For two decades, the operating assumption of marketing has been simple: attention is the currency, and more of it is always better. More impressions, more email opens, more scroll depth, and more notifications pulling a thumb back to a screen.
Bryanne DeGoede, founder of BLND PR, argues in a recent Entrepreneur column that this assumption is starting to crack. Her thesis, laid out in “The Most Valuable Brand Experience Might Be the One Nobody Posts About,” is that consumers are quietly rebelling against the attention economy. The brands that win the next decade, she argues, will help people disconnect rather than keep them tethered to a feed.
It is a timely argument, but it deserves more scrutiny than a single column can offer. The shift DeGoede describes is not simply a marketing tactic. It touches behavioral economics, generational psychology, and the operating economics of running a business. Some of it is genuinely new. Some of it rebrands ideas marketers have circled for years. And some of it will be far harder to execute than the article suggests, particularly for companies without the margins of a direct-to-consumer skincare brand or boutique fitness studio.
This analysis examines DeGoede’s central claim, tests it against research on attention, loyalty, and community, and offers a more grounded view of what leaders should do with the idea.
The Central Claim, Examined
DeGoede’s core reframe is this: instead of asking, “How do I get people to spend more time with my brand?” marketers should ask, “How can my brand help people spend their time better?” It is a clean, quotable line, and it captures something real. Attention has become so aggressively harvested that its absence now feels like a benefit rather than a cost.
The scholarship supports this premise more than most marketing columns acknowledge. Tim Wu’s 2016 book, The Attention Merchants, traced how nearly every media format—from the penny press to the smartphone—eventually becomes colonized by advertisers competing for eyeballs, until audiences start to resent the platforms they once welcomed. Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation also document how constant connectivity can degrade face-to-face interaction and leave people hungry for what Turkle calls “unitasking”: the ability to be somewhere without narrating it.
The psychological premise is sound. People are fatigued. Pew Research Center has repeatedly found that many American teens and adults have tried to reduce their phone use, while a growing share describe their relationship with social media as negative or mixed. That is a meaningful behavioral signal, not merely a marketing hunch.
Where the argument becomes more complicated is the leap from “people are fatigued” to “brands should build phone-free, in-person rituals.” That leap assumes every brand has the category fit, customer base, and operating margin to pull it off. A fitness apparel company can plausibly run a Saturday-morning club. A national logistics software vendor selling to procurement officers across four continents cannot replicate that model, no matter how elegant the philosophy sounds.
The idea is directionally right, but it is not universally applicable. DeGoede’s argument would be stronger if it acknowledged that constraint rather than implying that any entrepreneur can simply start small and succeed.
Supporting Arguments Tested Against Reality
DeGoede offers four supporting pillars: content saturation, the failure of Instagram-first event design, scarcity of attention as a luxury good, and ritual as the mechanism that turns an audience into a community. Each holds up differently under pressure.
Content Saturation
Content saturation is the easiest argument to validate. Generative AI has made publishing cheap and abundant, which means the marginal value of one more post, email, or short-form video continues to decline. DataReportal’s Digital 2025 report found that global average daily mobile screen time continued to rise even as consumers reported wanting to spend less time online. That contradiction suggests fatigue with content volume rather than a wholesale rejection of digital channels.
The market is not short on content. It is short on content worth a person’s finite attention, and that scarcity is the opening DeGoede identifies.
The Limits of Instagram-First Events
The critique of Instagram-first event design is the sharpest and most useful part of the argument. Marketers have spent a decade optimizing physical spaces for the photos they generate rather than the experiences they create. DeGoede is right that this has produced many forgettable, over-styled activations.
Museum of Ice Cream and similar pop-up concepts drew substantial foot traffic and social reach in their early years. Yet attendance and buzz faded once the novelty of the photo wore off and reviewers began noting that the experience beneath the backdrop was thin. That is the failure mode DeGoede describes: content-first design that neglects the substance of the room.
The correction—building for genuine engagement first and letting documentation happen organically—is sound advice. Eventbrite’s Pulse research has found that many consumers say live events make them feel more connected to a brand than digital content does, and that the connection can persist longer than a single social impression.
Attention as a Luxury Good
The claim that undivided attention is becoming a luxury good is conceptually interesting but less tested. DeGoede draws an analogy to product scarcity, where limited drops and exclusive access increase perceived value. Applying that logic to attention is clever, but attention scarcity behaves differently from product scarcity.
A limited sneaker drop creates fear of missing out because the product retains value once acquired. A phone-free dinner creates value only in the moment—and only for people who already have the social capital, free time, and disposable income to attend a curated in-person event on a Tuesday night.
This is where the argument risks becoming a proxy for class. Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the “third place”—the informal gathering spot distinct from home and work—is the intellectual ancestor of everything DeGoede describes, from run clubs to dinner series to mahjong nights. Oldenburg’s original examples, including diners, barbershops, and pubs, were affordable and low-barrier. Many current brand-sponsored versions—curated supper clubs, boutique run crews with branded merchandise, and wellness retreats—are not.
If undivided attention becomes a luxury, brands need to be honest that they are selling a premium good, not a democratized cure for digital fatigue.
Ritual and Community
The ritual-and-community argument is the most durable of the four and has the strongest evidence base. Lululemon’s free in-store yoga classes and city run clubs, Peloton’s instructor-led leaderboard culture, and CrossFit’s franchise model all demonstrate the same mechanism: recurring, low-production gatherings can create belonging strong enough to survive without constant brand messaging.
Peloton is particularly instructive because it shows both the upside and fragility of this model. Its community became a widely cited case study in modern brand loyalty during 2020 and 2021. Yet the company’s subsequent struggles show that community affinity alone does not protect a business from pricing missteps, product failures, or category shifts.
Ritual builds loyalty. It does not replace a sound business model.
What the Argument Leaves Out
Three gaps in DeGoede’s argument deserve attention from leaders considering this approach.
Measurement
Digital marketing dominates budgets partly because it is trackable down to the click. In-person community building resists that kind of attribution, and finance teams will ask for it anyway.
Leaders adopting this approach need a different scorecard, built around:
- Customer retention
- Repeat attendance
- Referral rates
- Customer lifetime value
- Qualitative feedback and advocacy
They also need to set those expectations with stakeholders before the first event, not after the first disappointing spreadsheet.
Scale
The article suggests entrepreneurs “start small” by gathering 10 or 20 people around something customers already enjoy. That is practical advice for a founder-led business. It is much harder for a public company or venture-backed brand under pressure to show quarter-over-quarter growth, where a monthly gathering of 30 loyal customers will never appear meaningfully on a board slide next to a paid acquisition channel generating thousands of leads.
The tension between intimacy and scale is real, and the argument underplays it.
What Is Actually New?
This is not an entirely new idea. Direct-to-consumer brands, membership clubs such as Soho House, and category leaders such as Trader Joe’s have built cult followings on low digital spend and high-trust, low-pressure experiences for years.
What has changed is the backdrop: an oversaturated content environment and a generation of consumers—particularly Gen Z—who report in surveys from Deloitte and McKinsey that they value in-person social connection and are actively seeking offline experiences after years of remote work and screen-based socializing. DeGoede is not describing a new idea so much as correctly identifying that the timing has caught up with it.
What Leaders Should Do
The practical takeaway is less about grand gestures and more about sequencing. Digital channels remain the most efficient way to reach new customers, and no credible version of this argument suggests abandoning them. The opportunity sits downstream of discovery.
A brand that earns someone’s attention on Instagram or TikTok should have a next step ready that does not simply demand more screen time. That next step can be modest:
- A recurring class
- A members-only walk
- A small dinner
- A workshop tied to something the brand already sells
- A local gathering led by customers or employees
The goal is not virality. It is a second visit.
Leaders should also resist the temptation to instrument every gathering for content capture. If an event is genuinely good, attendees will talk about it, and some will post about it without being prompted. That organic mention will carry more credibility than a branded hashtag. Research on word-of-mouth marketing, including work associated with the Fanocracy framework referenced in DeGoede’s agency materials, consistently suggests that unprompted advocacy converts better than paid or incentivized promotion.
Finally, leaders should be honest about who this strategy serves. It works well for premium and mid-market consumer brands with a local footprint, direct customer relationships, and a founder or community lead willing to show up in person repeatedly. It works less well for commodity products, purely transactional categories, and businesses without the staffing to run consistent, well-executed gatherings rather than one-off stunts that fade after the second attempt.
The Bottom Line
DeGoede’s central instinct is correct: the attention economy has become so crowded that giving someone a reason to put down their phone is starting to function as a competitive advantage rather than a nice-to-have. Evidence of digital fatigue, the success of community-first brands such as Lululemon and CrossFit, and renewed interest in third places all support the direction of her argument.
But the idea needs guardrails. It is not a universal playbook, it is not free of the class dynamics that come with curated in-person exclusivity, and it will not appear cleanly in the metrics most companies currently use to judge marketing performance.
Leaders who adopt this thinking should treat it as they would any strategic bet: start small, measure differently, and recognize that a monthly gathering of 30 loyal customers is a long-term trust investment, not a short-term growth lever. Done well, it builds the kind of loyalty that outlasts any single campaign. Done carelessly, it becomes another buzzword layered onto the same content treadmill it claims to reject.
The brands that get this right will not disappear from customers’ phones entirely, and they should not try to. They will simply become the rare presence worth setting the phone down for. In a market this loud, that rarity may be the most valuable asset a brand can build.