The Audience Is Not Listening to You. They Are Deciding Whether You Are One of Them.
There is a test your audience runs on every piece of content you produce, and it is not the test you think.
They are not evaluating whether your claim is credible. They are not assessing whether your product does what you say it does. They are deciding something older and more fundamental. Are these people like me?
Evolutionary psychologists have long argued that storytelling did not develop primarily as an information-transfer mechanism. Long before writing, before even stable agriculture, humans sat in groups and told stories. But the stories were not just entertainment or instruction. They were a continuous social audit. Who believes what I believe? Who shares my values? Who can I trust when it matters? The story was the technology for running that audit at scale, night after night, across generations.
Your brand content is running through that same ancient filter. Every piece of communication you put into the world is being read not primarily for its content but for what it signals about who you are. And the audience is asking one question: are you one of us?
Rory Sutherland frames this through the lens of signaling theory, drawing on evolutionary biology. The behaviors and choices that stick are often those that cannot be easily faked, because they carry genuine cost. A peacock's tail is metabolically expensive to grow and physically cumbersome to carry. That is precisely why it is a reliable signal of genetic fitness. A cheap signal is no signal at all. In Alchemy, Sutherland extends this logic to brand behavior. The willingness to commit to something genuinely, to take a position that costs you something, is what makes the signal credible.
This is why the most powerful brand narratives are not the ones that say the most. They are the ones that risk the most. A company willing to say something that might alienate part of its audience is demonstrating genuine conviction. A company that optimizes its messaging to be acceptable to everyone signals nothing except a desire to be acceptable to everyone, which is not a value. It is an absence of values.
Consider what Anthropic did in the final days of February 2026. The company had a Pentagon contract worth up to $200 million and a planned IPO on the horizon. The government wanted to use Claude for "all lawful purposes," and Anthropic held two firm positions: its technology would not be used in autonomous weapons, and it would not be used for mass surveillance of American citizens. CNN When the Pentagon pushed back and set a deadline, Anthropic made clear it would not back down. "Threats do not change our position," CEO Dario Amodei said. "We cannot in good conscience accede to their request." ABC News
The cost was immediate. The Treasury, State, and Health and Human Services departments moved to phase out Anthropic products. The Defense Secretary designated the company a supply-chain risk to national security and barred every military contractor from doing business with Anthropic. Nextgov.com Within hours, OpenAI signed the deal Anthropic would not. Axios
Those two decisions, made within the same news cycle, produced sharply opposite narratives, and the audience rendered its verdict almost immediately.
Claude downloads jumped 37% day-over-day on Friday and 51% on Saturday. The app hit number one on the US App Store, surpassing ChatGPT in daily downloads for the first time. TechCrunch Daily sign-ups broke all-time records every single day that week. Free users increased more than 60% since January and paid subscribers more than doubled. TechCrunch The demand was so sudden that Anthropic's servers went down, and the company posted that it was "grateful to our users as the team works to match the incredible demand." CNBC
OpenAI's numbers moved in the opposite direction. ChatGPT uninstalls jumped 295% day-over-day on February 28, compared to the app's typical 9% daily rate. Downloads fell 13% that day and another 5% the following day, a sharp reversal from 14% growth the day before the deal was announced. One-star reviews surged 775% on Saturday and doubled again on Sunday, while five-star reviews dropped by half. TechCrunch A movement called "QuitGPT" emerged, claiming more than 1.5 million people had taken action by cancelling subscriptions or sharing boycott messages publicly. Euronews
What happened next completed the contrast. Sam Altman published an internal memo admitting the company "shouldn't have rushed" the deal. "We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome," he wrote, "but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy." CNBC OpenAI then announced it was renegotiating the contract to add explicit prohibitions on domestic surveillance, the very protections Anthropic had held out for. Fortune
This is Sutherland's signaling logic playing out in real time. Anthropic's signal was costly and therefore credible. OpenAI's signal was cheap, a deal struck in hours, then walked back days later under public pressure, and the audience read it as such. Neither company had to explain itself. Their choices in a single week said everything the audience needed to know. The brain recognizes, on some level, when nothing real is at stake. The chemistry does not follow. And in this case, neither did the downloads.
The distinction shows up in the research more broadly. Zak's work on oxytocin is relevant here. The neurochemical is triggered specifically by character-driven stories, those in which a protagonist faces genuine tension, has something at stake, and must make a meaningful choice. Generic, aspirational brand narratives do not produce the same response because the brain recognizes, on some level, that nothing real is at stake. The signal is cheap. The chemistry does not follow.
Anthropic's situation was the structural opposite of cheap. The stakes were visible, the choice was real, and the tension played out publicly over days. Whether or not you agree with the company's position, the narrative architecture was undeniable: a protagonist with something to lose, a genuine conflict, a moment of decision, and a choice made on principle rather than convenience. That is exactly the structure of a story that moves people.
What does it mean, operationally, to make the signal costly?
It means taking positions that not everyone will agree with. It means being specific about what you believe and who you are for, which necessarily implies who you are not for. It means allowing your narrative to carry genuine tension, the acknowledgment that the problem is hard, that the answer is not obvious, that your company is genuinely grappling with something. It means, in short, behaving less like a brand and more like a person who actually believes something.
The companies that get this right tend to discover a counterintuitive result. Narrowing their appeal expands their reach. When your story is specific enough to genuinely resonate with the people it is made for, those people talk about it. When it is vague enough to offend no one, no one thinks it is worth mentioning.
Sutherland's formulation is useful here. He points out that Red Bull tastes bad and costs more than its competitors. Logically, it should not exist. But it succeeded precisely because those qualities were not bugs. They were signals. A drink that is expensive and unpleasant but that you choose anyway is a marker of something. That you are serious, that you are not doing this for the pleasure of the beverage, that you belong to a tribe of people who prioritize performance over comfort. Red Bull did not need to say any of that. The product itself said it.
Your story works the same way. It is not what you claim about yourself that matters. It is what your behavior, your choices, your genuine commitments demonstrate. The audience is not reading your about page. They are watching what you do and running it through an evolutionary test that is thousands of years older than marketing.
The question is not what do we want to say. The question is what do we want to be, and are we willing to demonstrate it at cost?
This is the second article in a five-part series on the alchemy of story in marketing.