The costume principle
A costume is a waiver, not a talent. On play as a method, understudies who know things, and why your brand should break character once a year.
Somewhere in your office there’s a quiet one. Nine words a meeting, all of them accurate. This weekend, at somebody’s Halloween party, that same person will put on a costume and hold a room for ten minutes, and on Monday everyone will say they had no idea, as if the information came from the polyester.
It didn’t. The costume is not a talent. It’s a waiver.
If the joke dies, the pirate told it.
Put on somebody else and the stakes quietly leave the building. The self you defend all year, the competent one, the consistent one, the one with a reputation to protect, gets the night off, and the understudy turns out to know things.
Costumes as a method
We use this at work constantly, and so does every creative team that’s being honest about its process. When a project stalls, the way out is almost never trying harder in the brand’s own voice. It’s a costume. Write the headline the way a hundred-year-old law firm would. Sketch the layout as if the client were a band instead of a bank. Pitch the whole thing as a late-night infomercial, badly, on purpose. None of those drafts ship. All of them loosen the grip, because the ideas that were hiding behind the fear of being wrong will happily come out for a rehearsal that doesn’t count.
This is what play actually is, and why it embarrasses adults unnecessarily. Watch kids run a game of pretend sometime: the negotiations are fierce, the rules are elaborate, the commitment is total. Play isn’t the absence of rigor. It’s rigor with the consequences unplugged, which is the exact condition creative work does its best growing in.
Break character once a year
Brands could stand to learn the trick.
We’ve argued hard in these pages for consistency: repetition with conviction, the long game, all of it. None of that gets taken back here. But consistency protects the core, not the costume, and a brand that can never be caught out of character isn’t disciplined so much as brittle. The brands people actually love have nearly all done it at least once: the serious company that ships one absurd thing, does it well, and goes back to its desk without explaining itself. One campaign in a wig. A product with no defensible reason to exist. We’d know: we’re a black-and-white digital agency that once built a retro game handheld for the joy of it, and that detour taught us more about our own brand than any workshop has.
The return trip
The rule that makes all of this work is the one Halloween itself runs on: you take the costume off. November 1 exists. A costume worn forever isn’t play anymore; it’s a rebrand you backed into, and nobody involved can remember which self is load-bearing. Whatever power the exercise has lives in the return trip. Try on the loud version, keep what it taught you, hang it back up.
So this week, while the whole culture is in the fitting room anyway, it’s worth asking what your brand would wear. Not to become someone else. Just to find out what the understudy knows.
Wear something ridiculous. Be home by midnight.
