rmous amounts of time and energy making things easier, optimising, iterating and bringing engineers in to refine the process all over again. Convenience used to be a competitive advantage. Now it is simply the price of entry because consumers demand it in 2026. So what comes next? Something just as important – perhaps even more important if you ask me as a creative – is personality. If you work in marketing, you will likely know Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The legendary book How Brands Grow argues that brands grow by being easy to notice and easy to think of, not simply easy to buy. With retail marketing now largely operating inside platforms such as Meta and Google, where everything is optimised for conversion, algorithms increasingly reward short-term thinking. Look at the number of retailers spending 90 per cent of their energy moving from promotion to promotion. It all leans towards a sea of templates and predictable creative – essentially just noise designed to push consumers through the immediate moment. Consumers are often not in-market until later. I know I am one of them. If I do not want to engage with your brand now, there is a good chance I will later. Jumping up and down for my attention in the present is unlikely to help. In fact, push hard enough, and it can have the opposite effect. If you want to win me over, show me your personality consistently. Too many brands save their personality for the big, expensive advertising campaign, whatever form that takes. I do not buy into that approach at all. At a time when every business is competing on ease and convenience, personality is what stands out. And I mean everywhere a brand appears – the line printed on the bag, the sign-off at the bottom of the receipt, the post-purchase success page on a website – everywhere. When Virgin Blue launched in Australia, I flew on one of its earliest flights. The pre-flight announcements were funny. The lines printed on the napkins were playful. Before passengers disembarked via the tarmac, a flight attendant warned everyone to avoid the “big hairy man with the paddles”. It was hilarious and, importantly, virtually risk-free. Nobody was harmed or offended, and it probably never crossed anyone’s mind that the joke might need to be removed. That opens another discussion entirely – overthinking. It is probably the single biggest killer of brand personality. Most people have been in situations where either they or somebody they work with has overthought an idea to the point where it became forgettable. Convenience is more objective, so overthinking can actually help. It means examining every angle, optimising, iterating and refining. Thinking deeply about how to make things easier for customers is generally positive. Thinking too deeply about who might possibly be offended is often damaging. Make life easier for customers, but do not bore them in the process. The holy grail is balancing convenience with personality equally well. Uber Eats does this brilliantly. The brand has a strong personality: fun, interesting, slightly unexpected, repeatable, consistent and, most importantly, memorable. At the same time, it nails convenience. Quick, efficient and easy. Everything arrives at the press of a button. If brands want to follow in the footsteps of companies such as Uber Eats, they should start by applying the right thinking in the right places. If you can genuinely excite customers while also making life a little easier for them, that is the sweet spot. Dom Megna is the executive creative director of integrated advertising agency Spinach.