Rory Sutherland

And everybody is forced to compete along the same dimension.

And what you end up with is just red ocean competition and nobody wins.

I can speak for Gillette where the evidence was that it was

And by the way, the research showed it was deeply problematic with a large swathe of people.

Has American Eagle suffered?

I doubt it.

In some ways, you could argue it's an ingenious marketing strategy, which is that you press the hot buttons of 1% of the population.

So they then repeat your message accompanied by their own signaling outrage.

Meanwhile, you get free media coverage practically everywhere.

But maybe I'm naive.

There's a kind of weird sensitivity signaling, which generally has nothing to do with the groups you are trying to protect, which is just it's sometimes called a purity spiral.

where you effectively signal your moral or political purity by signaling extraordinary heightened sensitivity to anything that might conceivably offend someone else, even if the group...

on whose behalf you claim to be campaigning, is completely unconcerned by it.

You have to really watch it.

And I've noticed this in certain people on the right.

Which is, I think it's fundamentally dangerous to invest too much of your own identity in a political standpoint to the point where I've seen it in people, both sides become effectively deranged.

Now, you could say that's the effect of the people who attack them and that the derangement wouldn't happen and wouldn't be necessary in a different kind of media environment.

I'm going to say, actually, that everybody always blames social media.

I would argue that the mainstream media, it is always in your interest, and this is a problem in journalism, it's always in your interest to provoke a fight because then you have something to cover.

Nobody's interested in reading about peace and harmony.