Two people walk into the same restaurant.
The lights are low, candles flicker softly on the tables.
One smiles, feeling a wave of calm. To them, candlelight means romance — warmth, love, and connection.
The other stiffens slightly. For them, candlelight recalls funerals, mourning, and loss.
Same room. Same glow. Two completely different worlds.
That moment has always fascinated me.
How can the same light create opposite emotions?
How can one person’s comfort be another’s discomfort?
It’s as if we don’t see the world as it is — we see it as we are.
And that thought took me back to something I’ve been reading about and watching for years — the double-slit experiment, one of the strangest discoveries in science.
We Don’t See Reality — We Interpret It
In the double-slit experiment, light behaves like a wave — pure potential — until someone observes it.
The moment it’s watched, it collapses into a single outcome. Observation itself changes what is.
That isn’t poetic exaggeration — it’s physics.
And the more I studied it, the more I realized how deeply it connects to human life.
We don’t see the Earth as it truly is; we see it as our biology allows.
Our eyes capture only a narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum — a slim window we call “visible light.”
Bees see ultraviolet patterns on flowers. Snakes detect heat signatures. Birds sense magnetic fields.
Even the air we breathe is full of energy and particles that we simply can’t see.
Our brains filter this complexity down to what we can handle — not for truth, but for survival.
They edit the universe into a manageable illusion, one that feels solid and familiar.
So when you and I look at that same candle, we aren’t really seeing the same thing.
We’re each seeing what our biology, our memories, and our experiences allow us to see.
That’s why I believe everything humans create — our art, our language, our cities, our technology, and yes, our brands — is filtered through the same perceptual lens.
We don’t build reality from scratch; we build it from what we understand of reality.
Marketing, then, isn’t an invention apart from life — it’s an extension of how life itself works.
Brands, like everything else, exist in endless possibility until they are observed.
And once they’re observed, they become whatever the observer’s perception allows.
The Consumer as the Observer
Before a consumer experiences your brand, it exists in a cloud of possibilities.
It could be modern or old-fashioned, affordable or premium, inspiring or ordinary.
But the moment someone interacts with it — sees your billboard, scrolls your post, walks into your store, or uses your product — their mind collapses all those possibilities into one reality:
“This is who this brand is.”
And when I say “see,” I don’t just mean eyesight.
Seeing includes every sensory and emotional encounter — your tone of voice, your color choices, your scent, your speed of service, the music in your store.
Each of these is a point of observation. Each one collapses meaning into perception.
It’s the same as those two people in the restaurant.
Same candlelight, different meanings.
The brand didn’t change — the observers did.
That’s marketing’s humbling truth: people don’t see your brand; they see themselves through it.
The Brand as the Observed
But there’s another layer.
In physics, particles behave differently when observed.
In marketing, brands do too.
When we know we’re being watched, we act differently — it’s called the Hawthorne effect.
A restaurant sharpens its service when it spots a reviewer.
A business becomes overly polite when journalists start calling.
A social page suddenly posts its community work once followers are paying attention.
Observation turns brands into performers.
And that’s not necessarily bad — it’s awareness.
When you know you’re visible, you become deliberate.
But there’s a risk: if you try to perform for everyone, you stop meaning anything to anyone.
The candlelight can’t mean romance and mourning at the same time.
You must choose whose perception defines your light.
Perception and the Right Eyes
That’s where audience comes in — not as a marketing checkbox, but as an act of focus.
Different observers collapse different realities.
A youthful clothing shop in Manzini might blast amapiano not to annoy older shoppers, but to signal belonging to the young.
A local brewery might use rough, hand-drawn labels that feel “authentic” to some and “cheap” to others.
Each choice invites a certain type of observer to see the brand in the right light.
You can’t please everyone, not because you shouldn’t, but because you can’t exist the same way for everyone.
The observer decides which version of you becomes real.
Seeing Creates Reality
Once you understand that, everything about marketing changes.
It’s no longer about controlling the message — it’s about shaping perception.
You stop obsessing over what you show and start caring about what people actually see.
Because what they see depends on who they are, what they’ve lived through, and what the symbols around them mean.
To one person, red means love. To another, danger. To another, a sale.
E200 for a perfume might whisper “luxury” to one buyer and shout “wasteful” to another.
Same facts, different frames.
Marketing isn’t about creating one truth; it’s about shaping the conditions of observation that allow your desired truth to appear.
Just like those two people under the candlelight, two consumers can experience the same brand and walk away with opposite feelings.
And that’s okay.
The goal isn’t to change their light — it’s to understand which eyes you were meant to be seen through.
The Real Work of Branding
Once you see marketing this way, everything softens and sharpens at the same time.
You stop shouting for attention and start shaping what attention reveals.
You become intentional about sound, color, language, and timing — because each one is an invitation for meaning to form.
When the right people see your brand, you don’t need to convince them.
They collapse it into the version of reality that already feels true to them.
Because in the end, the candlelight doesn’t change.
The glow stays the same.
What changes is who’s watching — and what that light means to them.
Observation doesn’t just record reality.
It creates it.
And in marketing, that means every consumer, in their own quiet way, becomes the co-creator of your brand.
Looking Ahead: Framing Reality
So the question becomes: if observation creates reality, how do we guide what that reality becomes?
How do we frame the moment of being seen so that what people collapse into meaning aligns with who we really are?
That’s where we go next — into the quiet architecture of perception.
Because once you understand that people don’t see the world as it is but as it’s framed, you begin to see that marketing isn’t just communication.
It’s construction.
Next in the series: Framing Reality — The Psychology of Meaning.