The Perfect Brand Ambassador Is One Who Is Nothing

Lea deliberately had no backstory. No biography. No origin. No past. She was universally deployable.

I read that sentence and it took me a while to understand why it stayed with me. It’s not the fact that an AI has no biography. Of course it doesn’t. It’s the fact that the absence of a biography is described as an advantage.

Universally deployable. That means: connectable to anything. No detail that gets in the way. No opinion that rubs people wrong. No past that raises questions. Lea can be anything because she is nothing. She can represent any brand because she has none of her own. She can appeal to everyone because she is no one.

That’s a product feature. Identity-lessness as a competitive advantage.

I spent many years in consulting. I’ve seen how brand strategies are developed. The first thing you learn: A brand needs identity. It has to stand for something. It has to have a position. It has to have edges that people can bump into. Because without edges, nothing is tangible.

And now I read that the perfect brand ambassador has no edges. That she works better when she’s empty. That the emptiness is the advantage.

That contradicts everything I know about brands. And at the same time it makes a disturbing kind of sense. Because emptiness is the maximum projection surface. Everyone can see in Lea what they want to see. The athletic woman sees an athlete. The intellectual sees an intellectual. The mother sees a mother. Lea never contradicts. Because there’s nothing there that could contradict.

A person has a story. The story limits them. It makes them someone, and therefore not someone else. A person who promotes a brand brings themselves along. Their past. Their beliefs. Their mistakes. All of that is risk. It can fit or not. It can change. They might say something tomorrow that hurts the brand. Being human itself is the risk.

Lea doesn’t have that risk. Because she is nothing. And nothing can’t say anything wrong.

I think about the consequences of this. If the perfect ambassador is one without identity, what does that say about the brands that use her? What does it say about the consumers who respond to her? What does it say about us?

Maybe it says that we’re not looking for identity when we follow brands. That we’re looking for mirrors. Surfaces in which we can recognize ourselves. And the emptier the surface, the better the reflection.

Lea’s designlessness is a strategic decision. Smart. Thoughtful. Effective. And I believe it’s effective. The numbers will check out.

But there’s a point where effectiveness stops being an argument. And that point is when the most effective solution is to create someone who is nothing. When the optimum is emptiness. When algorithms calculate that identity-lessness delivers the best performance.

Then we haven’t solved a marketing problem. We’ve done something else. We’ve created a market where Nothing is worth more than Something. Where emptiness works better than substance. Where the absence of personality is a product that sells.

Lea is universally deployable. What could also be said but isn’t: Lea is universally deployable because she is interchangeable. And she is interchangeable because she is empty. And the emptiness is the point.

I don’t know what it says about a society when the perfect representative is one who is no one. But I’m fairly sure it’s nothing good.