Most brands aren't taking their customers to the altar; they're buying love instead

That's the line that stopped us mid-response. “Hear me out,” said Elf...

We sat down with our co-founder, Elfried Samba, to ask him about attention, revenue, and why some brands earn loyalty for decades while others burn hot and then suddenly disappear. Twenty minutes in, he'd already dismantled the one framework almost every marketer defaults to.

Here's what came out of it.

Before we get stuck in, we're Butterfly Effect, and this is the first edition of our bi-weekly marketing newsletter Cause & Effect, where we'll bring you real thinking from the sharpest minds in marketing, not just the recap, but the reasoning behind it.

Let's get into it.

The funnel only gets you to the altar

Awareness, consideration, conversion: this is the slide you've probably seen in every deck.

Elf's problem with it:

“Really, the funnel is only half the job, because that is basically a roadmap to getting married, and marriage is not the end of the trust gap.”

Most brands race to the sale, then wonder why the customer never comes back again. They spent one night and thought there was enough trust to form a marriage but that's not how strong long-term relationships work... and we've all heard about the Tortoise and the Hare right?

So, what's missing from the roadmap?

• Advocacy
• Defensibility
• Belonging

A brand that wants to last isn't optimising for the wedding day. It's making deposits into a trust bank it'll need for the next hundred years.

Getting everyone together to celebrate the union, the ceremony, the toasts, the send-off, is the easy part. It's what happens once the guests go home and the room goes quiet that determines whether the relationship survives: whether you're still showing up for the client, or the customer, once nobody's watching.

We asked Elf: Attention is cheap somewhere right now. Do you know where?

His answer: stop watching brands, they're always late. Watch where creators and audiences are spending time before it gets commercialised and take advantage of underpriced attention before everyone else piles in.

His live example: LinkedIn. Not because it beats Instagram or TikTok on volume, but because 1,000 engaged people here can outweigh 100,000 anywhere else. Consider which audience you would prefer: a thousand people in a room paying full attention? Or a stadium full of people half-watching, half-listening, scrolling past without ever really engaging?

The tell isn't the platform, it's whether people are still there before the price of being seen has gone up.

“Unsexy” / “boring” is a story you're telling yourself about your industry

Water is boring, headphones were boring. Neither stayed that way.

Liquid Death didn't sell water, it solved the very specific, very real awkwardness of ordering water at a bar full of people drinking beer.

Beats by Dre didn't sell audio quality, they made headphones a cultural object. At the 2012 London Olympics, athletes were contractually barred from wearing non-sponsor headphones on camera. Whilst Beats wasn't an official sponsor, athletes wore them anyway, and Beats paid the fine rather than asking them to take the headphones off.

Elf's point: don't copy your category, rather borrow trust from wherever your audience already has it, then bring that familiarity into your industry. Most brands assume their industry has a fixed way of doing things, a ceiling on how creative or unconventional the marketing can be. That ceiling doesn't actually exist. It's just what everyone else in the category has always done. The moment you stop assuming there's a limit is the moment you find room to market in ways nobody else in your industry has tried, and that's exactly what makes you stand out.

Creators are not a media plan

Most brands use creators for one thing: distribution. Elf thinks that's the least valuable part of the relationship.

His four-pillar version:

1. Content (on and off their channel)
2. Media and IP (built with them, not just posted through them)
3. Distribution (meet customers where they are selfish and then let the best work travel)
4. IRL experiences (using real life to disrupt the feed)

Skip three of those and you're renting a face, not building trust.

Test the cheap version before you bet on the expensive one

Last question, and the most practical: how do you know an idea is actually worth scaling?

Elf's answer had nothing to do with confidence, it was more about signal. Run the smallest, cheapest version first: targeted ads in one location, one campaign, one hypothesis, and see if real demand shows up before you commit real budget. Convince one person, then ten, then a hundred. That's the only “hail mary” he trusts.

The thread running under all of it

Revenue matters, but it's not the finish line. It's the thing that lets you keep compounding trust long enough to still be standing in twenty years.

So here's the one we can't stop thinking about:

Is your brand actually building a marriage, or just chasing the next wedding?

Tell us in the comments: where have you seen a brand skip the courtship and go straight for the sale?

Follow Elfried Samba for daily takes on brand building, trust, and why most marketing playbooks are only half finished.

And while we've got you: which marketers would you like to hear from next?