Dinner Party Etiquette & Brands
Is your brand a good guest?
A Toast
For over a decade, we’ve operated under Dashboard Culture — a tyranny of metrics, an optimization for spectacle, and a sacrifice of substance for visibility. We’ve been conditioned: if it doesn’t register on the dashboard, it doesn’t exist.
“If you are not loud, you do not exist culturally, politically, or socially. In the age of the algorithm, cultural value becomes synonymous with measurability. Dashboards don’t give a shit about merit, substance or even truth.”
The result? A boring and exhausting arms race for loudness. Victims to this cacophony, many have retreated — and continue to retreat. We go camouflage. Group chats, paywalled Substacks, three-hour podcasts, niche subreddits, and yes, actual dinner parties.
We seek off-the-grid spaces that resist algorithmic and audience capture. Rooms you can’t just buy your way into or shout your way to relevance. Respite. Secrecy. Avoidances of performance.
But organizations are not conditioned for these environments. (If you’re brainstorming “What’s our Substack strategy?” you’re four years too late...) Orgs are conditioned to use megaphones, track reach in spreadsheets and posture — or really contort — for everybody all at once. They optimize for attention over meaning.
Brands are in new environments with old playbooks.
Culture’s a dinner party.
And orgs' etiquette sucks.
You don’t bring a playbook to a party.
Every cultural space, whether that be a community, conference, creator’s content or philanthropic cause, operates like a dinner party with unspoken codes. And organizations which ignore these conventions become the guest that everyone barely tolerates until they leave. And the moment they’re gone — there’s a sigh of relief. Finally, the real party begins.
They say “brand” is what people say when you’re not in the room, but the best brands are the ones invited into the room.
For any organization seeking to resonate today, they must learn how to become better dinner party guests. How?