Psychotechnology

Brand strategy has been reduced to reaction.

We’ve replaced vision with vibes. We’ve mistaken trends for truths, and every trend demands an immediate response. AI, robotics, and ‘the algorithm’ mean signals are crossing everywhere and it’s making the future feel impossible to predict.

But it’s not technology that will decide the future.

It’s the hidden psychotechnologies of our world that will change everything.

I’ve written a new report on how to build a psychotechnology brand that wins when the outer world feels unpredictable.

Psychotechnology is the architecture of belief that shapes how we see the world. It’s the powerful ideas, concepts, and mental models that ultimately decide how everything plays out, even the most powerful technologies among us today. It is the container that holds it all.

When you play in psychotechnology, you play at a level that predicates everything else. The technology, the culture, and the market will all follow.

This 90-slide report is both the culmination and the next step of my strategic approach to branding:

In it, I explore the three most powerful psychotechnologies that you will need now and into the next few years.

1. Big Ideas: These reveal the values people unconsciously organize their lives around, and tell us where we can create new values that people will actually adopt. Big Ideas don’t stay in their lanes. They go broad across culture in unexpected ways, and the new big ideas that are emerging are especially provocative.

2. Market Conditioning: This shows how those values are normalized and scaled, and how to place your brand on the critical path while your competitors fall off. If you’re not bending the will of the market toward your brand, you’re paving the path of the market toward your competitor. Bending the market is an incredible ability – almost like a strategic magic trick – and you have to learn how to see it happening.

3. Units of Culture: My favorite signals, these expose the outdated frameworks still shaping our experiences, and the latent demand you can tap into with your brand. There have never been so many outdated units of culture at the same time, and there is a lot of value to be captured right now. People are literally waiting to live their lives differently.

Strategy is in a tough spot right now.

I get the sense everyone is grasping for something deeper, some system of insight that can cut through the noise. As brand leaders, we’re trained to find patterns, but in the chaos of the moment we’ve failed to update our own models for understanding the world and our markets.

This report is how I am building both my own brands and those of our clients with a different lens.

No matter how fast the world moves, no technology, no trend, and no tool can ever live outside the psychotechnology of its time.

That’s an exciting thing because psychotechnologies are powerful, and they announce their approach years and decades in advance.

This is where you can build your culture brand.