Creating
Unreasonable
Growth

How do brands and businesses actually grow?

The most urgent conversation in business today is growth. Yet we are living in a low to no growth world.

The problem for business today is that we are clinging to old theories. We believe we know how companies and brands grow. Scrape away the layers, and it focuses on a misplaced belief in reason.

The old theory that marketing and advertising succeeds because people are reasonable is just not true. In fact, we now know that people are highly unreasonable.

New evidence from the behavioral sciences shows that humans are emotional and often behave in a fashion that defies logic. Leading the debate is Nobel Prize winning Psychologist Daniel Kahneman who writes:

“We are feeling beings who can think, not thinking beings who can feel.”

Our research suggests that behaving in a reasonable, rational fashion is possible the most dangerous thing a business can do.

Thinking Fast, and Slow.
- Daniel Kahneman

A Challenge to Conventional Business Thinking

There used to be three golden rules to grow your business:

1. Win Your Category
2. Win The Mind of Your Consumer, and
3. Win Today.

We propose new rules of growth that are sympathetic to the latest evidence of the primacy of the emotional mind:

Fame dwarfs category.
Feeling conquers thinking.
Long term Fluency beats short term wins.

Unreasonable Growth in Practice

We are using a simple, measurable and actionable approach to create ‘unreasonable growth in an age of unreason’ – based on feeling not thinking; culture, not categories; and the long term, not the urgent.

Our approach is already delivering success for clients such as Volkswagen and McDonald's. Our tools and workshops help clients optimise their growth and our partnership with the world’s leading System 1 research agency Brainjuicer means we can measure and benchmark a company’s performance against ‘unreasonable growth’.