Unseen Unknown

From the way we create our identities and manage our health, to the way we employ therapy-speak at work and vote in elections, it’s apparent that people are increasingly being guided by feelings and intuition in places where they may have once relied on reasoning or ideology. This noetic, direct-knowing way of moving through the world may sound familiar to you. Perhaps a colleague was “guided” to change careers, or a friend decided to “detox” their personal life. Maybe you, yourself, have dabbled in any form of “energy” practices. None of these major decisions came from religious ideology. None of them came from scientific reasoning. They came from a third place of intuition, and this is an important cultural shift that revalues knowledge in our world. When 87% of Americans believe in at least one New Age spiritual belief, it's clear this third place of knowing is growing. But what is really interesting is what we see when we drill down into that majority. What we find is not so much spirituality but instead the very definition of noetics: knowledge that is felt to be true, inside, by the self, with intuition as its defining experiential characteristic. In this house episode, Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb gives us a clear, compelling look at what this third epistemology actually is and how we’ve seen this new belief system emerging for the past few years in our work at Concept Bureau. It is a domain that is both needed and felt, but not yet surfaced in our culture… and that is the formula of a golden opportunity. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: The Noetic Future of Culture and Brands (Concept Bureau)High Fidelity Society Is Reorganizing The World (Concept Bureau)Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (John Vervaeke)The Body Keeps The Score (Bessel van der Kolk, MD. Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

In this house episode, we speak with Concept Bureau strategist Rebecca Johnson about the concept of "weirdness" and brands. All humans are weird, and brands that are willing to venture into strange and bizarre territories have a chance to connect with their audiences in a deeply emotional way. From Puppy Monkey Baby to the Pet Rock, we analyze brand weirdness's impact on consumer engagement and differentiation. Weird is risky, but it’s also highly relatable when it’s done right. It can engender a form of trust that brands don’t usually experience with their users, while also signaling a brand’s values and vision. It’s also a strong force of creativity. Everything new feels weird at first. Instead of shying away, Rebecca talks about how to lean into the odd side of human nature and create something novel. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: Drawing Wisdom from the Weird: Understanding the Influence of Weird on Brands and the Future (Concept Bureau)Goodbye Relevance, Hello Relatability: The New Industry of Brand Connection (Concept Bureau)Interview: Kevin Kelly, editor, author, and futurist (Noahpinion)Private Dinner Party: Clothing Not Allowed (The New York Times)The Tube Girl is selling confidence — and her audience is lining up (The Washington Post)This Man Married a Fictional Character. He’d Like You to Hear Him Out. (The New York Times) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

What does it mean to be good at thinking? Or more importantly, thinking strategically? Most people answer this question by saying that in order to be good at thinking, you have to be knowledgeable. And while knowledge is certainly a critical input for good thinking, it’s just an input. It’s not the actual practice of being able to think well. Good strategic thinking is the culmination of mental processes that enable us to analyze, reason, solve problems, make decisions, and generate creative ideas in an efficient manner. In other words, it’s a skill. But we don’t treat it as one. It’s something we can get better at and refine, a muscle that we can strengthen, and yet outside of our daily work, we do very little to develop that muscle. And it’s a special muscle, because thinking strategically demands that we employ all kinds of cognitive abilities at once. In this house episode of Unseen Unknown, Jasmine and Jean-Louis break down his steps for how to think strategically, and to keep getting better and better at it. Don’t take your ability to think strategically for granted. Many of us only do a fraction of what is possible with our minds, but there is a lot more power available to us when we start to cultivate our thinking skills. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: The issue at Houston Airport — Occupied time & design. (Caus)Episode 369: Wait Wait...Tell Me! (99% Invisible Podcast)The Truth Behind Japan’s “Seven Minute Miracle” (BBN Times)Episode 130: Diana Chapman: Trusting Your Instincts (The Knowledge Project Podcast)Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns & Leadership (Andrea Mantovani on Medium)Conspicuous Commitment Is The Next Era Of Status (Concept Bureau) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Brands get lucky once, maybe twice every generation, when the rules of status change and social equity is suddenly up for grabs. Our Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb believes we are in the midst of one of those rare shifts right now, where we are moving from the self-indulgence of conspicuous consumption to the self-denial of what he calls “conspicuous commitment”. Public figures are devoting themselves to difficult new modalities, diets, spiritual quests, life practices and ideologies. Your friends are going on arduous, painful, yet revelatory, psychedelic retreats. All around us, wellness brands, food brands, medical brands, lifestyle brands tell us that self-denial is the new flex. No longer are we obsessed with flaunting material possessions and extravagant experiences; instead, we're witnessing the rise of people showcasing their unwavering dedication to self-work, vulnerability and personal growth. In a time when nihilism is literally everywhere, when pessimism gets clicks on headlines, when post-capitalist hopelessness is a trending aesthetic on TikTok and every meme deals in absurdity, conspicuous commitment stands out. In this episode, we also speak with W. David Marx, author of “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change” who has an alternative view of how status is tied to money more than ever, and what that means for an increasingly flattening culture. If you deal in any premium or luxury category, this is a must-listen. The ways we seek to distinguish ourselves have dramatically evolved as we prioritize discipline and personal growth over material success. That means everyone has to play by new rules. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: Conspicuous Commitment Is the Next Era Of Status (Concept Bureau)Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change by W. David Marx (Amazon)Money Can’t Buy Happiness. It Can’t Even Buy Status, a New Book Says. (New York Times)‘The Most Measured Man in Human History’ (Vice)High Fidelity Society is Reorganizing the World (Concept Bureau)Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt (The Atlantic) Brokenism (Tablet)Futurist Predicts Humans Will Achieve Immortality By 2030 (IFLScience)How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan (Amazon) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Instagram and LinkedIn.

What happens when the world suddenly reconfigures itself around a very different kind of relationship? The last 20 years of social innovation has leaned into weak ties: distant social relationships that allowed us to trust and extract value on platforms like Yelp, LinkedIn and Facebook. But the next 20 years are already shaping up to look very different. Strong social ties, our close-knit relationships with frequent interactions, are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of the social fabric. In this new era of increased intimacy with our immediate network, what we value and what we create move in a markedly new direction. We co-buy homes with friends, form politically aligned living communities, go deep into conversational chambers and band together in vision-led DAOs. The way we relate to one another is more profound, but also more narrow. What we demand of our network communities, and the brand landscape in general, becomes more high stakes. In this house episode, we’re talking to Concept Bureau’s Chief Strategist Jean-Louis Rawlence, about the huge implications for tech innovation, community building and business. When strong ties become the future of community, community becomes the new brand. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid (The Atlantic)We Went to Anti-Vax Burning Man (VICE News)Friends are buying homes together. Here's why. (NBC News)The New Get-Rich-Faster Job in Silicon Valley: Crypto Start-Ups (New York Times)Community ≠ Marketing: Why We Need Go-to-Community, Not Just Go-to-Market (Future, a16z)Shareholder Democracy Is Getting Bigger Trial Runs (New York Times)The Community Garden: The Case for Leaving FAANG Companies for Crypto (Paradigm)Crypto millionaires are pouring money into Central America to build their own cities (MIT Technology Review)The Town That Went Feral (The New Republic)Meet Moxie, a Social Robot That Helps Kids With Social-Emotional Learning (IEEE Spectrum) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Cults make effective brands, and today, they’re all around us. We engage with them on some level every day, and cult experiences have come to define so much of who we are as a society that you have to ask, how did we get here? Perhaps the most insidious way cults have influenced the world around us is in everyday language that’s meant to control behaviors and change perspectives. It’s language we use with friends and colleagues, language in our media and content, and language we hear coming from today’s most powerful CEOs, on branded websites and in keynote addresses. In this episode we’re talking with Amanda Montell, a language scholar and author of the critically acclaimed book, ‘Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism’ to understand why cults have had a resurgence in branding and in real life. You’d be surprised to know that some of the successful brands of our time were either founded by, owned by, or closely tied to cults. There’s a very good chance that some influencer you’re following has at least borrowed from cult culture or knowingly created a radicalized cult around themselves. There are the cults we joke about like SoulCycle or Supreme, but they use the same dynamics and tools as the cults we like to gasp at in documentaries. Cults and businesses have always been intertwined, and understanding how they use the power of language to move people is the first step to decoding how they work. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell (Amazon)What LuLaRoe and Other MLMs Have In Common With Cults (Bustle)Elon Musk Is Not Just a Celebrity (The Atlantic)Five tactics used to spread vaccine misinformation in the wellness community, and why they work (Washington Post) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Have you ever stopped to think about what ownership means to us as a culture? Many of us see it as an artifact of the legal system or something that’s decided in courts. We believe it is a self-evident concept that lives outside of us and isn’t really part of who we are, but rather a set of rules that affects our mortgages and our car payments. But ownership is in fact very much a part of what makes us human. Today and throughout history, a mere six competing stories of ownership have dictated how everything in the world is distributed. As resources have become scarcer, everyone from American homesteaders and ranchers, to tech leaders and consumer brands, have created ways to impose their own preferred ownership story in a world where what it means to “own” something is constantly evolving. We speak with Michael Heller and James Salzman, two of the world’s leading scholars and authorities on ownership, and co-authors of the book Mine!: How The Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives to understand how the concept of ownership has been upending the brand landscape. They explain to us how the rules of ownership change in every generation, and how those changes reveal the true brand frontier, the role of business, and most importantly, a society’s shifting values. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives (Amazon)Drinking Water: A History (Amazon)The Hidden Rule of Ownership (Reason Magazine) Why you don't own the right to recline in your airplane seat (Salon)Why barbed wire — yes, barbed wire — was as transformative as the telephone (TED)Mine or Not Mine? An Interactive Quiz on the Ownership Secrets Everyone Should KnowThe New York Times Is Giving Up Its Cooking Community Facebook Group With Over 77,000 Members (Buzzfeed News) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

For the fourth and final episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about seemingly new emerging forms of spirituality, and how new spiritual brands are positioning themselves to take advantage of our collective movement towards wanting to be both categorized but at the same time free from conventional binary definitions. Everything is being catered more and more to us as individuals—and religion seems to be shifting in that direction, too. Part of that shift is the way we understand what religion is in the first place, and our youngest generations are pushing us further toward newly remixed ideas of spirituality that borrow from a wide range of traditions. Allegra Hobbs is a journalist who’s explored the phenomenon of the Enneagram. The Enneagram is a newly-revived derivative of the teachings of the Bolivian-born philosopher, Oscar Ichazo, that practitioners believe can lead to improved self-awareness. She found that the Enneagram and other categorizing devices like it have also seemingly crossed over into the mainstream because we find ourselves in a perpetual state of isolation and alienation—something Rachel Lo discovered as she developed the dating app Struck, which helps match people based on their astrological signs. This episode explores what these new forms of spirituality mean and how they’ve come into the mainstream with the emergence of a new spiritual consumer, and while discussions about spirituality can be challenging for a number of reasons, our conversations ended up revealing surprising potential implications for equity and inclusion in everything from how we find meaningful relationships to how we conceptualize our work. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: “Mucho Mucho Amor” documentary about the legendary astrologer Walter Mercado (Netflix)Psychologist Carl Jung on synchronicity (Arts of Thought)The Personality Typing System for Every Personality Type (Allegra Hobbs’ piece on Medium’s Forge) Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World by Tera Isabella Burton (Amazon)Like Astrology and Natal Charts? Try the Struck Dating App (LA Times) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Every single culture and subculture - from states and governments to user segments and brand tribes - falls along the tight-loose continuum. A culture’s tightness or looseness affects people’s perceptions of threat, how they relate to each other, how they consume, and of course the narratives that shape the businesses and brands that form within that culture. In this third episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about the invisible systems that make a culture relaxed or rigid, and the surprising tradeoffs involved. Michele Gelfand is a cultural psychologist and author of the book ‘Rule Makers, Rule Breakers’. Her life’s work has been spent researching how tight and loose cultures form in the first place, and if and how they can actually be changed. We talk about how this affects every kind of brand, including international brands, political brands, lifestyle brands, service brands, and CPG. Of all the studied cultural phenomena out there, this is perhaps one of the most important in helping us understand the world at this very moment. Once you understand the concept, it will not only reveal a new perspective on the world of business and branding, it will also reveal the deeper logic beneath the many seemingly illogical things in the world that may have been on your mind lately. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: Rule Makers, Rule Breakers (Amazon)Tightness–looseness: A new framework to understand consumer behavior (Wiley)Why countries with 'loose', rule-breaking cultures have been hit harder by Covid (Guardian)One Reason Mergers Fail: The Two Cultures Aren’t Compatible (Harvard Business Review)Mindset Quiz: How Tight or Loose Are You? (MicheleGelfand.com) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

For the second episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about systems of class and taste. In the past 10 years, new brands have emerged, specifically in luxury and premium categories, that point to a divergence in our social systems around what class and taste are, and how they are achieved. Brand strategist and sociologist Ana Andjelic places brands like Telfar, Blenheim Forge, Fly By Jing and Brightland in the Modern Aspiration Economy. This emerging economy trades in taste, aesthetic innovation, curation and environmentalism. And what’s remarkable about these brands is that they have all successfully decoupled class from money, and taste from wealth. In her new book, The Business of Aspiration, Ana explores this decoupling and contrasts the Modern Aspiration Economy to the traditional economy where consumers once signaled their status through collecting commodities, Instagram followers, airline miles, and busy back-to-back schedules. Now, it’s about collecting knowledge, belonging to micro-communities, and leveraging influence. As Ana points out, this new cultural and environmental capital changes the way businesses and entire markets operate. We talked about where and when this decoupling started, the ways in which it has changed global markets permanently, and how brands can trade in this new capital. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: The Business of Aspiration (Ana Andjelic)Big Fashion’s Niche Future (The Sociology of Business)How Micro-Communities Transform Aspiration (The Sociology of Business) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Whether it’s brand, behavior, or culture, the more you dig into the systems that affect our lives the closer you’ll come to a conversation about capitalism. In this house episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis dig into a curious pattern that's emerging across all kinds of markets, a divergent behavior that’s starting to change the rules of the game for brands and consumers. As part of a larger series exploring how divergent systems are shaping the business landscape, we dig into what divergent systems are, how understanding the gap between goals and incentives can become a powerful tool to predict the success of a business and industry, and how the aging infrastructure of capitalism is creating white space for a new set of values, behaviors, and relationships that may come to define the next generation of brands and consumers. Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

From the gig economy to the passion economy, changing consumer values are inspiring new brands and business models for creators. Today we’re seeing the emergence of yet another model that’s challenging traditional work - something that VC and Level Ventures partner Sari Azout calls the participatory economy - where fans actually participate in a creator’s success. This model, along with the others, all boil down to customer happiness. Customer happiness may sound trite but it’s likely not what you think it is. It’s definitely not as simple as you think it is. And considering that the user is changing, it’s also something you can’t afford to overlook. We also speak with Ty Givens, customer experience strategist and founder of the WorkforcePro, about engineering the human connection that turns customers and users into fans. Ty talks about how leaders can truly make customer happiness core to their brands and the second order effects that it can have on the company, its employees, and the overall landscape. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: Creator Economy to Participatory Economy (Check Your Pulse #48)The Creative Economy, We're Not Really Strangers, and the Immediacy Filter (Check Your Pulse #34)On Intentional Work, Level Ventures, and What I’m Investing In (Sari Azout on Medium)Customers 2020 - A Progress Report (Walker)The Passion Economy and the Future of Work (a16z)How the Passion Economy will disrupt media, education, and countless other industries (Li’s Newsletter)Unbundling Work from Employment (Li’s Newsletter)Clean color brand Kosas leans further into personal care (Glossy) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Self-care and wellness are everywhere around us. From cereal boxes to the makeup counter to furniture rental, CBD sticks, mobile apps and coffee - a new mindset about how to be… but also how to consume, has settled in. As second nature as this may all seem right now, the concept of self-care actually comes from a very radical and politically charged place in recent American history. In this episode of Unseen Unknown, we speak with New York Times journalist and editor Aisha Harris about the connected history of politics, race, gender and identity that underpins the self-care space today, and how it’s many interpretations reflect our American culture. The history or self-care and wellness is deep and rich, stemming from the civil rights movement, Black and LGBT communities, the hippie wellness movement of the 1960s, and then going mainstream with a new political resurgence after the 2016 election. We also speak with founder Jerome Nichols of The Butters, a self-care beauty brand and cult favorite that signals a new approach in the space among upstarts looking to bring self-care back to its communal roots through very intentional branding and user experiences. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: A History of Self-Care (Slate)‘Self-care’: how a radical feminist idea was stripped of politics for the mass market (The Guardian)You Feel Like Shit: An Interactive Self-Care GuidePost-election, Minorities Are Taking Self-Defense Classes In Droves (Slate)Inside the $2,000-a-Month, Invite-Only Fitness Clubs (Elemental)How Self-Care Became So Much Work (Harvard Business Review)Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press)Understanding the radical history of self-care is essential to practicing it successfully (Hello Giggles)The Dark Truths Behind Our Obsession With Self-Care (Vice)Where Group Prayer Meets Group Fitness (New York Times) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

There is no doubt that right now we are living through the most consequential time of our generation to-date. Today’s social and political climate begs the big question, ‘Who are we, really?’ As BLM, societal tensions and the added pressure of a pandemic force us to take a candid look at ourselves, the clues to answering that question lie in our online and offline spaces. Author and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom joins us for an intimate discussion on how the mechanics of the internet, social media, digital marketing and real-life institutions amass power along racial and gender lines, and what they tell us about the American identity. We discuss how certain cultural narratives create our understanding of ourselves and others, how consumption is becoming increasingly political, how inequality manifests in our digital realms, and the role that brands play in the larger discussion. We also discuss how things like Instagram filters, memes, the technology disruption cycle and platform economics accelerate our notions of race, gender and class even more efficiently than their irl counterparts. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: Upending Stereotypes of Black Womanhood with “Thick” (The Daily Show)Hear To Slay: The Black Feminist Podcast Of Your Dreams (Luminary)Feminist and Sociology Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom (PBS/ Amanpour & Co.)The Coded Language of For-Profit Colleges (The Atlantic)What does it mean to be a ‘Karen’? Karens explain (The Guardian)When Luxury Stores Decorate Their Riot Barricades With Protest Art (New York Times)Does the U.S. Still Have a ‘Middle Class’? (The Atlantic) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

When Steven Galanis and his cofounders launched Cameo in 2016, they noticed two things happening in the celebrity landscape: 1) fame itself has blown up, with more celebrities existing than in any other time in history, and 2) that these celebrities collectively enjoy more fame than their counterparts in the past. The overall mass of celebrity is increasing, and Cameo was built as a marketplace to give that celebrity mass more efficiency in reaching its fan base, and of course, monetizing it. As Cameo approaches its millionth video made, the company has unlocked an enormous well of unmet demand, and become one of the fastest growing marketplaces in the US. In this episode, we speak with Cameo’s cofounder Steven Galanis about the cultural drivers that make a company like this possible during a time like now, and how he made some very specific decisions in positioning and branding that have started to pay off. We also speak with sociologist and author Chris Rojek about how the nature of celebrity culture has changed over recent years, spawning the modern lifestyle influencer and a culture of self-disclosure that provides this new figure with their audience. We also discuss Rojek’s research on parasocial relationships and “presumed intimacy” in order to understand what is happening in the space and the emotional layer of celebrity-fan relationships that drives our behavior. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: How Cameo Turned D-List Celebs Into a Monetization Machine (Marker) Cameo Is Weirder Than Anyone Expected (The Atlantic)Fame Attack (Chris Rojek)The Belle Gibson scandal: The rise of lifestyle gurus as micro-celebrities in low-trust societies (CityLibrary, University of London)Miquela, the Uncanny CGI Virtual Influencer, Signs With CAA (Variety)The a16z Maretplace 100 (Andreessen Horowitz) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Brands are facing the fact that loneliness has become a part of our identities, crisis or not. But you can’t talk about loneliness without talking about the meaning of rituals first. As society becomes more secularized and isolated, we struggle to find the self-defining connection that rituals once afforded us. The weekly gathering that separated work from rest, the rituals of birth and death, the seasonal rituals of growth and change - all of these have been fading from our identities, and perhaps accelerated out of our lives with the arrival of COVID-19. Many tech and D2C brands have rushed in to fill the gap, but as the after-effects of crisis set in and we emerge from the collective trauma of social distancing and major economic loss, loneliness and ritual will take on radically new meanings. In this episode, we speak with three people whose work and research has significantly impacted our understanding of loneliness and human connection today: Sasha Sagan, daughter of Carl Sagan and author of the social history book “For Small Creatures Such As We”, Harvard social scientist Kasley Killam, and Danielle Baskin, founder of the social connection app Dialup. If rituals and traditions are the glue that keeps us together and protect us from disconnection, then it's important to understand how they are created, what makes them work, and how they frame our perceptions of things like time, pain and meaning. We explore models of ritual, different frameworks for connection, and how loneliness can actually pivot our lives in surprising ways. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode: Sasha Sagan: "For Small Creatures Such As We" (Talks at Google)How To Find Meaning In Suffering (Scientific American)Finding Connection and Resilience During The Coronavirus Pandemic (Scientific American) 'It's like a remote sleepover': my week meeting quarantined strangers (The Guardian) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

A lot has been said about branding and behavior at the individual or tribal level, but perhaps even more interesting is how these concepts work at the government level. How can government bodies use different psychological and branding techniques to change behaviors around work, life, and crisis situations like the one we’re living in now with COVID-19? Even more importantly, how can choice, perception and permission be leveraged for a more fruitful society after a crisis has passed? Rory Sutherland, prolific writer and author of ‘Alchemy’, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy and TED Speaker whose videos have received over 6.5 million views talks to us about the psychology that is often missing from economic models, and how behavior can be profoundly changed not by punitive enforcement, but by speaking to our very human inclinations. Rory’s work has boldly explored human psychology and behavior for global airlines, international conglomerates and of course, governments. He calls himself an anarchist, some have called him a contrarian, and NPR has labeled him one of the leading minds in the world of branding. In our conversation with him, we explore models of human behavior, social norms, belief systems and the nuance of what he calls America’s “gloriously optimistic consumer base”. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode: What’s The Difference Between Real and Perceived Value?Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life (Harper Collins)A Few Things Governments Could Learn From Marketers (TEDx) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

The big question: how is a brand supposed to act during a pandemic? How can CEOs and brand owners serve their users in a meaningful way while still struggling to survive themselves? It’s a difficult situation that requires sensitivity, listening and an open mind. In this house episode, Jean-Louis and Jasmine survey the current brand landscape for examples of companies that are doing it right. From Marriott’s open display of vulnerability to Parsley Health’s implicit giving of permission and Cameo’s smartly aligned feel-good content - the answer to this dilemma is never as simple as “We’re here for you” founder letters and reduced prices. To really serve your users, you have to read the room and know one thing: business may be slowing, but culture is accelerating. While all of us are holed away in our homes and commerce quiets down, our norms and beliefs are silently evolving in the background. Among other things, automation will change our relationship to work, a retreat to nostalgia will further the divide between Gen Y and Z, and a sense of self-sufficiency will change how we view our most intimate spaces. Throughout the episode we try to predict what the future may hold in a time of quarantine because, like all strategy, you can’t see your next move if you can’t envision how the world will change. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode: The Moral Meaning of the Plague (New York Times)Is This the End of Influencing as We Knew It? (Vanity Fair)Health care workers aren’t just “heroes.” We’re also scared and exposed. (Vox)What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage (Marker)‘You have to be hypersensitive’: As the coronavirus spreads, standard PR strategies are falling flat (Glossy)Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How. (Politico) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Times of uncertainty have a way of revealing the mindset of a society, and today’s imminent threats - from COVID-19 to political instability and global warming - are revealing a mental shift that emotion-led brands are responding to. A new league of brands has created businesses around beautifully designed, high style, premium disaster kits and products that are suddenly relevant in a space that’s gotten very little attention in the past. Meanwhile, the world’s elite have invested in luxury bunkers, exotic real estate and indulgent doomsday plans. When did disaster preparedness become so fashionable? What can these companies teach us about branding in a time of crisis? We speak with BBC and Vox journalist Colleen Hagerty, eschatologist and end-of-world expert Phil Torres, and founders Ryan Kuhlman and Lauren Tafuri of the popular disaster kit brand Preppi to explore the different narratives and deep rooted human beliefs that make sense of this trend. Don’t be misled by beautiful design and luxury veneers. There’s something going on in the subtext here that can explain a meaningful shift in our cultural values. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode: Exploring Our Endless Obsession With the End (Psychology Today) Psychology Reveals the Comforts of the Apocalypse (Scientific American) Most Americans are not prepared for a disaster. Now survival kits are all over Instagram. (Vox) The US Town Prepping for ‘Devastating’ Disaster (BBC) Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich (The New Yorker) How To Think Like A Brand Strategist (including a study on Costco) (Medium) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Brands like Ring and Billie leverage the uncertainty of our changing value systems to create new interest in old paradigms. In other words, they play with cultural constructs: arbitrary systems determined by our culture or our community, rather than a truth that stems from an immovable aspect of human nature. They prove that when constructs start to change, real brand opportunities start to emerge. In this house episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis talk about some of the biggest constructs defining our lives right now, from the nuclear family and privacy to gender and personal hygiene. These are constructs in limbo, creating a new brand whitespace for smart companies to play in. They are also constructs that affect our everyday decisions. Some may seem inconsequential, others may seem like they are fading, but don't be fooled. Many of our archaic constructs are alive and well, dictating how we move within our lives. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode: The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake (The Atlantic) How Ring Transmits Fear To American Suburbs (Vice/ Motherboard) Resonate (Nancy Duarte)Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.