Small Businesses and the Fear of Creative Risk
At one point or another, we’ve all found ourselves staring at a billboard or watching a commercial and thinking…what in God’s name is this company selling!? It’s safe to say this is not the reaction businesses generally want to elicit from consumers, particularly after spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising. However, with the right confidence and strong creative capital, a campaign that uses conceptual ads might be just the thing to snap the public out of complacency and demand attention.
Consider Friend, a startup that sells wearable AI companion pendants. Designed by Avi Schiffmann, the device listens to your surroundings and promises emotional support and interaction. In late 2025, Friend launched a large-scale, high-visibility ad campaign in the New York City subway system. The company reportedly spent over $1 million on ad placements including thousands of train cards and platform posters across all five boroughs. The posters were minimal and intentionally evocative, featuring fields of negative space and an image of the product—a small, white pearl-like pendant—on a white background. Sometimes the images were paired with minimal text like the definition of the word friend or simple statements like I’ll never bail on dinner plans. Some ads featured an image of the pendant alongside the company’s web address and nothing more.
All things considered, the campaign carried substantial creative risk. The company not only sought to introduce a new product, but also a new concept to the public: a non-human, AI companion. Leading with an abstract marketing push that did little to explain the product carried the risk of leaving the public uninterested and unresponsive. However, the campaign had the opposite effect, sparking much curiosity, and ultimately, much backlash from New Yorkers. Commuters were so provoked by the campaign that they responded with vandalism—many of the posters in the subway were defaced with graffiti explaining the importance of human connection and warnings about emotional dependence on AI. As a result, the marketing campaign—and the device itself—became big news. The attention that the company and the product gained from the backlash was priceless.
Tell-tale signs of Abstract Marketing
The Friend marketing campaign contained many of the hallmarks of abstract marketing:
Minimal or poetic copy
Symbolism over explanation
Ambiguity that invites interpretation
Strong aesthetic consistency
Trust that the right customers will “get it”
This type of campaign is not for the faint of heart, as it comes with many potential drawbacks. By its very nature, abstract marketing withholds explanation. This isn’t necessarily the best way for a small business owner to introduce a service or product for fear that the campaign will not enlist engagement. Owners may worry that failing to communicate their offering instantly will cost them the public’s attention. That fear is valid—especially when the business is reliant only on search traffic. Also, unlike the Friend startup, a new business owner might not have investors and thus, may not be able to allocate millions of dollars to a creatively risky ad budget.
And speaking of millions of dollars, many of the companies that engage in conceptual marketing have premium, well-established brands. They have already done the legwork of gaining the public’s trust over decades, sometimes centuries, and this gives them more leeway to experiment. Take, for example Cartier—a renowned jewelry brand whose very name summons delicious, elevated, bejeweled concoctions. The company has been in operation for nearly 180 years. Their 2012 marketing video L’Odyssée de Cartier perfectly embodies the idea of abstract branding. The video has no product messaging and no true narrative. The content features a jeweled panther (Cartier’s brand symbol) coming alive and leaping through various epochs and landscapes as Cartier jewelry bursts forth from the literal bedrock. It’s wild. And yet, it doesn’t feature any particular piece, or announce a new product line. It doesn’t even linger on the jewelry long enough to support a strong sales push. In this video Cartier is selling a mythology, a sense of desire and a fantasy of opulence, not the jewelry itself. Since Cartier has been long recognized as an established luxury brand, the company is able to make a wordless three and a half minute commercial overflowing with symbolism but light on substance.
The Literal Monster
On the other end of the marketing spectrum from the conceptual artistic campaign lies a near-religious adherence to the literal. We’ve seen clients so eager to communicate their entire business story at once, that they request logos that overtly describe their core services. Picture this: a boutique fitness studio comes to us and requests a logo with a barbell or dumbbell. The rationale is that if a potential client spots the logo in the wild, the pictorial dumbbell will provide an immediate visual clue as to what the company is selling. Creating a visual shorthand to inform an audience and support a brand sounds like a great idea, until you perform a quick search of boutique fitness studios in the tristate area and discover that an alarmingly high number of them feature barbells or dumbbells in their logo. There is a risk to standing out with conceptual branding or marketing, but one might argue, there’s an even bigger risk of blending in and looking exactly like the competition.
Business owners must trust their audience and their supporting brand elements to fill in some of the gaps. For example, consider Cowbird Creative! The name alone does not indicate that we are a creative branding studio. Nothing inherent to the cowbird or the larger blackbird family suggests visual development or brand identity. However, our logo (Lenny the Cowbird) offers a nod towards dynamic creativity with his energetic Pollock-like ink splashes. In fact, some of our merch features Lenny alone without an accompanying wordmark. We’ve found this invites much curiosity from strangers! Also, we’ve done work on our webpage and social media—and all of our supporting materials—to help further define who we are and what we do so that our conceptual logo can exist in the wild on its own and be a point of curiosity and an invitation to investigate.
Clarity on Overdrive
We understand that clarity is the foundation for strong branding. It’s a concept we underscore relentlessly with our clients. Small business marketing materials should define what the brand does, connect with their audience’s pain points and position themselves as the best solution. We understand that small businesses often lack large budgets for advertising and feel a pressure to convert clients immediately, so they might hesitate to employ an abstract marketing campaign. We’ve also found that in their panic for imparting clarity, they feel compelled to describe every single benefit of their service or product in their marketing copy. However, this mindset might ultimately be holding small business owners back.
We’ve witnessed the impulse some business owners have to be desperately thorough in their marketing and web copy, and sometimes, it’s not pretty. We’ve worked with clients whose webpages are an endless scroll of grave details or who preemptively attempt to address any and every question they’ve ever been asked by a prospective or current client. We’ve seen flyers and trifold brochures with wall-to-wall information and zero negative space. Clarity is crucial, but when confronted by an aggressive barrage of text, most audiences will turn away. It seems too much clarity can be just as off-putting as too little.
A Delicate Balance
This is all to suggest that perhaps there is a middle ground between artistry and literalism, between the impulse to overexplain and the confidence to say less. In an attempt not to alienate any potential audiences, small business owners sometimes end up on the wrong side of that equation, trying to appeal to everyone. But in appealing to everyone, they ultimately wind-up sounding like just like their competitors. It takes brand confidence and a good dose of audience trust to step outside of the box.
Some growing businesses may opt for the dual approach to marketing and branding. Their public facing campaigns (Instagram, ads) might lean toward a more emotional, evocative, conceptual design, while their websites and product pages might offer clear descriptions, pricing and FAQs. This allows them to attract emotionally and convert rationally.
Effective branding comes from knowing when to prioritize clarity and when to lean into creativity. While abstraction can spark curiosity and emotional resonance, it works best when grounded in a cohesive brand foundation. Small businesses don’t need to mimic million-dollar campaigns or abandon clarity altogether, but they may benefit from resisting the urge to explain everything, everywhere all at once. When brands trust their audience, allow room for interpretation and communicate with confidence, they create space for intrigue and genuine connection. The goal is to create distinction, not confusion. And in a crowded marketplace, that can make all the difference.
Abstraction carries less risk than being forgettable..