In this month’s episode of Brands & Outliers, we’re taking a broad survey of all the brands moving their categories forward, and the outliers that signal our coming future.
We’re seeing 3 big themes emerge right now:
- Foreign Touch: We’re about to feel the physical touch of AI through AI-enabled robotics, gaming and medicine
- Redrawing The Line of Blasphemy: We’re writing new rules at the extremes with the resurgence of swearing in everyday speech, raunchy Christian brands, and criminalization of alternative meat
- Anxieties About Our Kids: It’s not just Jonathan Haidt’s campaign against phones. It’s also a glut of low-grade AI content that’s being fed to young minds, deepfake loopholes and antinatalism on billboards
Many of our recent episodes have circled around a sense of confusion in culture, but this one feels more like a turning point.
People and brands are having tough conversations about the future we want for ourselves, and starting to make some decisions about what we will allow, and not allow, into that picture.
What is especially interesting in this month’s report is how god chatbot brands like Mark Wahlberg’s Hallow, and the god-touting-money-minting personal brands of people like Hailey Bieber and Ballerina Farm are branding religion in new ways. It’s bite sized, doesn’t ask you to change, and preaches the prosperity gospel.
Meanwhile, a whole movement around children and mentally damaging tech is starting to gain some real steam. We’ll see if Jonathan Haidt’s crusade leads to actual legislation, but what’s apparent right now is that he and his cohort are drawing a very strong moral line. Bad parents give their kids phones. Good parents don’t.
Overall, we’re in a moment of good versus evil, right versus wrong. If the past year was about change, it’s possible that this year will be about choices. There’s a feeling in our culture right now that, despite years of increasing fragmentation, people are ready to agree on what is allowed and what isn’t… at least in some domains.
Building a brand in that kind of climate is never easy. It’s important to know how people are redrawing the rules, and what that means for how they relate to the brands around them.
Watch the full video here.
