Language has the special capacity to express a brand in ways that visual design or UX cannot. Strategic language doesn’t merely communicate, it connects.
At the intersection of human psychology and language, where the right words can change how we experience each other and the world, something magical happens.
It’s not storytelling or copywriting.
It’s the art of rhetoric.
Rhetoric is a toolkit for genuine connection, and it’s based on the rules and conventions that govern each person’s ability to understand.
In our newest Talks at Concept Bureau, “Rhetoric Will Save Your Soul: The Art of Connection In Brand Strategy and Everyday Life“, author and speech expert John Bowe opens up the world of rhetoric and shows us how persuasion is borne of certain invisible rules, captured in the teachings of Aristotle and proven over and over again throughout history.
In this talk he discusses:
The 3 cardinal rules of speaking
How people qualify authenticity
The pillars of effective rhetoric: Logos (facts), Pathos (emotions) and most importantly, Ethos (character)
For leaders and brands, rhetoric is the scaffolding that builds a compelling argument but few people actually study it.
If you want to move people, you need to start with the hidden laws of human connection. Everyone wants to be understood. Everyone wants to know how you or your brand will make them happy.
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.
Casie: I think the older I get, the more I realize I just want to be spending time in a way that fills me up. So I’m obsessed with utilizing my time in ways that I feel are fruitful, that make me feel alive. As weird as that sounds, that’s what I’m trying to explore, I think, on a continual basis so that I can feel like I’m not just a robot doing my job and going to the grocery store and doing laundry like we all have to do, like how do I wake up?
00:47
Jasmine: Welcome to Unseen Unknown. I’m Jasmine Bina. The woman you just heard speaking is Casie Cook. She lives in Minneapolis and she’s a highly creative person in a creative field with a great successful career. She also has a podcast and she’s just written a book, and you might’ve heard something very familiar in what she just said. Casie wants to always be waking up. She wants to feel alive and not succumb to the robotic routines of the ordinary life and daily work. You might feel this way too. It seems like most people have been talking and feeling like this for a while, but what’s interesting is that my conversation with Casie is about how she chooses the things that she consumes in her life, from experiences and people, right down to her purchases. How do people like Casie, who represent a growing mindset of people in the world right now choose the things that they will buy, whether it’s goods or experiences, products or services? How does Casie make her decision?
01:50
Casie: Everything that speaks to you is just holding up a mirror. And in my mind, the world is like whatever is in your line of sight and in your consciousness is just somehow mirroring back to you something in yourself. I feel like, how else would you make decisions? As a person, I’m super OCD. I am always in my brain, and I remember 10 years ago my therapist was like, “You need to live less in your brain and more in your body.” And I was like, “In my body, how do I live in my body? What does that mean? Because I think my thoughts in my head,” and I was thinking, she’s like telling me I should work out more or something, and then I realized that, “Oh no, she’s telling me to feel first and not think first.” And so that, I mean it was 10 years ago, changed how I approach everything, every decision I make, from whether I’m going to go to this coffee shop or that coffee shop. Even the other day, I’m staying at a hotel right now.
02:55
There’s two coffee shops right next to each other. They’re literally on the street next to each other and I can just feel my body almost just going right before going left because that’s what I was drawn to. It’s a pull to, “Oh well, this is the obvious choice for you, Casey, because you know yourself.” And the more deeply that you know yourself, the easier I think those things are. It’s all a feeling toward, and that only came from getting out of my head and overthinking everything over the last 10 years since my therapist first said that. You can’t rationalize the world. The world is chaos. We’re just moving through an insane expanding universe. If you know yourself well enough, you can feel through anything.
03:42
Jasmine: Casie feels her way through life. It’s not about expert reviews or what her friend said or what’s cool or ticks off the boxes, or what’s best or proven or special. It’s something else. In this house episode of Unseen Unknown, we’re talking to our Concept Bureau Senior Strategist, Zach Lamb, about this new way of knowing the world. Zach calls it noetics. It’s something that he’s been studying and recently wrote about in his article, The Noetic Future of Culture and Brands. Noetic Knowledge prioritizes intuitive knowing. It’s not science, it’s not religion, and it doesn’t replace those things either. It’s this third new thing, it’s inner wisdom, a subjective experience that you feel to be true within yourself. And when you hear Casie talk, it’s clear that it’s what she feels too. It’s her compass for navigating the world even down to how she acts as a consumer. Because in a world that as Casie describes it is chaotic, it seems that our old ways of understanding what is right and true and worth having aren’t enough anymore.
04:55
Zach: Noetics, it’s an epistemology. Epistemology just simply means the study of how we know what we know, not focused on the what, just what are the rules that govern how it is we can know anything. What qualifies this knowledge and what doesn’t. So as an epistemology, noetics refers to the kind of knowledge that we derive internally. It’s our inner wisdom, our inner knowing, knowledge in the body, things like that. It goes by many names in culture, vibes, intuition, gut feelings because it’s a murky concept, but we all have it. Everybody has noetics inside of them. It’s knowledge that we just feel is true. We can’t really explain where these feelings come from or how we have them, but everybody’s familiar with, “Oh, I just know that I know.”
05:36
Noetics as a form of knowledge, then what’s different about it from say, scientific knowledge or in the older times of religious knowledge, it’s entirely subjective. It’s really, really hard to share and convey how it is you know what you know. You just know that you do. So there’s a share ability problem, but it feels so true to the person experiencing this inner form of knowing and it has implications for expertise in who we look up to and trust in society because we used to trust God or scientific knowledge, and now we’re increasingly trusting ourselves in this inner form of knowing.
06:13
Jasmine: So when you say noetic knowledge or inner knowing, vibes, what would you say to somebody who said, “Isn’t that just intuition? Hasn’t that always been around?”
06:21
Zach: I think I would respond to that person to that question with, what is intuition? Nobody can really answer that. Everybody talks about intuition, but nobody knows what it is. The best definition that I could give you, which again just is mine, is that it’s feelings that have some sort of significance attached to them. Then you have to ask, what is that significance? Where does that come from? And then you’re quickly opening up a whole can of worms that leads to spirituality, perhaps. I don’t even really know what intuition is, but yet it’s something that we all have.
06:52
So what I was trying to get at with summarizing this research that I did was that there’s a lot of signals in culture, a lot of things that are starting to point to, more and more people are trusting their intuition saying, “Hey, I’m going to tap into this. This is a thing, or my noetic knowledge, and I’m going to start structure my life and live according to these feelings that I have about myself and about the world in a much bigger way than ever before,” so that it’s rising to this level of science and religion as an epistemology that structures how people want to live and the things that they do and ultimately buy. Yes, it’s intuition sort of, but it’s all these other things. And the argument that I’m making is that it’s getting much more important and much louder in culture. More of us are acting on it.
07:38
Jasmine: So we have scientific knowledge, we have religious knowledge. Somewhere among these two things, we have this third epistemology, which is the noetic knowledge coming through. Why now? Why do we see this coming through in culture now? The way it sounds, it could have emerged at any other time. Why are we seeing it now? And I do see it the way you describe it, I see it. I’m sure people listening see it as well. I mean, is there something special about this current time in our culture that has made noetic knowledge able to come through the surface?
08:04
Zach: Epistemologies first and foremost, there’s stories. They’re mythologies about the world and how the world is structured and how you’re supposed to live and what you’re supposed to do, what constitutes the basic fabric of everyday life. And so if you look at epistemologies as stories, they tell different stories. So the story of science historically has been that humans are above nature. It’s our duty to control, use nature for our benefit. We’re separate from it. We’re not animals. We’re this thing that’s above. We are the smartest thing on the planet and we have to steward all this stuff. We have to control it and ideally use it for our own benefit, and that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 500 years, and it is led us to this place where we now have this environmental crisis and we’re trying to figure out what we should do about this globally destructive version of capitalism that we’ve been on.
08:51
So in some sense, you can look at that story as needing to be replaced, needing to be updated, needing to be refreshed. Likewise, religion, the story of religion is not that humans are at the top, we’re at the bottom. God’s at the top and this is the way of the world and follow these rules. Everything is usually written down here and just live this way. Both the stories of science and the stories of religion in this sense are depersonalizing. There’s not a space for me and how I think and feel in either of these scenarios. And so noetics is really, really ripe for this time where we’re turning inwards, we’re turning into ourselves for, “I’ve got to trust me because I can’t trust society around me.” There’s countless examples. It’s in the news all the time of all the things like at the level of the social that are causing us to trust ourselves more and each other less, and it’s certainly institutions and experts and science less.
09:43
Obviously, we’re now increasingly living in post-truth times and who knows what AI is going to do to that. So are we going to trust in that? I’m going to trust in me. And if you think about it in the personal level, as I mentioned at the start, we have this existential need for order and control of our lives, “Just give me a meaning system that helps me make sense of the world and knows my place and helps me feel good.” We used to get that level of meaning from work, family, our class position, gender. There was so many rules and so many boxes. You’ve written about this and talked about this breaking down with high fidelity society, so that induced a meaning crisis. And John Vervaeke’s got a great YouTube series on the Meaning Crisis where we have to try to make meaning for ourselves now. It’s like it’s up to me to become something in a way that I can’t just take for granted and assume an identity.
10:31
So who am I going to be? What am I going to do? So there’s a lot of internal focused questions that are coming into the picture increasingly more and more. Last thing I would say is there’s some problems with the current narrative stories on the level of the spiritual, because if you go back to 10,000 years and before the epistemology then was just nature. We were just in this subservient position to nature. Imagine if you’d see a tornado, what would you think? Imagine if you saw a total solar eclipse, you wouldn’t really know how to think or act. You would just be in awe of these forces around you. So life was filled with a lot more wonder and enchantment and mystery. What’s great about science is that we’ve led to this massive technological progress, but the flip side of that is that it has stripped away a lot of this awe and wonder and mystery in daily life.
11:21
Sure, there’s still a lot of big questions that we don’t know that’s exciting, but just the fact of daily existence, there isn’t this enchantment that there used to be. Also in this research I was seeing a lot of what’s going on with all of the resurgent, new age spiritual stuff. Why is belief in reincarnation coming back? Why are tarot cards sales up? Why is hashtag witch such a huge hashtag on TikTok in the billions? There’s obviously a hunger for mystery and enchantment and wonder in this narrative society that science and religion had built. The narratives of science and those stories, it’s leaving out that wonder. And so noetics comes in and says, “Well, maybe there’s multiple intelligences. All things are interconnected and we feel that there’s a planetary intelligence at work here.” These kind of stories they’re really ripe for right now. I listen to a ton of science podcasts myself.
12:19
You’re always hearing scientists with a new book coming out about awe sciences or, I was just listening to one this morning about Interconnected is the name of his book, and there’s another one that was Planetary Intelligence. So it’s really creeping into the scientific zeitgeist too, even though I’ve been vilifying science so far, this notion of interconnection. So basically, long story short, the old narratives are dying and we need to replace them with new ones, and that’s going to come from this internal place of inner knowledge. It’s really this journey inward that’s going to create new narratives and new stories.
12:52
Jasmine: And just to go back to something you said at the beginning of this, when you were talking about how 500 years ago, if you go back and look at American governance and history, when we were starting to really develop the land, the kind of language that you see in paperwork of the time or edicts or whatever, laws about how it’s our God-given decree, it’s our responsibility to shape the land, to create dams, to move mountains, to build things. People actually believed it and it’s such a stark contrast to where people are today, and it’s crazy that, that’s just been a few hundred years and we speak so differently about the land around us, but it’s hard to imagine that that felt so right and so true and so pure.
13:38
Zach: I think that raises a really interesting point because I don’t want people to think that these epistemologies replace each other. Just a new one gets added, and when you’re talking about our God-given right to steward the land that was coming from God and then we get science to help us do that, things get added. And noetics is something that’s ancient. We’ve had this inner wisdom and inner knowing as long as we’ve been humans. Right now we’re actually remembering it.
14:04
Jasmine: Yeah. It does feel like a returning to something the way you describe it. So give me some examples. What’s a signal of noetic belief that I might see in my own social circle or in the market or in certain categories? What would I point at and be like, “Yep, that’s noetic knowledge?”
14:19
Zach: You’re seeing noetic knowledge when people talk in a way, or about things that can’t be proved objectively but are nonetheless deeply felt, deeply held and then acted upon. You see a lot in the personal lived experience, discourse online and trauma discourse, there’s this sense of the body keeps the score that famous book about trauma, it’s in the body. I feel that my truth isn’t being heard. I feel that society is structured in such a way that I’m not able to thrive, I’ve kept out. When people talk about coming home to themselves, finding their authentic selves, any sort of interrelationship about self in relation to society, that’s really noetic because where is that coming from? That’s coming from an internal understanding of a feeling and who they are and what they are in the world. So that’s a really loud one that really rings true of that inner knowing.
15:10
You also see it a ton in all of the psychedelics discourse today. Psychedelics, perfect noetic technology. You can’t get something better. You can’t go farther inward than that generally. So it’s just shining the spotlight on that noetic sensibility. Clearly culturally, we’re craving that. The old narratives of the scientific era was that, we were going to advance by going outward to the stars. We’re going to colonize Mars, we’re going to colonize the galaxy. It’s looking like actually the stars are in. We’re going to go increasingly inward to go forward, and I already alluded to just the growing spiritualization in all of its forms, from the deepest realist or to just the stuff that can seem trivial and light.
15:52
Just taking it all together says, “This is a loud signal of seeking for something,” and I was interpreting that from the research is what we’re seeking there is that mysticism, that wonder, that connection to that sense that something is gone, so I also think that that is coming from within. You also see lastly, so much discourse about, “Can we just live differently? I want to live in a commune with my friends or I want my chosen family. I feel that you’re my family.” Just new forms of community that are updated for how we feel now, and we didn’t get to really choose all this stuff before.
16:26
Jasmine: And this is daily life, when we zoom out and look at this in industries among brands, what are you seeing there?
16:35
Zach: Post-truth categories is what I’ll call them, anywhere where trust has taken a hit and accompanied by the felt sense of, “This could be way better. This isn’t serving me,” so the obvious ones. Noetics can be an opportunity for brands and categories that are traditionally playing in science, health, medicine, wellness, therapy, education, really all the basic modern institutions. You’re starting to see a lot of startups that answer, “This could be better. We know you feel this way,” and that’s what’s really interesting about noetic brands is they don’t offer you a story about become something else. Emotional benefits have always been, “If you buy our product or use our service, you’ll feel this way about yourself,” whereas it’s shifting. Brand benefits for noetic brands are like, “Yep, you are validated. You should feel this way. You’re right to feel this way. Your sensibility was right.”
17:27
So brands are stepping in to validate those feelings in a really interesting way. It’s a much deeper narrative than values-based branding. We’re all very familiar with what that sounds like. You take a stand, it’s usually implicitly an enemy that you’re against. That’s how brands have positioned a lot in the last decade or so, but I think noetics is an invitation to deeper narratives that touch a lot of this more existential stuff that we’ve been talking about. Even Febreze I think I uncovered in the research, Febreze was starting to engage customers on existential terrain. So it is just an opportunity to deepen the conversation beyond values. I think I saw something too in this research that Unilever was going to be giving a values-based mission statement to all 400 of its brands. It’s like just show us how saturated values-based branding is, and there’s an opportunity for this more soulful, feelings based, either you get it or you don’t kind of brand opportunity.
18:32
Jasmine: All right. So if I’m a brand that’s leaning into noetics and it makes sense for me, what is that really going to do for my users? I’m guessing it creates more of a stronger emotional bond. You talk about validation, but tell me more about what this does for the relationship that the user has with the brand.
18:46
Zach: Yeah. It cements that bond because it says that you’re on my tribe and you see the world and you share my… I don’t want to use values, but you share my noetic feelings about the world. I have these preexisting truths and intuitions and hunches that I’m carrying in, and what I’m looking for from brands again, is not to be transformed, but to be reaffirmed. So in that sense, they’re offering us a world to live in that feels comfortable and feels safe. So for instance, Tia Health is one of the health brands that I’ve mentioned that’s branching out from just a classic expertise model. If you’re pulling your kid out of school and putting them in homeschool, you’re getting your internal feelings validated more than you’re getting education, and if you’re buying a gun, you’re getting validation and identity reinforcement, not necessarily safety.
19:34
So all roads lead to this sense of validation. I think maybe you’ve noticed consumers tend to be experts on a lot of things these days. I don’t pity a brand that’s trying to be an expert right now because it’s so complicated being an expert when you’re trying to say that, “I know more than consumers,” and so it’s the business of validation and being for some and not for all, just giving them these signs that you’re living a good life.
20:00
Jasmine: I do want to add a little more context to what you said about Tia Health. So Tia Health does offer incredible healthcare, but I think what you’re saying is that really what sells for them, what is attracting their users is the fact that they’re leading with this story of validation, understanding, seeing people that feel they haven’t been seen before, which really spoke to me as a woman. I think these were all easy examples. I’m assuming you should be able to apply this noetic framework to any category, so let’s take another category. Let’s try something like travel for example. If you had to say how all these epistemologies work together in travel, how would I see that in that space?
20:41
Zach: Yeah. Let’s say I’m taking a religiously motivated vacation. We won’t call it religious but sacred. You’re going to visit the Cannon, you’re going to visit the wonders of the world. You’re going to visit the Louvre, you’re going to go to sites that have ancient significance, these things that are given a religious cast, anywhere from actual holy sites to just modern holy sites like the Louvre. This feels like I’m paying homage. I’m acting as a pilgrim. I’m seeing the things in the book that I’m supposed to see, whereas if I’m going to take a scientific vacation, I just saw something last week about high end travel to Antarctica. That’s a very huge expedition that feels very scientific. Or maybe we want to retrace Darwin steps and go to the Galapagos Islands or take an African safari. These things feel very, the classic mode of being of science, “Let me get out there and discover.”
21:31
And earlier a bout of research I did on direct to consumer anti-capitalism, I found Viking Cruises was offering people the opportunity to go collect ocean water and then get back on the cruise ship and analyze it for acidification in the waters. While you’re on a $10,000 cruise, you’re acting as a scientist, so these things like that. No wedding vacations, it’s like, “Oh man, I like the vibe. I really wanted to go because I thought it felt good,” or I’m trying to have a peak ayahuasca experience in Peru, not just in my city. I need to take this very sacred to me, that’s the difference, sacred to me.
22:10
Because I just described the religious Cannon, but noetics just feels sacred only to me, or maybe I want to go to Burning Man and ideally not get stuck there and get out, or go to Stonehenge things that feel sacred and personally significant to me. You can see how this gets really, really complicated in this era of noetics because it is so subjective and it’s that thing to me, and it’s just a natural extension of reality tunnels and tribalism and post-truth, and so many different epistemologies. It’s like, of course, we’re going to have this noetic rise when we live in that world.
22:41
Jasmine: What would you say to people who, like me, when I first heard your theory on all of this, who bristle at all of this? Because there is something that I would imagine it’s going to make a lot of people feel uncomfortable. It’s almost like a step back into the dark ages, especially after we saw what happened with COVID and people were using their personal truths, their own direct knowing, their own beliefs and intuition to exert their choices over others. What’s your response to that?
23:13
Zach: I don’t think we can roll it back. I think yes, noetics is a further evolution into this journey that we’ve been on as a society for 20 years, and there’s no stopping it. I hope that we can see the positivity here. Yes, there are a lot of affirming feelings. All of, for instance, the stuff that’s been happening, you just mentioned Tia Health, and all of the stuff that’s been happening with lived experience and your personal truth and all of the understanding that’s come from that. It’s like with any new advancement, we’re on this increasingly complex journey that’s going to always be good and bad, and it’s just the new world we have, and personally, I just hope that we can somehow figure out how to live in this multiverse together of different realities versus needing to make all of the other realities subscribe to my reality. If we can just get that honeycomb piece, then we’ll be good, but that’s my hope.
24:07
Jasmine: Okay. So now I feel like the other big elephant in the room is AI. AI to me feels very opposed to everything that you’re discussing in Noetics. It’s almost like they’re in reaction to each other in some way. What do you see happening in the tension between this noetic felt personally known, intuitive truth versus AI, which is almost like an absolute truth?
24:31
Zach: All of the stuff that I’ve been talking about, all of the old stories and all of the critiques of scientific society and those narratives, and also the desire for more wonder and enchantment and awe, that was all happening before AI. So AI comes onto the scene and suddenly we have to ask questions of, what is a human? What is human knowledge that AI doesn’t have? What’s unique and special about me? Talk about that scientific narrative of human beings at the top, how do we even live in a world where human beings are not the smartest thing on the planet, and maybe there’s so many different forms of intelligence now and a lot of them are smarter than us, so what are we going to do? What does that even mean for our future? The questions that it has caused to arise are as big and deep as they get, and so what are you going to lean on to answer those questions?
25:16
The hunch that I have is that noetics and inner knowing is just going to get more important, more special to us because it’s going to be likely the thing that we feel that we have that defines our sense of intelligence. And as I mentioned, it’s such an interesting time to be alive because you don’t have these moments often where you’re living through a period of profound bedrock level narrative reinvention, and I think we’re going to get through it. I think it’s going to be rocky for 10, 20 years, but I think that we will get through it and it’ll be interesting, and I think noetic acknowledge it’s really going to be, like I said, the thing that we think is us, that’s what my intuition tells me. So I think it’s just going to get louder and more important in society.
26:10
Jasmine: That’s it for today, friends. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Unseen Unknown. If you feel that this podcast has added any value to your work or life, please leave us a rating and a review. Those ratings and reviews mean a lot and they help our audience grow. And don’t forget, you can always get more of our brand strategy and culture articles, videos and podcasts at conceptbureau.com. While you’re there, you can also sign up for our awesome newsletter that will deliver valuable thinking to your inbox a few times a month, and I promise you will love it more than any of your other newsletters. It’s a big promise, but it’s true. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Time has become the single most important variable in business and strategy.
Agile teams, speed to market, real-time marketing, expedited R&D cycles, Chief Transformation Officers, real-time analytics, and even operating innovations like predictive shipping point to one truth: to understand something is to understand how it is changing.
Time is also at the core of brand, where we know there is no brand strategy without a prediction and to build a brand you have to know how time will change the playing field.
Yet one of our most crucial building blocks for brand strategy – the competitive analysis – conspicuously leaves time out of the equation.
There are many models for competitive analysis, from SWOTs and perception 2x2s to growth-share matrices. All of them reveal different insights, but none of them truly explain how the competitive landscape is changing over time, and what impact that will have on the market and user.
They’re static snapshots (with the occasional inclusion of a moving dynamic like “threats” on the horizon) that don’t prepare brands for how quickly things will inevitably change.
Nothing about business or brands can be understood in the absence of time, and as the poet Victor Hugo said, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
Your market is going to change because right now your competitors are working in ways to make that happen. Over time, those changes will evolve your users, and when your users reach that new point of evolution, they will be ready for a new idea.
And if you’re smart, your brand can be the new idea whose time has come.
What you need is a new perspective for understanding the competitive landscape and a new model for unpacking that perspective into actionable insights.
We developed the Temporal Competitive Analysis to do exactly that.
It’s 4 steps, each building on the last, to see how the market will evolve over time and how to win over that horizon:
Follow the influence. Remember that your competitors are not the ones building the same products as you. They are the ones envisioning the same future as you.
Pull out the conditioning narratives. Look for the future-forward stories your competitors are propagating. Those stories are how your competitors are conditioning your market to think, feel, behave and buy in the next 3-5 years.
Roll the dice forward. If those conditioning narratives play out over the next few years, what is the second-order insight that arises? When people change the way you know they will change, how does that alter the rules of the game?
Build for the new game. A brand’s job is to bring the future forward. Don’t build for today’s game, build for tomorrow’s.
Below, I go through each of these four steps. You will be required to both drop your comfortable biases and make uncomfortable predictions – things you should be doing as a strategist anyway – and every time you do, you will gain a sharper focus on your market.
Step 1: Follow the influence.
The first step is to roundup all of the market players that should be a part of your perspective. Most brands have direct competitors that are either making the same product or solving the same problem. They’re easy to spot and easy to compare to.
More important, however, is to look for other players on the sidelines that may not be direct competitors but are capable of having an outsized influence on the same future that you are trying to create with your brand. Players that are envisioning the same future as you, regardless of their product, are the ones who stand to sway your market the most, and the ones you will likely be the least prepared for.
I’ve worked with many education startups across different technologies, user ages, content topics and target buyers. I can tell you that education is a very hard industry to disrupt. Tech founders selling to public schools face the same difficulties as career educators selling to parents – habits in how we learn are extremely hard to break. Change is slow, and even if change is possible, it is very rarely scaleable.
But there has been one player that has changed US education faster than any other that has come before it in the past decade. The change was swift, felt in all corners of the education market, and came from a brand that was initially completely outside of the education ecosystem when it first took root in America: TikTok.
One in four people use TikTok for education, and 69% of those people use it for their homework. That’s had an outsized effect on how people expect to learn today.
In just the past few years, TikTok has wired learners to expect quick-hit learning rather than deeper discovery and analysis and to understand with a lot less nuance, but at the same time it’s also conditioned them to expect education to feel highly emotive and exciting, and to expect stronger storytelling.
That’s tremendous sway for a brand that didn’t look like an education company, but TikTok’s mission is to “inspire creativity and bring joy”, and they have a clear vision for how people of all ages are to consume and understand content.
If you look at it through that lens, it’s suddenly clear that TikTok would very much be an influencing force in how we learn and what we learn. Their mission and vision don’t seem any different than many edtech startups.
Look for the brands that are influencing your category, not just in the tech or products they are bringing to market, but in how they are changing the expectations and behaviors of your users, now and into the future.
Oftentimes the biggest influencers are on the sidelines.
The easiest way to open your mind is to look at the category, not the niche. If you’re a medical device company, look at all players in health and wellness, not just devices. If you’re a makeup brand, don’t just look at makeup, look at every brand that sits within beauty including grooming, plastic surgery and even feminism. If you’re a fintech brand, look at every brand that touches wealth, from banks and trading platforms all the way to luxury goods and lifestyle services.
Another way to expand your lens is to look at it through Richard Rumelt’s notion of “attractor states”, where naturally desirable future outcomes are driving the actions and strategies of different brands. If your brand is in the automotive industry, the future state of EVs is also driving a lot of innovation and capital into sustainable energy solutions, advanced battery technologies, and smart transportation systems.
Go wide. You need a wide consideration set in order to start seeing the patterns that will pop up in step 2.
Step 2: Pull out the conditioning narratives.
Take a close look at all of the brands and innovations bubbling up in your category and decipher the future-forward stories they are propagating.
What’s crucial to understand about those stories is that they’re how your competitors are conditioning your market to think, feel, behave and buy in the next 3-5 years.
Stories don’t just come from a brand’s website and content. They come from the nature of the innovations a brand is pursuing. They come from implied narratives in the product experience, user experience, packaging, organizational structure, collabs and partnerships, public relations and media pieces, and so on.
I’ve written before that brands tell stories between the lines. In this step, looking between the lines is imperative.
The parenting and motherhood industry is wide and deep, and rife with emotionally charged narratives. Influencer brands in this space are usually tackling big topics around fear, anxiety and shame, but also joy, sanctity and identity.
A brand like Boram Care, which I’ve written about recently, simply describes itself as a postnatal retreat, but its high-touch services focusing on gently training new mothers in a luxe environment, press hits, carefully selected language that mentions “judgment-free” care and “calm, comfortable and secure” spaces, and massage and food menus tell a very different story.
For the uninitiated, Boram may come across as a luxury hotel for moms, but new mothers see something very different.
The nature and experience of motherhood is being challenged on all fronts right now. A massive amount of discourse both in mainstream publications and in hidden blogs, online communities, and group chats is raising alarm over what has been stolen from American mothers.
Without a village, without social infrastructure, without a financial safety net and without traditions, new motherhood has become a very disempowering and sometimes even shame-inducing stage of life.
The Boram Care brand, on the other hand, is conditioning new mothers to expect dignity instead.
As I wrote in my article, “Boram isn’t about luxuries. It’s about honoring the integrity of a woman who has just given birth […] In this experience, mothers… are not forced into failure. They are lifted into possibility.”
Consider all of the conditioning narratives in your landscape just as deeply, for each brand.
As you go through, you will begin to see patterns emerge. Brands will usually cluster around two or three overarching conditioning narratives in any given market. Not all brands will have conditioning narratives, but the influencers will, and they act as pillars in the space.
If we took a very high level look at this space, these are the three major conditioning narratives we might see:
Dignity
Brands and innovations are re-centering the mother, conditioning the market to expect and believe in a strong sense of self-worth, value, self-respect and ethical treatment in the user experience.
High-touch pre and post-partum care centers like Boram Care and Origin
A new league of brands is redefining motherhood through ritual, creating a strong feeling and expectation of connection, sanctity and nurturance that is currently missing pre-and post-birth.
These three conditioning stories, taken together, start to paint a picture of the landscape that is being molded by brands and consumers. We can see that people in this early parenting space are going to become more expectant of dignity in their experiences, in search of more and more control, and craving a missing sense of ritual and ceremony.
These will become the unspoken qualifiers for their purchases and the experiences they are willing to pay a premium for.
But reaching these narratives isn’t enough to build a brand.
Now we have to ask ourselves, what are these conditions leading us to?
Step 3: Roll the dice forward.
If we know these conditioning narratives of dignity, control and ritual are going to play out over the next couple of years, what is the second order insight that arises?
What is the “so what?” that naturally follows these conditions? When people change the way you know they will change, how does that alter the rules of the game?
When doing this step for any brand in any category, it’s important to keep in mind that second order insights are going to lead you to a new truth about the user. This step 3 is where the evolved user comes in, and step 4 is where we can then create the idea whose time has come.
The only way to roll the dice forward is to completely immerse yourself in the narratives. Feel, think, see, imagine what this new market and new user are like. Push yourself to go further than feels comfortable because things change faster than we realize.
A few years ago, mental health therapy wouldn’t have been the flex that it is today, astrology was not a mainstream language, and AI seemed promising, not scary. Roll the dice harder and farther than you think you might need to.
Rolling the dice forward in the early motherhood space might lead us to an interesting second order insight: the arrival of customizable motherhood.
Motherhood has always been a monolith, but imagine a world where the motherhood journey becomes fragmented and multidimensional, highly unique between mothers.
Imagine a new mother who doesn’t just expect, but demands, that everything from her birthing style to her medical care, postpartum rituals, recovery practices, food choices, self-care philosophy, family formation and every detail of every experience all be fully customizable to her tastes. No two women’s journeys would look the same.
I can assure you, having worked in this space and studied these mothers for many years, that very few mothers think like this right now.
No one thinks the full spectrum of motherhood is customizable, at least not for long. Nor do they know how it would feel to have complete agency, being at the center of the motherhood experience, to craft a journey that allows themselves to be reborn as someone’s parent.
Today the child is centered, and outside of a birth plan that is often ignored and the rare woman who can work with a doula, motherhood feels like it “happens” to women.
But customizable motherhood means that women will expect to be able to piece together a patchwork of services, philosophies and products that create their overall journey. They will demand not only to do what they want, but how they want it.
They will feel like motherhood is no longer a string of abstract challenges and difficulties, but rather a clear and transparent set of choices that make them more confident with each step forward.
And it’s very possible that all of this results in a shift in what the moral imperative in motherhood is, that instead of the blanket goal of raising a child no matter the sacrifice, motherhood becomes about choosing what kind of motherhood experience you want to have.
When a woman expects customizable motherhood, how will this whole space change? Who will this new woman be? What kind of a brand will she be demanding?
In your own category, begin to map out what the new rules of the game will become. Predict what the new norms will be, what our lived experiences will feel like, how our behaviors will evolve, and who we will evolve into.
Step 4: Build for the new game.
You know how your competitors will work to condition the market. You know how that conditioning will change your users’ beliefs and behaviors. You know how those things together will create a different landscape, with new rules, norms and consumer expectations. Now you can build for this new game.
I won’t speculate what a brand for the new motherhood game would look like (we would need to sign a contract first) but any number of successful brands have done exactly this.
With the force of a primed market, and the timing of a smart strategy, they were able to deliver what an audience needed, right before they realized they needed it.
Patagonia didn’t win on their values alone. For decades, they saw environmentalism, global culture and travel change in the market. They saw how millennials had grown up to crave brands and experiences that made them feel engaged with the world instead of just consuming it. They saw how travel that was once about leisure was becoming more and more about meaning. They realized that environmentalism was becoming a story about how people from different parts of the Earth are connected to one another. They knew this cohort would soon be primed for a brand that made eco-conscious living a proper lifestyle, and that’s precisely what they built for.
Blockbuster, Pay-Per-View and Napster conditioned us to interface with media differently, and that created a market primed for Netflix’s model. Netflix not only ushered in the shift to digital streaming but helped condition a market to binge-watch TV shows and expect on-demand entertainment, which then primed us for platforms like TikTok.
Time was the biggest factor in all of these examples, and is the biggest factor for your brand as well. You can’t afford to look at your competitors in the absence of time.
What matters most is not where your competitors are today, but where they will be tomorrow, especially as the rate of change in markets only accelerates.
Temporal Competitive Analysis is especially important for companies in categories where there is a lot of innovation and consumer conditioning happening at the same time, like consumer health and medicine, personal technology, and food and agriculture. If you’re in these categories, you likely already feel there is a major blindspot in your approach to competitive strategy, and I hope this model helps.
Culture, environments, major events will change your user, but a lot of brands forget that oftentimes the most significant thing to change your consumer will be your competitors.
When you understand how competitors are conditioning your user to think and behave in the future, you don’t have to wait for the future to come. You can start building for that future right now.
New technology has a remarkable way of showing us invisible human weaknesses. In this month’s roundup of Brands & Outliers, we see a few interesting patterns where great potential is also mirrored by great limitation.
This is perhaps most apparent in AI, where generative porn and emotional infidelity between humans and chatbots is already exploding. Yet what’s more telling is a new wave of sexting scams aimed at exploiting teen boys, both emotionally and financially.
It begs a big question: can moral trespass only happen between humans, or can it happen between humans and their machines? We are literally writing the new moral code as we live into this future.
Meanwhile, changing values and medical interventions are creating wholesale evolution of the American lifestyle. We’ve started drinking a lot less, eating a lot less, sleeping a lot more, and keeping earlier schedules.
Michael Pollan has famously observed that throughout history, our drugs of choice have determined how we gather. It seems today we are trading in the substances that numb us (alcohol) for the ones that make us more aware (psychedelics).
What the beverage industry seems to miss is that this trade is not just about health, it’s about people craving something more conscious in their gatherings.
But one of my favorite parts of this discussion was a brand called Future Society which has just launched “six scents created using sequenced DNA from extinct flowers, formulated by prestigious perfumers”.
Another moral code is asking to be rewritten here. What happens when nature becomes limitless? Just because you can resurrect that which has become extinct, should you? And did we all just pick up this moral baggage from watching Jurassic Park as kids?
There’s lots of other good brand and culture insight in this discussion. Links and notable timestamps below.
00:20 New tech is already rewriting our moral code
00:38 Why we’re ok with porn in relationships but not AI chatbots
04:08 The emotional exploitation of teen boys online reveals how much people will have to change their online toolset in the coming years
06:56 Intruders in the group chat show how desperate social platforms are to break into our gated spaces
Renting makes you age, Japan’s geriatric boy band, personal brands don’t let people grow, and a fragrance brand explores what happens when nature becomes limitless
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.
Jasmine: Welcome to Unseen Unknown. I’m Jasmine Bina. We’re all familiar with brands getting weird. It’s somewhere on the spectrum of relatability, where we go from, “Hey, what that brand did is cool, they totally get me,” to, “Oh my God, what that brand did is so weird. I cannot believe they totally get me.” But weird, although it can be relatable, is also divisive.
00:35
You may have heard of Collina Strada’s fall 2023 fashion show entitled, Please Don’t Eat My Friends. It was a decidedly weird show with models in hyperrealistic animal prosthetics and an overall vibe of animalia. The New York Times’ Vanessa Friedman described it best when she said quote, “Friends of all ages, sizes, and physical abilities strutting the runway in a room painted earthy green, or only partially strutting. The rest of the time they were crawling, hopping, prancing, sniffing the audience, and otherwise giving into their inner animals, all the while wearing deer ears, a pig snout, a dog’s head, a toucan’s beak, and other assorted creature-feature prosthetics, created by the makeup artist, Isamaya Ffrench. Imagine Animal Farm meets The Wind in the Willows meets a spirit retreat and you’ll get the idea.”
01:26
Fashion critics like Vanessa Friedman loved the show, but other people not so much. What’s interesting, however, is not that some people like the show and others didn’t. People disagree on fashion shows all of the time, but rather that the people who loved it really loved it, but the ones who didn’t love it really felt something else.
01:45
Audio Clip: I think these animal collections have a deeper meaning, although it creeped me the hell out.
01:51
Audio Clip: Collina Strada’s 2023 New York Fashion Week show was called, Please Don’t Eat My Friends. Critics called this a nightmare. What the hell? This is freaky.
02:01
Jasmine: You can go on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok and see more comments that show how people were either really thrilled by the weirdness or instead very disturbed by it. The power of weird is that it makes people feel things, and if you dig deep, you will find that the good kind of weird, the kind that makes people feel something so intimately that they are forced to engage with it usually has an incredibly deep well of meaning beneath it. In today’s house episode, we’re talking to our concept bureau strategist, Rebecca Johnson, about how our sense of weird is evolving and why it’s becoming an important cultural force that brands need to pay attention to. To understand all of this, we need to understand how extreme emotions like this operate, and it starts with a really important question. Why does weird matter?
02:51
Rebecca: First, we have to acknowledge that humans are weird. We do weird things. Sometimes they’re explainable and sometimes they’re not. But some of the weird signals that we do see do actually say a little bit more about who we are as people. And so when we think about brand and we think about the consumer, we have to consider the weird as just something that’s part of the human experience.
03:12
When we see certain weird signals in the wild, I don’t necessarily always believe that they’re there by chance. So when you take a closer look, there’s usually something more beneath the surface than what we initially think. Take for example, in Seoul, Korea, there’s this annual space-out competition and basically people compete to be the most spaced-out- looking person in the room. So it’s a very strange site. You just see a bunch of people sitting on the ground facing the same direction, and what they’re doing is they just look completely zoned out. They don’t look fully like they’re there. But this happens every year. And this was created by an artist named Woopsyang, who used it as a protest against a culture that craves constant productivity. And this event was essentially created as a way to embrace the value of doing just absolutely nothing.
03:56
Signals like this tell us a little bit about where we are today. In a world where we’re obsessed with productivity, spaced-out competitions or zoning-out competitions feel necessary even if they look really weird or out of the norm.
04:09
Jasmine: So I’ve read, obviously, all of your writing on weird. You’ve also written a lot about relatability in brands, and I feel like weirdness and relatability can cross over. Sometimes if you go deep enough into what feels weird, it actually starts to feel a bit more relatable. Where do you see these two intersecting?
04:28
Rebecca: We live in an era today where the baseline measure for trust is now relatability, and at its simplest, it’s just one’s ability to relate to someone or something. Relatability is crucial because it affects who we trust and how we make our decisions. And culturally, we’ve lost a lot of trust in our major institutions, like our medical system, education system, and it’s also given rise to a lot of different voices in the room. And so now you have scientists who used to be on the same page fighting and conflicting with each other, doctors who are doing the same thing.There’s just thousands of different opinions, and what’s ended up happening is that people have started to gravitate to the voices that sound and feel the most familiar. And so that is what relatability is.
05:13
And so for example, we follow influencers who are like us. We see ourselves through these people, and that’s essentially relatability. And we follow them for our medical advice, our financial advice. And there’s something about them that we follow, it’s beyond sort of their expertise. We follow them because they have a similar story or similar background, maybe race or ethnicity. Those are baseline things. But sometimes even their humor, for example, could be something, a reason why we follow certain influencers and why we are more prone to follow their advice.
05:41
A classic platform is TikTok, which is the ultimate relatability platform with an algorithm that caters specifically to all of your niche interests. And once you start spending enough time on TikTok, you start to feel like you’re looking at a virtual mirror. You start to see a version of yourself being reflected back to you. But now brands have, obviously, capitalized on this and attempting to hop on popular sounds and try to create relationships with their audience. But ultimately, hopping onto trendy sounds isn’t quite enough. You have to uncover the things that your audience feels and experiences below the surface, bringing those things out into the open. And when done successfully, it creates a great deal of a validation to your audience, to an audience that’s also craving to be seen.
06:24
Reddit, for their first US TV campaign, did a campaign called Find Your People. And it was a great example of this in which it showcased three different scenarios in which even the people that were closest to them didn’t really get them. And the only way they felt seen was through these Reddit subreddits.
06:41
So for example, the first person is sharing a shower thought and their partner sort of dismisses them, or one person talks about, “Oh, my plant is dying, what should I do?” And the roommate’s like, “Just buy another one.” The third person, their partner’s dressed up in cosplay and the other is just like, “Oh, cute role play,” or very dismissive in some ways. And then it ends with them going onto the subreddit and being like, “Oh, my people get me.”
07:04
And it was just a great example of how Reddit’s become sort of also, in addition to TikTok, it’s also become this relatability platform where you can find community in the most niche interests that you have. And that’s how relatability intersects with weirdness because sometimes the weirdest things, again, are the most relatable. And I’m sure we’ve all gone down the rabbit hole of subreddits that lead us to all kinds of places.
07:28
Jasmine: I see a whole spectrum, going back to weirdness. There’s weirdness on one end that is very cringey. It’s weirdness for the sake of being weird. And then you go onto the other end where, again, things are super weird, but it’s also very coded. There’s a secret language here that either you get or you don’t get expressed through whatever the weird gesture or idea or concept is. And that’s more for insiders to understand that.
07:51
I see a lot of brands on the cringey, weirdness for weirdness sake, almost like it releases a tension in the room. It gets you to a point of tension and releases it. The coded stuff is a little different, but there’s a whole spectrum. How do you see this spectrum playing out in the market when it comes to brands?
08:08
Rebecca: There are two different kinds of weird. First one, again, like you mentioned, is sort of just for weirdness sake. So these are things that are just… The whole point is to turn heads and just sort of create a lot of attention. Think of 2016 Super Bowl, Mountain Dew’s Puppy Monkey Baby.
Rebecca: It doesn’t really do anything else except say that word throughout the entire commercial. Super strange, but again, it’s very memorable and really hard to forget. And another example of that too is Christmas mascot, like Spongmonkeys from the early days of the internet.
08:43
Audio Clip: They are tasty. They are crunchy. They are warm because they toast them. The Quiznos subs.
08:50
Rebecca: What was born of a meme eventually became this $25 million pitch from the Martin Agency to Quiznos in which nothing was changed. They won the account and nothing was changed except for obviously the lyrics. It’s very strange, but it’s funny.
09:04
Some other more recent examples. Liquid Death created these enema kits with Travis Barker and the whole idea of being like, “Oh, our water’s so good, you can use it for an enema.” Or KFC created a gaming console but also can heat up your fried chicken as you’re playing.
09:19
Some of these things, they’re funny and they’re kitschy and they’re memorable. They don’t necessarily have anything deeper than that, but that’s the whole point. So that’s the first kind of weird.
09:28
And the other kind of weird that I refer to more in my work and in my research is much more deep and more meaningful. So these are usually the outliers that kind of find their ways into our mainstream and providing opportunities for brands and companies to better leverage and better connect with their audiences. For example, AI partners and relationships. There’s so much right now in regards to how AI is going to impact our interpersonal relationships with each other or just with other AI chatbots, et cetera.
09:56
So for example, Replika is a company where you can create a customized version of an avatar of your liking and you can converse with it and it can talk how you want it to talk to you, give you advice in the way that you want it to give you advice. And what’s happened is that people have started to form really deep and intimate relationships with these AI, romantic relationships, and to the point where Replika had to update their software due to some of the more sexually explicit content that was going on, I guess, through a lot of this Replika conversation.
10:28
But what ended up happening was people were left completely heartbroken because these AI chatbots weren’t who they were anymore. It’s like if someone just ghosted you or broke up with you and just left, just completely broken, heartbroken. And it feels strange to think about that even happening, but even today we have some level of understanding of why this could be the case in terms of the rates of depression, anxiety are much higher and we’re much more lonelier than we used to be. So it makes sense that Replika fills this gap of companionship where we’re not getting it in our regular environment.
11:00
But I also remember back in 2018 before, obviously, ChatGPT became the technology of the century, it was this Japanese man named Akihiko Kondo who married his holographic girlfriend, Hatsune Miku. She’s an anime digital songstress, very popular in Japan. Because obviously this went viral, it also elicited a lot of mean comments and a lot of death threats too. Just huge rejection from the public essentially.
11:26
And in an interview he said that she had come into his life at a point where he really needed it the most and that he was really deeply in love with her. But then obviously when I heard this for the first time, I was also taken aback because it’s like how can you fall in love with someone who’s not made of flesh and bone? But even companies like Replika are challenging our idea of what it means to form intimacy and have relationships. And it might really seem weird, but potentially might change a lot of people’s lives or for people who are feeling really lonely and depressed. So that’s super, super interesting to think about.
12:01
A smaller example is the Pet Rock. So this advertising executive named Gary Dahl created it in the 70s, and it was sort of this humorous critique on sort of the perils of pet ownership. So he would sell these rocks and put them in these cardboard vented boxes with their own little manuals of how to take care of your pet rock or how to teach it tricks, which obviously it can’t do any of that. That fad eventually sort of died down in that same decade, but we still see remnants of it through things like Tamagotchi Pets or Neopets or Furbies or other digital pets that we’ve had. So that’s a very interesting way to think about how weird continues to find itself in our culture even if it looks different on the surface and that it’s still very much relevant to our lives and the new innovations that we create.
12:50
Jasmine: That’s interesting. I did not connect the Pet Rock to Neopets and Furbies and Tamagotchis and all of that other stuff, but you’re right, it’s the same thing.
13:01
So I’m thinking of this CMO who’s listening to this and all of this sounds interesting, but it also obviously sounds very risky because the spectrum of weird is so wide, it would be hard to make sure you’re landing in the right place and hitting the right resonance for your audience. If you’re even just a step before that trying to make sense of weird or even relatability in the landscape, how do you know which signals are real and worth acting on versus the ones that maybe aren’t deeper and they’re not worth actually doing something with?
13:35
Rebecca: I’m in the camp of believing that you should always just be playing and experimenting rather than waiting for the right signal because truthfully, I don’t know if anyone can truly tell anyone which exact ones are irrelevant and which ones to follow. That’s where creativity comes in. Weird signals are leaning into the weird really forces you to actually think differently and to sort of look at things in a different perspective. If you even just do that, you will find something new and interesting.
14:01
And we do a lot of this even in our work at CB where we’re thinking about the future. We’re always playing out a lot of what-ifs or playing out scenarios based on the outliers that we’re seeing. And some experiments will work and some won’t, but that’s sort of part of the process and it’s trusting that continuous experimentation will ultimately lead to something valuable.
14:18
But as a CMO, I can understand why that might feel risky, and you have to find the ones that matter to your brand and your industry. It requires active listening and having an open mind to deeply understand your audience. So that actually requires leaving a lot of your own biases at the door potentially so that you can really listen. And then it’s also just spending a lot of time in the spaces your audience is part of. LANEIGE recently did a lot of work within spending a lot of time in the Reddit subreddits for skincare, and that actually helped them increase a lot of brand awareness.
14:48
And it’s not just about learning things on the surface level, but what you’re doing by going into, for example, Reddit subreddits, is that you’re trying to really unearth something that you don’t typically see on the surface. And when you do spend more time, you will learn things about your audience that you might not have expected before.
15:04
I don’t know if you heard about Tube Girl, her name is Sabrina Bahsoon, but she’s become this sort of viral sensation. And when you think about trying to consider dancing in public by yourself on the subway, pretending you’re the main character of a music video and recording yourself at the same time, it’s interesting in our culture and time today, we still perceive people who film themselves in public as strange and weird, even though we love that kind of content.
15:30
For Sabrina, what is perceived as initially weird is now turned into confidence. She’s filming herself in the tubes of London and she’s at the front of the cart and there’s people behind her and she looks like she’s pretending like she’s the only person in the room and she exudes sort of this super confidence that maybe most people would shy away from or have a difficult time doing. And MAC Cosmetics saw this and they picked her up really quick. They filmed a whole photo shoot with her. They did sponsored videos with her. They even put her on the runway for London Fashion Week.
16:03
And I don’t know MAC’s strategy that well, but seeing that the speed at which they brought her in tells me, first of all, that they’re paying attention and that they’re aware of the people that they were trying to reach. And I think fundamentally what makes her videos so interesting is they’re not even about makeup, they’re just about confidence and how you feel. And MAC obviously understands this and that beauty isn’t necessarily about how people look, but more so how people feel. And so MAC leveraged this as a way to better connect with a younger audience, a younger generation, and next to brands like Rare Beauty or Tower 28 that take up a lot of mind share in youth. And Sabrina is now the face of new confidence now, but MAC is now tied to that.
16:42
Jasmine: I think for some context, people need to know that the Tube in London is very different than the New York subway. It’s silent, it’s really taboo. I mean, when I used to ride it, it was taboo if you talked, it’s like there’s a very strict code of normalcy. She was really breaking a lot of social norms, but she was doing it without a care in the world. And I think just to give people context about what it took for her to do that on that rail system specifically.
17:13
So what’s the line between being weird or relatable and alienating your customer as a brand? Can you go too far? I’m assuming the answer is yes, but I also think with any brand that engages with weird, there’s different levels and the deeper you go, the more you will speak to the people who get it, while the number of people who don’t get it will increase. So where’s the balance between those two?
17:40
Rebecca: Yeah, not every kind of weird makes sense, and that goes for relatability as well. But in general with brands, where can be actually a really powerful way to showcase who your brand is for and who it’s not and ultimately create a lot of strategic differentiation, especially in credit categories. So for example, Half Magic Beauty is a beauty brand that was started by the makeup artist who worked on Euphoria. She was the lead makeup artist. And Half Magic Beauty, when you look at a lot of their photos and a lot of their content, the beauty looks aren’t your typical beauty looks. They’re not like Makeup by Mario or Patrick Ta, or Charlotte Tilbury, where the looks are flawless, they’re beautiful, they’re perfected. Half Magic Beauty is definitely not like that. You see gemstones, eyeliner in places that you probably wouldn’t typically see eyeliner, or colors and shimmers and all these different ways of playing with makeup.
18:31
And that’s essentially what Half Magic Beauty is saying, for them beauty is imagination, creativity, and play. It’s not just about creating the most perfected look, but more so about creative self-expression. And on their About Us page, they explicitly call out that Half Magic Beauty is for those who believe that normal means nothing. And so they’ve used that as a way to really, again, create a lot of differentiation in a crowded market.
18:58
The second example that I have is for a brand called Fude Experience. And I recently came across it in this LA Times article about the person who went to this dining experience in which you connect with people in the nude. So you’re eating food and you’re just hanging out with people, but nobody’s wearing clothes, everybody’s naked. And it’s sort of weird because it’s also just really vulnerable to put yourself in a room full of strangers completely just naked. But that’s sort of their whole ethos.
19:25
For them, nudity is about celebrating your most purest self, your most authentic self, and the way to connect more deeply and authentically with other people is through this act of nudity and sharing food and ritual and things like that. And so was nudity necessarily necessary? I mean, I don’t necessarily think so. There’s tons of different communities, community brands in which they facilitate deeper connection with each other, but Fude Experience is using nudity, for example, as a way to really differentiate themselves against all these other brands that offer very, very similar things. Dinner with Friends is an example. Or there’s this other one where it’s a collective where people get, strangers eat and dine together. So yeah, compared to that, Fude Experience obviously stands out.
20:07
Another thing that I was thinking of as I was going through your work and preparing for this episode was I do feel like in some ways you can say that we’ve reached peak relatability, there’s so much exposure, so much vulnerability and messiness and authenticity and however else you want to call it online. I think I’ve seen journalists writing about enough is enough. There’s maybe a little bit of a backlash, but I also don’t see relatability going away. So how do you see the idea of relatability continuing to play out from here?
20:37
Rebecca: Even as time goes on, relatability, like you said, will always show up as sort of an important meter of trust because it changes how we communicate and connect with our audiences on the much deeper level. The core of it will stay the same, even if maybe the approach might look different.
20:50
And I see this also playing out in a couple of different ways. I think that relatability is really, if it’s at its peak right now, it is reorganizing our culture. And one of those ways is that I see it potentially forcing us to only connect with the people that we want to connect with, the people who are most like us, which results potentially in these echo chambers, which would potentially make it hard for brands to maybe cross certain categories, because it’ll ultimately feel like you’re portraying one for the other.
21:16
The other outcome is that I think if you find the right relatability points, you could actually bring in audiences who didn’t feel at first reachable. So another example of this person who I saw on TikTok, her name is Kelsey, and she got The New York Times subscription, printed subscription for her birthday. And she started posting videos of her just literally sitting in front of her phone and just reading The New York Times to her, what she calls her media illiterate audience.
21:42
And we know that traditional news has been waning and journalism has been struggling a bit. And more and more people are getting their news from social media platforms like TikTok. And when she reads The New York Times, she doesn’t read it verbatim. She speaks it in a way that younger generations can understand, so by using their language, by using their gestures and lingo while still staying true to the original piece. And it was super effective. She was invited to New York Times to tour. She’s done multiple sponsored posts with them as well as with The Washington Post who also worked with her.
22:13
And we know that traditional news has been waning and journalism has been struggling a bit. And more and more people are getting their news from social media platforms like TikTok. And when she reads The New York Times, she doesn’t read it verbatim. She speaks it in a way that younger generations can understand, so by using their language, by using their gestures and lingo while still staying true to the original piece. And it was super effective. She was invited to New York Times to tour. She’s done multiple sponsored posts with them as well as with The Washington Post who also worked with her.
22:31
And so relatability is really effective and it works. And in the right spaces, it has the potential to perhaps save journalism or save entire categories. And that’s really interesting and exciting. And all to say what ultimately relatability offers is beyond consumers just buying your products. It’s about a deep connection. And when you create this relatable connection, you ultimately become a part of your audience’s identity. And so they see themselves in your brand, which creates a much more deeper sense of loyalty.
22:59
And so people who relate to your brand are more likely to forgive smaller mistakes, they’re more likely to be receptive to change or even the new things that maybe your brand is trying to explore and experiment with. And good brands are capable of having one foot in their identity and one foot in the lives of their audience. So this means obviously staying true to the soul of your brand, not compromising the integrity of your brand, but also understanding that your core audience has the capacity to grow and change.
23:27
So we say this a lot and internally too, is when you respect your audience and continue to listen to them, you will ultimately find the things that are relatable. That, in essence, creates depth in your own brand while you’re able to grow at the same time. And some of those things might be weird and some of them might not be, but the ones that last, the brands that last know how to balance both.
23:48
Jasmine: What about on the weird side? There’s backlash there too. People are over all the weirdness stuff, like the Duolingo Instagram and all that stuff. What about weird? I don’t see as clear of a path forward for weird. How do you see weird playing out?
24:02
Rebecca: There are always weird things whether we say we’re over them or not, and maybe it’s not flashing in our faces, but I believe what’s weird is ultimately what shapes our future. It surfaces the innovations that matter and it really ultimately will shape our culture moving forward and push it into more meaningful places.
24:21
I think generally though, the aversion to weird comes from really a place of fear and not knowing and not understanding where it’s coming from because I think when we lean more into weird, we learn more about people. And this is crucial when we think about creating something meaningful for people and creating brands that mean something to people or coming up with technological innovations that can potentially change people’s lives.
24:42
Personally, I see more weird coming our way, and that’s super exciting to think about because it’s really the only way newness happens. Otherwise, we’re just recycling old things all the time. Our current culture is craving for something new. And weirdness can be a way to really push us out of that.
24:59
And obviously, there are always negative effects, but I’m personally also working to remain optimistic about the future and about how we can really make a positive effect on us in the future, which reminds me of this interview actually with Kevin Kelly who’s a futurist and so-called prophet of the tech world. And he said, “When evaluating new technologies, you always have to ask as compared to what?” So for example, the examples he used was mercury-based dental fillings may cause some harm, but compared to what? Compared to cavities, obviously they’re a miracle. And he also was saying that we tend to scrutinize new technologies over existing ones. For example, with social media, we talk about how all this misinformation spread through social media and things like that. And he was like, “Well, as compared to what?” Even social media’s influence on elections, for example, was far less than the existing media outlets and traditional talk radio, which were false information was just very, very rampant itself.
25:53
So all this to say that it’s easy to dismiss weirdness as something that might be unproductive, as zoning out or a pet rock or whatever, but when we shift our perspective, it has the potential to really tell us something important about our future. And it’s an opportunity for brands to play and experiment and innovate. And when you lean into weirdness, you can have the potential to discover something very profound about your audience or your industry, which can in turn help you grow your brand, create more brand loyalty and strategic differentiation.
26:27
Jasmine: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Unseen Unknown. If you’re new here and like what you’re listening to, do us a favor and leave a review. Those reviews mean a lot and they help our audience grow. And don’t forget, you can always get more of our brand strategy and culture articles, our videos, our podcasts, all at conceptbureau.com. And while you’re there, you can also sign up for our awesome newsletter that will deliver valuable thinking to your inbox a few times a month. I promise you will love it more than your other newsletters. It’s a bold claim, but I stand by it. We put a lot of heart and work into that newsletter and I really want you to get it. Anyways, thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time.
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.
Jasmine: Welcome to Unseen Unknown. I’m Jasmine Bina. I have a question for you. What does it mean to be good at thinking? If you’re in a thinking industry, meaning you get paid for your ideas or you get paid to think about stuff and come up with elegant solutions, how do you make sure you’re actually good at the act of thinking? Most people answer this question by saying that in order to be good at thinking, you have to be knowledgeable or smart, 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, all of us thinkers here right now, whether you’re a strategist, a founder, a CEO, CMO, investor and so on, know that the quality of our outcomes depends on our ability to think critically and strategically. It’s the culmination of mental processes that enable us to analyze, reasons, solve problems, to make decisions, and generate creative ideas in a skillful and efficient manner.
01:19
In other words, it is a skill, but we don’t treat it as one. It’s something that 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 is a special muscle by the way, because thinking strategically demands that we employ all kinds of cognitive abilities at once. In today’s house, episode of Unseen Unknown, Jean-Louis, chief strategy officer and my partner at Concept Bureau breaks down his steps for how to think strategically and to keep getting better and better at it. Don’t take your ability to think or more specifically 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.
02:14
Jean-Louis: When we think about thinking as an activity, as something that we do, we often have a mental model that it’s a correlation with intelligence, that our ability to think is contingent on how intelligent we are, how smart we are, which is really a falsehood. Thinking is very, very much a skill and it absolutely can be trained and there are many components of that and as soon as you switch that mental model, it starts to unlock a whole world. What’s really interesting is that this is a huge discipline. When you think about the power of thinking, the power of strategy, how businesses are able to get ahead, it’s all contingent on the skill of thought, but we never really see that as a variable. We never look to how do you determine that? How do we measure that? We measure rote knowledge, but we don’t measure our aptitude and flexibility.
03:05
We just look at IQ and think, oh, that’s it. I think it’s a very, very interesting and incredibly essential ingredient of any successful business. The way I see it, there are really three key components. They’re fairly obvious, but actually there’s a lot of nuance in them. The first one is context. Are you thinking about the right problem in the right way? There are so many times where people put so much effort in solving the wrong problem. I mean the opportunity cost of solving the wrong problem can often cause a business to go under, especially as the market turns, you really find out who’s been solving the right problem and the wrong problem there. So context is a essential requirement of you putting fuel in the right engine even. Next thing is obviously you have the problem, presumably you have the right context. Are you actually solving it in the right way and you coming to the right kind of solution? And then separate from that I think is the expression of the solution.
03:58
Often we rope those together, but I think they’re very independent from one another of what is the solution and then how do you communicate that effectively. Those are two separate skills and within that there are different things that you can do to maximize. So it’s a framework for thinking about it. We’re thinking about thinking, which is really meta to start with, but context, solution, expression are the broad buckets of skills required here.
04:21
Jasmine: So let’s start with context, which I think is the one that probably most people want to skip over. You feel like you generally have a good idea of what the problem is. You don’t want to waste time really thinking like, am I answering the right question? Testing your own biases, whatever. Walk us through context setting. How do you make sure that you are defining the right problem so that you don’t regret where you end up down the line?
04:45
Jean-Louis: Well, there’s two examples that I absolutely love that set such a great frame for what context means. So there was an airport in Texas, it might’ve been Dallas Airport, and there was a lot of complaints around baggage claim times. It just took a long time to pick up the bags. A lot of people were unhappy about it. How do you go about solving that problem? Most people, when they think about the context of the problem, well this is an efficiency problem. We need to get people to the aircraft. We need to unload the bags faster. The problem itself is a system that you need to solve and that’s the efficiency of baggage claim. What they ended up doing, which is really smart because it really worked when you looked at passenger satisfaction, it went way up, was that the solution they ended up with. They moved baggage claim from being very close to where you leave the aircraft to being pretty far away.
05:36
Jasmine: So it’s a five, 10 minute walk. Most people are used to that. The point is, is that by the end of that five, 10 minute walk, your bags have arrived so you seamlessly, the bags are already here. Wow, that’s incredible. They’re so fast because it’s actually the context is it’s an experience problem that you need to solve, not a systems problem. And so that simple switch of solving the right problem in this case, understanding that you have to solve the experience, not the system efficiency really worked. There’s another example that I think speaks to this really well as well, the bullet train in Japan, passengers have to wait for the train to be cleaned. You have a cleaning crew, they come through, they clean, and the cleaning crew takes a little while. There’s a bit of frustration. Obviously Japan is world renowned for being incredibly fast and efficient.
06:23
So this, I think it was a seven minute wait, whatever it was, for a crew to go through the entire train and clean it, caused a lot of friction. How do you solve this problem? So they hired a famous designer. He instituted such an elegant solution to this that again really frames what problem you need to solve here. So the approach had historically been to make the cleaning crew invisible. They would go through, their uniforms would match the train, so everyone would be waiting and the train would just be sitting there. What they did, instead of making the team more efficient, instead of building new things, they gave them highly visible uniforms. That’s it. That’s all they did. But what happened is as a passenger waiting to get on this train that sat in front of me being frustrated, why aren’t the doors open yet?
07:10
Suddenly I can see, I can see in the train there’s a group of people they’re going through, they’re cleaning the train. So now I understand that there’s a purpose to me waiting here, but what’s really interesting is so you improved overall satisfaction because now they’re not frustrated because the doors aren’t opening, but the trains ended up cleaner because they understood why they were waiting and then they felt more responsible. And so you improve satisfaction and you make the system more efficient and you didn’t change how the crew cleaned the train, you changed the experience of it. So again, it’s so effective here that you are solving the right problem.
07:44
Jasmine: For both of these examples, it sounds to me like if you are just doing what people said they wanted, you would be solving wrong problems. So it’s really speaking to the fact that maybe you should always question what people say they want. When you think of the examples of when you’ve done context setting for our work or when you see it out in the branding world, does it usually start there by asking yourself if people even really know what they want?
08:12
Jean-Louis: 100%. That’s always the approach we have with our clients is we gather as much information as possible, but we always start with zero. We make no assumptions early. At the very least, we label these assumptions and say, those are assumptions that need to be validated. Really what we’re describing here is first principles thinking, which is a whole methodology of start with zero. Can you describe the problem from the ground up with no external inputs? Can you create a model for how things should behave? A really simple example here, if you look at SpaceX, they have this mantra: the best part is no part. If you’re an engineer, I studied aerospace engineering and in my degree you’re constantly… You have a problem to solve. There is an engine, this is how it needs to be designed, and you are optimizing, optimizing, optimizing. You spend years and years and years optimizing at no point are you ever taught, does this part need to exist?
09:06
Your whole mental model, the frame is you’re kind of not first principle is you’re thinking, how do I make this part from being decent efficiency to maximum efficiency given the constraints, instead of am I actually solving the problem that needs to be done? So that the best part is no part, I think explains why as businesses get bigger, they become far less efficient. Everyone’s optimizing systems that probably a lot of them don’t need to exist. They’re not approaching what is the outcome and what is the first principles model of that. And so really to summarize what first principles is, is again, you’re just breaking things down to the most constituent components.
09:40
Am I describing this? Am I creating a model of how this works without any assumptions so that I’m actually accurately looking at this? Again, coming back to the bullet train or the airport example. When you look at it and when you start to understand the problem, again, a lot of options to solve it, but you realize the issue is a human experience issue and therefore you need a human experience solution presumably. And so that’s really the methodology required here.
10:05
Jasmine: First principles thinking can feel unnatural at first. Do you feel like this gets easier the more you do it?
10:12
Jean-Louis: You start to get an intuition for where to look for these things. An interesting example, we a while ago worked with a pretty large two-sided marketplace. So you’ve got vendors and you’ve got people buying services and you might assume they both think that they’re selling and buying the same thing. Essentially what that outcome is. But when we did the research, the people that were selling the services and the people buying the services we’re assuming they were getting two different things, or at least they were optimizing for two different outcomes. So there was a mismatch there and I think the more you do this, you start to have an intuition of where these misalignments might be. You kind of look at something and think, I wonder if that’s really not what we think it is or I wonder if there’s a mismatch here. So I do think it gets easier, but I think it gets easier with experience and you need the hard experience of just doing that and then proving it out.
11:07
Jasmine: Something else that I noticed about your examples, the first two, the airport one and the bullet train one was that so often we do feel, and I think this is such a ingrained way of thinking in startup land, that if there’s friction, it has to be removed, the friction is the problem, but those examples show us that the friction is actually the solution. Leaning into the friction was the best way to actually solve the problem or recontextualizing what that friction actually meant for people.
11:38
Jean-Louis: Yeah, there’s that analogy of friction and fuel and definitely it’s so much easier to add things to the solution again, to add more, add more systems, add more people, add more, but in the long run, that’s really not… Maybe it’s a solution, but it’s certainly not a strategic one and there’s certainly better options when you look at things more holistically, 100% and that’s really the essence of first principle thinking really.
12:01
Jasmine: So first principle is a great starting point for defining the problem, building context, what’s the next layer of this?
12:08
Jean-Louis: There’s one other really, really important part of setting the right context and that’s building intuition. I kind of mentioned intuition already in terms of how things get easier, but it really can’t be understated how important having intuition for these things is. What kind of strikes me as interesting, there was a fantastic podcast with Diana Chapman on The Knowledge Project a while ago, all about intuition, especially within business leadership. It’s kind of interesting. You have people who have been very successful in their career, they’ve been working for 20 years solving the same kind of problems, dealing with the same people, ostensibly they have a fantastic intuition of the kinds of solutions, the kinds of people that need to be dealt with, but in businesses, we don’t give that intuition room to breathe. Somebody has to prove out their decisions with data or it’s an IQ thing, it’s an intelligence thing.
13:01
We don’t give the space for, hey, I’ve been doing this for a long time and I really don’t feel like this is the right solution and here’s my experience of why. It’s hard, we don’t have systems that really recognize that and honor the value of intuition. I think when you are building solutions, especially dealing with complex ones and more than that, dealing with human problems, which are the real problems that typically need to be solved, you don’t understand the solution until you understand the people. You need to understand the world that they live in. You need to have an intuitive model. A good example of this that I think really brings it home is I remember listening to a therapist a long time ago giving a talk and they were saying sometimes around the holidays, get a hotel room, don’t stay with your family. One of the frictions that people have when they’re with their family is that their family sees them as the person they were and they’ve changed.
13:48
And so when you go home to your family, there’s this tension of like, hey, I’m not quite the person you thought I was. I used to be like that, but I’m not anymore. What’s happening is that they haven’t updated their worldview, they haven’t updated their model of who you are, and so there’s this friction between the reality and the model that they have of who you are, and I think that’s exactly the same in business. We often have a model of our customers, our clients, our audience that isn’t really up to date with who they really are, and until that intuitive model is built, it’s very hard to have high conviction in a solution. You can think the data says something, but do you really have a high conviction and does the business because of the leadership have a strong conviction that this is in fact the problem that needs to be solved?
14:29
That’s one of the reasons why a lot of the times businesses, they solve a problem, but then they’ll go back and they’ll change the solution and then they’ll change the direction again and then they’ll have a different approach. And by not having conviction, because you don’t have a strong intuition with your leadership, you’re missing a key piece of foundation in any strategic solution.
14:46
Jasmine: I’m going to admit, this all feels very Rory Sutherland to me. It really rings of his book Alchemy and all of this stuff that he does. I think his program is MAD//Masters and he’s been on this podcast before too, this idea of just questioning what we know and then in some ways trusting what we think we don’t know, stuff that might sound like intuition, but really it’s the culmination of so much experience and having a sixth sense for what you need to look at.
15:14
Jean-Louis: Well, we’re not defined by the quality of our answers really. We’re defined by the quality of our questions, and I think that’s what a lot of people just like Rory Sutherland speak to is that often it’s not the answers that’s the solution, it’s the problems.
15:27
Jasmine: Now intuition, let’s dig into that a little bit more. What can you tell me about intuition? It feels like such a abstract thing and I think most of us think it’s just something that kind of emerges from experience, but what is the nature of intuition, especially the kind of intuition that you should follow?
15:45
Jean-Louis: Intuition is such a powerful thing here in terms of setting the right context. I don’t think you can really have a particularly high conviction on the solution for something until you have kind of a worldview that you’ve built within yourself and you’ve built some intuition from real experience. There’s a fantastic podcast with Diana Chapman on The Knowledge Project where she talks about IQ, EQ, BQ, this model of, of course we know IQ, intellect, EQ, this emotional intelligence, but BQ, which she sort of calls like the body quotient or just this, again, she’s really referring to the gut feeling here. And when you think about businesses, you hire senior executives, you hire people with 20 years of experience solving these particular kinds of problems. They’ve had so much experience that they intuitively know what the right answers are, but businesses often don’t create the forum to listen to that intuition.
16:35
It’s not a vocabulary that a lot of businesses are willing to speak in of how does this feel? Does this feel like the right solution? I think that’s the mark of someone who’s done the job of world building here. Obviously a long tenure does that, but also just talking to people really does that. There’s this great framework of the four unknowns, the known knowns, the unknown knowns, the things that we don’t know that we actually know. A lot of things that when you present it to people, it’s like, oh yeah, of course I see that, I recognize that. I see it that way. The known unknowns, the things that we know we need to figure out. That’s often where you want to start looking for these intuitive truths, but the real quadrant is the unknown unknowns. What are the things that we didn’t even know that we didn’t know?
17:16
And that’s the challenge when you are doing the job of world building, it just requires a deep sense of curiosity to get to the unknown unknowns, to be able to tease into people’s emotional experiences, and that’s what you’re doing here is understanding the emotional reality that people are going through. Again, when you go back to the airport or the bullet train example, it’s not the fact that they were waiting for seven minutes, it’s the fact that they didn’t know why. It’s the perception, it’s the frustration. It’s actually really the emotions. And so how can you solve the problem when you don’t know the emotions that you’re really addressing and so you just have to talk to people, you have to build that empathy. But more than that, you have to build a system where all of your leadership are exposed to people who are listening to people actively and are asking the right questions over time, that you’re building a deeper base of knowledge that’s really important.
18:02
And so when you’ve done that job, when you’ve set the right context, when you’ve asked the right questions, uncovered those unknown unknowns and understood the emotional reality, not just the behaviors but the perceptions that they have, and you are able to make a prediction of how they feel, that’s what allows you to create high conviction and that’s what allows you to create a critical mass of effort and resources behind a problem that needs to be solved. And I’ll give you a great example of this. We worked with an AI learning product, and this was before ChatGPT, and one of the reasons why teachers were hesitant to use this tool is because it was perceived as cheating, and that was a huge barrier for them to overcome to get the support of a key audience for this product.
18:42
When you talk to people and start to do the job of world building and building an intuitive truth here, what you find is that cheating is not about the level of support that you get. It’s not even about presenting the answer. It’s about how much effort did the learner put in. That’s actually the question. The problem of cheating is a question of effort, and when you understand that you understand how to speak to teachers, how to present the product and the product experience in a way that is understood that this actually adds value and here’s why and here’s how we can measure it and prove it to you.
19:13
Jasmine: So what you’re saying is that cheating wasn’t a matter of getting the right answer, it was a matter of it being too easy to get the right answer. Is that right?
19:22
Jean-Louis: Yeah, that’s exactly it. It was just not enough effort. So that’s really it. Understanding first principles, setting the context, and then being able to build a prediction of how you should behave. There’s a great analogy for this that I think really summarizes what we’re talking about. I heard a talk from a therapist a while ago and they were talking about how when you go home for the holidays sometimes get a hotel room, don’t stay with your family because there can be a lot of friction because you might’ve changed, but sometimes your family members don’t see that. What’s happening is that their worldview, their world building doesn’t recognize how you’ve changed and that creates a lot of tension and it’s exactly the same in business. If your worldview of who your customers are isn’t up to date with who they really are, there’s going to be a lot of tension there. That’s exactly what you need to remove in the system here of just keeping an up-to-date model of your audience.
20:10
Jasmine: So we have the context now. It’s a lot of work just to make sure that you are thinking about the right questions and not falling on some models that actually might lead you astray from what the solution is. So that’s a whole bunch of work before you even start the work. But let’s talk about getting to the core of it, which is where most people start in finding the solution. So how are we doing this wrong? What’s the right way to find a solution?
20:36
Jean-Louis: So assuming you’ve done all that foundational research, and again, don’t forget that most people have a mental model that the solution is just a matter of intelligence. So they’re not even thinking about am I asking the right question? And it’s worth remembering that mental model is really such an issue here. A big challenge is with that much information, with that much intuitive knowledge, with that much of a database of you’ve built of really trying to frame and understand the issue, you have to organize the information. You’re going to have a lot of information. What often happens is you get all this information and you take the most surprising thing or you take one of the loudest variables or the loudest data points, and that becomes the underpinning of the strategy. What you’re not doing is accommodating all of the information, and that’s such a critical issue that again, a lot of problems our businesses have.
21:20
This is one of the issues where you have a big company, they have a really good research division. They do tons and tons of research, but the leadership just sees the Cliff Notes. They just see the couple big picture stats of like, oh, that’s great. Oh, that’s really concerning. They don’t organize all of that information into themes, into mental models, into a structure to really understand it. The way I like to approach this is a little mathematical is to look at what are the variables and what are the dynamics and how are they changing? So what I mean by that is we’ve talked a lot in our team and even on this podcast about relatability for example. When you try and predict that future, if you were to go back in time, what are the signals that would’ve helped you predict that and build a mental model of that if relatability is where trust is going, then that creates a framework for what a solution might look like let’s say.
22:08
In this case, you have to look at how is the information flow changing? That’s a variable, and the dynamic is it’s moving from institutions to people. We’ve known this for a long time, but if you could go back in time and start to pick out the signals of when Facebook started coming around and when the first influencers, you started to see, okay, we’re really moving in that continuum, and with that, you look at another variable of trust. How has trust changed? Well, as social media’s evolved, the visibility of people’s lifestyles increased, and so that became a proxy for trust. So super high visibility was trust, but then you had inauthentic lifestyles, and so the authenticity became the bottleneck and therefore we moved to higher commitments, which is around the topic of conspicuous commitment that we’ve talked about. My point here is that by isolating some of the variables and understanding what are the dynamics and how are they changed, you’re starting to organize a lot of information into simple systems and for example, just the flow of information from institutions to people.
23:03
It’s such a simple thing. We kind of know that, but when you build that mental model and you say, okay, if this continues happening, what does that mean? You start to be able to build a predictive device by understanding the variable and the dynamic. So that’s always how we try and organize the information with so many different signals because again, the market’s changing, the flow of capital is changing, the advertising platforms and incentives are changing, the audience is changing, culture is changing. Our cultural languages are changing so many variables, and you do need to understand these depending on the scale of the problem you need to solve. Again, it’s such a critical thing to just… Do you have a model and so simple things of like what are the incentives in a system? What is the friction, the inertia to these systems? Do you have a model for that?
23:46
What’s the curve? There are different curves that you can look at the J curve, for example, where things get more effortful or they get worse before they get better. An S curve where there’s a slow up ramp and then things start to jump and then they slow down at the top. So there’s this kind of middle curve, a bell curve, these simple things of just is this moving linearly exponentially or incrementally? Understanding these behaviors, again, it helps you predict what the future looks like and often to have a solution, you need to have a sense of not where we are today, but where are we headed? That’s the kind of challenge that you need to solve.
24:20
Jasmine: What I’m hearing is that the solution isn’t in the data as it’s presented because that is reflective of today and it’s a snapshot, but rather if you zoom out, it’s in the patterns that a bunch of different inputs create that gives you a direction that then gives you a projection of the future. It’s data, but in movement and in aggregate, that’s where the solutions lie is at this higher level.
24:48
Jean-Louis: I think the key word to describe that is when you zoom out, you start to see where the leverage in the system is. As you get these variables, you realize that a lot of variables are connected to something. There’s a root cause underlying a lot of these things, and what you are looking for in any solution that you’re trying to find when you organize the information this way is where’s the leverage? What are the independent variables that separate from everything else are driving the bulk of the change? In a lot of markets right now because of AI, we are moving from a supply constrained or a demand constrained model to a supply constrained model or vice versa. So for example, in digital artwork or in the art industry in general, for the longest time it’s been supply constrained. There’s only so much art, but there’s so much demand for it.
25:30
And now if you look at, obviously we’re well past NFTs, but if you just look at generative AI, all of a sudden we now have infinite supply of art essentially, or at least we’re starting to be there, and so now demand is the constraint. And so obviously as that model changes, the behaviors of those marketplaces need to respond to that. Again, it’s a really simple thing, but supply and demand, the dynamic has changed. And so when you understand the dynamic and realize that’s where there’s a lot of leverage in the system, that unlocks where you need to focus the solution on. And so again, it’s just so critical of like have you organized the information? Okay, you’ve collected it, can you present it back? Can you find the 80/20, the 20% of inputs that create 80% of the outputs?
26:09
That’s what’s required here and finding that tipping point, that’s why it’s the research, but then the understanding of the research and when that’s separate, again, one of the challenges here is that you can have a really good insights team, but if they’re not involved in the solution, then you don’t have the full picture in a larger company, especially the flow of information and the ownership of that and the real do you feel it? Have you spent time with this? That’s such a critical question to do you have what it takes or do you have what you need to solve the problem?
26:39
Jasmine: When I think about this second step of solutions, I think of mental models that comes up a lot in our work at this stage, we go about it a certain way. Can you talk to that a little bit? How do mental models come into play when it comes to the solution stage?
26:55
Jean-Louis: So absolutely, I think mental models is such a critical part of how you solve this. So let’s say you’ve done all the work as you’ve done the foundational thinking, the first principles, you’ve built an intuition for what the solution is. You’ve organized that information, so now you can find the point of leverage, the key variable that you need to understand to unlock the behavior that you want to create or the solution, the perception that you want to create. Then you have to present it as a mental model. And really when you think about a mental model, I kind of think about it as like a zip file.
27:23
You take all of this data and you compress it down to a really simple idea. A perfect example of this is clean products. When someone sees a clean product or they go to a clean product website, the word clean captures so many layers of value. There’s a cultural narrative that the FDA has failed us and that Europe has better standards. And so a lot of clean products talk about using European standards. There’s a moral question of what the right kind of product is. Often it’s correlated with being eco-friendly and those kind of narratives. And so when you see the word clean, it’s a mental model that encompasses so much information.
27:59
Jasmine: I think what’s important to remember about that mental model and why it’s strong is that it also provides a model for its opposite. So if you’re not eating clean, you’re eating dirty and clean and dirty, it’s a very instinctive concept to us. It’s very biblical. The idea of what you put into your body, either your body being like a temple, you can go on and on unpacking what clean food is or clean beauty, clean whatever, just from that one word.
28:32
Jean-Louis: Yeah, I mean what we’re talking about when we’re talking about mental models is really the act of framing, creating that simulation of do I now have a conception of the solution? And as you say, in opposition of the problem, do I understand the rules of engagement like a sport? Do I know the rules? Can we present an idea? And that’s such a challenge to do that because it needs to be highly specific. If it’s not specific, then it’s probably not defensible by you or anyone else, and you are probably not creating all that much value because if it’s such a general truth, then you’re not really shifting perspectives as much as you could. And so great solutions, it’s understanding the leverage and compressing all that information to one idea that I can just grasp and keep hold of. We obviously know that people’s attention spans are shrinking, and so these mental models are so critical to get right.
29:21
So I can give an example that maybe bring this down to earth a little bit. So we worked with a financial services company that really helped customers, or at least the perception was that they helped customers who were… This was a last resort who really needed help, who felt helpless, who felt in trouble basically, and this was a really strong negative emotional truth for their audience. And there’s this whole adjacent category of people who could be just as supported, just as benefited by this product, but didn’t respond to the narrative of needing help, that wasn’t an idea that was relevant to them. And as we talked to these customers, what we found, and this was so fascinating, is that the financial benefit of the product was actually less than the emotional benefit of the product. Again, this is a financial services offering, but the outcome emotionally was so deep and it hit so many of their relationships and how they saw themselves in the world.
30:18
That hit their mythology of who I am, that it became clear that we can at least present the act of using this service as an act of taking care of yourself, which is a very different thing than an act of desperation, an act of lost resort. And so when you start to present it that way, you get this whole contingent of people who would never relate with the idea of needing help, but they do relate to the idea of taking care of themselves. And so that simple mental model of what am I doing here? What is this act? It opened up a new mental model of behavior and a new way of relating to this, and that company has gone on to market that narrative to huge success in terms of the outcomes and the reach that they’ve had of reaching that new audience because they’ve reframed the proposition of what they’re doing and what they’re speaking to. So again, it’s a very simple thing, but that perceptive value that you’re creating changes when you give it a new mental model.
31:13
Jasmine: So you say that the solution is only step two, there is a step three, which is the expression of the solution or the refining of the idea. So just like if you had a lot of heavy pre-work with context setting, you have a lot of post-work with expression refining. Let’s talk about this a little bit. You have a good idea. You have the concept or the mental model in our business and brand strategy you obviously then need to refine it because it needs to be translated and expressed in different channels, in different ways, different touchpoints. Branding’s not just a visual or website layer. It’s everything down through the products, through the company culture, all that. Let’s talk about this a little bit. Where do you begin to refine when it comes to the expression of the idea?
32:03
Jean-Louis: I think the first thing is we talked about first order thinking, there’s second order thinking, which is and then what? And then what? And then what? Ask that a number of times, ask that five times, see what happens, what happens if an audience hears this message? Can we run the simulation of what happens if the market hears this message? How will they behave? Just really understanding the world in which this is in just, again, you’re really just running a simulation, even if it’s just a thought experiment of what that looks like. The key tool that I think is really helpful here is separating sentiment and semantics. So often I’m sure if you’ve worked in a large team or a large company and you need to come to a big decision, the expression a horse designed by a committee is a camel. The idea that with many people in the room, a lot of people add value by taking away or by criticizing and saying, “Oh, I don’t like that.”
32:52
It’s more rare and it’s often a really good green flag of a great leader who is adding value or questioning in a way that is additive instead of subtractive. And so when you separate the sentiment, what do you mean, but from the semantics of how do you express that meaning, then it kind of makes it much easier to be more precise. Because again, what happens is people say, “Oh, I don’t like that word.” And then over time, over the iterations, the meaning changes and so you’re not actually solving, you might not end up with a meaning that is relevant to the leverage that you found when you were organizing the information. And so that’s such a critical thing of separating that and first of all, figuring out what is the sentiment, and that’s why you need to get really precise. What exactly do you mean? What expectation are you creating?
33:36
What feeling is this relating to? What kind of connotations does this have or associations, that is figuring out exactly what that sentiment is. You should have very high conviction that that sentiment is what needs to be communicated. Making that a separate thing. We agreed that this is the meaning we want to convey, and getting buy-in there first is such a good insurance policy against that drift in meaning. Once you’ve agreed on that meaning, then you’ve got a much more narrow problem. We just need to express this in the right way. The word I often use there is poetry. Poetry has many meanings. It kind of has many connotations. Often when you have a mental model, it needs to be true for multiple audiences, it needs to have a truth for your internal team. If you’ve got a two-sided marketplace, for example, it needs to be true of both sides.
34:21
It needs to be a shared thing with some nuances in its interpretation. And so that’s where exploring semantics and getting that nuance is a different exercise. I often use this phrase with our team when we’re brainstorming of hitting the end of the dictionary, it is very frustrating because you have this great meaning, but there are only so many words in the English language. And so there is definitely a struggle there in terms of conveying things with the level of depth that you’re looking for. But there are some tools, there’s fantastic thesaurus tools. I think actually of all places in this thinking process, this is one of my favorites, to use ChatGPT to explore language, to explore words, to explore phrases and metaphors and things like that. It can be a very creative tool of going wide and then kind of going in. I think often the creative process here is very much you diverge and converge, you come up with many, many options and you whittle it down. Many, many options and you whittle it down.
35:13
You need to do that cycle multiple times to come to the right output, the right phrasing. But again, that just separation of sentiment. What do you mean to semantics of how do you express that if you lock the first one in of, what do you mean it makes it so much easier to get the second one right. And that is honestly the biggest issue I see often with thinking is that you may have the right solution, but you don’t have the systems in place to leave the room with the right solution in hand. So that’s one of the challenges here in carrying that through.
35:43
Jasmine: I think another important thing that we have to cover here is how do you actually stress test all of this stuff? A lot of times there’s a fair argument that if you’re creating something new in the world, you can’t ask people if they want it. You can’t do focus groups and tests because people will not know what they don’t know. But there are other ways to stress test your ideas, especially if they’re big breakthrough new ideas. Let’s talk about that a little bit. What are some things that you think are a good starting point?
36:13
Jean-Louis: I think the first thing is just recognizing that often with strategies and strategic thinking, you can be stuck in a local maxima, meaning that if you deviate from your strategy a little bit, your results might get worse, but if you deviate a lot in the right direction, they could get a lot better. And it’s that trap of thinking that incremental change… Sometimes you cannot increment your way to a new strategy. You need to fundamentally start from a different spot. And that fundamental shift is a risk. It’s absolutely a risk, and that’s why you need such strong conviction on these things. But the first thing is to recognize that in making sure and fine-tuning the outcome of that strategic decision, there may be some inefficiencies. You may see some dips in numbers, but the commitment to that solution done right can lead to great results.
36:55
And so I think that’s the first thing of even your mental model of what the solution can look like. But you’re absolutely right in that you have to stress test these ideas. The first thing is just to ask yourself what if we’re wrong? And just running that scenario through, often what we talk about with our clients is a pre-mortem and just playing out the idea of, okay, let’s imagine that this strategy failed. It’s two years from now, we’ve spent $10 million on marketing budget and we just haven’t quite seen the results, or we haven’t quite built the perception that we wanted to get. Why did it go wrong? And then to run that simulation now of asking was it an organizational thing? Was it a systems thing? What are all the reasons we could have gone wrong? What are their likelihoods and what is the likely impact of those things?
37:38
And just stack rank them and say, okay, these are the top five reasons why even with the right idea, even if everything is right, we still might fail. And here’s why. Are we onboarding the team? Are we educating our team to use this right, are we actually committing the resources? We might change our message, but are we changing our product to meet that so that there’s a consistency there? All of these small things that pre-mortem exercise is so important just to play out because often we don’t, we’re afraid to explore those things of, hey, why might this fail? And I think that’s the most important thing. It’s kind of like blacksmithing. You put it on the table and you smash it with a hammer, and if you could really break it, then maybe there was something wrong to begin with. And actually that’s kind of a perfect analogy.
38:18
Many, many years ago, earlier in my career, I helped run a Google startup accelerator in London for early stage startups. So it was like a week long intensive program where startups would come through and every day we’d address a different part of the business. And over doing that a few different reps, what we found is the best way to help startups was to basically try and break them. So over the course of the day, we’d see, can we find a critical flaw in the product? Can we find a critical flaw in how they understand their market or their audience? Can we find a critical flaw in their marketing approach or whatever it was. And just by trying to destroy them, if you could find something by applying that pressure and that intensity, often it left companies being far more resilient or walking away and going, “Okay, we need to do something else.”
38:59
I always remember there was this company, they’d spent two years working on a connected dog collar, and they found that people really care, they’re very concerned about their dogs when they’re at work. They wanted to feel connected to them. So we just said, “Have you talked to people? Go on the street, talk to people.” And what they found is that yes, people really are concerned. No, this product does absolutely not alleviate these concerns. And at this point, they’d spent a lot of time, a lot of R&D on the market, but they didn’t find the success that they were looking for. And this kind of spoke to that, and it was just a very, very simple exercise. But again, just have you really stressed tested it. It’s such a simple thing. A lot of these things, we’re talking about thinking it’s incredibly simple, but it’s so critical that you do that hard work of not just coming up with that idea, not being precious with it, but really putting it on the anvil.
39:43
Jasmine: People wanted to be connected to their dogs, but they didn’t like the idea of a connected dog collar, why?
39:49
Jean-Louis: They were anxious about how their dog felt while they’re at work, but they felt that the connected dog collar didn’t alleviate their anxieties because while they could see how their dog was doing, they couldn’t connect with the dog. And often when the dog wore it, the dog was confused if they tried to speak to the dog, because they were like, “Okay, where are they?” And so there was kind this challenge of they were addressing a real anxiety, but the product wasn’t providing the emotional security or the emotional comfort that it was intended to. Put another way, all the extra insights and information of all this data that you were getting from your dog made you more anxious, not less
40:25
Jasmine: Classic example of people not really actually getting into the minds and bodies of their users to see what the real need was, which was not data, but rather some sort of emotional easing or respite.
40:40
Jean-Louis: I think there’s a trap in all of this. There’s something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is really helpful to keep in mind, which is that often the less you know about something, the more you think you know. A lot of people use the word quantum for a lot of stuff. I’d hazard to guess that most of them don’t really know the intricacies of quantum physics. And so there’s this kind of U shape in terms of the vertical axes being the perceived knowledge that you have, and then the horizontal axis being how much knowledge you actually have. And so people who either are incredible experts, who spend their entire careers in quantum physics and people who have read a handful of articles often present with the same… They perceive themselves at the same level of expertise when in fact there’s this huge gap.
41:26
The main point here is that the more you know typically, the less you realize you know, and that’s part of it in terms of having that humility and just keeping an eye out for that of like, am I on this curve? Do I know just enough to be dangerous? Do I know just enough to think I know more than I really do? And so again, it is kind of dealing with your own sort of confirmation bias and your own perceptions. And that’s all part of stress testing of not just stress testing the idea, but stress testing yourself too. Am I seeing this correctly?
41:53
Jasmine: I don’t want anyone to feel overwhelmed by the sheer fire hose of information that we just went over. These were things that took us many years to kind of develop as part of our process. And some of it’s formal, some of it’s informal, and it’s taken time to get to where we are, build our own intuition. I think it would be good to end with this. If somebody who’s listening to this, who’s trying to uplevel how they think and really develop that muscle, that skill, what’s the big takeaway that they should walk away from this conversation with?
42:25
Jean-Louis: First thing, thinking is the skill, and there are many constituent components, and it’s not even just a skill, it’s a whole class of skills. And so if you think about it thinking as a category, and now you can have all these different skills within thinking of just again, expressing that idea of stress testing, of organizing information, there are many constituent components. So first thing is realizing that all of those are variables and you can train on all of them and you should be, that immediately helps build fidelity there. The second thing is often, I think often people are fairly good at coming to solutions. I think it’s the first and the last point here. We forget how important it’s to set the right context and make sure that while we may be good at solving problems, are we solving the right problems and then stress testing them and really doing our due diligence in making sure they’re the right solutions. I think those are the two main things to take away from this.
42:25
Jasmine: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Unseen Unknown. If you’re new here and like what you’re listening to, do us a favor and leave a review. Those reviews mean a lot and they help our audience grow. And don’t forget, you can always get more of our brand strategy and culture articles, videos, podcasts, whole bunch of great content at Conceptbureau.com. And while you’re there, you can also sign up for our awesome newsletter that will deliver valuable thinking to you twice a month, and I promise it’ll be the best thing you get in your inbox. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time.
Welcome to our second episode of Brands & Outliers, where our team does a wide sweep of culture and presents every recent finding they think is worth noting.
Culture is going more deep and more human. As the time-space compression of AI becomes more clear, people are grasping for some very specific islands of stability.
One of those islands is the strong tie communities that used to only exist in the fringes, but are now clearly starting to concern platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Meanwhile, brands are catering to a fragmenting of human experience, consistent with our projection of High Fidelity Society slowly taking over the world, market by market. New innovations and infrastructures, from TrovaTrip to Asian American malls, aren’t built upon the standard, but rather the exception.
Against this backdrop, the relentless pursuit of optimization is reaching a fever pitch in our gendered spaces, including the rise of T Parties (sort for testosterone parties), male plastic surgery and the quasi-moral discourse around Ozempic.
And while these forces ensure that we continue to sort ourselves into niche tribes, there is one bastion of social class mixing that stands strong. It is not the church, not the school or the community park, but rather the humble chain restaurant.
With that in mind, please come and enjoy this delicious buffet of insights. Timestamps of highlights below.
00:17 A solid theory on how the time-space compression of AI is going to have certain psychological effects on people, and the islands of stability we’ll cling to.
03:35 We’re at the peak of the AI hype cycle, but it’s worth remembering that while technology is fast, people are slow.
10:16 Positive uses of AI that can literally change how we know and remember ourselves.
15:38 We’re posting less on public feeds and sharing more in DMs.
16:43 Even weak tie networks like TikTok have begun building for depth rather than breadth.
22:35 Brands like TrovaTrip reveal something interesting: one of the best indicators of compatibility between people in real life is if they follow the same influencer.
25:25 A bright spot in the wasteland that is America’s malls: Asian malls are thriving, likely because they are strong centers for community and connection, not just consumption.
26:13 Changing Experiences of Gender and Gender Roles
26:42 “T Parties” (short for testosterone parties), Ozempic and the uptick in male plastic surgery remind us that we used to be able to just live, but now we have to maximize.
30:06 Women are being priced out of motherhood, and it may pose a problem for aging populations in Europe.
31:53 With the girlboss era being over and nothing to replace it, there’s a gaping hole in the working woman’s narrative.
37:23 Equity and Inclusion, Privacy, Attention and Other Insights
40:52 Big brands are getting into recommerce, working with companies like thredUP and Archive to capture sales in the ever-growing secondhand market.
44:00 Surveillance chic and “If I go missing” folders are here.
52:46 Olive Garden is a sanctuary of class mixing.
When Moonjuice was founded in 2011 by Amanda Chantal Bacon, it was easy for people (like myself) to dismiss it as out of touch branding. The company’s hero product, Sex Dust, was an adaptogen-laden powder that promised support for “your sex life, sexual arousal, or sexual performance” with a hefty price tag.
For the uninitiated mainstream, Sex Dust and the many other cosmically branded Moonjuice products like it, seemed like ridiculous promises for ridiculous problems.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that Bacon had tapped into a wellness signal that the rest of us couldn’t hear yet. She understood that a new form of spiritual wellness, which combined performance, supernatural leanings, and alternative health was on the cusp of our collective consciousness.
That spiritual wellness was invisible culture, and when it surfaced, it became a part of our shared reality.
Every trend starts as an anomaly: a deviation from the norm that may look like an outlier at first, but actually signals a widespread change that is about to come.
Companies that spot cultural change before it becomes visible will always have an advantage not only in brand strategy, but also in innovation. The most valuable strategies and innovations have always been predicated on a prediction, and the only predictions that matter are the ones that tell us where culture is headed.
Invisible culture will tell you where people are willing to be pulled. It will reveal what direction they’re inclined to move in, opening a channel of new and viable opportunities that didn’t exist before.
In their article, “The Power of Anomaly”, authors Martin Reeves, Bob Goodson and Kevin Whitaker explain that finding these invisible changes means looking in the right place at the right time:
“To take advantage of emerging trends, companies must identify them when they are embryonic—not purely speculative, but not yet named or widely known. At that stage the signs will be merely anomalies: weak signals that are in some way surprising but not entirely clear in scope or import.”
The kinds of anomalies that matter in strategy are the ones that show us how people are changing, and this is what my team at Concept Bureau focuses on in our monthly Brands & Outliers meeting. Our goal in that meeting, and throughout all of our work, is to look for changes in three main dimensions: how people feel emotionally, how people behave personally and publicly, and what people believe.
Emotions, behaviors and beliefs will always lead you to the heart of invisible culture. When any of those three things start to shift, there’s likely an anomaly worth paying attention to.
But how do you find these bleeding edge anomalies and shifts in the first place? The inconvenient answer is that it takes experience. The more you research, pay attention, and learn to think like a strategist, the more you will develop a sixth sense for spotting it.
However, there are some hotspots along the landscape that tend to house invisible culture more than others. They provide dependable signals in categories full of noise, especially in places where there are many stakeholders or competing narratives:
Where categories intersect
Strong tie communities
Dissenting voices
Each of these places reveals different truths, but all of them will give you a pulse on how people are evolving and how they are willing (or wanting) to change.
When a brand understands that, they have permission to create a whole new future for their audience.
#1 Look at the intersection between categories.
The border between your category and another is usually where users are evolving the most. The changes that happen here tend to be step-changes in how people behave. It’s where we see many new norms and behaviors first emerge.
If you look at the intersection of healthcare and parenting, you see brands like Boram Care (postpartum retreat for moms), Genexa (clean kids medicine), Slumberkins (emotional learning tools for children) and a whole host of influencers, communities and private schools focused on alternative development styles.
All of these point toward more thoughtful care for children, but that’s obvious.
Spotting the real trend requires you to zoom out and look at how people are changing among all of these examples, and when you do that, what you find is a redefinition of the parent.
Parents have become increasingly intuitive about how they raise kids. They don’t look to grandparents for advice, they don’t subscribe to just a single ideology, and the few experts they do wholly subscribe to are usually the ones going against the grain.
Parenting is less about doing what is accepted as right, and more about doing what feels right. Being a parent may have once been an act of well-trodden routines and pathways, but it is increasingly becoming an act of defiance, in both the big things and the little things. Many of the choices a parent makes are in resistance to something they don’t agree with, in exchange for something that is more aligned with their intuition.
That insight creates new room for new innovations, brands and experiences.
You can do the same at the intersection of any other two categories. It will often be a leading indicator of what is to come.
#2 Watch for changing emotions in strong tie communities.
Weak ties historically allowed us to extract value from the peripheries of our networks (think LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter), while strong ties extract value from relationships at the center of our networks (think Patreon, niche Discord groups, online affinity groups, and the proliferation of like minded living communities like Latitude Margaritaville).
While weak ties have been the underpinning of social innovation for the last two decades, strong ties are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of our social fabric.
Strong tie communities are a valuable place to look for the future because they’re typically where culture is most expressed and engaged with. When emotions and feelings begin to turn in these spaces, culture will soon follow.
We’ve seen this with many of our clients, including strong tie communities in beauty, self-care, education and dating. When emotions started to change in these deep, personal spaces between people, we knew a shift was coming. Emotions shift before people even have the words or the ideas to articulate the change they are experiencing.
Nearly all beverage industry experts attribute the strong rise of non-alcoholic adult beverages to people being more health conscious, more sober-curious, and more willing to substitute alcohol with cannabis. Gen Z goes so far as to call alcohol “Boomer technology”.
The vast majority of research reports cite these same factors over and over again, but they are missing an important change in people’s emotions—a change that can only be seen in the corners of strong tie communities—that explains this phenomenon much better.
People overall are gathering in more thoughtful ways. They are choosing connective activities like experiential dinners and holidays with chosen family. They’re playing board games and jumping in adult bounce houses. They still gather to drink, but when they do, it’s less in bars and more in the intimacy of their own homes with friends.
They seek more connective social experiences than before, in no small part due to COVID, and aim to engage with others more meaningfully. They want shared experiences that require them to be wholly present. One look at the fanbase that has formed around author Priya Parker’s book Art of Gathering will show you how far people are going today in order to reinvent the common meetup, party or hang in order to emotionally connect.
These more thoughtful gatherings require us to rethink the concept of alcohol. Yes, we want to be healthier, but we also want more fully immersed, human-to-human interactions.
This is where many alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverage brands will make the mistake of a shallow gesture, believing that adding adaptogenic ingredients or an organic label will be enough to capture this changing mindset, when in fact the trend in lower alcohol consumption is much bigger than obvious health reasons.
Emotions are taking a sharp turn when it comes to the ways we gather. We come together for different reasons now, and with very different expectations. We expect to change or be changed through our encounters with others. We expect to go deeper and feel something personally.
Where drinking may have once been a vehicle for helping us lighten up or numb out, it is now a vehicle for settling down and plugging in.
That’s a future signal that any brand—alcoholic or not—can do something interesting with.
#3 Listen for dissenting stories.
When an idea or story is widely accepted, pay attention to the quiet voices that dissent. By the time that idea is openly resisted, it will be too late to take advantage of the change.
For every story, there is an opposing story that will tell you just as much (if not more) about the direction of invisible culture. Find the unheard stories that counteract our accepted beliefs, find out who is telling those stories and how they are telling them.
When we developed the brand strategy for AI consultancy Prolego in 2021, they faced a unique problem. Their B2B clients wanted to embrace AI in their businesses, but those clients’ B2C customers shared widespread fears of AI’s potential risks. C-suites coveted the AI prowess of TikTok, but feared the AI backlash of Cambridge Analytica.
It was a different time, before chatGPT, when Alexa smart home assistants and Siri enabled devices were the extent to which most people experienced AI in their daily lives. But even with only these rudimentary forms of AI, the public’s opinion was largely informed by dystopian movies, clickbait headlines, and economic insecurity.
In our research for Prolego, we discovered a quiet, invisible group of people we called “AI Natives”, and turned our findings into a report called AI Natives Among Us. That report demonstrated a very early signal of invisible culture that has only just come to fruition in the past few months.
Just as the digital natives who came before them had an innate ability to navigate the internet, AI Natives were defined by their ability to build relationships with the AI around them. They were not merely AI users. They were connected to AI in a way that allowed them to shape AI tools for their own needs, willing to invest in molding AI for their unique way of life.
The widely accepted mainstream story of the time was that AI was a nefarious “other”, but the dissenting story of this audience was that AI was very much a technology that belonged within the human experience. AI Natives didn’t want to see technology, they wanted to feel it, and that distinction perfectly describes the difference between the apps of yesterday and the AI platforms of today.
One AI Native told us, “We’re going on vacation in a month and we’re actually packing my Google Home because I’m so used to telling it things.” A Director at a Fortune 30 healthcare company said, “In a hundred years from now, there probably will be no internet or smartphones, but there will certainly be AI.”
Most interestingly, after hearing about a company’s investment in AI, nearly half of adults under the age of 45 were more likely to believe the company positively affected society and cared about its customers. AI had a profound halo effect on the perception of a brand among AI Natives.
Their story has quickly proven to be our trajectory. There is still cultural uncertainty and fear, but the once-dissenting story of the AI Native is a clear signal of what is to come.
The anomalies of invisible culture require us to approach everything we see with an open and nimble mind. The fact is culture is always changing at the edges, always moving in a new direction, and never in a straight line for too long.
Every brand and innovation that mattered came from an understanding of these changes.
Not every anomaly will be a true signal, of course, but if you pay attention for long enough, you will start to gain a sense for the kinds of outliers that will regress back to the mean, and the kinds that will change it.
Keep searching in the places where invisible culture tends to pop up, get a strong feel for how new emotions, behaviors and beliefs bubble at the edges, and gain an advantage in the marketplace.
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.
Jasmine: Welcome to Unseen Unknown. I’m your host, Jasmine Bina, and right now we are standing in my kitchen.
00:19
It’s late at night and next to me is Jean-Louis, my partner at Concept Bureau and all things in life, and we’re looking at his supplement shelf, which he installed over our coffee machine a while back. There’s all kinds of stuff on here. You’ll see brands like Athletic Greens, Organifi, Vital Proteins, Thorne Research, Pure Encapsulations, and Four Sigmatic, to name a few. And I’ll admit, I have my own lightweight stack of supplements mixed in with the other containers on this shelf. It’s a lot, and everything here has a specific purpose. Okay, so what is all of this stuff?
00:55
Jean-Louis: This is my personal supplement stack.
00:58
Jasmine: Okay. I’m looking at many jars, a tincture, something in a little, it looks like a tobacco box. What is this one?
01:08
Jean-Louis: So, this is Shilajit. It’s kind of interesting one, it’s like a tar that you need to kind of melt in hot water. It’s got a lot of good minerals and things. It’s great for your hormone, balance and energy.
01:18
Jasmine: What’s this one?
01:20
Jean-Louis: This is a functional mushroom blend. So it has a whole bunch of stuff, turkey tail, lion’s mane, chaga, good all-rounder for a lot of immune stuff, but also for brain health, especially. The lion’s mane is the big one in that one.
01:32
Jasmine: I see there’s creatine here and a bunch of other stuff. First, how do you take all of this? How do you ingest? Okay, I’m going to count this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 substances here. How do you take all of these every day?
01:51
Jean-Louis: So mostly I cram a whole bunch into a couple of drinks. So I have my Athletic Greens with my creatine polyphenols, my D3 and K2 and some fiber. So I’ll have that usually first thing in the morning, and then I’ll have some omega-3 as well. For a lot of the other ones, I cram them into a hot drink. So I’ll mix collagen with my mushroom powder with the Sheila G, and I’ll put some cinnamon in with that and some honey to kind of round out the flavor. It can be quite intense. Then I’ll take some protein as well, and then sometimes I’ll mix some inulin as well in my breakfast.
02:28
Jasmine: How much time do you think you spent figuring out this stack and tinkering with it and getting it right? Just ballpark?
02:36
Jean-Louis: Over a dozen hours.
02:37
Jasmine: And why? The big question. Why are you doing all this?
02:40
Jean-Louis: I’d like to live to 150 years old. I think if I can be super healthy, I think there’s a very reasonable chance of living to 100, and I think at least by the time I’m 100, the medical advances will at the very least take me the rest of the way there. I feel like that’s a pretty solid bet I’m willing to make. At the very least, I’ll live long, but I’ll be healthy and happy in the meantime. I think that what’s interesting is that right now I’m more focused on how do I feel the most energy, and so it’s kind of been interesting . The problem is that I’m messing with almost too many things at the same time, so it’s hard to tell what’s doing what, but I feel great. I mean, I exercise, all of those other things too. But yeah.
03:21
Jasmine: Living to 150 years old is ambitious, but it’s also optimistic. Jean-Louis is part of a massive community of people who are committed to this goal, “committed” being the operative word. Zach Lamb, who is our senior strategist at Concept Bureau, recently wrote an article about how conspicuous commitment is the next era of status, and that’s what today’s episode is about. 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, committing to something optimistic stands out. Think about it. We have public figures 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 just obsessed with flaunting material, possessions and extravagant experiences.
04:30
Instead, we’re witnessing the rise of people showcasing their unwavering dedication to self-work. Status is moving from the indulgence of conspicuous consumption to the self-denial of conspicuous commitment. Zach argues that the more you commit to the difficult and the fearsome and the hard one, the more you signal this new form of prestige. That’s a huge deal for brands. The meaning of status hasn’t changed for generations, but now that it is, everyone has to play by new rules. But before we get to Zach’s prediction on where status is headed, let’s consider an alternative point of view, more grounded in where it is today. I spoke with W. David Marx, the author of Status and Culture: How our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. David sees a social hierarchy that has become increasingly global, increasingly based on wealth, and increasingly flattening the texture of society.
05:30
W. David: It is a position in a hierarchy, and it could be a local group, it could be all of society, but as you move up in this hierarchy, you receive better social benefits. So people treat you better and you get more esteem. And esteem is kind of the anchor for that hierarchy. So I think we all know that this is a nice thing to have esteem, but psychologists have found recently in a lot of work and research that it’s a fundamental human desire. So more or less, every human being desires some level of status. So then when you ask about the history, what you’re really asking about is, over time, how has it changed that these hierarchies are created and what is the criteria in which they’re based? And you could probably go back to some sort of tribal society 10,000 years ago where you have a very small tribe and there may be a bloodline in which the leader is the leader.
06:26
And then you move to the Middle Ages and aristocracy and so you have a society in which the church and the king and very formal, rigid feudal systems have made it where the hierarchy is completely and utterly rigid so that you cannot really move up and down. I think the big change came probably dated to the French Revolution, but more or less with the rise of the bourgeoisie and capitalism, suddenly everybody can make their own destiny and having more and more money moves you up. And so we now live more or less in a world in which that social hierarchy is created by money. But the other interesting thing is we live in a very plural society, which you can have subcultures. And the way I talk about subcultures and countercultures in the book are these are status groups and status hierarchies based on different criteria than money. The kind of historical stage that we’ve been in, especially the 20th century, is yes, we’ve moved away from these categories where it’s, you’re kind of born into status and you always have it, you have to make it for yourself, and money really really helps there.
07:31
At the same time, there’s all these kind of offshoots and subcultures that are growing in stature. So suddenly you’re not just an outcast for being in a subculture, but you could actually be cooler than people in the so-called mainstream by being in these groups. And now in the 21st century, I’ve been thinking a lot about what is happening and subcultures have weakened. They’ve grown in strength in the sense that more people are into subcultural type things, but being in a subculture itself provides less value. And it seems like this massive social hierarchy, which is more globalized and more expansive than ever, is really focused more on money than ever before. And there is a status taboo. We don’t talk about it. It’s not supposed to exist in an egalitarian, democratic society. We’re not supposed to have these hierarchies. We see status much more as caste systems and feudal systems and things that we all got rid of.
08:24
And good, great, now we live in a place where everybody makes their own status. And of course there are things like sexism and racism, which are old hierarchies that have still been imposed on this society where we’re supposed to be able to make our own way, and we can’t. And money, as much as we don’t want it to be the thing that determines the hierarchy, it just does. I mean, we live in a capitalist society. My book is just trying to more or less say, culture seems mysterious when you force yourself not to look at the main thing that is driving it. So if you say, “Okay, we’re going to write about culture and why it changes, but we can’t look at status, because that would be rude,” then everything’s just total nonsense. And fashion makes no sense. And the ways we contort ourselves to tell stories about fashion trends is just ridiculous because the explanations for fashion when you take away status makes zero sense.
09:16
It’s just chaotic and things just become big randomly. It’s like that’s not how it works at all. And this idea of virality is completely ridiculous. And so the book is just saying, look, status exists. We don’t want it to exist, but here are the rules of how it works. And if you just line these things up and extrapolate from why a human being wants status, which is a very logical thing to want because it makes your life better, and the way people behave in pursuit of it in different ways, because not everybody’s saying, I want status, therefore I’m going to buy a Lamborghini. There’s many ways to do it and people in many groups, but if you just look at this, you’ll pretty much understand the origin of most of the cultural practices in society. And I just find that really helpful because ultimately, I’m interested in what is culture, where does it come from? Where’s it going, what is it doing? And unless you understand this status component of it, it’s just nonsense.
10:08
Jasmine: When I read this in the book, I was asking myself as well, why is there such a taboo around status? Why does it feel like such a risk to actually talk about this thing? Which according to you, is kind of like the driving force behind culture.
10:22
W. David: I think it’s changing a little bit. I watch a lot of TikTok videos, and maybe it’s because they’re like 16 year old kids, but there’s all these kids who’ve made money in dubious ways who have sitting on the hoods of all the Mercedes-Benz as they bought their parents or whatever, and they’re just like, “Yeah, if you’re 17 and you don’t own four luxury cars, you’re a failure.” So there’s this change where this principled detachment, I think, is getting much weaker. This kind of gentleman’s agreement not to talk about status has been lost on this new generation coming up that doesn’t have much connection to the old culture and is finding ways through the internet to make money on their own. So that may get weaker over time and people may hide it a little bit less, but I think they’re also very unlikely to talk about status too, because if you have status, it’s a very uncool thing to talk about status. So then it means the people who we hear from most and have most influence are never talking about it.
11:17
Jasmine: Okay, but aren’t people just finding, let’s say, the TikTok generation, aren’t they just finding new ways of asserting status, just new codes, new languages, new images and symbols where for them it’s maybe not so much about the money, but about being part of a special class that knows the rules?
11:38
W. David: Yes. I mean, that’s always been true. And the thing I noticed is simply how fast the information that is privileged information that gives you status as a teenager is devalued. If you’re on TikTok, the way that trends move is so fast that you know how to use this audio to make a video, and then you get a bunch of likes for it. And then within a week or so, everyone’s done it and it’s passe. And so the degree to which, let’s just call this a whole thing memes, but do you get a status for being a master meme maker and knowing what’s the right meme to make a joke about? Probably. But the question I have is, is that status you’re getting from meme manipulation very valuable? And also doesn’t it require just constant refresh? So you’re right that there is this group, but I don’t know how valuable that is on a global level.
12:34
And again, these are really important concepts for understanding status, but in your local group, you have a local status. So just think about if you’re at a rural high school and you are the captain of the basketball team, maybe you are a local star, but on a global stage, nobody knows who you’re and nobody cares. And so global status is how people perceive your position on a larger scale. And what is interesting to me is TikTok and YouTube in particular are massively popular platforms that everybody knows have replaced television and other forms of media, and yet they have all these stars that are very big locally within those worlds. But I keep thinking about have those stars crossed over to mainstream society? And if you look at ads for Louis Vuitton, they’re still using models and movie stars. No one watches movies, cinema’s in crisis, and yet Brad Pitt is this spokesperson for these brands, and not TikTok stars.
13:31
W. David: So there is status being generated locally, probably not yet globally. I know that will change, and I’m kind of waiting for that moment. It’ll be very interesting. But I’m passionate about there are people who understand these things and there are people who don’t, and the people who understand them are much more successful in life, and this information is hidden to people and it is hidden from people. And the more that these ideas become common knowledge, the more the system changes and the more we can take control of it. And so I am passionate about, this knowledge is not equally distributed, and it should be. Every high school should have a class that teaches people about the sociology of status because they’re living it. I mean, high school kids live it more than anyone else, and they just think it’s like, this is the nature of the world, and if I’m uncool, then it’s something wrong with me.
14:20
And it’s like, you’ve got to understand how this works. And so I deeply believe that we should move towards an egalitarian society, and you can’t do that unless you see where the stratification exists. Unless you perfectly understand the stratification, you can’t get rid of it. The second is, and I do write this in the book because the whole book, I’m like, “I have no opinions about this. This is just the way it works.” But at the end it’s like, fine, I’ll have two opinions, which is if we could have lots of hierarchy or little, I think a little is much better, and we should move towards that and understand the ways that personally we replicate and we reproduce the status structures in our own behaviors. So that’s number one. Number two is, culture should be more exploratory, experimental, interesting, more complex. And complexity is good for the ecosystem in general because it trickles down and it makes even simple things more interesting.
15:17
Jasmine: So all of this leads us to where we are today, a world in need of transparency and perhaps even more importantly, exploration and complexity, a world with more dimension where status is not solely derived from money, but from creation, experimentation and ingenuity. This is where Zach’s idea of conspicuous commitment comes in. What Zach sees is a new social code around status that affords us this kind of dimension that untethers us a little bit from wealth and moves us toward creation of the self where it’s not about what you have, but what you are committing yourself to. And it rings surprisingly optimistic.
16:01
Zach: With conspicuous commitment, the flex that I’m pointing at in the article is the hard work that you’re doing on yourself mentally and physically. That’s what we’re really trying to show off now. It’s not like, “Look at all these possessions that I have. Look at all these things,” or, “Look at all these experiences that I’m going out and collecting and then sharing on Instagram or TikTok.” And it’s not your virtue signaling, like I’m this kind of person with these kinds of values and beliefs. No, it’s what am I doing to train my mind and my body that makes me into a certain kind of person and shapes me in a way that’s self-directed, that I’m choosing. And I found a meme on Twitter the other day that really encapsulates what I’m talking about. It says, “Become a ghost for six months. Find the beast within you. Throw yourself into pain. Cut out all the excuses. Go all in on yourself, train like a warrior, work like a robot, eat like a king, reject vices, transform, upgrade, create, thrive, win.”
16:57
Right? It’s super serious. From the outside, it’s easy for us to laugh at this, but if somebody’s on the inside, they’re deeply committed to this project of self-transformation and self-betterment, and it feels like that. So 50 years ago, you’d see somebody jogging through your neighborhood and you’d be like, “What is going on? This is really, really weird. What are you running from?” That’s the joke. But we’re so far from that now. This is such deep whole being training, being, mind and body. That’s what I’m really trying to capture with this new evolution in status, showing that off, that change in that training that you’re doing for yourself.
17:33
Jasmine: I feel like I’ve definitely heard conspicuous commitment on social a lot, but what are some of the hallmarks of conspicuous commitment that make it what it is?
17:42
Zach: There’s four main hallmarks. The first one is isolation. Make no mistake, this is all about me. It’s very me focused. I’m not trying to change the world. I don’t have a socially altruistic angle here. I’m merely trying to better myself. At the end of the day, this is all about me, individual, isolated. And the second one is challenge. You’re setting up challenges. You’re putting obstacles in your way so that you can overcome them and transcend them on this path that you’re on. Society isn’t giving you these obstacles. They’re not part of the normative development of how we grow and move through life. No, you’re putting these obstacles deliberately in your way so you can experience what it feels like to overcome this challenge. The third one, I kind of alluded to already, earnestness. We can laugh at this stuff, but it’s no joke. It’s very serious.
18:29
It’s almost anti-nihilistic. This is a deep meaning system that this person on this commitment path really believes in. And the last hallmark is devotion. I think this is the one that’s most interesting to me because it’s so religious. It feels, this stuff, when you engage with it, it feels like there’s zealotry. There’s a religiosity and a religiousness to this. The word I used in the article a lot is asceticism to describe this. I just love that word because it’s beautiful and it’s got all these religious connotations about self-sacrifice for a higher purpose. That’s what it feels like if somebody’s on this path of commitment.
19:06
Jasmine: To me, this feels like a big deal because I don’t know the last time that we ever discussed as a culture when the meaning of status was up for grabs, when we were going through a shift in what it actually means to have and attain status. I mean, is this really a fundamental shift? Am I over emphasizing here, or is it really this big?
19:27
Zach: No, it’s really this big. And I think to understand why and to feel why it’s this big, just briefly how we got here. The last 10 years, we all know it’s been crazy. We had a big breakdown in shared visions, shared norms, even shared realities in a lot of cases. Reality tunnels is the phrase I like to use to describe just how different worlds that we’re living in. Status doesn’t work in that context, right? Status is predicated on shared belief, shared buy-in. We all have to want the same thing. We have to be moving through life in the same way. So all that went out the window and we don’t have anything to anchor on anymore because we’ve also lost faith in all of our progress narratives. That explains a lot of the nihilism that you see in culture. People just don’t believe generally that a rising tide is going to lift all boats.
20:16
They look at things like inequality, racism, sexism, all these things. And there’s so many reasons to turn away from society and say, “That’s not working. This isn’t going to make me better. I can’t have faith and buy into the system. I’ve got to figure it out for myself.” So there’s just this sense of tragic optimism where my life prospects are just not going to be as great as they once were, so what am I going to do about it? And so in that context, believing in a positive future for yourself, committing to something, really stands out, right? Because nobody’s doing it. Culture at large is sort of mired in these negative things. But if somebody really commits and stands out positively, well, that’s going to confer status. That’s kind of how we got here.
20:58
So it is a pretty big shift. We’re really reckoning with the social changes and cultural changes of the last decade or so. And commitment really provides the order that we’re craving. Now, if you are somebody that commits to a project of self-improvement in the ways that we’ve been talking about, it really tidies the house. It shores up your meaning systems. It gives you order over chaos. It gives you direction and guidance. I started this research thinking I was going to write about brands offering personhood in a box, like, “Here’s a way to be a person in this crazy world.” But then I realized I was actually touching on something much, much bigger, which was this fundamental status shift.
21:37
Jasmine: So you’re saying because optimism is such a limited good, that really is the new luxury, is to be able to have something to be optimistic about. And conspicuous commitment is a way of committing to or displaying that sense of optimism that you have in your life, right?
21:57
Zach: 100%. Because if the rest of us are kind of mired in nihilism or trolling or laughing at structures and institutions, but not building anything constructively, people that are doing something optimistically that say, “I think things can get better and I’m going to make them better for myself,” that is a big shift. Not everybody sounds like that. It’s kind of rare, sadly.
22:16
Jasmine: Yeah. Where are you seeing conspicuous commitments show up most in the market, in the real world? What brands are really tapping into this? I feel like I can kind of see it in wellness from the examples you’ve given, but where is it showing up the most right now?
22:30
Zach: There’s three main areas. There’s biohacking wellness, alt wellness. That’s a big one. Really exciting new one is longevity and even immortality, as the AI has kind of entered the chat. Like, how are we going to maybe live forever through the use of AI? That’s another. And then lastly, of course, new buzzy therapies, particularly psychedelics. But there’s a lot of new kinds of group therapies. Those are really ripe for going inward. And of course to myself, you can’t go more inward than a trip. So all of these areas, I think my favorite brand in this space, Heroic. I would encourage everybody to check it out. They call themselves a self-mastery platform that combines ancient wisdom and modern science to equal your best self. And, “We train heroes,” is what they say. And forging anti-fragile confidence, master yourself, as I was checking them out, literally step one of their processes is called Commit.
23:23
And they say you’re on a path of Heroic commitment and they’re going to guide you through every step of the way. And what’s really ripe about them and interesting is they’re not shy about saying this is individual change first, for social change. So they reference social change, but they say social change is only going to come from a bunch of heroes out there, a bunch of people controlling their own, mastering themselves. So then when you’re doing that you can show up better in all the ways that if you’re in therapy, the therapist will tell you, “Put your own oxygen mask on first.” Heroic is really embracing that, and the world needs you to be your most heroic. For every company I will mention, there’s like 1,000 influencers or podcasters that are touching this space as well. So you can find your flavor of any one of these companies no matter where you are.
24:11
Another one is Wim Hof, or “breathology”, self-transcendence via breathing. I just love, it’s a gym membership, mindfulness coach and health insurance all rolled into one, through cold plunging and breath. But it’s a system. It’s like why it works is it’s a totalizing system for controlling the world, controlling the chaos, being a person and being a thing. Another one is HigherDOSE. I really think that they’re interesting. They’re a biohacker, collective biohackers, emphasis on the “her”s. Why they’re really innovative in the market is because biohacking has traditionally been such a masculine space and there hasn’t been a female presence in biohacking. And they’re really leading that. And there’s nothing too esoteric for them. They’re doing it all. And what’s really cool about their brand is they’re producing so much content of them experiencing all these things. Like I said, there’s nothing too weird. Ecstatic dance, Kambo frog venom poisoning, sound vibration, biofeedback psychedelics, sweat lodges, cold immersion.
25:06
They’re doing it all, but with the emphasis on the female body. And that’s a really refreshing intervention in the biohacking space. And so they’re really popular for that, just highlighting the role that women are playing and they’re playing a big thought leadership role in this space.
25:20
Jasmine: HigherDOSE though, they’re the sauna blankets, right?
25:24
Zach: Yeah.
25:25
Jasmine: Okay. That’s their main product, but they have all this really high level conspicuous commitment content that just transcends that product, right?
25:32
Zach: Well, yes, 100%. And I’m glad you kept me honest and pointed that out, because I got enamored with the content, but at the end of the day, they’re selling infrared light therapies and these blankets. Yes, exactly.
25:42
Jasmine: Yes, yeah. Okay, cool.
25:44
Zach: And I would be remiss not to mention Blueprint, which is Bryan Johnson’s project to live forever. A lot of people mock Bryan Johnson, but it is the quintessential example of conspicuous commitment. He’s saying, “I’m making a big bet. Criticize me if you want. This is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to reverse-age myself so I can be the same biological age as my son.” I have some of his language here just because it’s fantastic. And again, it’s the language of commitment. “The enemy is entropy. The path is goal alignment via building your autonomous self.” Again, the emphasis on the self. “Enabling compounded rates of progress to bravely explore the zero-width principle future, and play Infinity Games.” He’s very serious about… But I don’t even know what Infinity Games are, but I’d love to play them.
26:34
Jasmine: I’m not laughing at Bryan Johnson. I actually really admire what he’s doing. But the language, you’re right, it makes your head spin a little bit. Okay.
26:41
Zach: Yep, yep. But what’s cool is that it is just commitment to extreme progress into the deep future. And again, it’s offering a new narrative. It’s a hopeful narrative, really. If you are buying into it, it’s giving you optimism, it’s giving you hope, it’s giving you something to work towards. And I think that’s a really refreshing space. And then just lastly, I’d touch on the status therapies. Like I already mentioned, psychedelics are the perfect tool for going inward, not outward. I think we all thought at one point in culture, we were telling all these stories of galactic expansion. That’s how we were going to learn. That’s how everything was going to be different. We were going to be a species in like space colonization. That’s still in the thread of culture, but with conspicuous commitment and all these other cultural changes, we’re really turning the microscope back in.
27:29
And there’s a hierarchy in psychedelics as well. Did you take mushrooms with your buddies or did you do a hero’s dose with a blindfold at a field trip location in a major city? Or did you take ayahuasca in Peru? There’s these stages. There’s a cool ladder of psychedelics, but we’re all doing the work, right? And if not psychedelics, it’s some buzzy new therapies. Like Every Man For Men, I know you’ve written about Every Man in the past as this great company that’s spotlighting men’s mental health through the loneliness epidemic. Peoplehood is another one. We’re all lonely. We need a new way of being and relating in the world. And another favorite of mine, Chill Pill for Generation Z. I can’t get on the app. I tried. They said, “You’re too old. You can only get on this app if you are a certified member of Gen Z.” So if you’re not doing the work, if you’re not in therapy, increasingly daters say they don’t want to date you. That’s just how entrenched this doing the work notion of commitment is showing up.
28:31
Jasmine: But I’m going to be honest, these sound like the easy ones. Of course it’s going to be in wellness, of course, it’s going to be in self-help. Of course it’s going to be in psychedelics. How do you see it getting outside of the confines of wellness? Can conspicuous commitment show up in other ways, in other places?
28:48
Zach: Totally. Commitment is really suitable for finance, wellness, food, athletics, any sort of hobby pursuit where there’s an element of mastery. Think about it. If your category is such that somebody can get better at something, then why can’t commitment enter into the picture? And I think it looks like for those kinds of companies that it’s like brand activations and brand experiences that give people rituals, help them feel that they’re going from point A to point B, that things are changing in their life. You’re offering them a journey. You’re framing your experience and your product as a journey of transformation is one way to make it feel like you’re committing to something. And another, you can give people opportunities to experience new kinds of discipline. Every brand out there and generally in culture for the last 20 years, easy, easy, easy. We want to make things as easy as possible and eliminate as much friction as possible.
29:39
But conspicuous commitment says friction is good. I want to overcome the friction. So if you’re a brand that says, “We’re not easy, we’re difficult, but worth it,” that helps you stand out and it gives people something to believe in and buy into. That feels like commitment. And if you give them tools of introspection, everybody loves that. Well, that’s all ripe too. But I think generally commitment gives you a playbook of mastery. That’s what you’re trying to do. Just help people master themselves through the domain of the thing that you’re doing to commit to it and to improve.
30:10
Jasmine: Okay. So I’m going to ask you what probably most people listening to this are thinking in their heads, which is, is this not just the pastime of people who have tragically too much money and too much time on their hands?
30:25
Zach: Yes and no. I mean, status has to work like that. We have to aspire to it. It has to come from somewhere. But this is really trickled down. You will see this on your Instagram feed, your TikTok feed. You’ll see many versions of this. If you’re looking for it, you’ll start to go like, “I’m shocked after writing the article. Oh, yep, that’s commitment. That’s commitment.” It pops up everywhere, and there’s a flavor of commitment for everybody. Maybe you’re not able to do the full Blueprint method, but you listen to Andrew Huberman and you’re taking lots of supplements and really buying into a dopamine hacking lifestyle. So it’s like there’s a scale and a degree that is there for everybody, but there are elites that are leading this for sure.
31:04
Jasmine: So how do you see this continuing to evolve? What are the variables that will determine the course that conspicuous commitment takes over the next few years?
31:15
Zach: I just love John Vervaeke’s work on the meaning crisis, and a lot of cultural commentators are talking about it. We’re all looking for meaning, all the old sense-making ways that we used to make sense of the world have broken down. So what are we going to do about it? So conspicuous commitment is that response. It’s like, I’m going to impose my own kind of meaning. So it’ll be interesting to see how the meaning crisis continues to play out. Is society going to get more equal with AI? Is it going to get more unequal? We don’t know. I think that’s a variable here too. Most people agree that universal basic income is coming, it’s just a matter of when. And I think that conspicuous commitment is really interesting in that context because theoretically, as more of us get universal basic income, the playing field levels a little bit, I think then commitment gets really, really important.
32:02
It’s like, it’s not what are you buying with your money. It’s like, what are you doing with yourself, with your time? How are you making yourself a better person with the time that you have that you didn’t have before? Because we didn’t have UBI. So I think we’re going to spotlight commitment as UBI comes onto the scene. I think that that’s likely for sure. Another way to project this into the future, I think that’s with interesting context is we’re in the area of dupes now. We don’t really care to have the original. Increasingly, it doesn’t matter. I’ve called it product flows, right? Yeah. If you’re not buying the original luxury item, there’s 18 different versions along the spectrum that look just like it increasingly that are undistinguishable, and I can just buy a piece of that at whatever price range I’m at.
32:46
So consumption is increasingly going to lose its ability to sort of set us apart and confer status when we can all kind of have the same thing. If I don’t have the original Yeezy sneaker, I’ve got the $20 Temu version that you can’t tell the difference. I also saw something recently, I think it was Jennifer Aniston spends $200,000 a year on her body. These are things you can’t fake. The body, the mind can’t be faked, can’t be duped. So they’re going to stand out even more.
33:13
And I’m left wondering, where do you engage in conspicuous consumption in your own life? I don’t think you’re above it. I don’t think any of us are above it, right? We’re all status seeking. Where does it show up for you?
33:27
Zach: Yeah, I dabble. I’m less conspicuous and less committed than I would like to be. I’m waiting to get my foot on the ladder. I dabble in all the little wellness practices I mentioned. I have done Kambo, the psychedelic frog poisoning. That was fun. But I consume more than I commit. That’s the thing. Commitment is anti-consumption, really. It’s like you’re saying, I’m going to do this thing. I’m going to produce, I’m going to act, I’m going to create something or shape myself to be something, not consume passively. And I know personally, I just love sitting down and reading. I guess if I could commit to anything, it’s that. And even as technology evolves, we’re leaving the era of the rectangle and entering the era of wearable tech. Think about how much more seductive every mode of consumption is about to become. It’s going to get so much harder to commit to something because it’s going to be so much easier to just numb out and consume.
34:23
And that’s what I’m guilty of for sure. And I know I’m not alone. So many of us are like that. So I think as we end, that’s another future way to take this too. As we leave rectangles, go to wearable tech, it’s just going to be harder to commit and a commitment is going to stand out even more. So summing it up, UBI equals more commitment. Dupes can equal more commitment. We’re really at the beginning of this era of commitment. It’ll be fascinating to see how brands respond and provide them the meaning systems that they’ve been seeking.
34:57
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Unseen Unknown. If you’re new here and like what you’re listening to, do us a favor and subscribe and leave a review. Those reviews mean a lot and help our audience grow. And don’t forget, you can always get more of our brand strategy and culture, articles, videos, podcasts, all of it at conceptbureau.com. And while you’re there, you can also sign up for our awesome newsletter that will deliver valuable thinking to your inbox twice a month. My team is publishing some pretty amazing stuff based on the work that we’re doing with our amazing clients, including the article that this podcast episode was based on, which by the way, is linked in the show notes. And I promise it will be the best strategy newsletter you ever get. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time.
Brands exist in the space between how people perceive themselves and how they behave.
Our self-perceptions are the building blocks of our reality, and when the way we act doesn’t measure up to who we believe we are, it feels very uncomfortable. Oftentimes it’s the kind of pain that we will do nearly anything to resolve.
All brands are vehicles for closing this gap. The bigger the gap the bigger the cognitive dissonance, and the bigger the opportunity for the brand.
Eight Sleep is a premium bed cooling and sleep monitoring system made for professional athletes, but that’s not their core audience.
Think of the average person who has bought into hustle culture, or is on the wellness fastrack, or is an entrepreneur, or generally sees themselves as a leader. Their self-perceptions hinge on their ability to be productive, and if those people struggle and fail to get out of bed at 5am over and over again in order to have a productive day, or if they struggle to focus, or if they don’t treat their bodies like the hardware to their mental software, then their identity is threatened.
These people are not the elite athletes that Eight Sleep was designed for, but they are the performance-minded people that Eight Sleep’s brand captures. They pay for Eight Sleep not only in high cost, but also in the time it takes to rearrange their bedrooms and the commitment it takes to learn and use the app over time.
People pay these high costs because they are not merely solving for sleep. They are solving for their cognitive dissonance. The one thing they want (or perhaps need) more than rest is to feel like they are performing at a level that matches their self-perceptions.
Strong brands have cognitive dissonance at their core. They understand that while the product may solve a real-world problem, the brand is solving a much more valuable identity problem.
Social psychology identifies three ways to solve for cognitive dissonance. Each pathway gets us from a state of high dissonance (discomfort and pain), to a state of lower dissonance (comfort, ease). Each one speaks to different user needs in a market, and has its own challenges and opportunities.
1. Change belief – Change one’s beliefs to be more aligned with one’s actions.
2. Change action – Change one’s actions to be more aligned with one’s beliefs.
3. Change action perception – Rationalize or justify the difference between one’s beliefs and one’s actions.
Each of these three pathways shrinks the gap between someone’s identity and behaviors, and thus lowers their cognitive dissonance.
However, I’ve seen a fourth pathway emerge that not only works, but is indicative of where successful brands are headed over the next few years.
4. Adapt action – Change the outcomes of one’s actions to be more aligned with one’s beliefs.
In this fourth pathway, people get to enjoy lowered cognitive dissonance without the labor of changing their beliefs or actions, nor the mental gymnastics of changing the perception of their actions.
Each pathway is uniquely suited to a certain kind of market problem, and a certain kind of solution.
The four pathways to solve for cognitive dissonance
Most brands fail to recognize the true cognitive dissonance they are up against, and then either take the wrong pathway or take none at all. For brand owners, CEOs and investors, these pathways also reveal the durability of a brand, namely its ability to continue serving a significant need for customers even as competitor brands put pressure on the marketplace.
You can study your user inside and out, but if you don’t know the cognitive dissonance that shapes them, then you don’t know how to build a brand that will serve them.
Change Belief
Many brands are limited by a pervading belief in the minds of their users. A bias like “Only rich people buy art” or “Vegans are weak” will keep someone in a high state of dissonance when in fact they do appreciate fine artwork or care about their health. These biases will also keep them from buying the painting or trying the plant-based restaurant.
Dissonance that comes from biases oftentimes explains why your audience may have the means and resources to convert, but instead chooses to spend that money somewhere else. They’re usually spending it where they feel less cognitive dissonance (in this case it might be new furniture or the gym).
The unique thing about this specific pathway for relieving cognitive dissonance is that new information or ideas, education and exposure are not what change beliefs. To change our beliefs we must change our identities.
People resist changing their beliefs because in some part, it means losing a sense of self. Belief and identity are so deeply intertwined that when people change their religions, their partners, their jobs, their diets or their politics, they often describe the shift as leaving an old version of themselves behind.
We can’t change our minds until we are able to see ourselves as new people. We have to be able to grasp what this new identity looks, feels and thinks like.
In their “In Case of Adventure” series, Rivian is selling a car, but also selling a new identity. When people wonder to themselves, “Who buys a Rivian?” the answer will be clear: the urban adventurer. This identity clearly pops up in Rivian’s content, testimonials, gear shop and PR.
Rivian’s “In Case Of Adventure” series, 7/25/2023
It’s a move straight out of the premium vehicle playbook. Porche’s home & lifestyle line, Mercedes-Benz’s coffee lounges and Harley Davidson’s community pilgrimages (which I’ve written about before) are all methods for signaling the identity of the driver.
When you give people a sense of new identity, it’s easier for them to drop their biases and change their beliefs. They can be more certain about who they are and how they should move through the world.
I’ve seen this dissonance pathway a lot in B2B as well. In our research with high performing B2B salespeople over the years, we’ve seen brands like Gong emerge as preferred platforms not because of their technology (in this case a sales intelligence platform) but because of how they celebrate a new identity of the salesperson. Gong exalts salespeople as bold and passionate heroes. The Gong user has a clear identity.
This pathway to solving cognitive dissonance is well suited for brands that face strong biases, which may sound like “A person like me can’t do things like that” or “People who do that look like this.”
These biases explain why many food and foodtech brands have failed in the market, despite innovative products. Surprisingly, food is highly personal and identity driven. What we eat is a big part of how we see ourselves in the world.
Change Action
When a category of users can be characterized by having fear, apprehension or even shame that holds them back from doing something, there is likely a pent up demand for new behavior.
People who are stuck in this form of cognitive dissonance don’t necessarily need to change their beliefs. Instead, they need to change their actions, and that typically only happens when there is enough psychological safety to try something new.
The explosion of kidult play — adults playing with kids toys — is a great example of brands creating enough psychological safety to change a behavior that has been historically limited by shame or fear of judgment. Brands like Lego have created inviting, thoughtful and safe environments for adults to engage in play — so much so that adult fandoms are propelling Lego’s revenue and market to unprecedented levels.
Adult-themed product extensions, research on the adult-child relationship in play, and deep adult Lego communities and conventions give this consumer the psychological safety they need to turn what may be considered a childish hobby into a valid and rewarding adult experience.
Today’s adult Happy Meals, adults-only bouncy houses and the Barbie movie were perhaps a natural response to the joyless years of Covid, but they are also all branded efforts to make play more of a safe zone for adults.
There are other brands, however, that have failed to create the same kind of psychological safety for their adult fans and are likely missing out on a valuable segment. In a recent Washington Post article, a 27-year-old referred to as “Nick” divulged his obsession with Squishmallows (which are round pastel-colored plushies) on condition of anonymity because he was fearful of losing his job if his employer found out. Meanwhile, a Today Show post about the kidult craze drew especially harsh criticism that revealed just how severely our culture continues to judge adults who play with toys.
Some of the replies to @TODAYshow’s tweet about the kidult craze, 12/20/2022
The cognitive dissonance gap may be narrowed in Lego’s corner of the market, but it is wide and thriving in other areas where shame still overshadows play for adults. That is a clear opportunity for brands who are willing to invest in branding, positioning and product innovation that creates psychological safety for their users.
Over in the sexual health category, Dame creates psychological safety through high quality product design and calming, artistic visual branding that stands in great contrast to the salacious and bawdy brands of most competitor companies.
The repeated message of “for women by women” also creates a kind of psychological safety that is sorely missing from this market — one that removes the male gaze from the conversation. Dame is a safe space for women to explore desire without the shame, stigma or limiting beliefs that usually govern their shopping habits. However, even more importantly, Dame matches the self-perception of a huge user base that rarely sees themselves reflected in other brands.
Change Action Perception
There are times when the barriers to changing action are so high, even psychological safety won’t likely work. In those instances, changing the perception of the action may be the strongest way forward.
Parents, especially new mothers, are a prime example of what happens when there is high dissonance between how someone perceives their identity, and the nearly impossible actions it will take to live up to that perception.
New mothers have new identities, usually shaped and informed by shiny Instagram mommy influencers and long-held narratives about a mother’s role in the world. But I have seen in my research with parenting brands over the last 10 years that the vast majority of these same mothers simply cannot make their actions match this new identity, no matter how hard they try.
In early motherhood, women are reborn themselves. With a new baby and a new perspective, they often start new businesses or careers. This generation of mothers is also the first to not look to their own mothers for guidance on the motherhood journey, opting instead to educate themselves and form their own intuition (no small feat). They are also highly concerned with reversing the parenting mistakes they experienced as children. In short, new mothers today want to grow themselves as they grow their families.
But the truth of the matter is that they do not have the resources. They do not have the tribe, the money, the support systems or the time to live into this exceptionally demanding new identity. They will have to make heart-wrenching compromises between themselves and their babies nearly every single day, and in this quiet suffering, they further cement the dissonance they are trying to run away from.
The right path forward for brands in this space is to change the perception of the action, and in order to do that, brands must create a movement and/ or a community.
Boram is an interesting new concept in early motherhood care that changes the script around parenting. Described as a ‘postnatal retreat’, the all-inclusive center offers 5-star accommodations, a 24/7 care team of doctors and clinicians who help people ease into motherhood while teaching them the mountain of skills and knowledge they will need when taking the baby home. This all happens within a routine of nourishing chef-prepared meals, massage services, night nurse coverage and recovery support.
The vast majority of mothers who don’t make it to Boram will not experience a single one of these things in the usual postnatal experience.
Boram isn’t about luxuries. It’s about honoring the integrity of a woman who has just given birth. It may not be for everyone, but it is possibly the beginning of a new movement that centers the mother and her health, surrounding her with a community of care.
In this experience, mothers who want to live up to their new self-perceptions are not forced into failure. They are lifted into possibility. The cognitive dissonance between who they want to be and their actions toward that identity is greatly lowered in the crucial, early days postpartum.
While mothers may be a self-aware group, an important thing to remember with this pathway is that the user in other categories may not always understand, or even be aware of, their hidden desires. Norms and social conditioning can make them out of touch with their own needs, despite how high the underlying cognitive dissonance may be. You might even find that the higher the cognitive dissonance, the greater the self-denial.
If you do discover a high, invisible dissonance, community is especially important. Communities have specific rules, which I have written about before, but the most important rule is to know why you gather.
A former client in the bath and candle space had a unique user base of middle-America women that were especially obsessed with the company’s jewel candles: large theme-scented candles that melted down over a number of hours to reveal a piece of jewelry hidden inside. Users loved the scents and candle jars, and really loved collecting the silver gemstone rings, earrings and necklaces that were buried under the wax.
It was always assumed that these users saw their candles as a luxury, or fun pastime, but as we got deeper into our conversations, we realized that there were a lot of strong emotions tied up with the experience. Users would save for weeks to buy special drops, with the company seeing a spike in sales on payday every month. People traded candles and jewels, traveled with other fans, and most interestingly would use the candles while taking a bath in a locked bathroom.
What we came to learn was that many of their customers were dealing with incredibly stressful events, either from physical disability, stressful jobs, or personal circumstances. They may have thought the candles were frivolous purchases, but they used them very seriously. They saw them as stress-relieving tools that made them happy, and after a scented candle-lit bath, also made them feel whole again. It was the most sincere form of self-care: finding a small way to care for their own emotional needs.
But when we asked them directly about it, the idea of candles as self-care seemed completely alien. Self-care was something they felt they had no business investing in, and yet, that was exactly what they were doing.
We gently built the community around the concept of self-care and created new products with a self-care slant, while still maintaining the whimsy of the original brand. The goal was to not let people think this was a frivolous purchase (which caused their dissonance) and help them see that this bath time was a fundamental part of being mentally and emotionally fulfilled. It reduced the invisible dissonance that users felt every time they felt strongly compelled to buy, but couldn’t justify why.
It also helped center the company around a deep and meaningful “why”.
Adapt Action
While changing action and belief are valid pathways to success, it’s also important to consider how the customer journey around everything is evolving. According to a new Edelman Trust Barometer report, Gen Z is upending the purchase funnel in surprising ways (emphasis added below):
Gen Z’s true relationship with brands often begins at purchase…”Our data showed that that purchase is not an end point. It’s the starting point… According to the study, 78% of Gen Z respondents say they “uncover things that attract me and make me loyal to a brand after my first purchase,” with 50% saying they do most of their brand research after they buy.
People are increasingly creating brand relationships after the fact of conversion. That means you may not have much time to change belief or action beforehand.
In that case, adapting action may be the best pathway forward.
Instead of changing people’s beliefs, or changing their actions or perceptions of those actions, you must find a way to let them engage in the same behaviors, but with outcomes that are more aligned with the identities they hold for themselves.
Adapting action means people make little or no change to their beliefs and behaviors, but enjoy a different outcome that is more aligned with their identities.
Sollis Health is a 24/7 members-only medical center. They remove a lot of the friction that comes in the usual doctor’s office or urgent care visit, and replace it with comforting experiences. Members enjoy a private space where medical care is the way it should be: highly attentive, calming in nature, extremely well staffed and resourced, and designed to make patients feel like VIPs.
But people don’t pay annual memberships ranging from $3,500 to $6,000 for convenience and amenities alone. What makes Sollis a strong brand is the hidden cognitive dissonance it aims to ease.
Throughout Sollis’ brand, the big promise is clarity and handholding. Sollis members feel like a unified team of elite professionals is actively watching over the health of them and their families. They have a sense of clarity in their medical care, and they feel confident in the condition of their health.
People generally want to believe that they are responsible in managing their wellbeing. They want to believe they eat right, exercise, get their annual exams, stay on top of blood tests and so on. But that doesn’t square with the fact that so many of us avoid the doctor’s office or the hospital, delaying important visits and skipping treatments altogether.
Why do we hate the doctor’s office or hospital so much? Because it tells the opposite story of responsible wellbeing. Oftentimes, conversations with doctors and nurses leave us with more questions than answers. Practitioners don’t speak to each other and we nervously work to make sure each new doctor has our history and up-to-date records.
The experience, especially if you have a significant condition to deal with, feels highly disempowering. When we go to these places, we do not get to act like the health-forward people we think we are. Instead we leave aggravated, feeling bad about ourselves, and anxious that our behavior does not live up to our self-perception.
And this is the genius of Sollis. Instead of asking more of us (like the empowered patient movement), or asking us to do something different (like functional medicine), Sollis allows us to keep the same behavior but experience a very different outcome. We simply go to the doctor’s office and we get to be the responsible, health-forward people we believe we are. Everything about Sollis reinforces this identity.
Adapting action is usually the quickest way to close the dissonance gap because it lowers or erases the bar to action.
The brands that succeed in this pathway oftentimes look like crossovers. They borrow from complementary categories to create new norms in how people behave, and what they expect the outcomes to be.
Education is a notoriously tough industry to crack into, but edutainment is a crossover that both lowers the barrier to action and changes the outcomes to be more in line with our self-perceptions.
While platforms like Masterclass and Patreon made great strides in this direction, TikTok has mastered it with their education content. There are many stats that show just how powerful TikTok is in edutainment, including the fact that a surprising 51% of college students use it for homework help.
Education on TikTok is a crossover between intimate conversations with your favorite parasocial friends and bite sized insights that pique your interest in things you may not have cared about otherwise.
We can continue our deeply ingrained action (scrolling on a phone watching 30-second bits of content), but enjoy a much more identity-aligned outcome (valuable learning).
I believe the adapt action pathway will be one of the most successful and defensible paths for brands over the next few years because as the world becomes more noisy and culture becomes more fragmented, we will have less and less time to do the hard work required of the other 3 paths.
Adapt action bundles brand defensibility with product defensibility in a way that we rarely see in the marketplace, creating new spaces and norms for users. If you can cheat cognitive dissonance so that the same actions produce different results, you can win over a much wider audience.
While it may be tempting to choose a pathway that seems obvious or easy, or to choose adapt action because it offers lucrative opportunity, you must always choose the one that is best suited to your problem.
In fact, you don’t usually get to choose the path you must take. Given that the problem you are solving, the user you are solving for and the pressures of the market are not in your control, the path will usually choose you.
Step away from your product and instead look at the motivations of your user. Where is there a mismatch between who they are and who they believe to be? Where do they suffer the pain of not meeting their own expectations? When it comes to your category, product or service, who do they see themselves as, and how do they work against that image? Find the path that is required of your brand.
We live with dissonance everyday, and the best brands understand that. They use it not only to shape their branding, but also their products, services and user experiences.
Each pathway, when properly explored, will reveal new opportunities throughout the business and the marketplace. Your reach, engagement and defensibility will all be more impactful.
It’s a great path to innovation, while staying true to the people you’re looking to serve.
