Category: Brand Strategy

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Brand Strategy Culture Featured

Soft Models

In season 2 of Farmer Wants A Wife (essentially The Bachelor but with cowboys), Amy, a real-estate agent from New York, asks handsome Texas farmer Ty, “Does the country bring you peace?” and his confused reaction is telling. “I wouldn’t say that it brings me peace. I think it’s… I’m in a peaceful place. Just as much as, for you, being able to get out brings you peace, the city brings me excitement.”

Anyone who knows anything about farm life knows it’s a grueling, financially unstable, politically charged existence. Farmers are over 3 times more likely to die by suicide, and the show, for it’s part, leaves room in its quiet interviews for the struggle to peak through. Any sense of peace may be fleeting.

I’ve been watching more reality TV lately, in large part because (if you can believe it) my principal strategist Zach Lamb is on this season’s MasterChef. Watching him bravely go on his competitive odyssey these past few months made me spend more time with the genre.

I see something in Farmer Wants A Wife just as I see it in Blue Ribbon Baking Championship, the many iterations of Fixer Upper, and even scripted hits like Nobody Wants This.

People are shoving meaning into places that were never meant to hold it, and Amy and Ty’s exchange shows just how hard we’re working to wrap our smooth fantasies around very rough realities.

The city-girl-chooses-the-simple-life trope is nothing new, but the sheer level of symbolic overload we ascribe to it, the intense need we have for the idealized (mis)conceptions of marrying into what seems like a simpler culture to be true, and the constellation of industries, social media trends and brands that revolve around it, tells us something in the audience has changed.

And something definitely has, because despite Farmer Wants A Wife being a massive global hit over the past 20 years in countries around the world (a fruitful format resulting in 200 marriages and 500 children!), it failed the first time it aired in the US back in 2008. It wasn’t until producers tried again in 2023 that it turned into one of FOX’s top-performing reality series.

There is a fever pitch of forced meaning-making in culture right now, and that’s exactly why this show has found its moment.

What have we become?

We’ve changed in ways we don’t even know yet. We’ve gone through acute, life-altering transformations via technologies, political events and health disasters these past few years that I won’t even list here. You already know them by heart.

So much change in so little time is simply too much for a culture to metabolize. We’ve emerged different, but we don’t quite know what we’ve turned into yet. Processing all of that existential rewiring takes time – time that we were never afforded, and now here we are on the other side of the revolving door, not sure how to define ourselves.

Transformative experiences like these are so significant they reshape our preferences, values, priorities, and even our sense of self. They change both how we see the world and what we want from it.

That leaves us in a philosophically uncomfortable place. If your values change, your identity shifts, your relationships recalibrate, are you still you? Or are you someone else wearing the memory of an earlier version?

We are post-transformation but pre-definition. An earlier philosopher likened it to, “Not a girl, not yet a woman”, and when I see the undercurrent of shows like Farmer Wants A Wife, I see an ambient confusion about who we are, what we believe, and what matters now.

That’s why we’re seeing meaning projected onto things never built to hold it.

Confused Oracles

Years ago in the before times, my new husband and I hosted a small dinner party in our apartment, drinking wine around an IKEA table, the name chatGPT having not yet entered our world, our sense of selves fully intact.

My husband’s good friend, an incredibly gifted thinker who had built an AI startup for the hospitality industry, started talking about the possibility of AI becoming conscious. He didn’t say it like a provocation. He said it like he believed it.

I pushed back. “We don’t even know how our consciousness works. Why would we expect it to arise from a machine?”

He pointed out that while we don’t fully understand consciousness, we do know it tends to emerge from complexity. With brains, and possibly even ecosystems and networks, consciousness appears to be correlated with systems that grow more sophisticated over time. Maybe it wasn’t impossible, he said. Maybe it was inevitable.

I think about that moment all the time now. Because whatever I believed then, I can’t help but notice what we’re doing now. We are treating our AI systems as if they can tell us something true. Not factually true but existentially true. We ask them about our dreams, our marriages, our careers, and we accept their answers as insight.

Even though they hallucinate constantly.

Chatbot hallucinations continue to rise with newer reasoning systems, with OpenAI’s going from 1-2% all the way up to 6.8% in the past year and a half. Its latest model has been shown to hallucinate up to 79% of the time in benchmark testing, and yet we continue to trust it even though their own engineers don’t know entirely how it works and reasons.

But that doesn’t matter because our trust in these models doesn’t come from accuracy. It comes from the fact that they feel right and validating and comforting. They feel coherent, as if they know something.

As Rachel Botsman has pointed out, trust hasn’t vanished, it’s just moved. It no longer flows upward to experts and institutions. Modern technology and platforms have instead changed the flow of trust to go sideways toward peers, strangers and crowds. And what is chatGPT if not the exponential intelligence of strangers and crowds, wrapped up in a voice that feels like a peer?

Sam Altman knows this. As Dave Karpf writes, OpenAI’s entire communications strategy is less about technical progress than about sustaining the illusion of futurity. The cadence of announcements is the product.

And if you step back, what we’re doing starts to look very familiar again. We’re shoving meaning into something that was never built to carry it.

In our hunger for direction, we’ve begun to treat AI outputs like prophecies. We are not treating them like systems of knowledge, we are projecting meaning onto them. We treat these technologies like soft models: emotionally loaded, unstable frameworks we project meaning onto in order to navigate identity, selfhood, and culture in a post-transformation era.

And we’re the ones doing the mental gymnastics to believe it’s true.

I am deeply excited about the potential of AI to solve many of the world’s ills. My agency and work has always been embedded in the tech world, and I am more familiar than most with both its tremendous possibilities and human pitfalls. Maybe one day AI will become conscious. I’m not betting either way. But if that day ever comes, it will only be a footnote to the real story because long before AI woke up, we had already crowned it an oracle.

The Adult Baptism of Pete Davidson

There’s a photo of Pete Davidson that made the rounds earlier this year, shirtless and conspicuously bare. The once chaotic collage of tattoos that covered his body had been mostly scrubbed clean. A GQ story called it an adult baptism, adding “he looked fantastic.”

Tattoo removal is having a moment. Clinics are booming and demand is very high. The stories people tell about why they’re doing it sound less like regret and more like absolution, with one person saying “I’ll return to the grave with a clean body.” Who knew that the real market winners of our trauma-induced reinvention would be laser removal clinics?

At least some of this is tethered to the aesthetics of clean wellness. I.e. smooth skin, clean slates, optimized lives. But that’s only the surface. What’s really being marketed is rebirth.

Wellness used to be about feeling better. At some point it turned into becoming someone else entirely.

You can see it in the rise of psychedelic retreats, cold plunges, trauma breathwork, and rituals that look more like modern mysticism than medicine. In the now-canonical Netflix series The Goop Lab, many episodes are punctuated by someone sobbing as if they’ve been spiritually reborn. And in some sense, they have. Wellness today is about burning off the self that no longer fits.

And yes, all of this began as a necessary response to a medical system that has long ignored the needs of women and marginalized people. It gave people language for the unspeakable and offered tools when the institutions failed.

But somewhere along the way, we started to load it with meaning that went far beyond healing. Wellness became the vessel into which we poured all our cultural confusion about purpose and identity.

It’s why despite all of the transcendence modern wellness promises some of us (myself included) find it to be an uncomfortable bedfellow to the $6.3 trillion megaindustry of powders, pills, devices, retreats and questionable influences that power it.

At some point, it requires a certain level of willful meaning-making, or at least an increasing share of your disposable income, to place all of your purpose and identity on the shaky pillar of something like cleanliness.

Temporary Scaffolding

The instinct to make meaning is not new. But the speed, scale, and saturation of it today is. Culture has become a hall of mirrors where everything gets loaded with symbolic weight it was never built to hold. From our media and movements to our presidents, platforms and products, we make identity out of objects far too fragile to hold the sheer burden of the meaning we throw onto them.

This is what happens when transformation outpaces definition. We’re trying to reassemble identity in real time, with whatever tools are lying around.

It’s important to be cognizant of what we are doing and to make meaning with our eyes wide open.

We have to remember that we are the ones assigning meaning. Let us be careful about assuming any of these soft models carry an inherent meaning that is beyond us. We can choose what defines us, and in our rush to land on a solid sense of identity, we should also make sure to not settle for anything that wasn’t designed to bear the pressure of what we require.

This is how conflict shows up too. We see someone else’s soft model and call it delusion, extremism, a personality cult. And in some cases it very much is those things. But they’re also doing exactly what we are – grasping for something stable to stand on. Cultural conflict, at its core, often isn’t about different values but about different coping strategies. And we are all coping right now.

If there’s a call to action here, it’s not to stop building meaning. It’s to stay aware of the scaffolding. To know when we’re myth-making. To hold our soft models lightly and be willing to build better, stronger, more resilient ones. I can’t tell you what those are, you will have to find them for yourself, but make sure you find them. Do not settle for what is easily at hand.

At some point, the scaffolding will start to harden and we’ll be locked into our systems of meaning. Culture will metabolize everything it’s been through, and the soft models we once reached for will become fixed realities. The meanings we project today will define the selves we have to live with tomorrow.

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Brand Strategy Culture Featured

Economies of Control

Control is becoming the organizing principle of modern life, and the next engine of economic and cultural value.

But not all control is created equal.

We name economies by what’s being monetized. The Knowledge Economy, Sharing Economy, Experience Economy, and Attention Economy were all new engines of value creation. Each name was a signal of where systems, money, and cultural innovation were headed, and beyond anything else, they revealed what we were really hungry for.

But the nature of our hunger has shifted so dramatically in the past few years that it feels pretty inadequate to call it by any of those names.

A new economic logic tells us what we want now is control. Not dominance, but rather a sense of power over the extreme complexity that pervades our everyday lives. Complexity that feels more and more like chaos.

We don’t always see the complexity, but we feel it in the disconnect between the everyday and the existential, like the way a cracked eggshell is somehow entangled with American religiosity and Turkish geopolitics. Just last week, a New York Times headline asked Why is everything so coded now? while another headline in the same paper posed the question Can I wear a sheath dress without looking MAGA?

We feel complexity in the constant churn of events we can’t quite explain, but somehow know we’re supposed to manage on levels both profound and inane.

The laugh-out-loud existential ennui of TikTok is now creeping into the broetry posts of LinkedIn, stripped of any charming humor (some of it written by yours truly, sans broetry), and you don’t have to scroll for long to see that time itself feels broken under the weight of acceleration. We’ve all got one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. Without a shared truth, one person’s “I’m thrilled to announce…” becomes another person’s “Late-stage capitalism is a vibe.” You know the drill.

This is the kind of complexity that doesn’t announce itself but still governs everything we do. And in response, people are willing to pay a premium for anything that promises even the illusion of control.

Just look around. Every single part of your life now has a control panel you can (and probably do) pay for.

Your body has a control panel, and it can take many forms, from sleep trackers and glucose monitors, to biohacking protocols and period alignment apps. We are self-surveilling our body fat percentages on our phones and our physiques in every reflective surface.

Your relationships have control panels too, governed by therapy scripts and templates for boundary-keeping. Your work, whether you’re an entrepreneur or an artist, is a series of Notion boards and inspiration apps that hold your ambition in place.

Parenting has infinite dashboards. Dating has them. Your nervous system has many. Even your personality is being flattened into an interface you can optimize. We’ve been taught to believe that if we can track it, if we can measure it, if we can optimize it and maxx it, then we can control it.

Religion is rising in the zeitgeist but I’d say that’s just a fancy control panel for spirituality. The religiosity of today doesn’t feel like belief so much as it feels like design. Techy incarnations of manifestation and bible study, when examined a little more closely, are really more like protocols for productivity culture. When Mark Wahlberg, the man famous for waking up at 2:30am and working out twice a day, is behind the #1 Christian prayer app in the world, you have to ask yourself if our religious control panels are more about systematizing than they are about surrender.

AI isn’t to blame, this movement started before, but it’s definitely speeding things up. A while back I posted an HBR chart that showed, according to mostly Reddit data, the top 3 use cases for AI have gone from being about ideas and search, to being about emotional needs like therapy and finding life purpose. People in the comments were split – some excited that AI was growing into a more emotional form, others alarmed that this may be the clearest sign yet of people retreating to a dangerous technology at the expense of real-life relationships.

It seems to me that we are adapting our shiniest new control panel to serve our deepest need. Perhaps the place where we feel we have the least power is with each other. Maybe AI isn’t profiting off our need for intelligence but rather our need to feel like we have control.

Different control needs yield different interfaces, whether they be emotional, biological, or metaphysical. But the logic stays the same: build a dashboard of control around the chaos and hope it holds.

But if you look closely, the control here isn’t always real. These interfaces sometimes seem to engender a lack of trust in ourselves and a false promise of power. We have more tools than ever, and yet feel less in control than ever. Every control panel is actually a portal to anxiety: Am I doing enough? Am I optimizing this right?

Is it really control, the real kind of control that we want, when everything is over-analyzed and over-optimized? When people across the political spectrum are increasingly “prepping” for disaster and fantasizing about moving to a homestead, does anyone really feel more in control of their lives?

The shadow side of control is reliance on systems that make us obsess over the minutiae that are far downstream from where control actually comes from.

That’s because the control economy we see today is largely reactive.

Reactive Control is about helping people cope with the chaos by giving them small optimizations within it. It’s about symptom management instead of fixing the underlying condition, and it often delivers control only in narrow, incremental bursts. These systems aren’t necessarily malicious but they’re definitely tired and most of them are deep in their curve of diminishing returns. They’ve been iterated so many times that all we’re left with is a finely tuned but fundamentally exhausted architecture.

You see it everywhere: supplements that target increasingly obscure biomarkers, productivity apps that shave minutes off workflows, dashboards that let you micromanage parts of your life that were never meant to be managed.

These systems condition us to believe we’re gaining control, when in fact we’re just rearranging our anxieties. You can optimize the wrong thing perfectly, but it’s still going to be the wrong thing.

What we need at a time like this, what we are really hungry for, is something generative.

Generative Control takes the chaos and builds meaning within it. Rather than offering better tools within a broken system, it builds entirely new ones that reshape the context altogether. If reactive control is about optimization, generative control is about agency. It offers the chance to reimagine the entire environment.

Generative control doesn’t just ask, “How can I manage this better?” It asks, “What if this didn’t need managing at all?” Generative control is a non-incremental jump forward, and for all the noisy (and lucrative) reactive control out there, we’re starting to see generative control peek through the cracks.

In education, we see concepts like Alpha School that uses AI to teach kids an entire, customized curriculum in just 2 hours a day, while the rest of the day is reserved for social and life skills led by guides (i.e. their form of teachers). It gives kids a chance to experience highly efficient learning with personalized instruction, but also have the rest of the day to just be a kid. Most of the day is spent away from the desk, and children learn to interact and collaborate on lessons disguised as play.

In marriage, we see different cultures exploring new relationship structures. In Japan, a growing number of young people are choosing to design their own version of marriage built around mutual respect, shared values, and practical partnership, rather than romance or tradition. They’re called friendship marriages and these arrangements might include cohabiting, or not. Parenting, if it happens, is often intentional and planned through artificial insemination. For many, it’s a way to reclaim agency in the face of rising economic pressure and evolving ideas around intimacy.

These are not concepts and systems for managing chaos. These are systems for finding new meaning in a changed world, and for giving people authentic control that has been missing. Now imagine if this logic of generative control started moving beyond education and relationships, and into other domains of life.

What would it look like if end-of-life care wasn’t treated as a series of medicalized checklists, but as an opportunity to reassert agency and meaning? What if families could choose models of dying that center emotional authorship, ritual, and dignity, as customizable and culturally resonant frameworks? Death itself, long relegated to reactive systems of care, could become a domain where people reclaim authorship over how they are celebrated and ultimately transition.

In America, the way we live is starting to change. I’ve talked about the rise of mommunes, communes and friendship-centered living, but a generative control economy could take us even further to include multi-generational living. What’s often seen in the West as a sign of economic precarity could be reframed through generative control as a purposeful structure where power, caregiving, and decision-making are intentionally distributed across generations. Instead of defaulting to the nuclear family or the senior home, people could design living arrangements that reflect the needs and values of everyone under one roof.

Medicine, food, transportation, travel, play, identity… when you start to feel the line between reactive and generative control, you start to see net-new ideas for how every part of life can be reinvented in our new control economy.

There is, however, an undeniable strangeness to generative control, and you’re probably already feeling it.

Generative control often enters the scene under the guise of the weird. It feels disconcerting at first, perhaps morally or socially abrasive. Something about it may even feel perverse because it breaks conventions and norms, just like an AI-based school or marriages of friendship may feel questionable. But weird is a clue that something new is trying to be born.

We’re living through a moment of historically high tolerance for weirdness. In the past few years alone, we’ve watched mainstream culture absorb things like mass resignations, the gamification of finance, therapy speak on dating apps, and billionaires talking about brain interfaces on morning shows. Things feel unstable, yes, but instability also signals openness. When the pace of weirdness accelerates, the conditions for reinvention are at their peak.

So if it feels like anything could happen right now, it’s because anything can, and that is a fantastic position to be in.

Cultural norms are more plastic than they’ve been in a generation. Expectations are up for grabs and there’s room, for once, to create rather than conform.

The control economy is still in flux and it can go in two different directions. You will be asked, implicitly or explicitly, to buy into one version or the other. In some places there is no generative option and reactive control is as we have. In other places, generative options are emerging but they require imagination, work and some risk taking.

Choose intentionally in what you invest in (time, money or otherwise), because the reactive control economy will make short-term money, but the generative control economy can create wholly new markets and massive new financial, cultural, and systemic value. We all need some reactive control in parts of our lives, but do not let it be a distraction from the promise of something more generative.

Generative control will be the economy that smart investors, brands, and governments will bet on because they know the upside potential is beyond anything you can get on the reactive side.

The control economy has only just arrived. We’ll all need to distinguish between reactive models that fill a short-term need, or generative systems that reshape our markets and reality.

Things can get weird, they should get weird, and you should be playing with the weirdness. There’s new value to be found and created.

 

For the Intellectually Isolated

I didn’t always know what to do with the parts of myself that overflowed my job.

The obsessive curiosity, ambition, obsession with finding meaning. Strategy was my work, but the rooms I was in didn’t always make sense to have the full conversation.

If you feel the same and are wondering what it’s like to find a place where you can put all that energy and connect with others who are just like you, watch our new Exposure Therapy testimonial video below to hear exactly what it’s like:

“One of the most instrumental things for my career.”

“I’d pay 3x what I’m paying for all of this.”

“If you’re anybody who is searching for anything, you will gain so much insight.”

“Just do it. You won’t regret it.”

We all need a community like this.

The people that feel intellectually isolated in the world… those people end up becoming our members. One year in and it’s become even more than I ever imagined it could be.

If this is what you’re seeking, come join us.

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Brand Strategy Featured

Third Order Strategist

It might feel like the world is falling apart because everything is so fragmented and contradictory, but the truth is that things are not falling apart. They are fusing together.

The reason you keep cracking little bits of eggshell into your omelet is because eggshells are more fragile now, because younger hens are laying eggs, because millions of older hens had to be killed after a bird flu outbreak borne of environmental changes, which caused prices to soar, memes to be made, Trump to get elected, and opened the door for a renewed embrace of religious identity and moral politics. We had to start importing eggs from places like Turkey, whose incumbent government got Elon Musk’s X to suspend opposition accounts amid civil unrest, in a move that only likely happened because the price of eggs is a big part of why Musk got into the government in the first place.

Your omelet has very real political, economic and spiritual implications now.

Your omelet is why everything about your user – their beliefs, behaviors, stories, preferences, aspirations – has changed.

So how can any of us expect cursory trend decks and industry conferences to be enough for a brand strategist to do their job anymore?

If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be this: start diversifying your information inputs.

Everything has become deeply interconnected, but we’re still using first-order mindsets to understand third-order markets. You have to start getting outside of your comfort zone and learning more broadly in order to anticipate what is coming.

Here are some of the unexpected places I look to stretch my own thinking and see where the future is headed with more clarity:

1. Geopolitics 

An area that has always intimidated me until I joined Peter Zeihan’s Patreon. He will help you see the 3rd/ 4th/ 5th order effects and tell it to you in a story that you can hold in your head. Easily the best thing I’ve paid for this year. His quarterly calls are especially enlightening.

2. Threat Tech

This isn’t a thing, I just call it that, but it’s essentially any technology built in response to threat. Digital Twins. Climate Tech. Defense Tech. Palmer Luckey and his cohort. Where threat meets tech is where we get a glimpse of the future under stress.

3. Underground Economies

Vigilante child predator hunters make real money on social and they’re getting more violent. Underground economies pop up when people have such intense unmet needs, they’re willing to break norms and laws. You have to go to Locals and Kick for stuff like this, but I read about it from a distance in articles and Reddit threads.

4. Finance

Gen Z & millennials treat money like manifestation. Money betrays peoples’ beliefs about the future, debt is the only real shame in a capitalist society, and how we save/ spend our cash decides who has power down the road. Watch money influencers, both the straight-laced budgeters and the new-age manifesters. They’re both saying the same thing: money is an emotion.

5. God

God doesn’t look like he used to. Silicon Valley is getting religious in curious ways. Megachurches continue to preach the prosperity gospel. Non religious church experiments continue to fail. When the FDA opened up public comments for the definition of “natural foods”, a surprising number of them referenced god. People like Tara Isabella Burton and Amanda Montell are great follows here.

6. Children’s Media 

If you want to know the values of a generation, look at their children’s films. In “The Mitchells vs. The Machines” the villain is an AI founder. In “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2” the bad guy’s headquarters are in a place called San Franjose. “Toy Story 5” is about the toys vs. Bonnie’s iPad. If our kids films are teaching our youngest generations to be suspect of technology and its leaders, that’s going to shape how they allow it to be in the world.

7. Demographics 

Books like Going Solo really imprinted on me early in my career. The 15-Minute City makes people either really happy or really angry. Mommunes and communes are growing, but so are other non-conventional living arrangements. Pay attention to what happens when people de-center marriage because that will change a lot of things.

8. History 

The big one. Gives you patterns but also perspective. I’ve started re-reading Durant’s ‘Lessons of History’. Perhaps my favorite history book is ‘The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets’ and I’ve bought 20+ copies for friends and community members. I very much regret not paying attention to history when I was in college, but as the saying goes, it takes a mature mind to appreciate the topic.

9. Death

So much activity is happening here as we finally start to grieve all of the people, ideas and promises that died over the past few years. Michael Erard just published a great book called ‘Bye Bye, I Love You’ about first and last words and what we owe each other. Living funerals and regular funerals are getting upgrades. We’re seeing early, stuttering attempts to create new rituals around grief, and we will need them in the immediate years ahead.

I was on a panel a few months ago and when the organizer asked me my title, I found that ‘brand strategist’ just wasn’t enough anymore. So I added ‘cultural futurist’ to my headline. It felt awkward at first, but it quickly became natural to me because it’s the truth.

What we do is literally take in signals, create a model of culture in the future, and build a brand that lives in that future. People either really get the brand and walk into the future to meet it, or really don’t get it and walk away. And that’s the best outcome you could hope for, because the worst outcome is a brand that people think is ‘nice’ but remain largely apathetic toward.

Be that kind of strategist. I don’t think you can afford to be any other kind.

 

Social Realities

How culture is tunneling, and keeping mental hygiene.

If my husband’s social feed is different from mine, we will literally be experiencing two different realities in waking life.

Which brings up a bigger question: we keep talking about AI, social media, and culture, but we rarely stop to ask, How do our brains construct reality in the first place?

Contrary to what you might believe, current science says our brains don’t passively absorb data from the outside. Our brains are actually nonstop prediction machines, constantly anticipating what will happen next, and our reality is mostly a prediction coming from inside our brains, not the outside world.

That means anomalies, not consensus, often drive belief change.

It was very important to me to get cognitive scientist and philosopher Dr. Mark Miller to come speak with us at Exposure Therapy because this all has big implications for how culture evolves in the age of social media and AI:

  1. If our brains are wired to update based on surprise, then the dominant driving force of culture in the age of social and AI is rupture.

  2. When outside forces distort our belief networks, they effectively distort the realities we experience.

  3. Belief hygiene is crucial. You shouldn’t live in a bubble or ignore hard realities, but you do have to protect the inner scaffolding that builds your outer world. I seek out people and places where possibility, imagination, and optimism are actively practiced, because that’s the world I want to live in. (It’s a struggle, especially in my profession, but I try to keep perspective.)

Reality is so, so malleable that it’s almost a wonder that we expect everyone to be living the same version. We have our own little reality machines in our pockets and offices, yet we haven’t learned how to properly control and use them yet. I think the science gives us more empathy and clarity for understanding the age we’re in.

This is what underpins everything else in the world right now. Remember that culture is just as much cognition as it is content. Watch Dr. Miller explain it beautifully in the clip below.

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Brand Strategy Featured

Psychotechnology

Brand strategy has been reduced to reaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategy is in a tough spot right now.

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

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

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

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

This is where you can build your culture brand.

Read the report below or access it through this link.

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Brand Strategy Featured

The Big Decoupling

There is an incredible decoupling happening at the very heart of our culture, and it will affect brands and people more than anything else over the next decade:

Work is untethering from reward.

And for a country founded on the Protestant mythology where the virtue of hard work means you are rewarded with greater economic, social and political value, it means there is no gravity holding things together anymore.

You can see this decoupling being encoded in our most important systems right now:

  • AI means anyone can be a master, so your hard work doesn’t win you more accolades. The marketplace of achievements is suddenly becoming way more unpredictable, and disruptive forces like AI are opening back doors, short-circuiting traditional paths to success, and normalizing a sense of randomness in work.

  • GLP-1s mean anyone can be skinny, so your hard work (or maybe just genes?) doesn’t get you more social favor. The ‘morality’ and economics of thinness start to fall apart, and it’s hard to know how we should celebrate work as it relates to the body (which is perhaps the most profitable moral highground, as evidenced by the nearly $7T wellness industry).

  • Crypto means anyone can strike gold, so your hard earned investing acumen doesn’t win you special fortunes. A single timely decision could outpace years of smart portfolio-building. Tokens and sh*tcoins proved fortunes could materialize far faster than the usual hard-earned, rags-to-riches story we see in the stock market or the movies we grew up with.

  • The TikTok-ification of everything means anyone can have viral content overnight in the slot machine that is social media, and the followers that you’ve spent years cultivating don’t win you extra views or extra reach. And yet brands and influencers alike still cling to follower count because the truth of the matter – the increasing randomness of reach – is just too hard to accept.

When you see work untether from reward in foundational systems like labor, finance, and media, you have to reorient your understanding of the market and the consumer. The future of business and culture is not merely about the value these systems unlock—it’s about the behaviors and beliefs they lock in.

We’re locking into a very different system that dissolves the old moorings of effort and reward, leaving us in a restless current of chance.

Chance and randomness are the dominant energies of our time.

It’s hard to make a narrative story out of that. There is no mythology available to us that will help make meaning out of the decoupling, although we’re seeing different factions of people try. Silicon Valley, faced with the imminent consequences of their own creation, is quickly revamping Christianity to be an absolving version of the prosperity gospel. The victimhood narrative that has characterized the far (over)reaches of politics, most recently America’s vengeful tariffs, may give people some small sense of purpose and understanding in a strange new world, but it will be insufficient.

What makes the decoupling so pervasive is the massive infrastructures that enforce it by default. Influencer culture, self-enhancement medicine, cheatware, min/maxing… the signs were coming for a while, but now we have legit, permanent systems at the heart of everyday life that force the decoupling on all of us.

The void will touch everything. How do we value an employee, a member of the community, a partner, a leader, a teacher, a political movement, an education, a lifestyle, a brand, a product, or an idea when we can no longer point to work and dedication as a reliable measure of shared value?

Where can we extract meaning when the singular measure a life well-lived no longer holds?

Some early signals suggest “we’re cooked” as my principal strategist Zach Lamb likes to jokingly say. We see darker versions of Christianity, politics, dating, tribalism and identity taking hold. Not because people are necessarily cruel, but because these versions are simply better adapted for this new world where beating (or cheating) the system is the only rational strategy.

But we’d be poor brand strategists and futurists if we accepted the next bad thing as our ultimate fate. The long trajectory of history has always pointed toward progress, social innovation, and most importantly, surprises in foresight that look like common sense in hindsight.

So what might those common sense surprises look like?

What we’re seeing now are early, clumsy attempts of a culture trying to reform itself, but there are also lighter versions of things coming into focus: people finding meaning outside of work, radical new forms of community building, psychedelic therapy, enlightened spirituality, and a redefinition of success.

When we can no longer value ourselves or each other by the “work” or the effort, we have to find other ways to decide who and what is valuable. In the short-term, there will be two concurrent tracks we see culture taking: worshipping chance or playing with meaning.

Worshipping chance is a natural extension of a system that has burned through its illusions of fairness. When hard work no longer guarantees reward, our default response is to elevate randomness itself, investing it with a near-spiritual authority. The hustle once revolved around effort, but now it’s about catching lightning in a bottle. The algorithm’s next wave or a stray viral moment can bestow wealth or influence more swiftly than years of honest grind, so chance becomes something to venerate. A chaotic deity in an otherwise disenchanted world.

In practice, this devotion to luck reveals itself everywhere from retail trading frenzies to viral overnight success stories. Instead of following predictable career ladders or carefully planned investments, people chase sudden gains, hoping to decode the next market upswing or social media glitch.

Brands, influencers, and even entire platforms amplify these tales of instant fortune, further fueling the belief that chance might be our last reliable path to success. When we glamorize this volatility, we risk normalizing the idea that pursuing (or even engineering) random breaks is the most rational option.

But worshipping chance also sets the stage for playing with meaning.

Once we recognize just how mercurial success can be, we can move beyond passive acceptance of the system’s randomness and begin actively reshaping our notions of value. There will be people who throw themselves headfirst into the glitch in the system and turn it into an art form. If everyone can cheat their way to mastery, wealth, or beauty, they will see it as a giant permission slip to create new ways of finding meaning.

When effort is no longer the golden path, we’re finally free to invent purpose that isn’t measured by sweat and grind. We can build cosmic parties, societies, religions where creativity is currency. We can remix our social rituals with absurd new rules. We can pursue weirdness like it’s sacred.

And some of that could really happen. Some of it is already happening in our homes, gathering places, and centers of worship.

If the old myth is gone, we are just as likely as not to write new ones so brilliant and so joyful, that they actually thrive in a system that precludes us from making work the pathway to meaning. When chance so often triumphs over sweat, the real opportunity lies in writing narratives that thrive precisely because they reject old rules, and in doing so, create surprising, life-affirming possibilities that might just become the new mythologies we live by.

For brands and their leaders, this decoupling has profound implications. If success can strike at random, then the old playbooks, where you simply celebrate hard work or exclusivity, might no longer resonate with consumers who feel the ground shifting under their feet.

When anyone can go viral, re-sculpt their body, or amass sudden wealth, it becomes harder to sell the myth that effort alone is what makes a product, lifestyle, or status truly valuable (which is how most products and aspirations are branded today).

Instead, you have to help people navigate this unpredictable landscape in a meaningful way. And the good news is that both worshipping chance and playing with meaning open the door for brands to build new kinds of trust and loyalty.

The obvious way is to acknowledge the randomness and empower consumers to experiment, take creative risks, and find joy in the unexpected. Lots of brands will lean into this chance-heavy side of the equation. It’s easier to feed into game mechanics, gambling experiences, and the overall sense of worshipping chance when it ensnares audiences into deeper usage. It can be as simple as a loot box or as sophisticated as an all-knowing slot machine algorithm.

But I think the far more exciting and lucrative path is for brands to play with meaning alongside their consumers.

There are the obvious ways, such as facilitating deeper forms of meaning-making through genuine community, playful engagement, or creative self expression. I haven’t seen any of these formats reliably solved so there’s plenty of room for brands to grow here alone.

But what if brands went further? What if we curate moments of shared wonder and purpose? What if we created joyful new norms around connection, family and belonging? Can you imagine a brand that makes people feel human again? Or makes them feel even more than human? The most exciting thing about all of this is that brands can finally, thankfully, build long term connections that go beyond the next viral spike because people are ready and waiting for it.

I firmly believe brands can help consumers rewrite the script, and transform a disorienting decoupling into an opportunity for collective reinvention.

There is an invisible but open need for a story that makes sense of this all. The decoupling may look like threads coming apart today, but culture always weaves itself back together. We can redefine what value looks like.

We can create new measures of experience and value that go well beyond the idea of work and reward, and help us measure our lives in more accurate ways.

Categories
Brand Strategy Featured

The Only Prediction That Matters to Me as a Brand Strategist in 2025

Things have been getting weird lately. I’m not talking about “shock value weird” or “gross weird”. I’m talking about the kind of weirdness we feel when we’re forced to embrace contradictions, and contradictions are starting to show up everywhere.

Think off-grid influencers, breadwinning tradwives, crypto-bro environmentalists, and the voters that picked both AOC and Trump on the same ballot. But don’t get caught up in the moral discourse here. 

Instead, pay attention to the contradictions that are being forced together. Try to feel for a moment what it means to reject society and have millions of followers on TikTok, or believe in democratic ideals and trust a republican leader to make them happen. More and more people are openly embodying conflicting truths, and if you ask them about it, they’ll tell you it’s freeing. It’s who they are. 

Humans are messy and in an algorithmic world where two-dimensional authenticity has forced us into shallow labels and binary tribes, we’ve been ignoring the fact that in our most authentic state, humans are not easy to categorize at all. 

Certainly not anymore, at least. Suddenly it’s impossible to describe who a typical feminist is, where a typical Republican is from, where to draw the line between a critic and a conspiracy theorist, or how to tell the difference between an entrepreneur and a blue collar worker. In our industry, people love to talk about how the algorithm has homogenized culture but they fail to see that what it’s really done is fragment identity. 

This is what post-authenticity looks like. An open embrace of weird contradictions that make it impossible to draw generalizations.

What most people don’t understand is that what may look like a contradiction from one angle looks just as much like concordance from a different one. When AOC asked her constituents why they voted for both her and Trump, one voter said, “I feel like Trump and you are both real.” 

Post-authenticity feels weird because we’ve willingly flattened ourselves and each other into tidy cultural boxes for so long that we’ve forgotten that people can have moderate views, vote for more than one party, redefine their self-interests and reject the need to explain themselves to everyone else. We forgot that people have always contained multitudes, and their multitudes are where they find meaning.

In the coming years, we will see more and more people publicly embody contradictions, and that will make it hard to categorize them in the algorithm of our minds. We will be forced to find beauty in the weirdness we’ve tried to optimize away. Merriam-Webster named authentic Word of the Year in 2023, but on the eve of 2025, it turns out we’ve been inauthentic this entire time. 

 

 

A rough map of the cultural eras takes us from conformity to aspiration to authenticity to now post-authenticity, and the trending line that connects all of those things together is the journey inward.

We’re going from external validation to internal discovery, and that aligns with the broader trend of culture becoming increasingly introspective, personal, and self-reflective. Of course we’re still desperate for validation, but the rising tide of weirdness tells us that perhaps the cost of validation is becoming too high. 

I think that’s a good thing. In fact, I think that’s a great thing because weird is an excellent wayfinder for brand strategists. 

I gave a keynote address at TikTok a couple months ago about how to predict the future, and one of the things I talked about was how weird signals usually give us a glimpse into the future we can’t see yet. Every major cultural shift that changed our lives once started as a small anomaly in the system.

Arnold Schwarzenegger at Muscle Beach in the 1970s.

Muscle Beach was a small anomaly in the 1970s, and it was very weird. But it wasn’t weird because people were exercising (exercise was becoming more widely adopted at that time). It wasn’t weird because women were in bikinis. It wasn’t weird because it was a gym on the beach.  

It was weird because men were flaunting their physiques. 

Up until that point, vanity was considered a woman’s domain and men were meant to have purely intellectual pursuits. Seeing men obsess over their muscles and celebrate their bodies was so weird that Muscle Beach was met with a tremendous amount of public disdain.

Of course today bodybuilding is a massive industry, and men flaunting their bodies isn’t seen as vanity. It’s seen as self-respect, dignity and aspiration. 

This story gives us a really important lesson about weird signals. Things that are weird for the sake of being weird do not matter. The weird that matters – the kind of weird that can help us see and create the future – are things that trespass our invisible boundaries and norms.

It’s usually the kind of weird you feel deeply in your body when you first encounter it. It can be good-weird or bad-weird, but either way you feel it in your bones. It’s a trespass you will feel within yourself before it registers in your brain because it’s triggering a deeper truth. 

Like I said, weird is a great wayfinder. And now that our weirdness is escaping the algorithm, the signals are multiplying. 

Mommunes (homes where single mothers live and raise children together) were in the news earlier this year and it made people feel all kinds of things. New forms of living arrangements are actually popping up everywhere throughout the world right now: eco-villages, inter-generational living, digital nomad co-housing and even the resurgence of traditional communes. 

People think these things are weird because they take away autonomy, but if you interrogate their emotions you’ll find that people feel weird because there is a norm being challenged here. 

For the first time ever in our culture, we are de-centering romantic relationships and instead centering friendship. Mommunes, especially, signal the fact that people are ready to build their lives and families outside of the norms of marriage.

Think about what that means for brands that play in relationships. What does it mean for parenting or community brands? If you want to create the future here, are you creating a future based on who we fall in love with, or instead based on who we choose to trust? Because it’s starting to look like who we fall in love with and who we trust aren’t always the same person anymore.   

There was a time not so long ago where if you were a titan of industry and a billionaire, you would build huge monuments in the middle of the city that not only celebrated you, but also our collective progress. That’s why we have Rockefeller center, the Getty, and Carnegie Hall.

But our billionaires today aren’t building monuments in the middle of town. Instead they’re doing something much weirder – building small cities and apocalypse bunkers on private islands, away from the masses and solely for a select few.

What does that tell us about being wealthy? Is true wealth about building society or is it about exiting society? How does that affect what people aspire to? For brands that play in status, Is it a status symbol to be famous or is it a status symbol to hide?

If you pay attention to the right kind of weird, it will tell you where old values are crashing into new ones, and those new values are what you can build the future on top of. The most successful brands tapped into our new values before we even had the words to describe them, and they got an outsized return by betting on them early. 

There was a time in Middle English when weird referred to someone who could control fate. In texts like Beowulf, weird is a central theme referring to the inevitable course of events. If you look, you’ll find myths and stories throughout the histories of different cultures that interpret weird the same way. We’ve always had an innate understanding that when things feel strange, they’re often premonitions of what is to come. 

As we wrap up the year and think about what’s ahead, I invite you to reframe your understanding of what weird is.

Don’t run from it. Learn how to spot it and chase it. 

Trust that even though things are about to get really weird and unfamiliar, you can use that to gain a better understanding of your user and your market. You can use those signals to create the future you want.

The world is still revealing itself.

 

 

P.S. I’ll be writing a report about this topic, with deeper insights, future signals and actionable takeaways for brands soon. Stay tuned.

Categories
Brand Strategy Featured

Branding in the Age of Moral Static

Article also published in Adweek.

When Ozempic was first becoming a household name last year, the public discourse around semaglutides took on a predictable pattern.

First there was concern about its safety, then skepticism of its effectiveness, and finally the conversation landed on the question of its morality. Was it immoral for obese people to “cheat” and use semaglutides to shed extra weight?

When every other practical concern was rebuffed, and even after offshoot brands like Zepbound were developed and released specifically for weight loss management instead of diabetes, the argument of morality only grew louder.

This is not an uncommon pattern for brands like Ozempic and their counterparts.

If you were paying attention you would have seen a similar pattern playing out in the public discourse around OpenAI, OnlyFans, Oatly, and smaller brands in emerging categories like female hormone replacement therapy, polyamory, end-of-life care, and baby formula.

One of the most interesting brand frontiers I see is companies tackling what I call “moral static”, and I recently wrote about it for Adweek.

We see moral static in categories where new technologies, inventions or ideas are forcing us to face our deeply held, sometimes deeply false, biases. When those biases are laid bare, we resort to an argument of morality.

Moral static isn’t genuine, nuanced moral discourse.

It’s the chaotic buzz of blunt moral objection with no real path to discussion or progress. When new ideas and innovations threaten peoples’ identities, they cling to one-size-fits-all moral arguments even when there is no logical argument left.

Instead of producing a clear conversation about how we can update our models of what is right and wrong, these categories produce static.

Food brands, which operate in a highly identity-driven category, see their fair share of moral static. Oatly faced initial pushback in its native Sweden with critics discounting their oat milk as nutritionally inferior to cow’s milk, and asserting the company’s sustainability promises were inflated.

Oatly easily dismissed or disproved those claims, but it wasn’t until dairy farmers and consumers pointed at Oatly’s slogan “Flush the milk” as attacking a Swedish way of life for both dairy farmers and consumers that Oatly’s narrative was finally complicated with moral static.

America’s own relationship with food is especially plagued by moral static.

Ten years ago, buzzy brands like Soylent and Huel were initially praised for their convenience and nutritional value, but eventually saw themselves in debates about the degradation of meal culture and America’s toxic relationship with food.

Today is no different. When the FDA opened public comments on how to officially define “natural foods”, consumers often invoked moral references to God, what God intended, or Mother Nature instead of more practical definitions that precluded additives or chemicals.

While discussions of morality and ethics are vitally important when culture is faced with any new technological frontier, moral static is different.

Kranzberg’s first law of technology says that ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’ People will always have biased reactions to new ideas, but today moral static is our lazy default. It’s the outrage in TikTok comments and Instagram clapback videos that only scares and confuses people, with no real intention of finding a new moral commons.

Morality is extremely difficult terrain for brands to navigate. Rather than doubling down on the moral question, it’s almost always better to deal with it through humor, irreverence or irony.

However for some brands, moral static is on the critical path to growth and the only way to go through it is to just go through it.

In cases like that, it’s important to remember that moral static places both the brand and the user at the center of a very difficult question: What is the right way to live?

That question can only be answered from the horizon of a new world, not the horizon of our old one, and the one thing brands do really well is build new worlds.

But there are rules to building a new world.

Brands have to be smart about how they support new moral beliefs, how they position themselves against common enemies, and the communities they nurture for their users.

 

READ THE REST ON ADWEEK [FREE LINK]

Categories
Brand Strategy Featured Psychology

Information Nutrition

In the business of strategy, you have to consume a lot of information. If you’re responsible for charting the course of a business or brand, then you’re responsible for understanding the world it lives within. 

The most successful founders and investors are always the ones who are able to connect the dots before everyone else and cultivate high-conviction predictions of where the future is headed. 

In large part, the success of a business is heavily informed by the information diets of its leaders.

In the English language, we think of ideas and information as food – “half-baked ideas,” “digesting information,” “food for thought” – so the metaphor of an “information diet” gives us a lot of intuitive jumping-off points to understand this world better. 

When it comes to information, there’s little gap between what we consume and our perception of the world. When people talk about the world ending or techno-utopia, what they’re really telling you is what content they’ve been consuming and what corner of the algorithm they inhabit.

If physical diet is to blame for many of the physical health issues we face today, then our information diet should also be considered a contributor to our mental health issues. Research conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic found the news we seek and consume plays a powerful role in shaping our moods and can even contribute to conditions like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. And there is an increasingly broad consensus of studies pointing to the stronghold social media consumption can have on our overall well-being.

This brings us to the question I’ve been considering: what is the ideal information diet? And how can strategists in particular develop a well-balanced palette?

The first observation is that information diets are to strategists what food diets are to weightlifters. Our consumption behaviors are highly atypical and are designed with a very specific goal in mind.

So, this isn’t just a question of who you should follow. It’s about your relationship with the content you consume and cultivating a structured approach to the information you invest your time in.

The Nutrition Facts of Information

In food, each nutrient is linked to a concrete physiological system in the body. We can similarly interpret the nutrition facts of information by looking at the systems that regulate our emotions and perceptions – our hormones. 

Of all the hormones in the body, there are five that seem most responsible for our conscious perception of the world. These are our “macronutrients” – dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, cortisol and adrenaline. (For simplicity I’m combining the effects of epinephrine and norepinephrine under adrenaline.)

Putting this into practice, here’s how we might better approach a more balanced information diet based on each of these hormones.

Understanding Our Diets

Laying out the information we consume this way starts to offer valuable insight. 

We all generally have a good intuition of what “unhealthy” content looks like – attention-grabbing, sensational, intense – and we know all too well that too much of it can affect us negatively. What we don’t see as obviously is the harm from low-oxytocin content – think themes of distrust and discord or skepticism and conflict. This type of content is just as pervasive, but it affects us more subtly. 

Unlike a spike in adrenaline or cortisol that is easy to observe, low-oxytocin content gradually adjusts our expectations of the kind of world we live in. Given enough engagement, it changes how we view our neighborhoods and our neighbors. It encourages us to be disconnected skeptics.

Sticking with low-oxytocin content also puts us at risk of missing the diverse nutrients from other types of information. The sort of valuable insights that make for successful strategists and leaders are not found where there is skepticism and conflict but where connection and trust are forming. The best insights come from finding what people are running towards, not away from. Those places show us where opportunities can be found. 

People talk about how everyone is running away from alcohol, but more importantly, they’re running towards more meaningful gatherings and connections.

People talk about how everyone is running away from buying houses, but more importantly, they’re running towards a more present-focused mindset around goals, spending and experiences. A lot of people are choosing to be “forever-renters” not because they can’t afford a home but as an intentional response to an increasingly uncertain future.

In both cases, there’s far more noise in the negative story but far more value in understanding the positive one.

Focusing your diet on “healthy” information won’t just improve your mental state, it’ll expose you to much higher signal-to-noise content. Content that actually represents reality and progress, not just perceptions of doom and gloom. 

When people are inciting fear, dread, or pessimism, they’re often looking to extract value from us. When people are optimistic and actively connected, it’s usually a constructive environment that is far more likely to add value. This is why it’s the optimists who make the money at the end of the day.

If you want to make this framework actionable, go through your typical information sources for 10 minutes and simply observe what hormones the content is designed to trigger. Remove the bottom 20-30% of content sources or creators from your channels, then make a list of the top five creators or sources of high-quality, healthy content. From now on, make a point to start any information consumption with one of those five.

The Food Groups of Information

Information nutrition is only one part of the picture. The genres of content we consume matter just as much, if not more. All information serves a function, so making sure the information we consume is serving us instead of using us is crucial. 

So, how should we think about the types of information we consume? At the risk of significantly over-using this metaphor, the food pyramid offers us a helpful framework to structure our thinking. 

We can break all information into five distinct functions: to inform, to entertain, to teach, to inspire or to connect. Broadly, this encompasses the full extent of the information landscape.

The information ‘food pyramid’:

For most of us, social media constitutes the majority of time spent consuming information, and depending on how you’ve trained your algorithm, you’ll get your own custom blend of these ingredients (likely with a heavy emphasis on entertainment). The one thing that social media does not provide us with, ironically, is meaningful connection.

Social media doesn’t let us actually absorb the information we consume. We’re blasted with low-context content and given no time to reflect on what we’ve just consumed before the next video starts to play. Functionally, it’s the same as junk food – we absorb the message straight into our psyche without vetting it, contextualizing it or reflecting on what we just consumed.

I recently watched a TikTok summarizing an article that was summarizing a documentary that was summarizing a trial. While there was some insight in there, it’s worth pausing and asking if this information is strategically valuable to me or if it is just interesting. Am I actually educating myself or just entertaining myself? Is this rare information or insight that will help me cultivate a deeper, valuable understanding or is it actually “junk food” for my brain? I didn’t get the chance to ask myself these questions in the moment, I just scrolled to the next video – and therein lies the truth.

What we ought to do instead is chew our food. Take the time to process the information, ideas and concepts on our screens. Would we be better served to consume less but process it more? I think so.

You might think a healthy information diet – especially one for a business leader or strategist – would have information at the bottom of the pyramid, but you’d be missing a crucial insight. Connection is how we process information.

When there’s a big event in the media, it’s our collective discussion of it that makes it make sense to us. If you want to really understand a category, you need to talk to the people in it – it’s only then that the truth will reveal itself. 

Musician Brian Eno coined the term “scenius” to describe the collective intelligence of a whole community. Often, the geniuses we look back on in history were one part of a whole collective of people, it’s just that history is better at remembering names than groups. This cannot be emphasized enough: we’ve forgotten what made our heroes so great, which was the collective.

The point here is that, as a society, we seem to dramatically undervalue the importance of human connection as a way of understanding the world, much less centering it in our information diets.

As a strategist, if you want rare insight, you need to have access to rare perspectives and those come from people, not publications or posts on social media. 

In business, a heuristic I’ve found to be very consistent is that you can measure the quality of a business’s leadership by how deeply they understand the people they serve and how much intuition they’ve built up from direct engagement with their audience. In the book Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara talks about the all-too-common problem in organizations where the leadership has all of the authority but none of the insight and their staff have all of the insight but none of the authority. 

The short of it is that when we think about information diets we might fixate on the quantity of information but ignore the quality and the processing of it. That’s like only looking at calories to determine if a diet is healthy. We need to have a higher-fidelity picture of the information we consume – our entire perception of reality relies upon it. 

If you want to build deep insights, you need to cultivate deep sources. If you want to have original thoughts, you need to spend time thinking. It sounds obvious, but many of us fail to make time for anything other than just consuming content when we’re trying to get our information fill.

This thinking about developing an information diet was the driving inspiration behind building Exposure Therapy, Concept Bureau’s private community for strategic minds. Launching this community was an experiment to develop our own scenius and build a culture of connection around the information we consume. 

Connecting with more than 60 other strategists, executives and founders from around the world – each tapped into unique facets of culture and the market – has created an incredible forum to go deeper and expand my radar of insights. It’s also been a fantastic opportunity to speak directly with a breadth of experts I would have never otherwise had the opportunity to connect with, from top-ranked pokers to conflict negotiators and financial therapists. 

To become a genius, you have to build your scenius. 

While launching or joining a community like Exposure Therapy is one example of an actionable application of this framework, you can also start small. Take 30 minutes every day to journal on an idea and explore its repercussions or deeper considerations. Then, go share those reflections with someone. If you don’t have someone to have that conversation with, spend 30 minutes instead reaching out to people who might be interested. This is the real practice of “digesting” our information. 

Dieting Your Information

An idea I’ve been contemplating a lot recently is the virtue of ignorance. We know that being ignorant of everything is bad, but the opposite is true, too. To be hyper-aware of everything is terrible for our mental health, unnecessary and also impossible. So, it’s safe to admit to ourselves that some level of ignorance is good for our information diets. The question is: how much?

The law of diminishing returns is a helpful guide here. For every hour I educate myself on a given topic I’m learning fewer new things. During the first hour I spend understanding game theory or Bronze Age history I’m exposed to tons of new ideas, but during the 10th or 100th hour I’m learning far less. Thinking this way, there are two types of knowledge: the breadth of our awareness and the depth of our awareness within each topic.

The challenge as a strategist or leader is that you never truly know where valuable insights come from. Our tangents, side quests or personal passions often lead to the most influential ideas. 

When you look at our most influential leaders, they all have one thing in common: a “T-shaped” knowledge graph. They’re in the top few percentile in terms of depth of knowledge in a certain field, but they also have a much broader awareness of things in the world than most. 

If the value of insights is proportional to their rarity then being in the top 5% of depth in a specific field and the top 5% in breadth of awareness means you’re maximizing your surface area of valuable insights.

For most, our information diets are closer to resembling a square – we know an average amount of things about an average number of topics. We’re closer to 50% in the breadth and depth of what we consume. The danger in this information diet is that we’ll never see what others don’t because we’re simply not looking in places that others aren’t.

Building a T-shaped knowledge graph means aggressively diversifying your information sources, spreading out wider to seemingly unrelated areas and capturing the advantage of being at the beginning of the diminishing returns curve where you’re constantly exposed to new ideas. It also means being selectively ignorant about certain things. You have to critically evaluate what you consume and choose to place novelty over familiarity. In the few areas you don’t want to be ignorant about, go all the way in by reading lesser-known books, talking to the experts and cultivating your own original thinking through reflections and conversations. 

This is what curiosity looks like – making yourself at home in novelty and constantly seeking new connections. Yes, it comes at the tradeoff of depth in other areas, but the leverage gained by not going too deep in depreciating returns means the amount of extra exposure you get is well worth the cost.

The ability to recontextualize old ideas in new ways is the magic of coupling diversity and depth in an information diet. Think of Steve Jobs and how his interest in calligraphy went on to be deeply influential in the philosophy of Apple, a perfect example of how taking mental models and learnings from seemingly unrelated disciplines can unlock new insights. After all, that is pretty much the definition of innovation.

Putting It Into Practice

Building a high-performance information diet requires more effort than your physical diet. It means being mindful of how the information you consume affects you, focusing on connection and reflection over just consumption and prioritizing the diversity and rarity of where your insights come from. Do this and you’ll gain a whole new vantage point on the world.

While I’ve provided you with some actionable steps to begin developing your unique diet, I’ll leave you with one last appeal to find a community that can help you identify and meet your nutritional needs. Make a deliberate practice of connecting with individuals and building collective wisdom. After all, food is best enjoyed in good company.

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Brand Strategy Video

Convergence Literacy & Brand Innovation

insights in culture

Convergence Literacy & Brand Innovation

With guest speaker Lydia Kostopoulos

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People say the world is crazy right now because everything is so disconnected, but I would argue the opposite.

The world is crazy right now because suddenly everything is so connected.

Electric vehicles are causing food instability in Congo, Silicon Valley tech culture is eroding the friendship between a cab driver and his pizzaiolo in Italy, and we’re all eating crunchy omelettes because wild birds are changing their migration patterns.

All of these are examples of convergence, and convergence is coming for your brand.

In our newest episode of Talks at Concept Bureau, strategy and innovation advisor Lydia Kostopoulos gives us a lesson on “Convergence Literacy”, which is really the practice of knowing how everything is connected, and predicting how those connections will change our world.

Lydia has brought her insights to the United Nations, NATO, US Special Operations, US Secret Services, IEEE, and the European Commission. It’s her (awesome) job to see how seemingly unrelated dynamics are converging together and creating wholly new market opportunities.

I feel convergence is the biggest blindspot in nearly every brand strategist’s view right now.

We can hardly see past a year into the future and we think that’s because things are so uncertain, but that’s not what’s really going on.

We feel uncertain because we’re still using first-order mindsets to understand third-order markets.

We haven’t developed the skill of seeing how everything is connected. It is unwillingness, not uncertainty, that’s limiting us. If you truly want to innovate your brand, you can’t do it in the confines of your market anymore because your market no longer lives in a silo.

And that’s why I’m so excited to share today’s talk with you.

Convergence Literacy is a skill that takes constant practice, but once you begin to master it, it can reveal a whole new horizon of opportunities for your brand.

Watch the full video here.

Written By
Jasmine Bina​

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Brand Strategy Marketing

Branding In A Post-Funnel World

Branding has always had its place throughout the purchase funnel, but the funnel has changed and it’s time that branding changes, too.

In the old funnel model, the stories and narratives of a brand evolve as people move linearly down the funnel, and the more perceived value and emotional investment a brand can create as people reach the bottom, the more likely the purchase and loyal the customer.

Yet as we know, the funnel isn’t linear anymore for most Gen Z and millennial consumers. It’s now an endless loop of inspiration and exploration.

By way of influencers, a nascent social shopping scene and general information overload, millennials and Gen Z are skipping a lot of the brand connection that used to happen before conversion, and instead shifting it to after conversion.

When 50% of global consumers say they do most of their brand research after they buy, an even greater 78% say they uncover things that attract them to a brand and make them loyal after purchase, and pre-purchase is increasingly dedicated to price and feature research, it’s clear that post-purchase is where real branding begins.

But you’d be hard pressed to find many brand leaders that prioritize post-purchase branding in their own companies. It’s time we changed that.

In my newest article published in AdAge, I explore why the greatest opportunity for brand building is increasingly happening after the first sale is made, not before it.

And that means new rules for making sure your brand is connecting with your user.

 

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