Uncommon Sense

04/06/2026

Bolt's CEO fired his entire HR team. His words: "They were creating problems that didn't exist." Most founders only fantasise about this on a Friday afternoon, usually after the third "listening session" of the week. Breslow actually did it. Good for him.

Bolt's Ryan Breslow fired his entire HR team. Most of the problems it solved were problems it created. Why more founders should follow suit.

28/05/2026

Ferrari spent seventy-five years building a story about mechanical romance, Italian craft, and unapologetic excess.

Then it launched the Luce - a £550,000 four-seat EV with a Jony Ive interior several reviewers compared to a luxury toaster.

The share price fell 8%. Billions wiped off in a session.

Has Ferrari just driven into the same disaster that took 97.5% of Jaguar's European sales?

https://www.uncommonsense.co.uk/2026/05/28/ferrari-hasnt-learned-the-jaguar-lesson/

26/05/2026

Most advertising shouts over an audience trying to do something else. Heretics is the opposite.

The audience opts in, they listen alone, they listen long, and most importantly, they trust the host. And when a brand is read into that environment, it lands with the same weight as the conversation around it.

For products that need explaining properly, for brands built on trust rather than impulse, there are very few opportunities like it.

Get in touch to advertise on Heretics today.

https://www.uncommonadspace.com/contact-us/

21/05/2026

Most podcast audiences half-listen. The Heretics audience leans in.

They've opted out of mass-market media and chosen long-form, honest conversation instead. For brands, that means undivided attention from listeners who trust the host they're hearing it from.

Learn more below:

Heretics with Andrew Gold reaches 766K subscribers and 85M+ views. See the audience data, advertiser fit, and why brands should buy in now.

14/05/2026

Behind society’s greatest marketing moments sit the drives - and there are five worth knowing: Status, mate attraction, tribe, risk avoidance, novelty.

Pick one and you’ve got a campaign. Pick none and you’ve got nothing more than a press release.

Find out why ignoring these drives could be deadly to your business:

Marketing has spent a decade chasing purpose and politics while ignoring the evolved human brain. A case for evolutionary consumer psychology as the missing piece.

13/05/2026

An industry built to influence human behaviour has, somewhere along the way, stopped studying the discipline that explains how humans actually behave.

Evolutionary consumer psychology is mainstream science. Saad, Miller, Buss, Dawkins and Dunbar have, between them, mapped most of what reliably moves a consumer: status, mate attraction, tribe, risk avoidance, novelty. The literature is decades deep. The agencies that could most use it have largely stopped reading it.

The piece on our blog this week works through why, and what it's cost the brands that have forgotten. Bud Light and Jaguar feature, but not in the way you might expect - read as commercial case studies rather than culture-war footnotes.
Worth a read for anyone who briefs, buys or writes campaigns.

Marketing has spent a decade chasing purpose and politics while ignoring the evolved human brain. A case for evolutionary consumer psychology as the missing piece.

07/05/2026

On April the 26th in London, Sabastian Sawe ran a marathon in 1:59:30. The first legal sub-two-hour marathon in history. He was wearing Adidas. So was the runner-up, and the winner of the women's race who broke a world record of her own.
The same week, Nike sat at a 12-year low.

Lee Taylor on what happens when one company spends a decade lecturing its customers and the other spends three years making better shoes.

Nike preached for a decade. Adidas designed better shoes. Lee Taylor on what the sub-two-hour marathon tells us about purpose-led marketing.

05/05/2026

Sarah Paulson wore a £56k ticket and a mask called "Blinded by Money".

Critiquing the room from inside the room reads as confusion, not commentary.

LOL to calling out the rich while partying with the rich and... actually being rich?

28/04/2026

There is a particular kind of business that believes profit is a stain to be scrubbed off. Not balanced, not moderated, not set against other concerns. Scrubbed off. Apologised for. Redeemed by a certificate from a non-profit in Pennsylvania.

That business is the B Corp, and the whole enterprise rests on a moral framework that is quietly poisonous to commerce itself.

There is a particular kind of business that believes profit is a stain to be scrubbed off. Not balanced, not moderated, not set against other concerns. Scrubbed off. Apologised for. Redeemed by a certificate from a non-profit in Pennsylvania. That business is the B Corp, and the whole enterprise res...

22/04/2026

Businesses don't need a certificate from a non-profit in Pennsylvania to behave decently. They need customers, competence, and the freedom to get on with it. Good product, honest conduct. That's it.

There is a particular kind of business that believes profit is a stain to be scrubbed off. Not balanced, not moderated, not set against other concerns. Scrubbed off. Apologised for. Redeemed by a certificate from a non-profit in Pennsylvania. That business is the B Corp, and the whole enterprise res...