Optimise for love.

Here is a confession the marketing profession has never made out loud. For a hundred years we have been optimising the wrong number, and we have known it the whole time. We optimised for attention, because attention could be sold. Then for reach, because reach could be counted. Then for engagement, because engagement could be charged for by the hour. Then for conversion, because conversion could be put in a quarterly report. Each metric, once we chose it, we maximised with everything we had. And each one, at scale, curdled into something we are now ashamed of.

Maximise attention and you get outrage, because nothing holds the eye like fear. Maximise engagement and you get addiction, because nothing keeps the thumb moving like a machine that has learned your loneliness. Maximise conversion and you get the dark pattern, the cancelled-subscription maze, the consent you did not give. We were never optimising value. We were optimising a proxy for value, and every proxy, pushed hard enough, betrays the thing it stood in for. We spent a century polishing shadows and then wondered why the world they were cast by got colder.

There was always a deeper number available. We never said it in a boardroom because it sounds unserious, almost embarrassing, next to words like funnel and yield. It is the most serious word there is. The next stage of marketing, of organisations, and of government is to stop optimising the proxies and optimise the thing itself. Optimise for love.

I · Why love is the superior metric

I am not making a moral argument yet. I am making a cold one. Love has three properties that no other metric in the marketer's toolkit possesses, and any one of them would make it worth chasing. It has all three.

It does not decay with scale. Attention saturates: the more you demand, the less each unit is worth. Trust can be spent: every brand has a balance and most are quietly overdrawn. Virality burns out by design. Love is the rare quantity that compounds. A loved brand is forgiven its mistakes, granted the benefit of the doubt, defended in rooms it will never enter, and carried by word of mouth that no media budget can buy. The economics of being loved beat the economics of being known, and they beat them more every year, because being known is now cheap and being loved is not.

Being known is now cheap. Being loved is the last expensive thing.

It cannot be faked by a machine. This is the part I did not expect to believe, given that I spend my working life engineering how AI sees and recommends brands. Love requires being known, and being known requires a consistency held across years that a generated persona cannot sustain. A machine can produce a warm sentence in nine seconds. It cannot produce a decade of keeping the same promise when keeping it was expensive. In a world about to drown in generated everything, love becomes the one signal that cannot be synthesised, because its entire proof is time. I tell founders this after I have sold them the algorithmic work: the real moat is older than the internet, and the machines have just made it more valuable, not less.

It is measurable, just not by your instruments. The objection arrives on cue: love cannot be put on a dashboard. But it can. We simply chose easier proxies. Here is the only brand metric that has ever mattered, and almost no company measures it. I call it the mourning test. If your brand vanished tonight, would anyone grieve? Most companies, honestly answered, would merely be replaced. A competitor would be found by Tuesday and the spreadsheet would barely notice. A small few would be mourned, the way you mourn a shop that closes or a writer who stops. The entire value of a brand lives in the gap between replaced and mourned, and there is no line for it in any quarterly report ever filed.

II · What it means to actually do it

A thesis with no instructions is a poster. So here is the work, at the three scales where I am asked to help: a brand, an organisation, and a country.

A brand optimises for love by abandoning the funnel and designing the life of the person after the funnel. The sale is where most marketing ends; it is where love begins. It means making one promise you would close the company before breaking, and then building everything backward from that promise. Patagonia ran an advertisement telling you not to buy the jacket. That is not a campaign. That is love, costed and shipped, and it outsells the brands that beg. Measure the moment after the purchase, not the click before it. Ask the mourning question in every board meeting until someone can answer it without flinching.

An organisation optimises for love by loving its people enough to tell them the truth. Not the comfortable version. The true one, delivered in a way that makes them stronger rather than smaller. A manager's real job is not to make a person more compliant. It is to make them more themselves, and then point that self at something worthy. Everything the consulting industry sells as psychological safety is simply love, operationalised and given a name a CFO can fund. The companies that will own the next decade are not the ones with the cleverest incentives. They are the ones whose best people cannot imagine being treated this well anywhere else, and so they stay, and compound.

A government optimises for love, and here the idea turns radical, by treating dignity, loneliness, and the affluence of people's time as measured national outcomes, the way it already measures GDP. The most expensive diseases of the coming century are diseases of the nervous system, and they are diseases of a society that optimised for output and forgot to optimise for warmth. Kindness can be built like infrastructure: public, funded, redundant, walking-distance from every home. The first government to print a loneliness figure next to its growth figure will look, in fifty years, exactly the way the first government to fund clean water looks now. Obviously right. Quietly ahead of everyone. India, which still carries the cultural memory of seva in its temples and chai shops and langars, is the natural place for this to begin.

The first country to measure loneliness beside GDP will look, in fifty years, the way clean water looks now.

III · Love is not the soft option

The reflex is to call this soft. It is the opposite. Love is the single hardest optimisation target in existence, for the precise reason that it cannot be faked, rushed, bought, or delegated. Outrage is easy. Addiction is easy and well-funded. A discount is easy. Love takes years to build and breaks the instant you cheat, which is exactly what makes it the last real advantage left. Anything a competitor can copy by Friday was never a moat. Love is a moat made of time, and time is the one resource no rival can acquire faster than you.

And now the argument that matters more than any business case. Every metric humanity has ever maximised has, at its limit, produced a dystopia. Maximise engagement and you get a population that cannot look away from its own anxiety. Maximise growth and you get a planet that cannot breathe. Maximise control and you get a people that cannot speak. Love is the only optimisation target that gets better the harder you push it. A civilisation that maximised love is not a cautionary tale. It is the only future anyone would actually want to live inside. Which means the choice in front of us is not really about marketing at all. We are deciding what number the most powerful machines ever built will be told to increase, on our behalf, at a scale and speed no human can supervise. We had better hand them the right one.

So here is the assignment, and it is the same whether you run a brand, a team, a ministry, or a single ordinary life. Choose one relationship. One customer base, one team, one community, one person. For a single year, optimise it for love instead of for what you can extract. Judge it not by what you got but by whether they would mourn you. It will be the least efficient and the most important thing you do, and while everyone around you keeps optimising the click, you will quietly become impossible to replace. The next stage of our species does not need more intelligence. We have built oceans of that, in silicon, and we will build more. It needs more of the one thing the silicon cannot hold. Be the brand, the company, the country, or the human being that optimised for love while the rest of the world optimised for the algorithm. History does not remember the others. It never has.

Slowly,
Avinaash