Article also published in Adweek.
When Ozempic was first becoming a household name last year, the public discourse around semaglutides took on a predictable pattern.
First there was concern about its safety, then skepticism of its effectiveness, and finally the conversation landed on the question of its morality. Was it immoral for obese people to “cheat” and use semaglutides to shed extra weight?
When every other practical concern was rebuffed, and even after offshoot brands like Zepbound were developed and released specifically for weight loss management instead of diabetes, the argument of morality only grew louder.
This is not an uncommon pattern for brands like Ozempic and their counterparts.
If you were paying attention you would have seen a similar pattern playing out in the public discourse around OpenAI, OnlyFans, Oatly, and smaller brands in emerging categories like female hormone replacement therapy, polyamory, end-of-life care, and baby formula.
One of the most interesting brand frontiers I see is companies tackling what I call “moral static”, and I recently wrote about it for Adweek.
We see moral static in categories where new technologies, inventions or ideas are forcing us to face our deeply held, sometimes deeply false, biases. When those biases are laid bare, we resort to an argument of morality.
Moral static isn’t genuine, nuanced moral discourse.
It’s the chaotic buzz of blunt moral objection with no real path to discussion or progress. When new ideas and innovations threaten peoples’ identities, they cling to one-size-fits-all moral arguments even when there is no logical argument left.
Instead of producing a clear conversation about how we can update our models of what is right and wrong, these categories produce static.
Food brands, which operate in a highly identity-driven category, see their fair share of moral static. Oatly faced initial pushback in its native Sweden with critics discounting their oat milk as nutritionally inferior to cow’s milk, and asserting the company’s sustainability promises were inflated.
Oatly easily dismissed or disproved those claims, but it wasn’t until dairy farmers and consumers pointed at Oatly’s slogan “Flush the milk” as attacking a Swedish way of life for both dairy farmers and consumers that Oatly’s narrative was finally complicated with moral static.
America’s own relationship with food is especially plagued by moral static.
Ten years ago, buzzy brands like Soylent and Huel were initially praised for their convenience and nutritional value, but eventually saw themselves in debates about the degradation of meal culture and America’s toxic relationship with food.
Today is no different. When the FDA opened public comments on how to officially define “natural foods”, consumers often invoked moral references to God, what God intended, or Mother Nature instead of more practical definitions that precluded additives or chemicals.
While discussions of morality and ethics are vitally important when culture is faced with any new technological frontier, moral static is different.
Kranzberg’s first law of technology says that ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’ People will always have biased reactions to new ideas, but today moral static is our lazy default. It’s the outrage in TikTok comments and Instagram clapback videos that only scares and confuses people, with no real intention of finding a new moral commons.
Morality is extremely difficult terrain for brands to navigate. Rather than doubling down on the moral question, it’s almost always better to deal with it through humor, irreverence or irony.
However for some brands, moral static is on the critical path to growth and the only way to go through it is to just go through it.
In cases like that, it’s important to remember that moral static places both the brand and the user at the center of a very difficult question: What is the right way to live?
That question can only be answered from the horizon of a new world, not the horizon of our old one, and the one thing brands do really well is build new worlds.
But there are rules to building a new world.
Brands have to be smart about how they support new moral beliefs, how they position themselves against common enemies, and the communities they nurture for their users.
