CRAVE: A Love Story. A Brand Story.

There was a season when I had forgotten what it felt like to want anything.

Grief had hollowed me out. Loss upon loss had settled into my bones like sediment, and I moved through my days with the particular numbness that comes from surviving rather than living. I worked. I cared for my children. I showed up where I was expected to show up. But somewhere along the way, desire itself had become foreign to me, a language I once spoke but could no longer recall.

And then I encountered someone whose work pierced through the veil of despair.

His name is mine to keep. What I can tell you is that his voice was unlike anything I had heard before. He had a point of view that cut through the noise, a willingness to say what others were afraid to say, a passion for meaning that felt almost reckless in its intensity. He was well-read and gifted in ways that challenged me, that made me want to rise to meet him. His creativity was not performance. It was overflow.

And when we finally spoke, I discovered something I had not expected: he felt the same pull toward me.

We recognized each other. That is the only way I know how to describe it. Kindred spirits who had somehow found each other across the noise, each carrying gifts the other needed, each seeing in the other something that had gone unseen for too long. We challenged each other. We sharpened each other. We called forth versions of ourselves that had been waiting, patient and hungry, for someone who could hold what we offered.

I did not simply admire him. I craved him. And he craved me.

The distinction matters. Admiration is cool, evaluative, distant. Craving is visceral. It lives in your body before your mind can catch up. It is the pull you feel toward something that seems to hold a piece of yourself you did not know was missing. And when the craving is mutual, when two people awaken something in each other that neither could have awakened alone, it becomes transformative.

He saw me as luminous when I felt like ash. I helped him remember things about himself he had begun to forget. We did not save each other. That is not how this works. But we became catalysts for each other's becoming.

I am not telling you this story because it is romantic. I am telling you this story because it taught me something essential about what makes anything, or anyone, impossible to forget.

The brands that create devoted followings, the kind that borders on religious, work the same way.

Not the one-sided way, where a brand broadcasts and an audience passively receives. That is the old model, and it produces transactions, not transformation. The brands that create real devotion operate like the relationship I just described: mutual recognition, mutual shaping, mutual becoming. The brand sees something in the audience that the audience has not fully seen in themselves. The audience reflects back to the brand what it is becoming, what it means, what it makes possible. They challenge each other. They sharpen each other. They grow together over time.

This is what most brand builders miss. They think of their audience as recipients of their message rather than participants in an ongoing relationship. But craving is never one-sided. The pull has to go both ways, or it fades.

What Craving Actually Is

Most brands settle for attention. They optimize for clicks, impressions, the fleeting dopamine hit of someone pausing on their content for three seconds before continuing to scroll. They mistake visibility for connection and wonder why their audience never converts, never returns, never tells anyone else about them.

But attention is not the same as craving.

Craving is what happens when something speaks to a desire you carry but have not been able to name. It is recognition before understanding. It is the sense that this thing, this person, this brand knows something about you that you have barely admitted to yourself.

When you crave something, you do not need to be convinced. You do not need to be sold. You need only to be shown where to find more.

I have spent years studying what creates this kind of pull. I have built a library of over two thousand books spanning mythology, psychology, business strategy, fantasy literature, history, and more, all to facilitate my learning. I have traced patterns across cultures and centuries. I have worked with founders and leaders who wanted to build something that mattered, something that would outlast trends and algorithms and the relentless churn of what is new.

What I found is that craving is not accidental. It is not luck or timing or some mystical quality that certain brands possess and others do not. There is an architecture to it. A structure that makes the pull possible.

I call it CRAVE.

The Architecture of Desire

CRAVE is not a formula. It is a diagnostic.

The difference matters. A formula tells you what to do. A diagnostic reveals where you are strong and where you are bleeding. It excavates what is already true about you rather than manufacturing something from a borrowed blueprint.

The framework has five elements: Compelling, Resonant, Authentic, Vivid, and Emotive. All five spring from a single source, your Core Truth, the essential belief you want your audience to rally around. Without a Core Truth, you have tactics without strategy, a brand that looks complete on the surface but collapses under the weight of its own emptiness.

Each element has rules. Each element has costs. And because constraints create the conditions for originality, each element has consequences for what happens when you skip the cost.

This is what my library taught me. In the best fantasy novels, magic has rules. Gandalf cannot simply wave his staff and solve every problem. In Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, channelers who draw too much of the One Power can burn themselves out entirely. In Joe Abercrombie's First Law, no power is gained without an equivalent price, often exacted through death or the slow erosion of the practitioner's humanity.

These constraints are not obstacles to wonder. They are what make wonder possible.

The same is true for brand strategy. What I am about to share with you is not a checklist you complete once and forget. It is a lens for every decision you make, every piece of content you create, every pivot you consider. When something feels off in your brand, one of these elements is out of alignment. When everything is working, all five are singing together.

Compelling: The Courage to Say Something

Compelling brands do not grab attention. They cultivate it.

The distinction is crucial. Grabbing attention is loud. It is sensational. It is the marketing equivalent of screaming in a crowded room and hoping someone looks your way. Anyone can grab attention once. The question is whether you have anything to say when people turn toward you.

Compelling brands have a point of view. A Core Truth worth rallying around. They have chosen a fight, taken a side, declared what they believe even when, especially when, that belief will make some people disagree.

This is the first cost of being compelling: not everyone will like you. The consequence of avoiding that cost is far worse. If no one disagrees with you, no one cares about you either. You become background noise, pleasant but forgettable, the brand equivalent of elevator music.

The man who awakened me from my numbness had something to say. He was not trying to be palatable. He was not hedging his opinions to avoid offense. He had a perspective forged from his own experiences, his own reading, his own particular way of seeing the world, and he shared it without apology.

That is what made my Kindred Spirit compelling. Not volume. Not frequency. Substance.

What do you believe that others in your industry do not? What change are you trying to create in the world? What would you keep saying even if it cost you followers, clients, opportunities? Your answers to these questions are the foundation of everything else.

The brands that last are not the loudest. They are the ones with something worth hearing.

Resonant: The Frequency You Share

Resonance means you share a vibe with your audience, not because you are trying to please them, but because there is genuine alignment between what you offer and what they crave.

Here is what most brands get wrong: they think the relationship flows in one direction. They broadcast, the audience receives, and if they are lucky, the audience converts. But resonance is not a monologue. It is a conversation that changes both parties over time.

When you are resonant, people hear your message and think, how did you know? You are not inventing a problem so you can sell a solution. You are articulating something they have felt but could not put into words. You are giving language to a longing they have carried privately, perhaps shamefully, perhaps without even recognizing it as longing.

And here is what happens next, the part most brand builders miss: they give language back to you. They tell you what your work means to them, and it is never quite what you expected. They show you dimensions of your own offering you had not fully seen. They shape your understanding of who you are and what you are building. The relationship is reciprocal, or it is not a relationship at all.

This requires research. It requires listening. It requires the patience to understand before you speak. The cost of resonance is that you cannot skip the work of actually knowing your audience. Not demographic data, not age ranges and income brackets, but what keeps them awake at night, what they secretly want but are afraid to admit, what transformation they are hoping someone will finally make possible.

The consequence of skipping this work is a message that lands nowhere. You speak and your words echo in an empty room. You wonder why your marketing is not converting and you never realize it is because you are talking about yourself when you should be talking about them.

Resonance also requires specificity. You cannot resonate with everyone. The attempt to appeal to all audiences guarantees you will move none of them. The narrower your focus, the deeper your connection.

When I encountered the work that would eventually change my life, I felt seen. Not because he was speaking to me directly, but because he was speaking to desires and frustrations I had never articulated even to myself. That is what resonance feels like from the other side. Recognition before understanding. The sense that someone finally gets it.

Your positioning, your unique value proposition, your voice of customer research: these are not boxes to check. They are how you find the frequency your audience is already tuned to.

Authentic: The Madness of Your Method

Authenticity has become a buzzword so overused it has nearly lost all meaning. Every brand claims to be authentic now. The word appears on mission statements and marketing decks with the same frequency as "innovative" and "customer-focused," which is to say, constantly and meaninglessly.

So let me be precise about what I mean.

Authenticity is alignment. It is the match between what you claim and what you deliver. It is not about sharing everything, not about being vulnerable for its own sake, not about performing rawness to manufacture connection. It is about the particular magic of your approach, those elements that make it yours alone.

I call it the madness of your method. The specific alchemy that emerges from your unusual background, your unconventional combinations, the path you walked that no one else has walked in quite the same way.

My madness is reading fantasy novels to inform business strategy. It is pulling threads from mythology and psychology and weaving them into frameworks that help founders build something memorable. It is the interdisciplinary degree I earned in business, psychology, and religion because I could not bear to study only one. People sometimes ask why I read so widely. This is why. The connections that emerge from disparate subjects are my competitive advantage.

The cost of authenticity is that you cannot copy what works for someone else. Their magic is not transferable. The consequence of inauthenticity is that people sense it, even when they cannot name it. They simply do not trust you, and they do not know why.

Authenticity is addictive. This is my creed, and I believe it absolutely. When a brand matches the business behind it, when there is no gap between promise and delivery, people feel safe. They relax into the relationship. They stop waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The things that make you "too much" are not liabilities. They are the very qualities that will make you irreplaceable. What you have been told to minimize is often exactly what you should amplify.

Vivid: The Discipline of Specificity

Vivid brands are specific and concrete rather than vague and forgettable.

This is where Artifice lives. Not artifice as deception, but artifice as the power of beauty, the strategic use of aesthetics, the understanding that how something looks and feels and sounds matters as much as what it says. I named my platform Stratagems x Artifice because I believe in both: strategy and beauty, substance and spectacle, intellect and aesthetics working together.

Most brands are vague. They use words like "innovative" and "solutions" and "excellence" because those words feel professional and safe. But vagueness is the enemy of memory. If your brand could be described using the same adjectives as your competitors, you have not yet become vivid.

Vividness requires the discipline of specificity. It means choosing particular colors for particular reasons. It means developing a sensory vocabulary that extends beyond visuals to encompass how your brand sounds, how it feels, what tactile and spatial associations it evokes. It means using language so concrete that someone could describe your brand to a friend without resorting to generic placeholder words.

The cost of vividness is exclusion. When you become specific, you necessarily leave some things out. You choose this and not that. You accept that your aesthetic will not appeal to everyone. The consequence of vagueness is that you could be anyone, which means you will be remembered by no one.

Consider the brands that are impossible to confuse with anyone else. They have visual identities you would recognize from a fragment, a corner of a logo, a particular shade of a particular color. They have language patterns that feel proprietary, words and phrases that belong to them in a way that copying would feel like theft. They have fixed points, non-negotiables, the things they will always do and never do regardless of trends.

When I think about what made my Counterpart unforgettable, part of it was how vivid he was. His voice was unique. His presence was commanding to strangers but warm and familiar to me. He was not trying to blend in or play it safe. He had made choices about who he was and how he showed up, and those choices were specific enough to be remembered. And because he was so fully himself, I felt permission to be fully myself in return.

Your brand deserves the same specificity.

Emotive: Entering Into the Spirit

People make decisions emotionally and justify them logically. This is not a new insight. What is less understood is that emotion is not something you add at the end, not a coat of paint you apply once the structure is complete. Emotion is inextricable from the structure. It is the reason any of this matters.

Emotive brands create a feeling. Every touchpoint, from discovery to purchase to advocacy, is designed to evoke a particular emotional response. The website feels like the email feels like the sales conversation feels like the product itself. There is consistency, not just visual consistency, but emotional consistency. The same note, played across different instruments.

My former rabbi once taught me that rituals help us enter into the spirit of something. A doorpost with a mezuzah signals a threshold. A Shabbat candle marks the transition from ordinary time to sacred time. These are not empty gestures. They are invitations to shift how we feel, to cross from one state into another.

Your brand touchpoints work the same way. They are invitations for your audience to enter into the spirit of what you offer. When they are aligned, when every interaction reinforces the same emotional truth, people feel something they cannot easily explain. They trust you before they have conscious reasons for trusting you. They return without being asked.

The cost of being emotive is vulnerability. You are declaring what you want people to feel, and you are exposing yourself to the possibility that the feeling will not land. The consequence of being emotionless is a brand that processes transactions but never creates loyalty. You convert customers, but you do not transform them. They leave as easily as they came.

What I felt when I encountered The Man I Craved was not incidental to the experience. It was the experience. The emotion came first: the recognition, the pull, the sense of coming home to something I did not know I had been missing. The understanding came later, if it came at all.

The brands that create cult followings do not appeal primarily to logic. They appeal to the part of us that wants to feel something, that is starving for meaning in a world that often seems determined to strip meaning away.

The Diagnostic in Practice

CRAVE is not a one-time exercise. It is a lens you return to again and again.

Before you launch something new, ask:

• Is it compelling? Does it have a point of view worth rallying around?
• Is it resonant? Am I speaking to desires my audience already carries?
• Is it authentic? Does it reflect the madness of my method, the particular magic that only I can offer?
• Is it vivid? Is it specific enough to be remembered?
• Is it emotive? What do I want people to feel, and am I creating the conditions for that feeling?

When something is not working, use the diagnostic to find the broken element. If you are struggling to get attention, check Compelling. You may have a clear Core Truth, or you may be saying what everyone else in your industry says. If your message is not landing, check Resonant. You may be talking about yourself when you should be talking about them. If you feel like you are performing rather than expressing, check Authentic. There may be a gap between who you are and how you are showing up. If your brand feels forgettable, check Vivid. You may be hiding behind abstractions when you need concrete specificity. If you are getting transactions but not loyalty, check Emotive. Your touchpoints may be functional without being meaningful.

The brands that last are not the ones that get everything right the first time. They are the ones that keep looking, keep adjusting, keep using the diagnostic to find what needs attention.

What Becomes Possible

I began this essay with a story about craving a person. I want to end it by telling you what that craving made possible.

I had forgotten what it felt like to desire anything. I was existing, not living. I had accepted emptiness because the void felt safer than risking hope. Somewhere beneath all of it, the longing to live fully was still alive - I just couldn't reach it. What we found in each other did not save us, but it reminded us both of what was possible. The will to live, not just survive. The capacity for yearning. The courage to explore parts of ourselves we had kept locked away. We became mirrors for each other, reflecting back the luminosity we could not see in ourselves.

This is what craving does. It does not give you something you do not already possess. It reminds you of what was there all along.

The brands that create devoted followings do the same thing for their audiences. They do not manufacture desire from nothing. They name the desire that already exists. They give language to longings people have carried privately, shamefully, without even recognizing them as longings. They create the conditions for transformation by being compelling enough to stop someone mid-scroll, resonant enough to make them feel seen, authentic enough to earn their trust, vivid enough to be remembered, and emotive enough to mean something.

This is the work of brand strategy. Not logos and color palettes. Not posting schedules and content calendars. The architecture of desire. The creation of something people crave.

I believe in this work. I believe it matters. I believe that in a world increasingly stripped of meaning, the brands that offer meaning will be the ones that survive.

And I believe you can build one of them.

Each element of CRAVE deserves deeper exploration than I can offer in a single essay. In the posts that follow, I will walk through what makes a brand compelling, what resonance actually requires, how to excavate what is authentic rather than manufacture something borrowed, how to become vivid in a sea of vague, and how to create the emotional experience that turns customers into believers.

Whether you are building a corporate brand or a personal one, the diagnostic works the same way. The questions are universal. The answers are yours alone.