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A good brand makes a promise;
a great brand keeps that promise.

— Muhtar Kent, former CEO, Coca-Cola

For more than a century business folklore has insisted that “the customer is always right.” In 2025 the maxim still holds—only now the customer is verifiably right.

Social-media algorithms capture every tap, pause, and scroll, then feed us a stream of content engineered to affirm our opinions and nudge our purchases. Seventy-one percent of consumers expect this personalization and 76 percent say they feel frustrated when it’s missing. The feed isn’t merely a social-media channel; it’s an algorithmic-machine designed to confirm our reality.

Peter Drucker’s baseline remains non-negotiable: “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.” Yet he also knew that creation starts within.

A brand that cannot say, crisply and courageously, who it is and whom it serves will never earn trust from today’s hyper-skeptical buyers. Authenticity is table stakes; self-awareness is the differentiator. When positioning is precise, persuasion fades—demand is baked into the clarity of the promise.

And that promise must translate into value as the customer defines it. Drucker’s reminder—“Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in; it is what the customer gets out—and is willing to pay for.” Tracking that perceived value—on customer terms—has become Marketing Job No. 1.

Welcome to the Age of the Discerning Class

Times have changed, expectations have changed, and three forces make today’s buyers uniquely exacting:

1. Infinite choice. Thanks to same-day drops, livestream shops, and borderless marketplaces, almost anything you can imagine is only a swipe away. Instant manifestation has never been more possible and where there is a “no,” there is always an alternative.

2. Different facts, not just opinions. Personalized feeds have replaced the single nightly news. Today, we don’t debate opinions—we debate facts, each of us armed with a slew of data curated to confirm our private reality.

3. Zero tolerance on time. Fifty-two percent of customers say they’ll bolt after a single bad experience. Expectations are everything; meet them every time and you gain a loyalist, miss once and you lose them forever.

This is the credo of the Discerning Class: “I am 100 percent right about what’s right for me.” This generation of customer expects brands to meet that certitude with equal clarity.

In a post-truth world, discernment—the skill of separating fact from fabrication—has become the
ultimate measure of (cultural) sensibility.

First impressions, Lasting Consequences

Recent headlines illustrate the stakes. Jaguar’s 2024 reboot—pausing every current model and previewing a £200 k neon-lit EV under a new minimalist badge—shows what happens when a legacy brand misjudges its own identity. Core buyers felt abandoned, potential new fans saw hype without substance, and the Discerning Class said, “Tesla?”. A 180-degree pivot, without the self-awareness to bridge heritage and ambition, left everyone unconvinced.

Name the Tension

Liquid Death nails self-awareness by turning an everyday reality—sober people and non-drinkers feel awkward drinking water at a bar — into the most subversive object in the room. Its tallboy cans look like craft beer, its “Murder Your Thirst” slogan winks at hard-party bravado, and its irreverent metal-album graphics give non-drinkers social camouflage that they enjoy flashing. Instead of apologizing for being water at a party, the brand revels in it, making the sober choice feel rebellious rather than abstinent—and creating a $1.4 billion valuation for a brand selling water.

Both stories expose the same blind spot: whether you’re a century-old automaker or a one-weekend pop-up, misreading who you are and whom you’re talking to turns bold ambition into public embarrassment.

The £35 Wonderland That Wasn’t

One of my favorite examples is Glasgow’s infamous “Willy's Chocolate Experience.” Parents paid £35 for what the ads called a chocolate wonderland, only to find a half-lit warehouse, a masked figure named “The Unknown,” and a mere two jellybeans per child.

For family-friendly day-trippers, it was a disaster. Parents livestreamed the fiasco, police were called, and the event shut down within hours—yet irony-seeking TikTok users later said they’d pay just to witness the meme in real life, writing “I’d pay to see that chaos” in the comments. Same product, two wildly different interpretations. Had the organizers positioned the event as a tongue-in-cheek, glitch-core fever dream—an immersive oddity for meme collectors and alt-culture tourists—the bare sets and surreal cast would have read as deliberate art direction, not failure (which of course, it did to some people). In other words, the fiasco didn’t prove the concept was bad; it proved the concept was marketed to the wrong crowd.

Self-awareness beats “authenticity”

Ray-Ban knows a pair of Wayfarers costs only a few dollars to manufacture, yet it also knows people gladly pay a premium to feel effortlessly cool. The company’s job is not to slash prices; it is to keep the frames cool enough that the premium makes emotional sense.

The Drucker double mandate—revisited for 2025

Drucker once quipped that all the results are “on the outside” of the organization. In 2025 those results arrive as instantaneous ratings, unfiltered reviews, and algorithmic lifts or plunges. Sellers live or die by a metric nobody controlled a decade ago: Did the experience meet, exceed, or violate the picture the algorithm painted in my mind?

That said, the Discerning Class leaves brands only two levers—exactly the pair Drucker named decades ago:

1. Marketing: Shape perception with surgical self-awareness.
   Can a stranger articulate your promise after one scroll, and does every touchpoint reinforce it?

2. Innovation: Deliver the promise without wasting my time.
   Where do you still create friction, and how quickly can you remove it?

Keep both levers tight and today’s discerning buyers will reward you with the only currency that matters—attention, trust, and repeat business. Slip on either, and the algorithm-certified verdict will be swift, public, and brutally right.

Old-school marketing, new-school stakes

“Authenticity” alone no longer earns trust; what matters is ruthless self-awareness. A brand must know precisely who it is, why it exists, and whom it serves, then deliver on that promise consistently. Whether you’re launching a disruptor brand or rebooting a century-old icon, results hinge on Drucker’s twin engine: marketing that defines a precise promise and innovation that unfailingly delivers it.

The closer you come to delivering—every time—on what your audience expects, the closer you get to winning long term loyalty for your brand. Fail, and the algorithm will broadcast the miss before you have time to compose an apology tweet.