The cat, the brand, and the box
You can't predict the cat collapse without feeding the market.
A note before you read.
This one takes more chew than scroll. If you suspended physics in school and you're still up for it, that's actually the right starting point. Bring a vermú. The slow version of you.
I work from affinity. Not from volume.
Deep, no clock-watching, no cheek-keeping.
What I know about brands isn't only instinctive — though it is — it comes from observing people, business, systems.
Watching behavior with stealth, holding my breath so I don’t make noise, sharpening the ear. Because if you sharpen the ear enough, you can hear thoughts bloom.
Observing myself from the outside.
And thinking — because I get paid to think, and I also relax thinking.
Thinking through observation — which is the best way to think — I landed on something.
There are funny things in physics.
I hated it because of the teacher, and loved it privately, where I made my own arenas. The classroom version was code to memorize. The private one was a way of seeing.
Schrödinger put a cat in a box. A vial of poison, a mechanism, a closed lid. Until you look, the cat is both. Looking is what forces the answer.
Brands are the cat in the box.
You don't know — with all the faith, all the proofs, all the decks — if the brand is alive or dead on arrival, until you collapse it.
And you collapse it through the market.
The market is the measurement. The opening of the box.
Schrödinger was right about measurement. But in brands, the collapse only confirms the state — it never invents it.
Everyone is obsessed with changing the market, breaking it, hijacking it. With predicting the cat before the box opens.
But you can’t predict the cat. The cat is in superposition until reality picks one.
What you can decide is how you walk to the box.
And walking to the box — really walking, not running, not predicting — takes three looks. From three perspectives.
Look one: you observe yourself.
You look at yourself from the outside. How you’re presenting, what you’re selling, what you’re charging, how you’re sounding, what image you’re broadcasting.
This is audit work on you.
Look two: you know yourself observed.
You know the market is watching you. People are reading you, comparing, dismissing or choosing. There’s a perception of you that you don’t control but that is real.
This is awareness of how you reach the other.
Look three: you observe back.
Not the market in the abstract. The specific players doing what you could do. The ones already where you want to be. The ones beside you, fighting the same fight. The ones one step ahead. The ones one step behind.
Most people do one or two. Almost nobody does the three at the same time, sustained, with honesty.
Looking at what others do isn’t to imitate them. Or to dismiss them.
It’s to understand the field you’re going to operate in. What space is already taken. What space nobody’s looking at. What space you could occupy in a way only you can.
And at the same time you measure yourself against yourself. Not an idealized version — the real one. What you know how to do, what you don’t, what you’re willing to learn, what you won’t do even if they pay you.
From those two crossed analyses — the outside one, the inside one — a hole appears. A gap. Something the market is asking for, or needs, that you could give in a way nobody else is giving.
But here comes the part almost nobody does well.
The useful gap has three conditions.
Not every gap will do. Only the one that meets three things at once.
Aligned with who you are. Not who you could be if you tried hard enough. Who you really are. If the gap forces you to fake it, it’s not your gap.
Aligned with what you’re after. With what you want to build, the life you want to have, the work you want to be doing five years from now. Not the immediate opportunity that looks good today.
Aligned with what you’re willing to sustain. And this is the hardest one. Because sustaining something for years, in private, without anyone applauding, not knowing if it will work, while others seem to win faster — that’s not for everyone. And if you’re not going to sustain it, the gap is a trap. You’ll abandon it in six months and blame the market.
If the three conditions hold, the gap is yours. It’s the place you’re going to operate from.
If one fails, keep looking. Don’t go in yet.
Why this matters.
Changing your medium without doing these three operations at once is what produces the rebrands that go flat in six months.
People observe themselves but don’t observe back — they end up doing something disconnected from the field. Or they observe back but don’t observe themselves — they end up copying someone. Or they do both but don’t measure against themselves — they end up in a gap they can’t sustain.
The three looks at the same time, without collapsing one into the others, is what produces repositionings that sediment.
That's what produces brands that last. And the people who can hold them.
Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas
cultooruido.com