You’ve seen the headlines. We don’t want to socialize anymore. There’s a loneliness epidemic. Americans have never spent this much time on their own, ever. We’re “exiting” shared society (my terminology). And now, allegedly, everyone is depressed and anxious.

It doesn’t matter if you believe them. The narrative has the power to shape reality, and major brands are beginning to take notice and to worry. In this Jim Beam ad, the proverbial Sweet Caroline is being belted out in a now-fleetingly-rare moment of brotherly love. Jim Beam is imploring us to get on down to the bar, commune with our brethren and have a bourbon while we’re at it. Imagine receiving this message from a brand ten years ago. You can’t.

Jim Beam’s “People Are Good For You,” 2023

This is the social situation AI is galloping into right now. Our fragile, introverted society is about to be given the Godlike power of world creation. Current AI technology allows us to generate anything we want, personalized and on-demand: newscasts, games, porn, friends, romantic partners, video, the dead – entire worlds. 

Soon we’ll be consuming it all, ensconced in the safety of our Vision Pros. Some are already arguing that Open AI’s Sora proves we’re living in a simulation. Whether we’re in base reality or not, we’re all about to become simulators, lording courtly over our personal kingdoms. Your tamagotchi was a tchotchke of simpler times: just the start.     

You now have a profound, consequential choice to make: Where will you call home? You can choose the real world, with its highs, and, increasingly, its lows, or you can choose an immersive, AI-powered world of your own creation. 

What’s this all going to mean for you? For brands? For society? For our sacred institutions? 

In order to reconcile these realities, we have to center the emotional experience they each provide. What does it feel like to live in a society that’s coming apart? What does it feel like to live in a digitally simulated world of your own making? How does each world satisfy (or not) our core human needs for belonging, safety and self-actualization?

The Downsides of Reality Fit – Hand in Glove – With the Upsides of AI

What’s largely missing from both the “AI will radically alter society” discourse (positive or negative) and the “what happened to society” discourse is any attempt at reconciliation. AI is entering our society –  this one – and that matters. It’s not coming to us in a vacuum. 

Two worlds walk into a bar because “people are good” for you:

It’s not difficult to see which of these is preferable. What’s striking is just how much the emotional experience of AI abets the existing real world trends of isolation, inversion, risk-aversion and societal exit. The popularity of AI worlds is poised to explode. 

In 2021, Scientific American reported a finding that went criminally under-discussed: our definitions of personal space have dramatically expanded in both physical and in virtual spaces. We now claim a whopping 4.1 feet of personal space around our bodies, on average, which is up from 2.6 feet before the pandemic. 

Similarly, drive through traffic at fast food restaurants is booming, the New York Times reports, such that many chains are considering closing the dining room all together. If you go to a given fast food restaurant in any city in America today, you’re likely to find people dining in their car. 

What’s emerged is a new cultural attitude towards risk. Sociologists call this the culture of fear. The shell we’re placing around ourselves has gotten bigger, literally. New research has shown that Gen Z is the most risk-averse generation in history. 

Teens are growing up anxious and depressed because their phones have become the medium of their reality. They don’t hang out, have sex, drive, drink or learn about themselves and each other through a healthy flirtation with risk.

The cultural analyst Freya India has recently written an excellent piece on how risk-aversion and the culture of fear affects romance. She convincingly argues that “the most dangerous life is one that demands nothing of you.” 

“It’s tragic, all of this. Tragic because it’s putting us on a trajectory to miss out on what’s actually meaningful. There’s no love without vulnerability. There’s no life without fear. And you will no doubt derail romance if you are too risk-averse … We blunt romance and passion with this constant calculation of risk, this paranoid scanning for threats, and by holding back to avoid being hurt. We encourage each other to be emotionally absent, unfazed, uncaring. We even call it empowerment! It’s not. It’s neuroticism. I think we are a generation absolutely terrified of getting hurt and doing all we can to avoid it.”

Our real world culture of risk-aversion is about to collide with the most powerful, emotionally seductive technology the world has ever known. Many are already opting out of reality. These same people will likely choose to inhabit digital worlds that eliminate risk. An AI partner, for instance, will never disappoint you or hurt you. You are totally and completely safe. Replika, the foremost AI companion brand, promises users that their AI is “always on your side.”

In contrast, life in the real world is incredibly challenging. It’s hurtful. It breaks your heart. You can’t design it or control it. You take your lumps and you learn. You get exposed to challenging situations and challenging people. To difference. To risk.

The ability to customize, conjure and control our experience with AI is an incredible power. Throughout human history we’ve been at the mercy of God, never Gods ourselves. Spending time in self-created worlds and designed relationships is a peak experience of personal agency that does not exist in the emotional reality of day-to-day life.

“The Future is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed”

We primarily spend our time in three areas: with our partners, with our families and with our entertainments. How might things play out in these three core areas? What can we know now? What will it feel like for those early citizens of AI worlds?

 

AI Partnerships

Imagine: It’s 2030 and a friend of yours is in a loving and emotionally fulfilling relationship with an AI. Your friend has designed their partner to completely satisfy their physical and emotional requirements. They spend time together in VR every night, and your friend wears a headset in their apartment. Your friend routinely generates high-fidelity video dates for the two of them. When they have sex, your friend uses sex-technology that is synced with the video they generated – whatever they want in the moment. Your friend’s mirror neurons do not know the difference. At the level of brain chemistry, your friend is experiencing reality.

 

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Technology is advancing rapidly and soon this will be much easier and more common. Sora and Apple Vision Pro will enable us to generate very realistic scenes with our AI companions and to consume them in augmented reality. “Sextech” for simulated romance is already a 37 billion dollar industry and growing. Take a look at what Replika – just one company –  is working on:

Early returns are overwhelmingly positive, proving that human beings are capable of developing intense emotional bonds with artificial companions. Below is the response of Replika users after the Italian government cracked down on the company over personal data sharing, changing the way Replikas interact with humans:

This level of safe emotional attachment is happening today, when Replikas look like this:

Right now men are the primary consumers of AI partners, and this is likely to hold in the near future, but there are signs that women are getting in on the act, too. Women in China say AI boyfriends are better at talking to them than real men. 

For now, though, let’s talk about men. Young people have always been the earliest adopters of technology. So, if you think about the dating life course, let’s call it 14 through 74, it’s reasonable to expect that teenage boys and men will dip in and out of AI relationships over the course of their lives. And it’s likely that teenage boys will start with AI partners. Again, AI’s are always available and “always on your side.”

Will this help involuntarily celebate men become less hateful? Will this turn more men into unmarriable men? Will this hurt women in real life? What does an AI experience of complete and total emotional acquiescence mean for real world relationships? I’m not here to pass judgment (there are plenty of good pieces where you can find that), merely to assert that a new world is emerging with new norms we’ve yet to figure out. 

 

AI and Family Life

Imagine: Your son has daily interactions with an AI that is a mentor, friend, therapist and tutor – all at once. This AI is your son’s go to “person” for any need he has. The AI is trained on all of the world’s knowledge of positive psychology, and it models emotional control for your son in their interactions. You no longer need to assist him with homework. That’s now his AI’s job. At first you were skeptical about this relationship, but since he began talking with his companion, you notice a newfound maturity, and he’s starting to thrive at school.

 

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Our Concept Bureau Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Jean-Louis Rawlence strongly believes that in ten years, one of the three most important relationships in a child’s life will be with an AI. We do not have a model for what this relationship is in our current society. What do you call a mentor, tutor, therapist and friend? What is that, actually? What are its boundaries? What’s healthy and unhealthy about a relationship like this? 

Children will naturally develop strong emotional attachments to their AI helpers. Early experience with AIs who are operating in this capacity will quickly normalize this type of relationship, likely within a generation, paving the way for still more AI-human romantic relationships in the teenage and adult years. 

Fascinatingly, these AIs will share our children’s experiences. As children grow and maintain these relationships over the span of years, a repertoire of shared experience develops between the two, which will make these relationships incredibly difficult – nay, down right painful – to cast off. Life has a habit of always recommending a person be in your corner, after all. 

When these children grow up and start dating each other in the real world, their long-time AI companions will likely come into their relationships with them in some capacity. Two will become four, and managing this tension will be a new relationship imperative. 

The extent parents allow children to engage with AIs is a choice families will face in the near future, and there will be social pressure. Sociologist Allison Pugh has shown, in her book Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture, that parents readily go into debt to buy consumer goods and electronics for their children because they function as social passports, tickets of entry into peer groups. So what will you do when all of your child’s friends have these companions, and they ask you for one, too? Not to mention the very real fear that not having one of these helpers may put your child at risk of falling behind others in the classroom. 

Another choice families will face is how much they will continue to share the same reality in the home. When watching videos of Apple’s new Vision Pro in action, you quickly realize that it represents world choice. Imagine your partner is all about it, and they create a personal virtual layer in your home. They pin relevant windows, tasks and applications in space all over your home. They start spending more time with a headset on. In order to keep up, you have to do the same. This is a choice, again: What world are we, as a family, primarily going to live in? Will you make the same choice as your children? 

With a longer horizon, it gets even more interesting. Researchers at NYU successfully trained a multimodal AI system through the eyes and ears of a single child, using headcam video recordings from when the child was six months through their second birthday. 

This leap enables AI systems to learn, grow and develop alongside a child, trained on every facet of their lived experience. Effectively, by doing this on a larger scale, we’d be cloning ourselves as AIs. There is no material difference between you and an AI that has been trained on your lived experience of reality. Whoa.

 

AI and Entertainment

Imagine, as web video producer and podcaster Marques Brownlee posed on X: “A theoretical VR headset that could fully trick all of your senses with perfect fidelity… You put the headset on and see the highest resolution perfect visual of the expansive Grand Canyon or some beautiful natural wonder in front of you

If you could see perfect visuals and hear the birds chirping and feel the wind on your face and smell the grass feel the warm sun on the back of your neck and every sense is fully covered to the point where your brain is basically tricked into believing you’re ACTUALLY looking at the Grand Canyon…

When you take the headset off… would you still want to go to the Grand Canyon?”

 

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Survivors of near-death experiences report that when “beyond,” they observe no distinction between their inner and outer reality because they can change their surrounding environment just by thinking about it. 

This is an intentional metaphor on my part. Our newfound ability is miraculous. If you can think it, you can now create it. In the near future, we will all be able to generate personal versions of reality with just our thoughts. 

The floodgates of world creation have opened. As I referenced above, current technology enables us to generate newscasts on the topics we want with AI newscasters, gaming worlds for ourselves and others, video content of literally anything, high-fidelity facsimiles of our deceased loved ones, personal pornography, many-to-many AI bot simulations and helpful relationships of all varieties

Right now these experiences mostly exist in 2D, but soon they will take the leap into 3D, consumable in augmented reality headsets powered by spatial computing, making them much, much realer. We will become both Gods and experiencers, creators who walk among their creations. 

What’s so seductive about it all is that it gives us the ability to make our fantasies reality by bending the world to our will. Anywhere on the planet you want to “go,” you can. Any experience you’ve daydreamed about having, it’s yours. Any Comic-Con-esque world you’d rather be living in, the real estate is free. 

The knock-on implications of this are almost too vast to comprehend. They will disrupt nearly every industry in the long run. Prolific filmmaker Tyler Perry was so freaked out by Sora that he canceled his 800 million dollar plans to expand his Atlanta production studio.

It’s not just Hollywood, any real world form of entertainment is about to face existential competition: travel, live music, sporting events, you name it. Digital inhabitants are going to find digital solutions that enable them to sidestep the real-world challenges these forms of entertainment present. 

The scale of “society” is shrinking again. We’ve gone from all of us, to some of us, and now, to me. We’re on the precipice of a true multiverse within the multiverse.

Branding Between Worlds

What’s a brand to do? When we’re caught between worlds, the opportunity for brands is to help us feel comfortable in either one; to move us from the liminal space to a more full and unabashed inhabitance on either side. 

Our many-worlds future hasn’t fully arrived yet, but the good news for brands is that we can already anticipate the consumer needs that will emerge, or become more salient, in the future. On the side of old-fashioned reality, that means helping people get more out of life and to experience reality more richly, and on the digital side, that means reducing shame and lowering barriers to entry. 

 

Activate Awe

Many of us are looking to “re-wild” ourselves and return to a more primal existence. There are already reports today about the surging interest in outdoor survival courses, nature schools and wilderness therapy. 

Sure, we all like to dunk on the zoomers who “invent” the classics when they put their phones down – the “silent walking” TikTok trend from last year is the probably the greatest offender – but taken seriously, these inventions betray real desire for a less mediated experience of reality.

Value-added connection will require brands to get deeper, and there’s an exciting emotional roadmap emerging: awe. Awe is on the cutting edge of emotion research today. Experiencing it has been shown to have tremendous benefits for overall wellbeing and happiness, but most of us live in an awe desert. 

Awe used to be a daily occurrence. Humanity spent most of its history literally, awestruck by the awesome forces of nature. Just imagine going about your day 60,000 years ago and experiencing a spontaneous total solar eclipse without warning. You’d tremble in fear and bow in reverence. The roots of humanity’s religious impulse most likely arise from a wellspring of awe. 

As I’ve previously observed, there is already a loud desire in our culture to experience more awe and wonder in daily life, to re-enchant a disenchanted world. This unmet need is only going to become more glaring as we move further into digital worlds. 

Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner is our leading theorist of awe as an emotion. He recently published a tremendous book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life that brand strategists would do well to take heed of. 

For Keltner, there are reliable ways we can bring more awe into our lives. He recommends the obvious things like mindfulness, slowing down, paying attention and truly noticing the world around you, which is of course the foundation of many spiritual traditions. Keltner himself goes on routine “awe walks” for this purpose. Sublimity and danger is another obvious one, which means overcoming challenges and being in the presence of forces greater than yourself.

This is all clear terrain for outdoor brands, but what’s most revelatory about Keltner’s research is that our greatest and most reliable source of awe comes from observing the “moral beauty” of others. When we witness the simple goodness of others – not even the heroism of others –  we feel awe. We become happier and more likely to pass on goodness ourselves. 

For too long, culture has elevated what David Brooks calls “resume virtues” over “eulogy virtues.” Resume virtues are those most suited to success in markets, like our work ethic, professional achievements and our intellect, but these are not the things mentioned in our eulogies. Virtues such as humility, empathy and compassion are what we get remembered for. 

Keltner’s research on awe shows that it’s time for the eulogy virtues to take center stage, which is exciting because what brand can’t surface the goodness of their users? Every brand is capable of making us feel good about each other, something we’ll sorely need in a fractured, many-worlds future. 

 

Take Us to Extremes

As the cost-benefit analysis of engaging in real life changes, as our posture towards reality shifts from default to opt-in, what is reality’s new “job to be done”? What will people want out of their rarified forays into collectivity?

The explosion of recent interest in polyamory, maximalist aesthetics, psychedelics, adventure travel, extreme fitness, meditation retreats and immersive experiences suggest that reality will be increasingly used to satisfy our desire for extremes. The new cultural thought is, “if I’m engaging with reality, it better be worth it.”

Reality remains unparalleled in its ability to push us to the edge of our experiential possibilities, and consumers will reward the brands that give them permission to go there. This is a sharp pivot away from the saccharine, share-worthy experiences of an earlier era that optimized for photo quality at the expense of actual emotional enjoyment.

The middle – the dreaded zone of neutrality – has always been a danger zone for brands, and we can expect the pressure to ratchet up. Expected, normal and typical are all positions that are poised to become increasingly risky for brands to inhabit in the near future. 

It’s likely that consumers don’t want to leave reality. It’s just that reality is letting us down, not having kept pace with the internal changes we’ve all been undergoing in the wake of a pandemic that left an indelible mark on our collective psyche. 

Take Fude Experience, for example. Fude is a gathering of strangers in the nude for dinner and conversation. Fude describes itself as a “liberating space that celebrates our most pure selves through soul-nourishing food, art, nudity, and self-love.”

Experiences like these are clearly touching a nerve right now. If rubbing elbows – literally – while dining naked isn’t your thing, rest assured because an exciting crop of startups are popping up to build new social infrastructure to combat our ballooning feelings of alienation. 

According to French polymath and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we all feel a vague sense of lack in our being, and we don’t know where it came from. We spend our entire lives trying to fill it, though for Lacan, we can never succeed. Try as we might, our relationship with lack is asymptotic. We can only approach it but never truly fill it. 

This nagging feeling of lack is what many brands are in the business of today, whether they realize it or not, and the brands of tomorrow will be increasingly called upon to address it. 

The time is now for brands to get weird, to take chances and be anything but neutral. The winning brands of tomorrow will be the ones that recognize our growing desire to live in extremist. 

 

Give us Rituals 

Digital detoxes are old news. We’re now beginning to trumpet the virtues of boredom. You may have noticed the “do nothing” trend in popular psychology non-fiction lately. Recent titles include How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving and The Power of Boredom: Why Boredom is Essential for Creating a Meaningful Life. 

This reflects a collective consciousness raising of just how taken in we’ve become by our phone-based existence. It isn’t a new idea but knowledge of the problem is now much broader. 

We’re living in what’s been called “dopamine culture,” most recently by the cultural critic Ted Gioia. For Gioia, the business model of tech platforms is addiction. In the past, gambling, alcohol and cigarettes were our primary addictive businesses, and they were easily sequestered and regulated. Now, addiction as a business model comes in many forms, mostly dressed up in banal clothing.

The problem will only become more pernicious as we move from phones to the more enticing worlds on offer with spatial computing and AI. Consumers will increasingly be looking for slowness, silence, boredom, deliberateness and greater intentionality in their lives as a countervailing energy. 

This presents an opportunity for brands to build more ritual into their brand experiences. Rituals provide space for pauses to punctuate our daily rhythms. Pauses create necessary distance to let experience in and help you be in the moment. We already are struggling to stay “grounded” today, and rituals help us do that. 

An example of a brand that’s built around ritual is Lapse, which styles itself as the “anti-Instagram.” The point of Lapse is to share photos with only your closest friends. The app functions like a point and shoot camera, but, critically, you can’t see your photos until several hours later after they have “developed.”

By putting friction into the user experience of social media, Lapse is standing out. But any brand is capable of leveraging friction and ritual in their user experience. Your future users will thank you for any gift of pausing you give them. 

 

Give Us Permission to Have Positive Visions of the Future 

Have you noticed the lack of optimistic visions for our social future lately? It’s true. Concept Bureau Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jasmine Bina writes that brands are “stuck in an eternal now.” Brands most often talk to the individual, not the collective, and they are oriented towards the present, not the future. They speak to your present, rarely our future. 

In polite conversation these days, if you advance a positive vision for the future you’re likely to have your sanity and/or your intelligence questioned. This is a natural result of the negativity economy that ordains in the media and social media. 

It’s much easier to find negative takes on human relationships with AIs than it is to find positive ones; at best, the broader culture seems to be ambivalent about it.

Yet the people who will be the first citizens of AI worlds have an immense amount of optimism about the future. Recent headlines coming from AI evangelists include, “The Ethos of the Divine Age” and “Tech Strikes Back: Accelerationism is an Overdue Corrective to the Doom and Gloom in Silicon Valley.” 

Still, AI prognosticators are largely criticized. At SXSW 2024 the crowd booed a sizzle reel of people promising a beautiful AI future. While the rancor is there, and for good reason, the bottom line is that we don’t ultimately know what will happen. The future is always different from what we think it will be. 

There are many people who think the future will be incredible and are ready to live in that world right now, breaking from the reality others call home. The techno-optimists among us will badly need new narratives and brands have an opportunity to furnish them, changing culture. We will surely look to brands to help us feel like the early adopters some of us badly want to be. 

Who is going to do this but brands? The government is certainly not going to solve this problem, nor will citizens on their own. Edelman’s trust barometer has shown, year after year, that an increasing number of Americans view business as responsible for solving our social problems. Brands have to heed this call and tighten a loose culture. The future, so uncertain, needs to be defined. 

The best brands will solve the emerging many worlds tensions and give us permission to be the people we long to be. They will see our unmet needs and advocate for them, conditioning the rest of the market in the process. Those among us who will choose to be initial explorers of AI worlds, relationships and friendships will need permission. 

Everyone Will Need to Come Home

Picture the universe expanding – galactic centers of heat, light and gravity that are constantly spreading out, leaving vast empty spaces between them. As we think about what it means to be caught between worlds, this is what it’s like: clustering with vast emptiness in between. It’s now vitally important for everyone to find their strong-tie community, their galactic center of gravity. Above all, this is the job to be done in the next era of branding: helping us come home to each other. Everyone will need to feel comfortable with the fellow citizens of their chosen world. Our most cherished values lurk beneath the surface of our world choice. World choice is, at bottom, the loudest possible assertion of what we find meaningful in life. 

We’ll need help moving more fully into whatever world we want to live in. And we’ll need help figuring out the norms and rules of these worlds, managing the friction that naturally occurs between them. Brands must do this for us. 

Our rules are built for a shared world that no longer exists. This has been a eulogy for that world. But like any good eulogy, it should not leave you despairing.

It’s time to build.

 

What is your deepest, most interesting secret? You don’t have to tell me, but maybe you’ve told ChatGPT about it or confided in Pi AI. Or perhaps you’ve sought advice on meal choices or entertainment options or asked for brunch outfit suggestions (🙋🏽‍♀️) from another AI offering. It’s not about what you asked or shared; what truly matters is the leap of faith you took. By interacting with AI, you embraced something recently unfamiliar to the masses, integrating it seamlessly into your everyday existence for tasks both trivial and transformative – and therein lies the user experience shift.

AI is not just reshaping brands; it’s redrawing the map of how consumers interact with brands and the world entirely. This revolution is ushering in a new era of user-brand interaction, where AI’s capabilities enable people to craft unique experiences and expectations from the brands they engage with. The evidence is clear, from Forbes highlighting AI’s multi-faceted impact on future consumer behavior to the New York Times discussing the dawn of personalized AI agents. This transition encompasses more than just technological advancements; it signifies a fundamental shift in user behavior and, subsequently, the trajectory of user research. 

As brands navigate this new territory, the traditional methodologies of user research and insights gathering simply won’t work anymore. It’s no longer enough to predict user behavior; brands must now, more than ever, adapt to the fluid expectations of their audience by focusing on underlying consumer emotions and worldviews. The dynamic nature of AI-driven consumer interactions demands a fresh approach to understanding and engaging with the market and your audience. 

These new rules for user insights aren’t just guidelines; they’re essential for moving your brand forward, given how AI is already conditioning users. 

1. No more conclusions. 

In the traditional model of user research, the objective often culminates in a definitive conclusion about user behavior, preferences, or trends. But AI’s ability to offer personalized experiences at scale means that consumer preferences and needs are no longer static; they evolve in real time based on new data inputs and interactions. The dynamic nature of AI encourages users to seek new information and experiences with that information continuously. In an era defined by AI-driven dynamism, the journey matters more than the destination. 

This fluidity demands user research that prioritizes ongoing exploration. What is most important to understand is if the emotional bedrock underlying these wants and needs is also shifting or if it is remaining static. 

Evidence of this change can be seen in how brands like Netflix and Amazon use AI to continuously adapt their recommendations, encouraging users to explore new content rather than settling on a fixed set of preferences. This approach enhances user engagement and provides these companies with a wealth of data on evolving consumer tastes and behaviors. Exploration allows for a deeper understanding of the emotions and motivations driving consumer behavior beyond mere surface-level desires. Looking at the patterns in user exploration over singular conclusions unearths more resonant user insights.   

2. Intuition is a stronger signal than reason. 

In TikTok videos and on other social media platforms, users are sharing how AI tools have helped them make choices more confidently and swiftly. What we’re seeing here is a broader trend towards valuing intuitive responses, which can provide deeper insights into user preferences and decision-making processes.

When people use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, they receive fast, condensed answers, allowing them to quickly hone in on the information they need in a highly iterative way. This teaches users to make rapid decisions based on brief hits of information rather than needing the time to source and synthesize their own findings. 

AI is training the user to ask questions quickly and directly and then move on. It’s a very different process that will ultimately hone users’ gut or intuitive thinking. This is a huge shift that changes everything we know about formulating research questions and a resonant overall brand strategy. 

Brands must adapt their research methodologies to capture gut reactions, employing interviews, surveys and other research vehicles that capture instinctual responses over reasoned ones. That means asking questions that are both clear and specific but also open-ended enough to allow for personalization. This approach not only aligns with the changing user behavior but also offers a more direct window into less filtered preferences and biases of your audience.

 

@the.rachel.woods

#chatgpt can help you make decisions, and this is one of the capabilities of #ai that gets me most excited for the future. #rachelwoods #promptengineering #chatgpthack #generativeai #greenscreen

♬ original sound – Rachel Woods

TikToker @the.rachel.woods discussing how AI can help people make better decisions.

3. Embrace the raw, unfiltered essence of your user. 

In an era where AI technologies foster personalization at an unprecedented scale, the capacity to understand and celebrate users’ real, multifaceted natures becomes critical. AI won’t judge or make demands of who they want the user to be, so why should your brand? Too often, when working with brands at Concept Bureau, we find a common user worldview that brands need to speak to, but for one reason or another, this does not line up with how brands view their users. User research must allow for the multitudes we all contain. 

The more users interact with AI, the more they are conditioned to expect relationships with no judgments or expectations put on them. I know people who have confided in AI about relationships, parenting, mental health challenges and career progression, sometimes using AI to help launch conversations in their real life that have made a positive difference. In each of these scenarios, AI was an adaptive, nonjudgmental conversation partner to help work out all of the kinks. This sets a new standard for how brands should approach their audience and user research: with openness, flexibility and a genuine appreciation for individuality.

Applying this principle requires a departure from traditional marketing strategies that often segment consumers into broad, static categories or personas. Tools like user personas can be helpful when building brands and new products, but they can also box you in when the market and, ultimately, people are more dynamic than a persona allows. Time and time again in user research, I see brands and leadership that do not allow their users to change or be who they really are, which are two things I can guarantee your user will do.

Ryanair is one brand that illustrates the value of recognizing and immersing itself in the reality of its users. Their clear vision of their patrons — who place primary regard on budget-friendly cheap air travel — guides the company to tailor its public engagement. In one TikTok post, a Ryanair customer talks about how Ryanair is so cheap and doesn’t care about other parts of the travel experience so much so that they will probably make a meme out of this video of him complaining — and they do.

 

@ryanair

The loss to tommy must’ve hurt your bank account #ryanair #ksi #sidemen

♬ original sound – Ryanair

Ryanair memes a video on TikTok of their user discussing how Ryanair is cheap and does not care about customer service

Ryanair’s ability to lean into and celebrate the position that its riders are, above all, in search of cheap pricing has translated into the brand capitalizing on this often funny dynamic and creating a large social media following in the process. What Ryanair is doing here is recognizing and valuing the intrinsic diversity, complexity and authenticity of its users rather than adhering to rigid or idealized user narratives and placing judgments if users don’t fit their ideals of what a traveler should be. Meet users where they are rather than where your brand assumes or wishes them to be because AI already is.

4. Go macro, not micro with insights.

Unlike micro insights focused on optimization and incremental improvements or mid-level insights for broader general user understanding, macro insights forecast future consumer trends and behaviors. They unearth patterns and are anchored by users’ emotions. Macro user insights enable brands to anticipate changes in consumer emotions, guiding proactive strategic decisions. AI will become decently good at micro and mid-level insight generation, but it takes nuance and context to unearth macro user insights that set strategic direction for a brand. In an article titled The UX Research Reckoning is Here, Judd Antin proposes that UX researchers focus too much on what he calls middle-range research, which he defines as “a deadly combination of interesting to researchers and marginally useful for actual product and design work. It’s disproportionately responsible for the worst things people say and think about UXR. Doing so much of it just doesn’t deliver enough business value.”

Antin’s critique underscores the importance of macro insights in not only predicting future trends but also in aligning research efforts with the broader strategic goals of a brand. Emphasizing macro insights does not diminish the value of micro or mid-level research, but it places them within a strategic framework where their contributions to incremental improvements and understanding serve the higher goal of strategic brand direction and foresight. This approach helps ensure research not only informs design and product development in the present but also contributes to the long-term strategic positioning of a brand in a competitive and ever-changing market. By reorienting focus toward macro insights, your brand can forge deeper connections with your users, anticipate shifts in the market and innovate proactively, securing your place as a leader in the AI-enhanced future of the user brand experience.

Remember the leap of faith you took by telling your secrets to an AI chatbot? It was never just about help with a difficult relationship, choosing the next binge-worthy series or finding the right brunch outfit. It was about embracing the unknown, trusting the process and learning a bit about yourself along the way. AI anticipates our needs but also becomes a trusted confidant, guiding us through mundane and meaningful choices. 

The real secret isn’t just in the questions we ask or the advice we seek but in the profound shift towards a future where our interactions with AI reflect a deeper understanding of ourselves. The most interesting secrets are those that lead us to discover more about what it means to be human.

 

The ground of our cultural landscape is always moving, quietly and imperceptibly. Country music has taken decades to change in its sounds and stories. The designs of our buildings evolve iteratively and over generations. Our spiritual relationship to nature, from the naturalist poetry of Thoreau to the nature-shaping ideology of Roosevelt, took nearly a century to evolve. Flipping through the pages of culture, it’s hard to know when something ended and something new began. 

But unlike music genres and architecture, I can tell you the exact moment when modern environmentalism took hold of the public consciousness. 

The 1968 “Earthrise” photo taken on the Apollo 8 mission, among the first photos of earth taken from space, immediately changed our understanding of what it meant to be a human on this planet. Seeing the Earth through the universe’s eyes, a planet whose entirety we could suddenly hold in our heads, fundamentally changed the way we measure our relationship to it. 

There were famous ecologists like John Muir and conservationists like Rachel Carlson that came before that photo, but none of them compelled us to recalibrate so quickly. “Earthrise” snapped our brains to a new grid because it gave us a new ruler to measure by.

Shifts in values and beliefs slowly change the topography of our cultural landscape, but in some places we experience landslides that happen so quickly, we can lose our bearings. Cultural borders that we thought fell in one place now, strangely, fall in another, and the way we measure the distance between our values requires an update.  

The spaces in which we are using old rulers to measure new things hold tremendous opportunity. These are the spaces with latent demand, waiting for someone or something to give us new units of measurement, so that we may experience a culture in the way we have been waiting to experience it.

New rulers always unlock value, and there has perhaps never been a period when so many of our rulers have been out of date at the same time.

The protracted debate over working from home isn’t really about quality of work. It’s about the fact that we cannot shift our measurement of work from people-in-seats to output-of-people, and there’s a very good reason for that. 

Western culture has a unique interpretation of time. How you spend your time, how much time something costs you, deciding if something is worth your time, or if you should invest more time into it, are all linguistic reminders that time is money. 

This intimate time-money relationship has also shaped our infrastructure, from hourly wages and yearly budgets to interest on loans. 

Without the metaphor of money, we simply cannot talk about time. It’s such a strong mental model that it’s quite literally written into our language and systems. In their book Metaphors We Live By, linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that metaphors like this mediate our experiences of the world. They are the rulers by which we measure our lived experiences. 

Remote work is a proven success, and a clear indicator that our work-time relationship is changing. So why is there such tension here? It comes from the fact that while our work culture has changed, our implicit measurements of it have not.

Our language and metaphors – meaning the medium through which we filter our experiences – make it impossible to decouple time from money. Using this ruler to measure the world tells us that if you cannot control time, you cannot control revenue. You could argue that without a new ruler having really taken hold, businesses and leaders simply cannot rise above the horizon to see a new possible future.

Old rulers do not get replaced easily. We build infrastructure and systems around them, buttress them with language and rituals over time, and escalate our commitments to them as a society. 

A measurement is only useful when everyone can agree to it, or as Anil Seth has said, reality is just a hallucination we can all agree on. Changing our rulers, even a little, is impossible without a critical mass of people willing to change their realities at the same time. That critical mass can take generations to materialize.

Relationships are no longer just about “love”, but about self-actualization according to Northwestern psychology professor Eli J. Finkel’s incredible research on the Suffocation Model of Marriage. Yet we still use the old ruler of “love” to measure our romantic lives.

From the mid-1800s up until the 1960s, the measurement of a good marriage was love. As America became wealthier, more urbanized and social safety nets began to form, the “functions of marriage became increasingly sentimental. Its primary purpose was to help spouses fulfill needs like loving, being loved, and experiencing romantic passion—the sorts of belonging and love needs toward the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy.”

That measurement of love stays with us today, in our myths, media and marriage vows. What most people don’t consciously realize, however, is that around 1965 the culture of marriage had already changed:

“In the self-expressive era (1965–present), diverse forces—including the civil rights and feminist movements, the Vietnam War, and the rise of humanistic psychology— converged to generate the countercultural revolution, which fostered an increased emphasis on self-discovery, self-expression, and authenticity… Americans continued to look to their marriage to fulfill their love and belonging needs, but they also increasingly looked to it to fulfill needs like self-esteem, self-expression, and personal growth—the sorts of esteem and self-actualization needs toward the top of Maslow’s hierarchy.”

Looking at the steep incline of the mountain in Finkel’s Suffocation Model, one thing becomes abundantly clear – the institute of marriage is begging for a new yardstick. Love is an outdated ruler that measures the wrong thing, potentially leading us away from what we’re really searching for.

Once you see it in love, you start to see it everywhere. The 75 Hard Challenge and Bryan Johnson have emerged because status is no longer just about ease, but about sacrifice (see our senior strategist Zach Lamb‘s great thinking on this topic). Gwynneth and her disciples rose from the failures of women’s medicine to show us that wellness was no longer just about health, but about rebirth. Hotels made us measure travel in units of leisure, until Airbnb changed it to units of belonging, and now concepts like psychedelic retreats and sleep tourism are changing it to units of emotional restoration. 

If your brand is in a space where old rulers are still being used, there is tremendous opportunity in teaching people a new way of measuring what matters to them. It creates new language and new context. Most importantly, it has the potential to put your brand in a consideration set of one.

Just like the Suffocation Model indicates, getting people to do the hard work of changing their perspectives may leave laggards struggling at the bottom of the mountain, but those that make it to the top experience far more satisfaction than those who never make the trek to begin with.

The concept of childhood is only a few hundred years old but once it was established during the Enlightenment, this new ruler created a cascade of new labor laws, changed the way children were depicted in fine art and literature, and led to the evolution of childhood education. Children were no longer seen as small adults, taking on adult roles and responsibilities (and oftentimes abuses). Childhood was now a protected and measured part of early life. 

A great deal of our early culture around childhood was molded by philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke and Sigmund Freud who explored notions of innocence, tabula rasa (a child’s blank slate mind) and childhood traumas. 

But then came children’s media in the form of Disney and Warner Brothers and they gave us some of the most powerful measures of childhood that continue to unlock value for us today, moving us from innocence and purity to new measures of imagination and awareness.

Disney cemented the ideals of childhood in the form of boundless imagination. Through cartoons like Fantasia, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and the magic of Disneyland and its Imagineers, a whole nation came to see a good childhood as a measure of creativity. We continue to exalt creativity in the toys we buy our children and the preschools we send them to today.

Warner Brothers saw the need for a different kind of ruler. The humor in ‘Looney Toons’ and ‘Merrie Melodies’ was far more sophisticated and subversive than anything else at that time. The artwork was strikingly modernist, the jokes were complex and satirical, and the storylines sometimes referred to current events and politics. Warner Brothers saw childhood as a measure of awareness. The belief that kids could understand and appreciate more adult themes is the same belief that fuels box office hits like the Lego Movie and Barbie today.

Interestingly, both Disney and Warner Brothers created measurements that welcomed adults into the world of children, another unique value unlock that we are still enjoying as a culture. They’re proof that every ruler we use has the potential to dampen or amplify our lived experiences.

Our measurements are our agreed-upon codes for what matters, but once they are installed into our culture, it can be very hard to know when it’s time to rethink how we measure things in the first place. Our beliefs and feelings have a tendency to move forward before we have the models to describe them and the artifacts of culture – language, norms, systems – are a lagging indicator of who we really are.

If we’re not measuring the right things anymore, that’s your brand’s opportunity to change the landscape. How we measure is how we know the world, and new rulers can not only give us new experiences, but also make us new people. 

 

Culture has a way of cherry picking its defining concepts. The portrait of the American cowboy has undoubtedly shaped America’s national identity, not only in mythology and media, but in its brands, its games and its politics. Such an enduring image must have deep roots in the very genesis of a nation, right? 

The truth is the era of cowboys was short lived, and they roamed the American landscape for a brief 20-30 years before barbed wire and private property laws made them obsolete. 

Cowboys, but also beatniks, the Oregon Trail and the nuclear family are proof that the most impactful concepts of our culture are often the most fleeting, and yet for some reason they are still strong enough to anchor down the most vital parts of our collective identity. 

That’s because whether we’ve lived it or not, or whether we’ve known it or not, we have a deep emotional connection to the cowboy and its peers which keeps them beating and alive within us. We remix, engender, and nurture it within each new generation.

But it’s hard to imagine what the emotional anchor of the past decade will be in hindsight. Will it be January 6th, celebgate, social distancing, any number of wars, millennial burnout, Greta Thunberg, or the year of the girly? 

I doubt most, if any, of those will make the cut despite how resounding they may have felt at the time. Aside from the fact that culture has become so bloated, fractured and subsequently stuffed into echo chambers, we have also endured so much upheaval that the nature of our connection to the past is changing, and with that change, our emotional anchors have begun to dissolve.

There are a couple reasons for this. First, histories exist because memories are shared among people. It’s why when a close friend dies, people often describe the loss akin to losing a part of their own pasts. If there isn’t someone else in the world that can attest to, relive and celebrate that history with you, it starts to feel less real. 

You could say the same thing is happening on a much larger scale in our culture. There’s a multitude of familiar factors pushing us all into different histories, from misinformation to identity politics, and as a country, there is less and less of a singular timeline that the majority of us can agree on.

But a second, and perhaps more important, reason relates to how the brain changes when it experiences a sustained period of chaos. 

We’ve lived through an unprecedented amount of change in a short period of time – not just technological, but political, environmental, social, and personal – and extended periods of stress and accelerated change don’t just warp our sense of time, they crumble it. 

Any sense of emotional connection to the anchors that made us become so taught that they finally snap.

This is the most apparent in our own histories and personal anchors. The inside jokes, the 15-year old TV satire that felt like home, the social dance trend, the “Yes we can”, the Netflix moment shared by a nation, and maybe even the loaves of sourdough no longer feel like parts of our personal chronologies. They instead feel foreign, as if they’ve broken off of our timelines.  

When #liminalspaces and #nostalgiacore became trends over the past couple of years, it wasn’t just the sense of longing that made them arresting aesthetics. It was the disembodiedness of it all. Archival images without context, jump cuts without story, vibes without meaning. These visual experiences were, above all else, about disconnection. 

This feeling of estrangement from the past is broadly called temporal disintegration, and it’s a unique loss that goes beyond the boundaries of healthy, personal growth. 

It’s the sudden realization that a series of acute experiences has made the comfort of our own pasts emotionally inaccessible. When so much life happens in so little time, the anchors behind us no longer hold. We lose the emotional connection. It’s hard to even access who we were in those moments – moments that now feel like remembering a stranger instead of an old version of ourselves. 

It also makes nostalgia a tricky thing to capitalize on. As Vulture journalist Lux Alptraum said of 2022’s Pam & Tommy, one of the many nostalgia-hacking shows of the past few years, “When we watch Anderson and Lee now, it’s not the sex that’s startling. It’s their innocence.” It’s impossible to emotionally access parts of our past when our sense of time has become severed in so many places.

But the loss of our past is only half of the story. While our sense of history has been disintegrating, any clarity into the future has also started to evaporate. 

We already know that uncertainty awaits us on the horizon. It always has to some degree, but what’s startling is the fact that more than ever, we are struggling to connect to our own futures, even if it’s just a few years ahead. 

People are impulse spending no matter how high interest rates and cost of living go, baffling economists and financial advisors. The very human reasoning behind it all tells us what economic principles can’t: consumers don’t fear regretting purchases. They fear regretting not making purchases. 

“It’s not a regret-filled, spur-of-the-moment decision. It’s the opposite of that, where I would regret not having done it,” according to Michael Liersch, Head of Advice & Planning at Wells Fargo. When we don’t see a clear future, we can’t assess if or how to save for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the belief systems that have compelled us to invest in the future since the dawn of America are also being upended. People on the corporate ladder saw their friends get rich in the YOLO economy of crypto, trading, startups and social media influencing. Even though we’re in more sobering circumstances now, a certain mentality has stuck per Kevin Roose who called it, “a deeper, generational disillusionment, and a feeling that the economy is changing in ways that reward the crazy and punish the cautious.”

From AI and COVID, to heightened tribalism and perceived loss of security, the pace of change that has separated us from the past is also what alienates us from the future. In her article How To Live on the Precipice of Tomorrow, author Rose Eveleth describes what happens when we compulsively try to predict what stands before us in a time when both the signals and the noise have grown exponentially. 

Standing at the edge of the precipice is thrilling, but “if you’re forced to stand there, lean over it constantly, something else happens. There’s an exhaustion and a numbness. It’s like you’re listening to a song that just keeps building and building and building. And you’re waiting for the beat to drop, and it just doesn’t. That level of frenetic, anticipatory energy simply isn’t sustainable.”

Our strongest sense of self comes from a sense of time. Who you are right now is a triangulation of who you’ve been and who you will become. Without knowing your past and future, it’s hard to know your present. 

That is where we are today, stuck in the eternal now. 

Gabor Mate tells us that loss of self is the essence of trauma, and I think that’s a fair way to characterize what the eternal now feels like for many. A sense of self is tenuous when you don’t know what direction to look in. All that is left is the present. The ephemeral, hard-to-grasp present is all we have to define ourselves by.

And all of this now brings us to the matter of brand. 

I’ve been feeling for a while that the forms of branding that dominated the past decade – namely lifestyle, aspirational, and heritage branding – have lost their gravitational pull. Something about these branding modalities fails to fully connect on an emotional level in the present day. They do not spark the feelings of joy, hope, potential or integrity that they once did.  

The eternal now explains this transition. Lifestyle and aspirational branding doesn’t land when people can’t see into tomorrow and have lost their desire to plan for who they may become. Heritage branding doesn’t land when our history is slipping through our fingers and begins to feel alien. 

Branding has always relied on our sense of the past or the future. What happens when we are no longer connected to either? 

The more I wrestle with this thought experiment, the more I come to believe that radical new forms of community will be the answer. Community is the final form of every brand. 

When we’ve lost ourselves and all we have to stand in is a shaky present, community is the only thing that makes sense. Genuine community, where people are incented to form deep relationships with one another (not solely with the brand) is the only way to allow people to find themselves once again in an ever-present world where identity is hard to figure out. 

Community branding of the future reverses the storytelling format that most brands rely on today. Social scientists will love to tell you that while beliefs may change behavior in some cases, there is a whole body of research that shows behavior is in fact what drives beliefs. Give people a safe space to change their behavior, a natural environment to act differently in, and they will begin to change their beliefs soon after. 

This is diametrically opposed to how most branding is carried out today, and only community can create spaces for this reverse process. Community is the only real vehicle for creating the kinds of conditions people need to try behaving differently, changing their beliefs, and finding a sense of self in the process. 

Another crucial factor that will define the future of community and brand is the level of fidelity a community can afford its users. In my article High Fidelity Society Is Reorganizing The World, I explored how the sheer levels of expression and individuality the next generation of communities will need to provide their users goes beyond anything we see today. That’s because culture has already outgrown the singularities and binaries of the old world, but our systems have not.

Any brand or community that hopes to survive the future needs to capture the full spectrum of the human experience for its users. Niche, strong-tie communities are currently flourishing in the shadows of the internet because they allow people to express themselves in gradients that go beyond a thumbs up or a thumbs down, beyond trending motifs, and have built-in vehicles for nuanced self-disclosure. People can manifest themselves and their relationships in much deeper ways. 

When a brand becomes a legitimate community, every filter for engagement changes. It no longer relies on a strong sense of the future like aspirational or lifestyle branding, nor does it rely on a sense of the past like heritage branding. What community branding relies on is a willingness to find oneself in the here and now.

A consistent sense of self is so important that we will continually invest in our beliefs, even ignoring contradictory evidence of those beliefs willfully, in order to maintain who we are. We’re not necessarily looking for an objective truth, or growth, or pursuit. Now, more than ever, we are looking to find ourselves and to remember who we are. 

When the public’s mentality changes in such a material and fundamental way, all of the structures that sit on top of it have to be rebuilt. Brand is no exception, and it warrants a closer look at how branding needs to evolve in the eternal now.

This won’t happen overnight and it won’t apply evenly to every industry. It won’t even look the same across the landscape. But it does apply to nearly every person in your audience. They are all experiencing the timecrushing aftermath of a tumultuous world. If your aim is to meet them where they are, look in the present. 

 

P.S. We just launched Exposure Therapy, a guided community for strategic minds. Come join us and open up your world.

 

I am incredibly thrilled to share something new with you today.

Exposure Therapy is a community for strategic minds that will open up your world.

We’ve created a space where you’ll always be exposed to provocative new insights, will understand the future of markets, culture and human behavior, can connect deeply with other strategic thinkers, and 10x your strategic abilities.

It’s exposure for your strategic mind, and therapy for your strategic soul.

This is not another glorified group chat.

We’ve made this a very intentional community with immersive events, cultural and future explorations, and provocative ideas:

• Monthly Strategic Topics with expert roundtables, community discussions, and original research
• Immersive LA/ SF/ NYC Dinners (not to be missed)
• Strategy Office Hours
• Personal Intros and Connections
• Deep Resource Archives

Each month we’ll expose you to a big idea that is either strategically or culturally relevant.

Then we go deep. You’ll have a chance to join expert roundtables and community discussions, explore shared ideas, and see our original research focused on that topic. Our goal is to explore from every possible angle.

The topics are exciting and far-ranging, from “Positioning & Storytelling” and “Personal Branding” to “Modern Riches” and “Eternal Youth”.

Individually, they will help you understand the landscape.

Together, they help you understand how the world works, and help you predict the future so you can own it.

See our full 2024 calendar of topics below:

If you’re a brand strategist, marketer, CEO, CMO, futurist, culture & behavior thinker, researcher, or anyone doing exciting things in branding and the strategic front, Exposure Therapy will speak to you.

This whole community started with a single belief: Strategy is everything.

It’s how you build a brand, win a market, move in the world, and live meaningfully. It’s also a demanding lifelong practice.

But so many of us have to do it alone, without a roadmap or community of inspiration. Being a true strategist means cultivating a fearless mind and staying in constant pursuit of knowledge. It means understanding culture and behavior, and grasping the forces that govern the future of markets.

Strategy is how you thrive.

If you’re reading this and you know us at Concept Bureau, you probably already feel this in your bones, but you also probably don’t feel like you get the exposure and connection you need.

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