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Episode 002 · Brand · Creativity · Emotion

Excitement Unlocked

Excitement is one of the most underrated forces in brand building, and one of the hardest things to engineer deliberately.

With Gordon Euchler & Maik Hoffman, The Spikes

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Artwork for The Evergreen Playbook episode "Excitement Unlocked" featuring Gordon Euchler & Maik Hoffman.

Show notes

Gordon Euchler and Maik Hoffman from The Spikes join David to explore what excitement actually is in a business context — not as an aesthetic quality, but as a strategic outcome.

They look at brands that excite successfully, examine counterintuitive examples that work against expectation, and build a practical case for why more companies should treat excitement as a design goal.

Excitement is when, in terms of business, a company manages to stand out, because every day, hundreds of companies with thousands of approaches try to reach out to people and want something from them.

— Gordon Euchler

80% of companies claim to be customer centric. 80% of people think companies are customer centric. You don't have to look up that study because you can feel it every day. There's so much going on, so much activity, but not everything companies do is truly reaching out to the people.

— Gordon Euchler

Switch the perspective from the company to the people's perspective. Switch from what we're sending to what people are receiving.

— Maik Hoffman

Things that might sound counterintuitive or even impossible are possible and are relevant to people.

— Gordon Euchler

I always ask this question at the start because I get so many different ideas for this idea of value. And that's really exciting to me.

— David Göz

The Playbook

The core principles from this conversation.

  1. 1 Excitement is comparative. What thrills today becomes baseline tomorrow.
  2. 2 The most exciting moves are often counterintuitive
  3. 3 Ask what excited people, not what they prefer
  4. 4 Look outside your category for the next idea
Read the full playbook

The Guest

Gordon Euchler & Maik Hoffman

The Spikes

"It's easy to be cynical about advertising. But it's possible to make a difference and to excite people — and it is worth pursuing that." — Gordon Euchler.