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Performative Brands & Promise Inflation

KFC Australia just tried to position fried chicken as health food.

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Amazon and Pinterest attributed their massive layoffs, to “AI restructuring” to appease investors, while the real reasons involved overhiring during the pandemic and missed financial targets.

Federal prosecutors indicted the founder and former executive of First Brands (known for Autolite), accusing them of a long-term scheme to lie to lenders about massive hidden debt and faking invoices.

Despite "Join Life" collections and 2025 sustainability targets, Zara's core business model—releasing 500+ new designs weekly—drives overconsumption, high carbon emissions, and substantial waste.

AI-washing, green-rinsing, DEI theater, metric laundering…..the list of corporate lie categories goes on.

This keeps happening. Not the gap between announcement and reality (that’s always existed). What’s new is the size of the gap, the confidence with which it’s delivered, and how little anyone seems to give a f when it’s exposed.

It’s called promise inflation.

As leadership visibility increases and accountability dies, organizations expand what they publicly commit to without a proportional expansion in systems, incentives, or enforcement to support those commitments.

When signaling is rewarded faster than delivery, promises naturally grow larger while execution capacity remains constrained.

Pierre Bourdieu wrote about how elites use cultural capital to distinguish themselves: taste, references, subtle behaviors that signal belonging. But promise inflation operates differently. It’s not about distinguishing yourself through what you know or how you behave. It’s about distinguishing yourself through what you claim. The bolder the claim, the higher the status. Articulation has become its own currency.

And the market has learned to price it.

Stock prices jump on announcements. Follower counts grow on brand claims. Funding rounds close before proving product-market fit. I sat in a pitch meeting last year where a founder explicitly said “we need to 10x the language” - not the product, the language - to close their Series B.

The incentive structure is so clear it barely needs stating: get rewarded for what you say now, maybe get audited for what you do later. And “maybe” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

What’s stranger is that we’re living through this in a culture that supposedly prizes authenticity and accountability. We’re chronically online. Everything leaves a receipt. “Receipts culture” is a whole “gotcha” genre of content. And yet.

The promises keep getting bigger without any accountability on follow-through. Despite us catching brands and being horrified, the gap generates almost no friction.

Part of this is just numbness. We’ve been lied to so many times - by institutions, by platforms, by people we trusted, by sad orange men - that outrage doesn’t stick. The cycle moves too fast. By the time a promise is broken, there’s a new announcement to absorb, a new claim to evaluate, a new narrative demanding attention. The discourse moves on before consequences arrive.

But I think there’s something else happening too.

Brands Under Pressure

Performative Brands & Promise Inflation

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