't own. What's changed is not the loss of control but the loss of the illusion of control. The funnel was always a fiction brands told themselves. The agent just makes the fiction harder to maintain.

The brands best positioned for this future are not the ones most invested in being loved. They are the ones most invested in being legible — consistent, verifiable, structured enough for a machine to trust. That is a different brief from anything brand teams have been given before. And it rewards qualities — clarity, consistency, data discipline — that have never been particularly glamorous.