Friction, Devotion, and the Brands That Choose Strangeness

On Black Friday 2011, Patagonia spent money on a full-page ad in the New York Times to tell readers not to buy the jacket on the page. The instruction was direct. The placement was deliberate. By most documented accounts, it accelerated loyalty rather than eroding it. People who already loved Patagonia loved it more. People who hadn't noticed it before noticed it then. The brand got harder to dismiss precisely because it made itself harder to simply consume.

That is the optimistic version of what happens when a brand chooses friction over fluency. But it raises a question worth sitting with: does deliberate strangeness — opacity, provocation, the refusal to make yourself easy — reliably build the devotion it is betting on, or does it quietly select for an audience too small to sustain the thing?

Patagonia's 2011 move worked partly because it wasn't strange in a vacuum. The brand had spent years making a particular kind of outdoor gear for a particular kind of person who already held environmental seriousness as a value. The friction of "Don't Buy This Jacket" was legible to that audience. It confirmed what they already believed about themselves and about the company. The weirdness was calibrated — it looked wild from the outside and completely coherent from the inside. That gap between external and internal legibility might be exactly where devotion lives.

Duolingo's "unhinged owl" persona across its 2023 and 2024 social media presence is a different experiment in the same territory. The brand chose an aggressively strange, often confrontational register as its primary public voice, and it reported follower growth as internal proof that the bet was landing. But the Duolingo case is interesting because the product itself is relatively conventional: a language-learning app with streaks, gamification, and a mild guilt mechanism built in. The strangeness lives almost entirely on the surface. Which prompts a genuine question: is the devotion being built to the owl, or to the learning? And does it matter, as long as people keep opening the app?

James Hurst's second book, Weird the Normal / Normal the Weird, published in 2026, puts pressure on exactly this. The book's central argument is that the real discipline is not choosing a side — not committing to strange or committing to legible — but developing the capacity to switch between them. James describes this switching as "a pulse, a way of staying alive," which is a more demanding proposition than it first sounds. A pulse is not a position. It is a rhythm. It implies that any brand which plants its flag permanently in weirdness has, by that act, stopped pulsing — and something that has stopped pulsing is, by definition, no longer alive in the way it was.

This is where the framework gets interesting to test against itself. If the discipline is switching, then Patagonia's 2011 ad was one beat in a longer rhythm — the brand has moved between provocation and straightforward product storytelling across decades, which may be precisely why the provocations land when they come. The friction is periodic, not constant. Duolingo's unhinged persona, by contrast, has become a sustained register rather than a departure from one. Whether that constitutes a pulse or a plateau is a genuinely open question — and one that the follower growth metric alone probably can't answer.

James' first book, Use Design To Design Change, identifies the Theranos failure mode as what happens when belief in a brand outruns the substance behind it. The cult-building chapter is shaped around that risk: not as a lesson about fraud, but as a structural warning about the gap that can open between devotion and reality. It is worth asking whether deliberate friction — the kind that makes a brand feel exclusive, demanding, even slightly inscrutable — can accelerate that gap as well as close it. Friction that rewards the already-converted is one thing. Friction that substitutes for substance is another. The two can look identical from the outside, at least for a while.

What Patagonia seems to have understood, and what the switching framework in James' newer work gestures toward, is that friction only builds devotion when there is something on the other side of it. The "Don't Buy This Jacket" ad worked because the jacket existed, was well-made, and the company's environmental commitments were documented and costly to maintain. The strangeness was a door, not a room. People walked through it and found something real.

The harder version of the question is about the brands that use friction as a primary identity rather than as a periodic move. When opacity becomes the product — when being hard to understand is the thing the audience is devoted to — what exactly is being sustained? There is probably a crowd for that. The question is whether it is a crowd that can grow, or one that is, by the nature of its own selection, already at its ceiling.

And maybe that is fine. Maybe some things are supposed to be small and devoted and deliberately bounded. The Patagonia of 1973 was not trying to reach everyone. First Things Club, James' own gathering for curious minds, presumably does not measure success by whether it could fill an arena. There is a version of the friction wager that is not really a growth strategy at all — it is a filtering mechanism, a way of finding the people who will actually stay.

Which leaves the question sitting somewhere uncomfortable: when a brand chooses to make itself harder to understand, is it building a community or drawing a perimeter? And is there a meaningful difference?