I had 42 unread texts yesterday while researchers at the Cultural Fluency Summit
By Tonycoles · October 30, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I had 42 unread texts yesterday while researchers at the Cultural Fluency Summit in New York explained why people are cutting brands out of their lives.
The researchers were from Collage Group, and they call it pruning. After years of fees, logins, alerts and products that quietly got a little worse, people are going through their lives the way you’d go through an overgrown yard, cutting back anything they can live without. One presenter described trading her phone number for free shipping or 10% off, again and again. Each trade felt reasonable at the time. Together, it felt like a lot.
I recognized more than my phone in that story. Over my career I’ve approved my share of small changes that made sense in the room. One of them was retiring a station mascot who felt dated and irrelevant to us. The argument for it was sound, and it went through the way most of these decisions do, on its own, without anyone setting it next to every other small change we’d made that year. We underestimated the connection our audience had with him, and more importantly, how he made them and their kids feel. The emotion people felt when they saw him was everything our brand stood for.
Boards see decisions like that as line items, if they see them at all. A fee that hits its revenue target looks like good management, and so does a service trimmed where the data says nobody will notice. What almost never gets reviewed is the total of what a company is asking its customers to give up or put up with. Customers are now running that review themselves.
A great question to ask at the next strategy review is who owns that total. The collective of all the decisions. If the answer is nobody, your customers have already taken the job, and they’re the ones doing the pruning.