Raymond Loewy was responsible for some of the most recognized visual identities in the twentieth century.
The Lucky Strike cigarette package. The Coca-Cola vending machine. The Greyhound bus. The Shell logo that still runs today. The S-1 locomotive. The interior of the Apollo command module. Over a career that spanned six decades, Loewy designed objects that billions of people interacted with daily, often without knowing his name.
When asked what made his work succeed where others failed, he described a principle he called MAYA: Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable.
The idea is precise. Human beings are attracted to novelty, but they are anchored by familiarity. Push something too far into novelty and the Old Brain treats it as a threat. Stay too close to the familiar and the Old Brain categorizes it as invisible. The space that works is the narrow band where something is different enough to notice and familiar enough to trust.
Why Your Old Brain Filters Out Most of What Is New
The Old Brain's filtering system exists for a reason.
For most of human history, genuinely unfamiliar things warranted caution. A new sound at night. An unknown plant. A face you had never seen before. These required evaluation before engagement. The nervous system that defaulted to caution in the face of novelty survived. The one that engaged with the unfamiliar freely took on more risk.
That filtering impulse did not disappear with modernity. It simply redirected. Your customers' Old Brains are still running the same calculus in an office, on a shopping aisle, or on a website.
When something new appears, the brain asks a rapid, unconscious question: can I map this to something I already know? If yes, the familiar framework extends to the new thing and evaluation proceeds from that foundation. If no, if the thing is genuinely without a prior pattern in memory, the Old Brain adds friction to the evaluation. Not hostility. Just resistance. Extra work. A cost that sometimes means the thing gets filed as "not worth the energy."
This is why revolutionary products almost never launch as revolutions. The iPhone was described as "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator." Three familiar things your audience already owned. The new thing was framed through existing mental patterns, not as a break from them.
The Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable Equation
Loewy was solving the same problem every marketer, brand builder, and product designer faces: how do you make something genuinely new without triggering the Old Brain's threat response?
His answer was to anchor the new in the familiar before revealing the distance.
If you want to sell something surprising, make it familiar enough first. If you want to sell something familiar, introduce enough difference to break the invisibility. The needle moves in both directions depending on where the brand currently sits.
The new entrant in a crowded market tends to look too similar to established options and gets overlooked. The solution is not to be radically different but to identify the one distinguishing element, the familiar signal that telegraphs "you already understand something about what this is," then build contrast from that anchor.
The legacy brand that has been in market for decades faces the opposite problem. The Old Brain has filed it so thoroughly under "known" that it stops registering. The solution is not a rebrand that erases equity but an evolution that introduces enough freshness to break the pattern without breaking the trust.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In building a brand, the MAYA principle applies at every level.
Your visual identity should be familiar enough that someone in your category recognizes it as belonging to the category, and different enough that they recognize it as yours specifically. If you look too much like everyone else, the Old Brain sorts you into the commodity pile. If you look like nothing that has come before, the Old Brain adds evaluation cost that many prospects will not pay.
Your messaging should connect to a need or frame the audience already holds, before it introduces anything new. The human brain learns through analogy. "This is like X, except it does Y differently" is a faster path to understanding than "this is something entirely new." Give the Old Brain the familiar anchor. Then introduce the distance.
Even your sales conversation follows this logic. Before you introduce anything unfamiliar, find the familiar ground: the problem your prospect already recognizes, the category they already know, the outcome they already want. Build from there.
The Brand That Is Too Different
The most common mistake I see in ambitious, creative brand-building is optimizing entirely for differentiation.
Be bold. Be disruptive. Break convention. All of this is well-intentioned. And all of it ignores what the Old Brain needs as a precondition to engagement.
You cannot disrupt an audience that has not yet found its way in the door.
The most innovative brands in history found the door first. They built enough familiarity to earn entry. Then they showed you something you had never seen before. In that order.
Are you being too different, too fast? Or are you not different enough to be worth noticing? That is the question MAYA asks, and the honest answer usually points to where the work is.
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Paul Larche is the author of The Divided Brain (BookLife Prize 10/10, Editor’s Pick) and a behavioural branding strategist.