KFC Australia just tried to position fried chicken as health food.

Amazon and Pinterest attributed their massive layoffs to “AI restructuring” to appease investors, while the real reasons involved over hiring during the pandemic and missed financial targets.

Federal prosecutors indicted the founder and former executive of First Brands (known for Autolite), accusing them of a long-term scheme to lie to lenders about massive hidden debt and faking invoices.

Despite "Join Life" collections and 2025 sustainability targets, Zara's core business model—releasing 500+ new designs weekly—drives overconsumption, high carbon emissions, and substantial waste.

AI-washing, green-rinsing, DEI theater, metric laundering…..the list of corporate lie categories goes on.

This keeps happening. Not the gap between announcement and reality (that’s always existed). What’s new is the size of the gap, the confidence with which it’s delivered, and how little anyone seems to give a f when it’s exposed.

It’s called promise inflation.

As leadership visibility increases and accountability dies, organizations expand what they publicly commit to without a proportional expansion in systems, incentives, or enforcement to support those commitments.

When signaling is rewarded faster than delivery, promises naturally grow larger while execution capacity remains constrained.

Pierre Bourdieu wrote about how elites use cultural capital to distinguish themselves: taste, references, subtle behaviors that signal belonging. But promise inflation operates differently. It’s not about distinguishing yourself through what you know or how you behave. It’s about distinguishing yourself through what you claim. The bolder the claim, the higher the status. Articulation has become its own currency, and the market has learned to price it.

Stock prices jump on announcements. Follower counts grow on brand claims. Funding rounds close before proving product-market fit. I sat in a pitch meeting last year where a founder explicitly said “we need to 10x the language” to close their Series B. Wut?

The incentive structure is so clear it barely needs stating: get rewarded for what you say now, maybe get audited for what you do later. And “maybe” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

What’s stranger is that we’re living through this in a culture that supposedly prizes authenticity and accountability. We’re chronically online. Everything leaves a receipt. “Receipts culture” is a whole “gotcha” genre of content. And yet.

The promises keep getting bigger without any accountability on follow-through. Despite us catching brands and being horrified, the gap generates almost no friction.

Part of this is just numbness. We’ve been lied to so many times - by institutions, by platforms, by people we trusted, by sad orange men - that outrage doesn’t stick. The cycle moves too fast. By the time a promise is broken, there’s a new announcement to absorb, a new claim to evaluate, a new narrative demanding attention. The discourse moves on before consequences arrive.

But I think there’s something else happening too.

We’ve lost the ability to distinguish between aspiration and commitment.

Brands have learned to speak in the language of values - transformation, sustainability, equity, customer-obsession - without the infrastructure to support any of it. And we’ve learned to absorb it as background noise. When every company is “on a journey” toward something better, the phrase stops meaning anything. It’s not a promise, it’s a vibe, and vibes are all that matter, right? RIGHT??

The result is a kind of linguistic inflation that mirrors the economic kind. The words get bigger to compensate for the value staying the same. “Good” becomes “great” becomes “world-class” becomes “transformative” becomes “revolutionary.” Each escalation demands the next. And anyone who refuses to escalate sounds like they’re not serious.

I work with brands in really high-stakes moments - M&A, rebrands, leadership transitions, fundraising. The pressure to inflate in those moments is suffocating. Everyone wants a clean story and a confident narrative (storytelling remains a trend!).

The uncomfortable truth is that the leaders who resist this aren’t rewarded for their honesty; they’re often punished for it in fact. Underselling gets you ignored and admitting uncertainty gets you passed over, leaders can’t just be “figuring it out.” The people willing to over-promise get the rooms, the press, the capital - at least in the short term.

Long-term consequences exist, but they’re diffuse, hard to attribute, and easy to outrun in a fail fast, break shit culture that rewards risk more than outcomes.

So what do you do if you’re someone trying to build with integrity inside a system that punishes it?

I don’t have a clean answer or a fix society wand. The brands I’ve seen navigate this well don’t resist promising altogether - that’s a losing strategy. Instead, they get surgical about what they’re promising and what they’re not. They build in public accountability before someone else forces it on them and treat their own skepticism as a feature rather than something to overcome.

But I won’t pretend that works in every room.

The question I keep sitting with isn’t whether brands sound aligned. Most of them do. Getting messaging right has never been easier, especially now with highly trained LLM beep-boops.

The question is what happens when the gap between words and actions stops mattering? When we stop expecting follow-through. When broken promises become priced in. When the only people still tracking the gap are the ones who got burned by it.

Maybe we’re already there? Maybe promise inflation is just the new normal, a cost of doing business in an attention economy where bold, exciting click-worth claims beat the honest ones.

But I don’t think that’s a stable equilibrium. Systems built on inflated promises tend to correct eventually. The question is just what the correction looks like, and who pays for it when it comes.

If you want a claimable promise that you can stand behind, let’s talk.