People avoid the number 13. They blow on dice before rolling them. They insist a footballer called Zé is the difference between glory and heartbreak. None of that is rational. None of it is going away. The brands in this article didn't argue with it — they built campaigns on top of it, and the results were considerably less irrational than the thinking.
Here are six tactics from the Storytelling Engine that let irrational thinking do the rational work.
- Turn a Conspiracy Theory Into a Brand Platform
- Embrace a Superstition That Already Belongs to Your Product
- Manufacture a Superstition to Drive a Behaviour
- Unearth a Folklore Belief and Make It Your Proposition
- Make the Audience the Ritual Keepers
- Weaponise Bad Luck Against Your Rivals
1. Turn a Conspiracy Theory Into a Brand Platform
Find a pattern too convenient to be coincidence — then make your brand the one who blew the lid off it.
Football Is Food — Uber Eats, 2024
Uber Eats had data showing orders spiked when its ads ran alongside food brand commercials — proof that football makes people hungry. The answer was to take that insight to its most paranoid conclusion: what if football was always a conspiracy to sell food? What if the goalposts were two french fries? What if Julius Peppers, CJ Ham and Jerry Rice weren't a coincidence? Matthew McConaughey played conspiracist-in-chief across an entire NFL season, culminating at Super Bowl LIX — a game named after a bowl, at a stadium named after a salad. The campaign earned $225 million in ad value and drove a 3x quarter-on-quarter increase in app sessions.
Zé Delivery (GUT, 2022) found a different conspiracy in Brazilian football statistics: every time Brazil had won the World Cup, there was a player named Zé on the squad. With none on the 2022 roster, the brand launched a national movement asking Vinícius Jr. — full name Vinícius José — to put Zé on his jersey and restore the nation's cosmic luck.
