LOVED OR SHOVED
There is a rather wonderful, if occasionally maddening, quirk in the human psyche which means that even our most beautifully calibrated instruments of reason tend to go a little haywire when pointed directly at the shimmering, unpredictable aurora of human affection. For years, those of us fascinated by the delicate dance between a person and a product, a customer and a company, operated under the charmingly optimistic belief that this connection could be mapped, graphed, and predicted with the cool precision of a Newtonian physicist. We built our grand strategic orreries, polished our demographic lenses, and trusted that if we just crunched the numbers with enough vigour, human loyalty would eventually reveal itself to be a tidy, solvable equation. And yet, for all our efforts, the results kept coming back with a mischievous, almost human, unpredictability. The universe, it seemed, was not unfolding as it should.
This book, LOVED OR SHOVED, was conceived in that very gap between elegant theory and messy reality. It grew out of a thousand conversations, held in hushed tones over coffees of varying qualities and temperatures, with brilliant minds who confessed to a shared and perplexing bewilderment. They were doing everything by the book, ticking every box on the strategic checklist, yet they found themselves staring across a silent chasm at the very people they sought to serve. Their magnificent efforts were met with one of two starkly different responses: either a fierce, unshakeable love that defied all logical explanation, or an equally baffling indifference, a swift and decisive shove into the outer darkness. This wasn’t a failure of diligence; it was a crisis of understanding. It was the dawning realisation that the maps we were using, for all their intricate detail, were showing us a different world from the one our customers actually inhabited. The instruments were fine; we were simply measuring the wrong phenomenon.
Our first instinct, naturally, was to tinker. We sought sharper data, cleverer algorithms, more emotionally resonant colour palettes for our advertisements. These things helped, of course, in the way that fitting a faster engine to a ship helps it to travel more quickly in the wrong direction. The fundamental issue remained: we were treating the human heart as a target to be acquired, rather than a universe to be explored. We were trying to solve a problem of affection with the tools of administration. What was needed was not a minor course correction, but a complete and joyous philosophical recalibration, a new way of seeing the entire cosmos of human connection.
And so, let us imagine that a brand is not a corporate entity, but a celestial body, a vibrant star blazing in the psychological firmament. Its power, its gravitational pull, comes not from its market cap or its physical assets, but from something far more potent and profound: its narrative mass. This is the accumulated weight and coherence of its stories, its actions, its promises kept, and its identity expressed. It is the stuff of meaning, the substance that attracts us not to what it sells, but to what it is. It is where the brilliance and attraction of a star become conjoined with the meaning and inspiration of a story. From this new Loved Or Shoved perspective, we describe this conjoining of a star and a story as a STOR.
From this radiant core, the STOR emits its energy, its light. And we, the audience, are not static points on a demographic chart; we are in orbit. Our relationship is defined by our Emotional Proximity, a felt sense of closeness to that narrative core. Are we drawn into a stable, life-affirming orbit by a STOR whose story resonates with our own? Or do we find ourselves in a decaying trajectory, spiralling away because its light feels inauthentic, its gravity weak or its narrative hollow? This is the true dynamic at play. The ultimate question is not whether a customer has purchased, but where they are in their emotional orbit, and in which direction they are travelling. The great drama of being loved or shoved is simply the final, observable consequence of these deep, invisible gravitational tides.
This book, therefore, is not a manual filled with seven easy steps to guaranteed adoration. The human heart, thankfully, is far too gloriously complex for such shabby reductionism. It is, instead, an invitation to become a different kind of explorer. It is a new lens, a conceptual telescope, designed to help you gaze upon the familiar landscape of your work and see the hidden constellations of meaning, the invisible forces of narrative, and the profound psychological currents that truly determine your fate. It is for the leader who feels that the soul has gone out of the machine, for the strategist who yearns to connect on a more human level, and for the creator who dreams of building something that doesn’t just sell, but endures because it matters.
It is, I hope, a journey that will feel both exhilarating and, at times, daunting. It asks us to trade the comforting certainty of spreadsheets for the richer ambiguity of stories. It requires us to listen with a third ear for the unspoken desires and deeper truths of the human condition. And, most critically, it insists that we accept the profound ethical responsibility that comes with this knowledge. To understand the mechanics of human affection is a privilege, and it comes tethered to a non-negotiable duty of care. The goal is to learn how to genuinely earn love by building things of authentic value and integrity, not to master the dark arts of manufacturing a cheap and fleeting imitation. The difference between the two is the difference between a star and a black hole.
Ultimately, this is a work of profound optimism. It is rooted in the belief that commerce, at its very best, can be a force for genuine human connection, and that the most successful enterprises of the future will be those that are the most authentically, courageously, and empathetically human. The choice to be loved or shoved is not a random lottery; it is the direct result of the narrative you build and the emotional reality you create. It is my sincere hope that this new way of seeing will inspire you to build a STOR of such dazzling light and irresistible narrative mass that to be in its orbit feels like the most natural and wonderful place in the universe to be. The adventure begins now.