Bring back businesses with lore. I want weird history. Inside jokes. Strong opinions. Give me something.
A lot of business marketing is getting objectively better in useful ways. Websites are clearer. Positioning is tighter. Navigation is simpler. Calls to action make more sense. Copy is shorter. People can figure out what a business does without wandering through six paragraphs of throat-clearing.
Good. I am not arguing for the clutter back.
But there is a point where useful compression becomes over-compression, and the business itself starts to disappear.
The homepage gets cleaner. The service descriptions get sharper. The old stories get cut because they are not essential to the buying decision. The odd language gets standardized. The founder's long explanation becomes a three-word value proposition. The strange policy gets rewritten as a generic benefit. Eventually the marketing may be clear, competent, and almost impossible to distinguish from another competent business selling the same thing.
That is the part I want to be more suspicious of.
Facts are not the same thing as lore#
A founding date is a fact. A company timeline is a collection of facts. A list of locations, awards, certifications, and milestones is mostly facts.
Those facts can establish longevity, legitimacy, or experience. They are not automatically lore.
Lore is the stuff people remember, repeat, argue about, or use to explain why a business is the way it is.
It might be the menu item that has survived every redesign because regulars would riot if it disappeared. It might be the old mistake that permanently changed how a company handles a job. It might be a founder's stubborn opinion that became operating practice. It might be an object nobody throws away, a phrase customers keep using, a tradition employees explain to new hires, or the reason an apparently odd policy exists.
None of that needs to be cute.
Lore is not manufactured founder mythology, random personal trivia, forced local references, an invented mascot, a generic "we're a family" paragraph, or personality sprinkled onto the copy because a brand exercise said the business needed more personality.
Those are decorations if they are not true.
Lore is earned.
Marketing is a compression system#
A lot of good marketing work is compression.
What do you sell? Who is it for? Why should someone choose you? What proof matters? What is the next action? What can be removed?
Those are good questions. I ask versions of them constantly. They make websites better because they force a business to decide what a stranger actually needs to understand.
But they do not naturally ask another useful question:
What about this business would disappear if the people who know its history stopped telling the stories?
Search engine optimization can compress a page toward the terms people use. Conversion work can compress it toward the decision. Positioning can compress a complicated business into a legible promise. Design can compress visual noise into hierarchy. A template can compress a hundred possible page structures into one dependable pattern.
None of that is the villain. Neither is artificial intelligence.
The problem comes when every interesting detail gets the same test—Does this help explain the offer right now?—until everything that explains why this particular business feels like itself is gone.
You have made the business easier to understand and harder to remember.
I preserved the facts. I mostly did not publish the stories.#
This applies to ZacWine.com too.
My résumé covers more than twenty years of work. It can tell you that I trained digital sales across 33 East Coast dealerships, worked in customer experience at Gazelle, ran event marketing for local businesses, owned digital acquisition for a 15-location healthcare organization, and later did consulting and nonprofit work.
Those facts matter. They show where I have been and some of what I was responsible for.
ZacWine.com does a different kind of compression. It tells you what I do now, who I work with, and where I might be useful.
Both are doing their jobs.
A résumé is an archive of facts. It is not necessarily an archive of lore.
The résumé preserves the roles, dates, metrics, skills, and projects. It does not preserve most of the ordinary stories around them: the phrases that kept coming up, the opinions that got stronger with experience, the things we tried and dropped, the odd details that mattered, or the reasons certain habits survived.
Those stories exist. Most of them simply are not in the résumé or on ZacWine.com.
That gap is the point.
Clutter and lore are not opposites#
The answer is not to keep every old sentence because it has history attached to it.
Some clutter is just clutter. An outdated service, a long internal explanation, a meaningless award, or a page nobody needs does not become sacred because it is old.
The distinction I care about is simpler:
Clutter is information that does not deserve the reader's attention. Lore is specificity that tells you something true about the business and is worth preserving.
A story can be true and still not belong on the homepage. A tradition can matter internally without helping a customer. A founder opinion can be distinctive and wrong. Preserving lore does not mean turning every page into a scrapbook.
Sometimes the right place is an About page. Sometimes it is a project story, a product description, a field note, a tool explanation, a caption, or one sentence where the context makes the odd detail useful. Sometimes it should stay inside the business until there is a reason to tell it.
The businesses I remember usually have some residue#
The businesses that stick with me are rarely memorable because every sentence was perfectly optimized.
Something has residue.
There is a reason the sign still looks that way. There is a product somebody refuses to discontinue. There is a policy with a story behind it. There is a phrase the owner has apparently said a thousand times. There is an old scar in the operation that explains a new rule.
That residue gives customers something to repeat and employees a way to explain the place. It gives marketing material competitors cannot copy by changing the nouns.
And it gives clean marketing something to be clean around.
Otherwise clarity can become a solvent.
I do not think I have solved this#
I have preserved a long career in job titles, bullet points, metrics, screenshots, old files, current work, and a website that is getting much clearer about what belongs on it.
That is useful.
I have preserved the facts. I have not put much of the lore anywhere public.
The answer is not to reverse the cleanup or stuff the website with autobiography. A commercial website has a job. So does a résumé. Compression is necessary.
I just do not want necessary compression to become accidental deletion.
Clean up what deserves to disappear.
Be much more careful with the stuff people will still tell stories about.