Why friction is the hidden ingredient in brand growth
Eugene Healey’s rallying cry for more friction in modern life was aimed at consumers. But it feels just as relevant for marketers today.
In recent decades, the explosion of new technologies has fueled the belief that the ultimate goal (in life, play, and work) is to eliminate friction. Algorithms anticipate our needs before we even search. Delivery apps erase the effort of cooking. AI tools now promise to think for us.
Convenience has become the measure of progress. But that same pursuit of ease has quietly eroded something vital: the satisfaction that comes from effort. The challenge that makes achievement meaningful.
Friction is often what transforms an experience from forgettable to fulfilling.
Think about it. It’s the blister-forming five-hour hike that makes a summit sandwich taste incredible. Or assembling the IKEA wardrobe that drives you mad but leaves you proud. Even the long, ritualistic check-in at a luxury hotel that reminds you: You’re supposed to slow down. The harder the journey, the sweeter the payoff.
The illusion of frictionless growth
Big tech has stripped friction not just from our lives, but from marketing itself. The rise of growth marketing promised speed and certainty: reach the right person, at the right time, with the right message, and watch the metrics rise. What once required time, debate, and creative conviction could be optimized in a dashboard.
But that frictionless model has reached its limit. Performance is plateauing, privacy rules are tightening, and brands are discovering that efficiency and effectiveness aren’t the same. The easy wins are all but gone.
Real, durable growth (the kind that builds equity, not just engagement) requires the kind of friction we’ve spent years trying to remove. It’s born from the hard conversations across departments about who we are and what we stand for. It grows in the creative tension between what the data says and what instinct knows. And it’s solidified in the repeated effort of showing up with a consistent message, in an inconsistent world.
Friction, in this sense, isn’t the enemy of progress. It’s the material from which progress is made.
Friction as a creative force
If the past decade was about removing friction, the next will be about designing for it. The truth is, creativity thrives under pressure. The best ideas rarely emerge in perfectly optimized systems. Instead, they emerge when humans come together and make the effort to navigate constraints, collisions, and the discomfort of not knowing the answer right away.
Friction is what forces you to interrogate assumptions, to ask complicated questions, to make deliberate choices. It’s what keeps teams from settling for generic ideas or convenient compromises. In a world where technology can deliver anything instantly, real meaning comes from the things that don’t come easily.
For brands, that means leaning into moments of productive tension: between speed and craft, scale and soul, automation and human touch. When managed well, these opposing forces don’t cancel each other out but create a different kind of energy.
Growth isn’t a straight line of optimization. It’s a series of creative struggles that push teams to build something new. Friction (or tension, or discomfort with the unknown) is the signal that you’re not just repeating what worked last year, but you’re inventing what might work next.
From growth marketing to growth invention
For years, the formula for growth was simple: Find efficiency, scale it, repeat. Performance marketing rewarded experimentation, agility, and an almost scientific obsession with optimization.
Today, the levers that once delivered predictable returns are losing power. Brands face rising performance costs, opaque algorithms, and audiences that have learned to scroll right past the familiar. They are tuning out brands that all look, sound, and act the same.
And the problem isn’t that growth marketing failed. It actually was too successful, ultimately optimizing the soul out of marketing. In removing friction, we also removed the tension and discomfort that forces originality and sparks new ways of creating and communicating.
The next era of growth will belong to the teams that can reintroduce (and, more importantly, embrace) the right kind of friction. That’s not chaos or inefficiency, but a working environment that rewards challenging assumptions and forces invention. Because that’s essentially what growth invention is: not repeating formulas, but continually tinkering with and reimagining systems.
It’s a mindset that asks the questions. What if speed isn’t always the answer? What if scale matters less than significance? What if the friction between brand and performance isn’t a problem to solve, but a balance to experiment with?
When teams embrace that kind of friction, growth stops being a race for attention and becomes a practice of deliberately building meaning.
