Unseen Unknown

Personal branding has an ick factor. It can feel like vanity, performance, or selling off a private part of yourself. But that discomfort often comes from misunderstanding the work. At its best, a personal brand is a service. It names a feeling people have not been able to articulate, gives them a story for understanding themselves, and creates the release of being witnessed. That matters because...

Staying professionally curious sounds simple, but it is one of the hardest disciplines of strategy. It is not about reading more, saving more, scrolling more, or building an infinite pile of references. It is about developing a mind that knows what to feed on, what to reject, and how to metabolize information into original thought. Information is food. We digest ideas, chew on thoughts, sit with r...

Some of our most prominent expectations of the future just died. In this episode, we explore what replaces them. We start with achievement. For decades, culture has been organized around progress and accomplishment. But as AI accelerates discovery and takes over more forms of achievement, that model begins to break. Achievement becomes less meaningful, and attention shifts toward experience, conne...

The middle is disappearing. What's left looks like two kinds of people. One group is going all in - AI maximalism, founder mode, the sense that the window is closing and if you don't build your way through it now, it closes behind you forever. The other group is opting out entirely - redefining success as non-participation, embracing slow life, opting out, as seen in trends like agrihoods, homeste...

Trust has always been the invisible architecture beneath brands, institutions, and markets. But today, that architecture is shifting. For the past decade, we’ve moved through distinct eras of trust. First came consequence brands, which positioned themselves around measurable moral impact. Then came emotion-led brands, where what felt right became the guiding force. Now we appear to be entering a t...

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...

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 d...

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 pr...

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 dev...

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 relatio...

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...

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 mak...

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...

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...

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...

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 ex...

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 othe...

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 epis...

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 T...

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...

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, th...

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, perc...

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. Fro...

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’...

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...