Field Notes Podcast by Brand Shepherd

Twenty years in, and it is time for a new experiment. This week’s Field Notes announces the reimagining of shepx into a brand experience lab where we take public risks, fail openly, and share what we learn along the way. Four experiments are launching with it: a website built on Cloudflare’s new EmDash CMS instead of WordPress, custom brand music produced with AI, 3D-printed branded hard goods, an...

Here is a fast, reliable test for what your next creative engagement is going to be like: listen for how the creative uses the word “art.” If they call their commercial work art, brace yourself. This week’s Field Notes gets into why the century-old distinction between art (self-expression) and design (problem solving) still matters, why so many creative professionals have quietly lost that distinc...

Every new technology has a stated reason people use it and an actual reason people use it. The gap between the two is where brands either lead or get left behind. This week’s Field Notes gets into three underlying reasons people keep coming back to AI that almost nobody in leadership positions is talking about. All three point to the same thing: customers are experiencing something in their AI con...

Here is a strange observation: in over 30 years of doing this work, nobody has ever sent me a video and said “you need to watch this. It will challenge how you think about your business.” Articles, yes. Books, constantly. Posts on LinkedIn, all the time. But never a video. This week’s Field Notes explores why that is, and what it tells us about the mediums of influence in professional life. Video...

History is rhyming, and the rhyme should concern us. This week’s Field Notes is more philosophical than usual. Dan walks through the structural parallel between the Industrial Revolution and the current AI moment: the unchecked deployment, the cultural backlash that followed (the Arts and Crafts movement), the eventual synthesis (the Bauhaus), and the dark consequence almost nobody wants to talk a...

Print is back, and brands are starting to ask the right questions about how to step into it without getting burned. This week’s Field Notes covers three things every digital-first brand needs to know before ordering their first print run: why color will not match your screen and what to do about it, why Pantone is no longer the industry standard (and the strange Adobe falling-out that caused it),...

Buy low, sell high. The same logic that drives investing applies to brand building, and right now is a buy-low moment. This week’s Field Notes makes the case that mid-2026, with morale low and the economy strained, is exactly the right time to build your brand from the inside out. Dan walks through how Vibe, Tribe & Why® works internally (applied to HR, talent, and culture) just as powerfully as i...

Commencement season 2026 has a theme: crowds booing anyone who mentions AI on stage. It is a loud moment, and it is worth paying attention to, not because the outrage is right, but because of what it signals to every brand quietly building with AI while everyone else reacts to it. This week’s Field Notes is Dan’s honest assessment of where public opinion on AI actually stands, what savvy brands ar...

Your Why is not a philosophy exercise. It is not a whiteboard session. It is one sentence, and if your team can’t agree on it in ten minutes, that difficulty is already telling you something. This is Part 3 of a three-part Field Notes series on the origins of Vibe, Tribe & Why®. This episode covers Why, the component that connects Vibe and Tribe into something that actually works. It’s the simples...

Your logo is not your brand. It has to capture your brand’s vibe, but the brand itself is something larger than that. This is Part 2 of a three-part Field Notes series on the origins of Vibe, Tribe & Why®, Brand Shepherd’s proprietary brand-building framework. This episode covers Vibe, the presence component, where it came from, what it actually covers, and why a logo design roadblock 20 years ago...

This is the first of three episodes digging into the background of Vibe, Tribe & Why® , Brand Shepherd’s proprietary brand-building framework. Each part has a history. Each part continues to evolve. This episode is about Tribe . And the place to start is a story. The Interview That Never Aired A film crew came to the Brand Shepherd office to conduct an interview. The setup was straightforward: sit...

Twenty years in, and Brand Shepherd is busier than the portfolio suggests. Welcome to the first installment of From the Pasture , a quarterly Field Notes series where I pull back the curtain (as far as the NDAs allow) on what Brand Shepherd is actually working on. If you’ve visited brandshepherd.com recently and wondered why the case studies haven’t kept pace with the calendar, this episode explai...

A lot of creative professionals are losing sleep over AI. Brand Shepherd is not one of them. In this episode of Field Notes, Dan Crask speaks candidly about what it actually looks like when a 20-year branding agency takes a clear-eyed, disciplined look at AI tools like Claude, Claude Design, Firefly, and Runway, and decides to welcome them rather than resist them. The conversation covers why “AI p...

Cloudflare just launched EmDash, a new CMS built with AI agents from the ground up. Brand Shepherd breaks down why this WordPress alternative is worth watching. Get full access to Brand Shepherd at brandshepherd.substack.com/subscribe

There are things people expect when they start working with Brand Shepherd. They expect to dig into brand identity. They expect to talk about what makes them different. They expect to come out the other side with clearer messaging and a stronger sense of who they are and who they’re for. What they don’t expect is to be surprised. But they almost always do. And the surprises almost always come in o...

Here’s episode 41’s blog companion: 3 Things Brand Shepherd Does for Every Ag Brand Field Notes, Episode 41 | Brand Shepherd It’s the late 80s. A 13-year-old kid in a small northern Illinois town climbs onto a bus in the wee hours of the morning, headed for a cornfield. For several weeks, that bus runs the same route, depositing a crew of teenagers into fields owned by Cargill seed, where they wal...

The Expert Generalist: AI’s Most Valuable (and Long-Overlooked) Player Field Notes by Brand Shepherd Every major technology shift creates new roles. Think back through the last few decades: the desktop computer, the internet, mobile, and social media. Each one reshuffled the deck. Some existing roles evolved. Entirely new ones appeared out of nowhere. AI is doing the same thing right now. And we’r...

Don’t have time to listen right now? We got your back. Here’s the TL;DL version: * Gate Keep Everything: single page, clear value, clear CTA, sign up to access more. * Embrace the Prompt: give visitors, customers, and prospects a prompt to work with about your brand’s Vibe, Tribe, & Why®, and then lead a discussion with them on a platform. * Be Ruthlessly Pro-Human : Get a fax number. Drop all tec...

This week’s Field Notes by Brand Shepherd is an “ audiobook ” version of an article published this week by our founder, Dan Crask. Listen to the article narrated by Dan Crask here or via Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or read the full article linked below. I had an existential pause today. Not a crisis. A pause. The kind where you read the room in your profession, listen to the people you work with,...

There has been a major shift in how we are to think about SEO in light of Google’s use of AI Overviews. Google is pretty open about the fact that it sees its AI Overviews as the future of search. Let that sink in. In this article from shepx (a spin-off brand of Brand Shepherd) , we present the receipts for the traffic shift away from Google that AI Overviews alone have driven. And the thing is, we...

In this episode, we address something that’s been brewing in the background of everything we do at Brand Shepherd: our relationship with AI and why we’re so committed to integrating it into our brand-building work. We know AI has become polarizing. The word “slop” gets thrown around a lot by critics who argue that AI only steals and can’t create anything original. But here’s what we want you to un...

5 Things I Would NEVER Do To My Brand, As A Brand Strategist Get full access to Brand Shepherd at brandshepherd.substack.com/subscribe

5 Ways to tell if your brand is cluttered. Get full access to Brand Shepherd at brandshepherd.substack.com/subscribe

5 Trends We See Forecasted In Branding For 2026 Brand Vibes • The pro-human backlash to AI – loud but short-lived. Brand Positioning • “Quiet” takes over. Quiet Luxury, Quiet Quality, Quality > Quantity, and a continued drop in personal posting to social mean brands need to learn to quietly assert their quality-over-quantity position. Brand Strategy • Social media takes another step back, and will...

In the final Field Notes of 2025, let's cover insights and takeaways about brand building and its broader reach from the year. ✅ Consumer Insights ✅ AI ✅ Brand Clarity Cheers to the close of 2025! We mark 20 years in business in 2026, but first: end-of-year rest. Get full access to Brand Shepherd at brandshepherd.substack.com/subscribe