You don’t need a more complicated mousetrap to catch a mouse, you need the cheese
David Todd McCarty | Monday, April 14, 2025
A cynical person might see the strategy of using a run-down, automotive repair shop on the outskirts of Las Vegas as a front for a boutique branding agency to be just another marketing gimmick, and on the surface, they would be right. But there’s a deeper meaning and purpose.
Sal’s Auto believes that our culture has lost it’s way, that we’ve lost our balance. Technology can be great and the product of amazing creative innovation. We’re big fans. But there’s more to life than what goes on inside the little gadgets in our pockets. We’ve lost touch with what’s important in life and that has adversely affected the art of branding products and services to humans.
On the one hand, you have mounds of research unequivocally telling us that consumers, especially the younger, valuable segments, crave authenticity and purpose, and are desperate for real life human connection. Then on the other, you have an entire industry hellbent on pushing artificial intelligence into every aspect of our daily lives.
We’re not even using this technology to encourage people to design their own toys or something more practical. We’ve merely given them the ability to make images of a fake toy in their own likeness. We’ve turned them into cheap, powerless gods, and all they get in return is a shitty picture they didn’t even make.
It’s not just that GenAI was built by unethically and immorally stealing the work of creative artists everywhere. It’s that it’s part of a continuing trend to remove the humanity from commerce, where everyone has been reduced to a data point, a line item, a blip. It’s an endless loop of self-feeding algorithms and self-fulfilling prophesy that is the antithesis of thousands of years of human culture, and it’s destined to fail.
If you’ll allow a single automotive metaphor. Let’s say a car in the 1950s had about 2,000 parts. Today, it has at least 30,000. We’ve made improvements in literally every area of the car, making it faster, safer, and more efficient. But how much better does it perform it’s primary function of getting you from point A to point B? Minimally better, at best. How much harder is it to build and fix. Exorbitantly more. How much more does it cost? It’s unaffordable.
Every little thing we did was better in some way but it became so complicated we can’t fix it without specialized equipment and knowledge and it performs basically the same function as before. Almost no one needs a high performance car that go from 0-60 in three seconds. This isn’t Fast and Furious. We need to get to work, pick up groceries, and take the kid to dance class.
Sal’s Auto offers brands an opportunity to take a low tech approach to building human connections with consumers. We believe in getting back to the genuine roots of telling true stories about products that will make a difference in the lives of the people who use them. Forget all the bullshit about immersive experiences and creative storytelling. If you’re talking about real life, it’s already immersive, experiential, and creative. You just have to tell the story. Stop overcomplicating things. Stop overthinking your brand strategy.
The key to connecting with consumers is human emotion, and you’re not going to find that by asking a computer what it thinks. Turns out, no one needed a better mousetrap. The mice don’t need an elaborate maze of mass confusion. They just want the cheese. We have the cheese.
Having brand troubles? Call a mechanic. 702.472.8138