Game Face
And how brand strategy keeps targeting people who don't exist
“Don’t talk to me.”
My friend stared straight past me across the pool. We’d been clowning around just a minute before. Now he was somewhere else entirely. He pulled back sharply when I tugged his arm. “Dude,” he grunted without moving. “I’m about to race.”
I was ten. I didn’t understand what had changed. When the race ended, he was instantly the same person again. That day I learned what game face means. There’s nothing insincere about it; it’s just a different version you construct to handle a specific set of circumstances.
I picked up my own eventually. Turns out it’s pretty normal to have a game face. To have many faces, in fact.
What we already knew
For twenty years, I’ve channeled this fascination with people into helping brands understand who they exist to serve. A big part of that work is building segmentations, mapping journeys, creating products and messages that might actually matter in someone’s life.
Some of this work fed into what people called human-centered design. But the presence of humans usually felt decorative. I’d watch teams from prestigious organizations fabricate details about these humans, pulling random details out of research or even their own personal memories! “Bringing the consumer to life” meant stretching and flattening what we’d learned. We’d deliver presentations about made-up people. Shawna, the Indulger. Denise, the Perfectionist. I doubt anyone actually used those profiles.
The fabrication wasn’t really the problem. The segments themselves had no living connection to the lives people were actually living. We stretched them because there wasn’t enough underneath to begin with.
None of this is news, of course. Erving Goffman made this point in 1959. Ann Swidler added to it almost thirty years later. Bucholtz, Lave, and Myers Scotton have since made their own contributions to the same claim: identity is constructed, dynamic, and shaped by context. So when I watched these corporate research teams making up vaguely human profiles, I kept waiting for someone to say: we know this isn’t right. It doesn’t work. Why are we doing this?
No one said it.
It was all very Emperor’s New Clothes. The work was ultimately measured by single sales percentage points up or down. Mostly everyone shrugged. On to the next thing. This was not a world where the brand was making a real and positive impact in people’s lives. The delta between effort and impact has been so wide for so long, I think people have been trained not to care at all.
What I’ve learned along the way
Here’s what I’ve learned: we, as people, don’t move through the world as units. We move through masks, as conditional and contextual ways of being.
These ways of being are anchored by deeply emotional tensions that drive what we notice, how we think, how we feel, and how we behave.
For example, it’s 6 PM on a Tuesday. You’re sitting in traffic, trying to plan ahead for your friend’s visit this weekend. No big deal, but you’re anticipating some schedule conflicts with family members. You’re in organizing mode. Focused. A little tense. Then your friend calls. That mask falls away, replaced by something more fun-loving and whimsical. Suddenly, you barely resemble the person who needed all that order. You’re now the person who wants to laugh about how chaotic it’s all going to be anyway. What you notice and what you care about changes.
A half-hour later you’re in the grocery store, still wearing the same whimsical mask. You linger in the snack aisle, open to surprises, picking up things you don’t need. A product catches your eye simply because it feels playful. You buy it without thinking twice. The mask that activated in your car came with you into the aisle, informing what you noticed, what you reached for, and what you bought.
Which is why a brand that gets a mask right gets to follow that mask wherever it goes. And why most brands—still dreaming up a “Shawna,” still guessing—keep missing the bigger opportunities sitting right in front of them.
The questions rising in me now: who’s actually doing this well? And what are the rest of us leaving on the table by pretending we don’t know better? We’ll explore these questions in next week’s post. If you’re interested in discussing or even working with this material directly, drop a note.