Each month, our team does a wide sweep of culture and presents every recent finding they think is worth noting.
It’s my favorite meeting ever, and it’s called “Brands & Outliers”: brands because they are the bellwethers of culture, and outliers because every movement begins as an anomaly in the landscape.
Today, we’re sharing this rich discussion with you. I want you to think of this as your smart friends and colleagues getting in a room and freely talking about what they’re paying attention to, because that’s what it is for me.
From this conversation emerges vital second-order insights that help progress our model of the markets. Our rule is to move fast and lean hard into casting the future.
It’s a deep dive primer into innovation, culture, business and future signals, but in a way that ties all of it together in an actionable story.
It will give you clear perspective and new ideas to work with.
I’ve included timestamps of highlights below, but there’s a ton of good stuff in here.
If you like this video and want to see more recordings of our monthly Brands & Outliers meeting, let me know. We’d love to keep sharing this conversation with you.
10:58 We’re a culture obsessed with “detox”. We detox our bodies, relationships, dopamine addictions, social media and environments. The idea of shedding and purging is everywhere.
12:36 We’re in an awkward transition out of optimized tech culture into something more ‘feeling’, and it’s decidedly surreal.
15:15 #humancore and NPC streaming may be bizarre, but they also get you in your feelings. (It’s all very High Fidelity Society.)
29:21 So many new brands are just skins over chatGPT. It’s therapy dressed up as a buzzfeed quiz or an editor clothed as a writing coach. Reminds us of the disaggregation of Craigslist.
42:43 What happened to the irredeemable bad guy/ girl? They became complicated, human, nuanced when we left Low Fidelity Society.
45:46 Death doulas, operatic escapism, people getting over alcohol… we are reassessing the vices and fears we subscribe to.
01:02:52 Population collapse meets fertility tech: the first babies conceived with a sperm injecting robot have been born, and IVG (In-Vitro Gametogenesis) is here.
01:03:49 Biophilic design speaks to our desire to bring nature indoors. The home is for healing now, and that has big implications for the industry.
01:04:56 Language is the operating system of democracy, and that has significant implications when large language models begin to shape how we interface with the world.
Here’s the only definition of brand strategy you will ever need: Strategic brands bend the will of the market.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the coolest brand, the biggest or the most innovative. None of those things are defensible on their own.
Real strategy is when you make moves today to condition the market, so that tomorrow the market prefers you over your competitors.
Apple conditioned the market to see electronics as identity markers.
Architectural Digest conditioned the market to see interior design as social voyeurism.
Equinox conditioned the market to see the gym as a temple of “high-performance living”.
All of them created conditions that favored them over anyone else in the space. This is real strategy.
If you can’t look at all of your brand activities and decipher how you are shaping the perception of your category in a way that positions your brand as the natural winner, you do not have a strategy. You are merely reacting to the rules that another player has written.
At any given point, the market moves forward linearly. Products, features, ideas, expectations, behaviors and the overall story that defines them will continue to move forward in the same direction along the same line.
But when you bend the will of the market, you bend the direction of that line. You change the overall story so that suddenly your brand is on the critical path, and your competitors have fallen off.
There are a few ways to bend the will of the market, regardless of whether you are a small company or a big one, B2C or B2B, first to market or last.
What matters more than anything else is that your brand resists falling on the linear path. Bending the will of the market is always hard, and there is no guarantee, but the brands that are successful are usually the ones that take the biggest swings.
Create new context
Every category has rules, but some of the most interesting brands exist at the border between two different categories, where the rules of one are traded in for the other.
James Dyson revolutionized the vacuum cleaner market by introducing bagless cleaners, except they played in the rules of high technology. Dyson conditioned consumers to see vacuum cleaners as high-tech, high-performance appliances and managed to shift the perception of cleaning from a chore to something more sophisticated and even desirable – and far less tied to the female domain.
When a vacuum becomes a technological wonder, there’s no need to hide the inner machinery anymore. Dyson designed clear bins so users could see the cyclone at work, and encased the vacuums in sleek, bold housing.
As a tech product, Dyson put itself in a category of one. They bent the will of the market by creating new context around the meaning of a vacuum cleaner.
Changing the company you keep gives you access to a new set of mythologies to play with and benefit from.
Create new identities
Why did Tesla win while other, highly capable incumbents lost? Why was Tesla so highly valued before they even shipped their cars, oftentimes at the expense of Ford, GM and Toyota’s stock prices?
It wasn’t because of the technology. It was because no other brand was investing in the expression of identity.
In all of his branding and marketing efforts, Elon wasn’t really telling us about the car. He was telling us about the driver.
Tesla conditioned the market to see electric vehicles as luxury, high-performance cars at a time when EVs were seen as feeble playthings, but even more remarkably, they conditioned us to see the driver as a future-forward innovator when EV owners were seen as backwards-looking tree huggers.
Tesla understood that creating a new identity would bend the will of the market in a way that no other player could catch up with.
Create new needs
Chobani transformed the yogurt market in the United States with the introduction of greek yogurt, but in order to succeed with an audience who already had a very entrenched taste for sweeter, thinner yogurt reserved solely for breakfast, the brand had to recondition what Americans thought yogurt was for in the first place.
Tapping into a growing consumer interest in high-protein diets and natural foods, Chobani was one of the first functional food brands, touting the higher order functions of greek yogurt that was high in protein, kept people fuller longer, and led to better performance throughout the day.
Nobody had seen yogurt as a functional food before. Yoplait commercials showed us french women eating yogurt pots on swings in green fields (or something like that). We weren’t even looking at food in terms of function as a society at that point. But Chobani educated its customer to care about something even more important than taste or calories.
Yogurt went from being a light snack to a powerhouse meal. Chobani released new fruit and topping combinations that were both sweet and savory, as well as new packaging formats that looked and traveled like a to-go meal.
They created a new need that has completely changed the way we qualify, buy and eat our yogurt every day.
If you are not bending the will of the market toward your brand, you’re paving the path of the market to your competitor. In most industries where hypergrowth can happen overnight, this is a zero sum game.
“Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time.” Those are Elon’s words. Perception is the most important tool you have.
Don’t go for the linear story. Go for the exponential story that pulls the market toward you and away from others.
It’s hard not to be captivated the moment Jasper The Doll pops up on your TikTok For You page. The supposedly 22-year-old character lives in the shell of an unrecognizable Anna from Frozen doll, which is covered in pen marks and sports short, spiky hair. With a hoarse voice and an air of chaos, she defies all expectations of a typical Barbie doll. But if you stick around to watch her videos, you’ll discover that #JasperTok is actually about helping heal your inner child.
She might look like the sort of thing that only appears in your nightmares, but in actuality, Jasper loves to bake, make videos and watch TV and overall just feelherself. More than one million followers have fallen in love with Jasper, living vicariously through her unhinged behavior, buying swag from her merch line and even creating accounts dedicated to impersonating her.
In a sea of JasperTok videos, there is one that gets to the core of her wholesome messaging. In this particular video, Dani Traci, a creator whose content is mainly comprised of duetting and impersonating Jasper, is in the middle of transforming into her Jasper form. With the “therapy dupe” sound playing in the background, the text across the screen reads: “POV: JasperTok healing our goofy-gremlin-inner childs so we can embrace being our silly & weird selves.”
Beyond the wild makeup, the eccentric hairstyle and the unapologetic silliness, Jasper The Doll resonates with a deeply vulnerable part of ourselves that’s often suppressed. Particularly for AFAB (assigned female at birth) individuals and those who identify as women, she embodies the playful, child-like aspects that defy societal expectations of how a “proper adult woman” should behave or sound. So, while at first glance, Jasper The Doll might seem “weird,” if you look closer, you’ll discover a profound message of self-acceptance.
Jasper The Doll is just one signal for something that we’re experiencing more broadly as a culture. Jasper runs alongside other “weird” trends like “goblin mode,” which spawned an entire industry around Goblincore, taking an aesthetic and turning it into an identity that others can buy and adopt for themselves. Goblin mode, very much like Jasper The Doll, expresses a desire to create something that feels real and authentic in a digital world that feels artificially performative.
Over the past few years we’ve experienced massive trauma across the board: lockdowns, job losses, deaths, economic surges and downturns, inflation, protests, elections, human wars and tech wars, the list goes on. It has affected our social circles, our mental health and our physical health, and it’s made us react in some so-called “weird” ways. From Seltzer Enema kits to naked bike rides; AI boyfriends to mammoth meatballs, these signals are a push towards the rejection of conformity, and they come from a hidden desire for something new and meaningful that does not yet exist in the open.
At Concept Bureau, we often call upon the Mark Twain quote, “History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes,” meaning what we’re seeing is not entirely new. Marie Dollé from the In Bed With Social newsletter talks about how we’ve been here before when Poulaines, the unusually long and pointy shoes from Medieval times, became popular following the violent and deadly episodes of the plague. With so much death, she writes that the “puzzling flamboyance” of Poulaines was a direct “business therapy” response to this tragedy.
In our post-pandemic world, we are currently experiencing something similar, and in “Internet world,” we get to see all kinds of these weird signals in hyperdrive. Erik Davis on The Ezra Klein Show recently spoke about “high weirdness,” saying that “‘weirdness’ isn’t just a quality of things that don’t make sense to us; it’s an interpretive framework that helps us better understand the cultures and technologies that will shape our wondrous, wild future.” Weirdness is here to stay, and now is the time to embrace it.
For brands, when you pay attention to the weird and lean into it, you uncover opportunities that you may not have noticed before. What at first feels uncomfortable can lead you to opportunities to tell new stories and create new realities relevant to your brand. Once you push past the veil of oddity, you will find hidden truths, emotions and beliefs that can help you reach your audiences in intimate ways. In playing with “what could be” as opposed to “what has been,” you can forge pathways that feel more authentic to your audience.
Just as Jasper The Doll is healing the inner children in all of us, Rememory leverages AI to help people find healing after the passing of their loved ones. Unlike a static pre-recorded video message left by your loved one before they pass, Rememory recreates their likeness so that you can have a conversation with them in real-time. This is the sort of weird we’ve long imagined and even feared, but companies like Rememory are creating a new narrative by crafting an emotional experience that counters our sci-fi fantasies.
Famously, Kanye West gifted Kim “a special surprise from heaven” years ago – a birthday message from her late father Robert Kardashian. Although it wasn’t interactive like Rememory’s offerings, there were moments that tapped into the intimacy of their relationship. The hologram of her father didn’t just wish her “happy birthday,” he also called out specific things that only the two of them could share, like the music they listened to and inside jokes.
Despite all of the criticism, backlash, and “spookiness”, some related to Kim’s experience:
In a Western culture that does not know how to process death and loss, it is no surprise that Rememory was named CES’ Innovation Awards Honoree twice. It’s not that death is just taboo and morbid, our culture simply lacks the rituals and language to move through it.
As Concept Bureau CEO & Co-Founder Jasmine Bina mentions in her article about shame stories, when you aren’t just dismantling the narrative but providing another one, you are creating a new reality for your audience.
For Rememory, by repositioning death as immortality, what at first was weird is now healing. More importantly, it’s creating a whole new way of experiencing the bereavement process that never existed before.
Leaning into the weird doesn’t just mean healing. In fact, weird can actually be used as a form of play to imagine new narratives for self-expression and creativity.
In an era in which face filters perpetuate uniform beauty standards, Half Magic Beautychampions weird as a way to express our unique individual beauty. Born from the popularity of founder Donni Davy’s inventive makeup looks on HBO’s Euphoria, Half Magic Beauty has become synonymous with play. On TikTok, #EuphoriaMakeup has over 2.4 billion views with countless videos and tutorials of people not only recreating iconic looks from the show but also exploring new unique forms of expression through makeup.
For Half Magic Beauty, to play with makeup isn’t to meet the expectations of others, it’s a true reflection of identity and self manifested through shimmery blue shadows and gemstones. Where conventional beauty standards dictate conformity, Half Magic Beauty’s offerings promise to help unleash your creative freedom.
Half Magic Beauty isn’t a weird brand, they’re an imagination brand: a direct response, rejection and reimagining of long-standing beauty norms, transforming weird into a wellspring of creativity.
Another example of weird making waves in the creative space took place during the Autumn/Winter 2023 New York Fashion Week. Collina Strada notably diverged from convention with a shocking runway show titled, “Please Don’t Eat My Friends, which featured models costumed as animals, not merely strutting down the runway but crawling, prancing and skipping. Spectators were stunned as models displayed eccentric accessories like elongated earpieces, teal beaks, reptilian masks and pig snouts, some even mimicking animal sounds.
The show was criticized by some for being weird and a “nightmare” while others were “obsessed” and called it “fantastic.” No matter what side you’re on, Collina Strada leveraged weird as a way to elicit a reaction and make a political statement in a new way. As Vanessa Friedman from The New York Times said, “…rather than hector or preach her position, Ms. Taymour made its expression almost radically ridiculous, so it is impossible not to smile.” For a sustainable brand in an industry in which greenwashing is pervasive, Collina Strada created differentiation in a crowded category.
People costumed as animals might look radically ridiculous in the physical world, but in the virtual world, the opportunities to create new rules of expression are encouraged.
Despite what we think about the currentstateofthemetaverse, gaming in virtual worlds is thriving more than ever. Today, half the world’s population is actively involved in virtual worlds, and if you pay close attention, we are surrounded by many different weird signals that suggest we are already in some ways “living in the metaverse.”
Take the meteoric popularity of Fortnite, an online survival game. While the game itself is free, according to a LendEDU survey, nearly 60% of players spend money on outfits, skins and characters. On the surface, that might not seem that strange, but with the ability to look like anything or anyone you want, 52% of Gen Z gamers report they feel more like themselves in the virtual worlds than in real life. This has huge implications, especially for those who experience gender dysphoria.
In virtual spaces, people have the freedom to experiment with their appearance and make their true selves visible. This is more than paying for self-expression, it’s about finding identity.
We are currently living in a time when the lines between fantasy and reality are blurring and virtual worlds are creating room for new rules of self-expression and identity. Success in virtual realms like the metaverse won’t be driven by those who adhere to traditional norms but by those willing to establish entirely new ones.
Especially in this age of algorithms and AI when creativity feels questioned by regurgitated versions of Drake and Balenciaga x (insert pop culture) AI videos, listening to these weird signals in the noise to tap into net-new forms of creativity is crucial. It’s not to say that AI can’t be leveraged to your advantage, but as brand strategists, you need to carefully consider how you can continue to create differentiation in your category.
At our agency, a core phrase that we often tell our clients is to “be different, not better,” and with the rate of change that we’re experiencing, this rings true now more than ever.
As we navigate through these transformative times, brands and individuals alike should not shy away from the weird, but rather, embrace it, explore it and celebrate it. Play and experiment, lean into discomfort with curiosity and explore the signals that will lead you into unexpected places. In doing so, you get to redefine and reimagine what is considered the “norm.”
So the next time you come across something like #JasperTok, a hologram from beyond the grave or a beak-wearing human in the wild, pay attention rather than dismissing it. Use it as a signal and as inspiration to discover new and unexpected ways your brand can show up in the spaces that matter to your audience. You might learn that the weirdest things are actually the most meaningful.
Your brand can only exist within the culture of its time. If you get too far out ahead of that culture, you lose touch with your user. If you trail behind the culture, even a little bit, your user loses touch with you.
Any given culture generally moves between 4 stages: Entrenchment, Tension, Exploration and Transformation. Each stage leads to the next, and each stage has its own characteristics.
But just because your industry is in a certain stage of culture doesn’t mean you have to play there. You can change the culture of your category in order to position your brand as the natural winner.
In fact, most good brands uphold the culture of their time, but the greatest brands move people from one stage of culture to the next. The early internet culture, the social media boom, and the rise of ethical consumerism all told us the norms of those spaces, but they also gave us a framework for feeling when those norms were being outgrown. It wasn’t until we were given language and ideas like ‘digital privacy’, ‘personal branding’, and ‘sustainable living’ that these categories began to change, and we started to update our place in the world once again. The brands that spearheaded that change, like Telegram, LinkedIn, and REI, ended up creating a market that valued them more than their competitors.
Culture tells us our place in the world. Every category, from media and fashion to food and finance is in a different phase of cultural change, but it’s the movement from one stage of culture to the next that creates the highest form of brand equity.
While there are bounds to what culture will tolerate in a given stage, there are levers within those bounds that you can use to push your audience forward. But first you have to understand the rules in order to understand how to properly break them.
The Culture Brand Cycle is a roadmap for moving the culture of your category from one phase to the next, so that your brand is ideally positioned and your competitors are at a natural disadvantage.
Moving your category’s culture from Entrenchment to Tension, from Tension to Exploration or from Exploration to Transformation requires the right kind of brand at the right time.
Below, I discuss what triggers are needed between each phase of culture in order to move your category forward.
If you can accurately diagnose where you are and where you need to go, you can be the changemaker that captures outsize value.
Entrenchment
Entrenchment is a stage in cultural dynamics where a specific ideology, belief system, narrative, or value-set has become deeply rooted and widely accepted by the majority. It often results in a shared societal perspective, with individuals, businesses, and other institutions investing heavily in maintaining this status quo.
Entrenchment feels safe, but also stale. There may be a sense of boredom or apathy, but there is generally little discomfort.
The following industries are in the Entrenchment phase right now and they provide good examples of how our value sets in these areas are still pretty deeply rooted.
Fast Food – The fast food industry has been entrenched for decades, characterized by convenience, standardized menus, and quick service. The giants have been giants for a long time, and the challengers don’t look that different from them. The culture in this space is simple, safe and risk-averse, with the vast majority of players (and consumers) valuing speed and cost. In fact, this culture is so entrenched that sociologists consider the “McDonaldization of society” to be a major force that has rippled outside of the fast food industry.
Education – The Education category finds itself deeply entrenched in long-established systems and traditional approaches to learning. For decades, formal education institutions like schools and universities have been the primary means of acquiring knowledge, primarily through standardized curriculum and testing. While a glut of tech and learning startups have tried to change this, and there have been movements to shift education toward critical thinking, creativity and problem solving skills, any change has been incremental. Other than online classes and iPads in backpacks, you won’t see much difference in the classroom of today versus the classroom of a decade ago.
Hotels – The traditional hotel industry, with brands like Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt have long-established value propositions of comfort, convenience, and amenities. Despite the rise of alternatives like Airbnb, hotels remain the default option for many travelers and no one is complaining because we’re entrenched in a generally accepted value system within this category.
How To Move From Entrenchment To Tension: Entrenched cultures emerge when people concede to “good enough”, and the only way out of it is to make what’s “good enough” feel painful.
Your brand needs to wake people up to the discomfort they’ve ignored and make them see the inferior status quo they’ve accepted, but simply showing people a better way won’t get you far.
The kind of pain that spurs a culture out of Entrenchment and into the next phase of Tension is deeply personal and emotional. It’s the pain of cognitive dissonance where there is a conflict between one’s self-image and their behaviors.
When Apple employed their branding to turn all of us into electronics tastemakers according to Seth Godin, they suddenly created a dissonance between how people viewed themselves and how they shopped for electronics. It was painful to not own an iPhone, which had now become a signal of personal innovation and creativity. Suddenly a whole generation was faced with the question of “Who am I?” when they went shopping for phones.
During its Entrenchment phase, the culture of the auto industry was deeply rooted in notions of raw power and speed. Ferrari spent years engineering the perfect sensory experience of a revving gas engine. The military might of Hummers showed up in the suburbs. The Fast and the Furious multiplied.
But Tesla took the culture from Entrenchment to Tension by introducing the right kind of pain. They may have talked a good game about replacing fossil fuels with sustainable energy, but what really won them the market was a legion of early adopters who wanted to see themselves as stewards of the future by way of technology.
They created a new dichotomy between the old and the new. While other EV brands tried to make something familiar, Tesla made a clean break with the past.
Every few months, the internet would gather to watch a Tesla race a gas-fueled supercar on Youtube, until one day the Tesla won. Where there was once the power and speed of engines, there was now the power and speed of computers.
Tension
The Tension phase emerges when friction begins to develop between existing beliefs or behaviors and emerging societal values or needs. These tensions highlight a dissonance between what our culture has accepted and what it may need to accept for future growth.
You’ll often notice a sense of unease in this phase as people look to the years ahead. It’s an open secret that change is necessary but the opportunity in front of us feels murky. There may be good ideas and alternatives floating around, but consumers still have a hard time seeing them play out.
The following industries show us how Tension manifests in the market.
Automotive – After a very long period of deep Entrenchment where automakers focused on efficiency and dealerships wielded great political power to protect themselves against pressures to evolve, the category has entered the Tension phase. Automakers are experiencing friction between the long-standing tradition of fossil fuel-powered cars and electric vehicles, and Tesla has single handedly put the dealership model under existential threat, with brands like Rivian and Lucid following. Players know change is necessary given the escalating climate crisis, peoples’ increasing demand for frictionless online buying and customization, and loosening legal protections, but many car buyers are still hesitant due to concerns about infrastructure, battery range, and the upfront cost of EVs.
Fashion – The fashion industry is experiencing tension as it grapples with issues related to sustainability. There’s growing awareness of the environmental impact of fast fashion, including waste and pollution, but the industry’s reliance on quick, cheap production cycles and consumer demand for new trends creates resistance to change. Consumers, just like brands, say one thing but do another.
Agriculture – The agriculture industry is in a state of tension due to the growing awareness of the environmental and health impacts of traditional farming practices, especially with large-scale livestock farming and monoculture crop production. Meanwhile, new concepts like vertical farming, lab-grown meat, and plant-based proteins are emerging but have not yet reached widespread acceptance or viability.
How To Move From Tension To Exploration: If you find yourself in a culture of Tension, the best way to move that culture forward is to create a sense of clarity and opportunity. Show people what’s possible. Even better, show people what they could be capable of.
This is a time to inspire and allow people to see themselves in a new world. Give them something to dream about. Turn them into empowered optimists. Let them turn that tension into a sense of Exploration.
Bitcoin and the brands around it moved finance from Tension to Exploration by giving people a clear sense of the democratic opportunity ahead. In his recent Talks At Concept Bureau on How to Build A Brand Mythology, Peter Spear noted that Bitcoin represents a “Big Bang story for the origin of a totally different financial universe based on liberation and a totally mysterious technology code as a matter of fact.” In the context of brand mythologies, Bitcoin was doing something “cosmological”. The opportunity was palpable.
New healthcare brands like Hudson Health and Levels have reframed medicine as a holistic approach to personal growth, not merely illness. While traditional medicine has been a practice of helping people get back to a baseline, these new brands are about helping people get from a baseline to an ideal. They introduce new ways of relating to one’s body, and new perspectives through which to see medicine, doctors, and patient control that have turned growing tension into exploration.
Exploration
In the Exploration stage, society begins actively searching for solutions to the frictions that surfaced in the Tension stage. There’s a general openness towards new ideas, narratives, beliefs, and an eagerness to experiment with different solutions. This phase, however, is characterized by a certain degree of risk, as the culture navigates uncharted territories in an attempt to resolve the tension and align with new cultural ideals.
Brands that operate in cultures of Exploration can feel exciting but precarious. So much is possible but a pervading sense of uncertainty colors peoples’ views.
Finance – The financial industry is in the Exploration phase, and while crypto and decentralized finance have cooled for the time being, challenger banks, AI financial tools and robotic process automation (RPA) are all going strong and vying to be the new default mode of finance. Traditional banking methods are being questioned, and alternatives are being explored. While many are open to these new financial solutions, the path forward is unclear due to regulatory uncertainties and technological complexities.
Healthcare – The healthcare industry is in an Exploration stage with the rise of new screening technology, longevity healthcare, home testing, psychedelic treatment, novel mental health formats and telemedicine. A great deal of this exploration is coming from outside of the system, namely startups and tech companies that don’t fall under the coverage of health insurance. However, the sector is still navigating issues related to patient privacy, quality of care, technological requirements and inconsistent laws and regulations across jurisdictions.
Space – The space industry is in the exploration stage. With private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, the possibilities of commercial space travel, asteroid mining, and lunar habitation are being actively pursued. The industry is in a state of innovation and discovery, but the new norms for commercial space activity are still unclear and in the process of being established.
How To Move From Exploration To Transformation: For brands who find themselves in a culture of Exploration, the goal should be to usher their users into a culture of Transformation by creating certainty in the market.
In a high optimism, high risk environment like this, people need to be instilled with confidence to move forward.
I’ve written in the past that food and nutrition have become our new religions. That’s because the Exploration phase of food culture over the past few years has graduated into Transformation. Functional foods, new diet philosophies and new nutrition science created a vast array of brands that opened up our understanding of what it means to gather and eat. Our relationship to food has evolved, and we now see what we eat and drink as both therapeutic and political.
Highly prescriptive brands like Ezekiel Foods, Hü Chocolate, Vital Proteins and Whole Foods all pushed culture from Exploration to Transformation, and all of them gained massive brand equity and market share as a result.
What all of these brands did was focus on creating confidence in their categories. Each one created highly informed, highly opinionated consumers that became discerning in their purchases, not simply with information but with philosophies about what it meant to eat, whether it was a matter of health, morality or even status.
People were bolstered with a strong sense of confidence that allowed them to transform the category.
Transformation
In Transformation, our cultural exploration is beginning to yield early winners and losers. This period heralds a cultural shift where new ways of thinking and behaving are adopted and solidified into social norms. It’s a phase of significant change, often seen as a revolution in social principles.
The Transformation phase can take time and be distributed unevenly across a culture at first, but more than anything else, it is characterized by a sense of comfort in our new realities. There is no identity play, no murkiness, and no lack of confidence. The new normal makes sense.
Categories that have arrived at Transformation can be shaky at first, but they all signal our new shared values.
Media and Entertainment – The rise of streaming services, social media and user-generated content platforms have pushed this category fully into Transformation. Companies like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube have drastically changed the way people consume content, moving from scheduled programming to on-demand viewing. Distribution models have been upended, causing a significant shift in the overall industry’s structure.
Work and Career – We’re just entering the Transformation phase of this category, but our new shared values around work and career have begun to take root. The traditional career ladder is all but dead for most employees, the multi-hyphenate worker is the new standard, and remote work is still in a tug-of-war with legacy organizations but it’s clear that new companies will be much more amenable to the arrangement. Throw in the growing movements around the 4 Day Work Week, work-life balance and the fact that gen Z workers have leaned hard into freelance, and it’s clear that this category is undergoing transformation.
Food – Our new food norms are here. Flashy functional food brands that once only showed up in specialty coastal stores are now carried in every Walmart across the nation. National and international fast casual chains have begun to reflect our new diet philosophies, and even Starbucks has rolled out a line of olive oil based beverages that will resonate with anyone who has a certain understanding of dietary fats and the industrial food complex.
Transformation can be a long golden age for brands. Cultures in this phase can feel new for a very long period as people take time to settle into their new normal. It’s the reason why somewhere in the recesses of our minds we still feel Google is a startup or Netflix is a challenger brand. Neither is true anymore, but that mentality speaks to the power of transformation.
At the tail end of the Transformation phase, we move into a period of optimization where margins get competed away and everyone converges on a single modality of solutions. More and more depreciating returns lead to consolidation and oftentimes duopolies. This is where you see regulatory capture as companies work to close the door behind them. What was once a growing pie begins to move toward a zero sum game.
Meanwhile, the status quo becomes stronger until we return to the beginning of the culture cycle with…you guessed it, Entrenchment.
One important thing to remember throughout all of these phases is that ideas, not technology, impact culture the most. With AI advancements rattling nearly every industry, it’s easy to forget that technology can only express itself within the boundaries of the culture it’s born into.
Washing machines were supposed to liberate women from the home, but instead the culture of the time made them fire their housemaids and do the work themselves. Mass production of cars should have created the suburbs, but it didn’t. It wasn’t until the idea of the nuclear family was popularized that we saw the topography of cities change. Social media was supposed to bring us together, but within the culture of the time, it’s done the exact opposite. We’ll have to wait for an idea, not a technology, to deliver on that promise.
Know your culture. Understand both what it demands of your brand and what it denies it. Use these cycles to move your people forward with ideas and concepts that can improve the world we live in.
Very few brand leaders understand how to move the cultural landscape, but those that do have always had an incredible advantage.
Brand myths may seem like undecodable magic, but like Air Jordans and Barbie Dolls, what looks like an enigma on the surface is actually a formula underneath.
Brand myths perform 4 functions: the mystical, the cosmological, the sociological and the psychological. Each one of these functions creates context for understanding the world, and when done right, they create the world’s most significant names.
In this episode of Talks At Concept Bureau, ethnographer and brand thinker Peter Spear shows us how companies like Pinterest, Axe Body Spray and even Bitcoin all filled these functions, and were then able to take on mythical proportions as brands.
To get the inputs you need for brand mythology, Peter proposes Brand Listening – his extremely active and open form of qualitative research that anyone at any company can start doing right now.
It’s based on a few core principles, including the fact that we think in images, that people have experiences not answers, and that awkwardness is a beautiful way of opening people up.
This is a talk about both seeing and listening to your audience in a new way so that the mythology of your brand can do what myths are meant to do: give your people a sense of meaning and purpose.
Six years ago, I shared my 16 Rules of Brand Strategy, a list of tenets to build or test your company’s strategy. That article went viral and is still referenced today more than any of my other pieces. But consumers and culture have changed a great deal, so it’s time to write some new rules.
Consider the original 16 rules to be the cost of entry. They are now the baseline requirement for brand building. This new and revamped list is how you build on that foundation and level up to greatness.
You will quickly see that these rules are not only valuable for brands but can (and should) inform product, UX, sales, marketing, PR, HR and nearly every other business activity.
1. Don’t rebrand the product when you can rebrand the problem.
Rebranding the product puts you in a consideration set with other products, but rebranding the problem can put you in a consideration set of one.
EVRYMAN reframed the problem of therapy from “finding yourself” to “creating yourself” before they positioned their product. Cofertility rebranded the problem of fertility from “egg freezing and donation” to “touching human lives” in order to make their product newly relevant.
We recently helped a client in the debt relief industry rebrand the problem of owing money. Debt relief is a murky category with shady players, and while we understood the tremendous integrity that our particular client was built with, we knew it made no sense to say, “Hey, trust us! We’re the good guys!” (a very common mistake many brands make).
Instead, we dug deep in our psychographic research and saw something remarkable—when people go into debt, they become the debt.
Their entire identities are reduced to one dimension: They no longer identify with their hobbies, they stop going to family functions, stop volunteering, stop enjoying time with friends, stop taking pride in their work, stop planning their lives.
They lose what makes them human, and understanding this was the real brand opportunity.
The brand wasn’t about an honest debt relief company with good products, although that was very true, the brand was about re-dimensionalizing people. We reframed the problem of “debt” to the problem of “losing selfhood.” And that is the concept we built their entire strategy on.
Immediately, their rebranded ads, messaging and positioning saw a huge uptick, while the culture of the company evolved toward a singular vision that guided every decision toward a common goal.
Think clearly about what you’re branding, because sometimes there is something much bigger than just the product.
2. Real conversion happens emotionally, not logically.
People who have damage in the emotional centers of their brains are normal in every single area of their lives with one notable exception—they can’t make good decisions, and sometimes they can’t make decisions at all.
It turns out that decision making is driven by emotion, and logic is what we use after the fact to justify our actions. Risk assessment, emotional processing, memory, self-perception and social cognition are all bound together in our brains, and they are all part of a very complex, very emotional decision-making process. That means B2B is just as emotional as B2C. It means underneath every feature a user tells you matters to them lies an emotion they themselves perhaps don’t understand. It also means feature-led branding will always lose. You need to find out the emotional triggers that will truly convey your value to the user. Emotions, not features (or USP or benefits or measures of being “better” than your competitor) should be the basis of your brand. When people convert from the heart and not the head, they are more willing to pay for premium products, more willing to evangelize and more likely to remain loyal in the face of UX and product issues, delays and other challenges. Why would you give up that much goodwill by ignoring emotion?
3. Changing belief means changing identity.
Most brands have one giant challenge between them and success: changing people’s beliefs.
But the thing about belief is that it’s much more than ideas floating in our heads. Atomic Habits author James Clear famously documented how those who are most likely to stick to changed beliefs and behaviors are the people who first change their identities. Entrepreneur Seth Godin put it another way when he said, “People like us do things like this.” Belief and identity are so intertwined that changing our beliefs can feel like losing ourselves. It’s scary. We live in a culture that sees it as a sign of weakness—for example, consider the fact that instead of celebrating politicians who evolve their worldviews, we approach them with distrust and skepticism. But when we change our beliefs, we change our behaviors, and it’s oftentimes the most effective way to get people to understand the value of your brand. The best way to change people’s minds is to help them see themselves differently in the world. In order to change the beliefs that held people back from running, Tracksmith first had to create an identity around a new “running class” of people who do it for the personal ritual. It created room for a new kind of runner—someone who wasn’t winning races but still had permission to enthusiastically invest in their running practice.
Every category has a culture. Psychologist Michele Gelfand has found that cultures fall on a spectrum between tight and loose. Tight cultures like finance and sports are governed by strict norms, whereas loose cultures like parenting, food or psychedelics may have an overabundance of information but few steadfast rules everyone can agree on. Loose culture categories feel chaotic. What diet is the right one for me? Am I raising my kid right? What is the morality of doing illegal drugs for mental health? These categories don’t have a paradox of choice. They have an absence of norms. I’ve found exploring this theory offers a useful framework for brands. Every brand must assess the tightness or looseness of their culture. If there is a pervading sense of normlessness, then it is likely that your audience is looking for a specific perspective. Today’s most successful food brands bring a tight culture to loose places. Lesser Evil snacks, Ezekiel breads and Garden of Life supplements are brands built on tight culture. Ezekiel, for example, conjures the authority of biblical language to define what constitutes real, natural food. Is religious metaphor a cute vehicle for branding bread? Sure. Is it a genius device for bringing a strong set of norms that help consumers assess their bread choices amidst shelves of other options? Also very much yes. If there is a loose culture, there is an opportunity to set the rules of engagement for your space.
5. Love is great. Hate is useful. Indifference kills.
Most brands have the problem of user indifference. People may think you have a nice enough brand but that doesn’t compel them to convert. Don’t get mired in a quest to gently move indifferent people down the funnel. Your goal should be to create so much tension that your brand really turns on your lovers or really turns off your haters but leaves no room for indifference. Chasing indifferent users will run your company into the ground. Ideally you’d want to lean into the love side of the equation, but you can successfully lean into the other side, as well. Marmite’s “love it or hate it” messaging created a near-mythical story around it’s divisive flavor, but the truth of the matter is that people were generally indifferent until the company decided to rebrand around this polarizing idea.
Oatly created https://fckoatly.com/, an aggregated history of hate toward the brand that you either get and really love or don’t get and really hate. The one thing you can’t do is remain indifferent. Most founders see indifference as being on the path to love, but that’s a dangerous falsehood. Love and hate are on two ends of the same path, while indifference is a dead-end highway in another town. You will waste precious time and dollars that could have been spent learning about your true base and how to broaden your audience from there. You’d rather have lovers and haters than a world of bystanders.
6. Make people leave their biases at the door.
Be cognizant of the consumer biases in your category. People may think childcare is menial work, or that math skills are genetic, or that polyamory is shameful (all bases I have worked with for client brands), but it doesn’t matter if they’re true or not. What matters is if people carry those biases to your door. You can either let them enter with old biases that will make them blind to your USP, or you can signal a whole new set of rules that will make people enter with an open mind, ready to behave differently. I believe this will be one of the most important factors in defining the brands that win and the brands that lose in the next decade.
When Qualtrics rebranded their category from user data to experience management, they forced a new perspective on how data should be employed. Experience management meant seeing things more holistically across customers, employees and broader stakeholders and crafting an experience, not merely diagnosing problems. It precluded people from bringing old notions about data into this new environment, which was crucial to their 2019 acquisition for $8 billion, referred to as an “eye-watering” sum at the time.
7. Don’t hide the experience behind conversion.
I often meet companies that have great products and services but their brands do little to reveal the experience beneath. They may talk about features or benefits, but they don’t surface the feelings that underpin them.
However, without first understanding the experience, users are afraid of unknowns around how to engage and measure the benefit. Don’t make your user wait until conversion to understand what the experience truly is, because most of the time, they won’t get far enough to find out. Instead, give them a glimpse of how they will feel upfront. Allow them, in some small way, to experience your offering without having to first convert. Airbnb did this when their brand said, “Belong Anywhere”. That phrase offered a brief window into the experience of traveling by way of locals’ homes that, until then, had been locked far behind the door of conversion.
Find out what really happens on the other side of conversion, capture the way that your users change by way of your experience, and move it up front.
8. Don’t let value get misattributed.
When my team was building the brand for one of the world’s largest work platforms, we saw something very interesting happening in the user journey. The super users that got the most value out of the platform believed they had “hacked” it somehow. They believed that they themselves had figured out how to leverage the power of the platform in their business, without recognizing that the UX was actually designed to get them to that point. Once we saw it with this client, we began to see it with many others. If your user journey is really good at helping people extract value from your offering, it’s highly probable that people think it’s because they are smart, not because you are good. And that means less loyalty and brand equity. This is why storytelling around the user journey is so important. You need to take credit for all of the incremental value that is created well after conversion by demonstrating the thoughtful choices and guiding beliefs that led you to build that specific journey. Think of it as the digital version of craftsmanship. It’s an important narrative that helps people understand the value that you created for them.
9. Brand first, business second.
Brand is not the look of your website or the tone of your marketing voice. It is the organizing idea for every activity your company engages in, including product, UX, sales, communications, recruiting and even your org chart. People read brands between the lines. They understand your brand not by what you say but by what you do, and what you do counts in every single touchpoint, in every single channel. That’s the point of brand strategy—to orient every single business activity toward the same outcome. You should see your brand strategy as a filter for every decision. The Lego brand is about meaningful play for every age, but that brand isn’t borne of their website or marketing alone. You must take their positioning, product strategy, collabs, press, communities, business model and innovations altogether to understand their deeper brand. If you stopped at the website, you’d just think it was a toy company.
Patagonia’s brand is about drastic measures to save the earth, such as suing the US government and rebuffing the very VCs that turned the brand into a west coast status symbol. These were tactical decisions made through the lens of the brand.
Strong businesses have brand strategy at their core. You’d be hard pressed to find much daylight between business and brand for companies like Tesla, Apple or Meta. To make brand inferior to business is a mistake.
10. Strive for brand singularity.
Brand singularity is when the company brand, the CEO brand and the employer brand are all synonymous. It creates a powerful flywheel effect in which no matter who your brand reaches or how it reaches them, you can be certain it’s the same resounding message every time. Not many companies have accomplished this yet. It’s hard to maintain one brand, let alone three that echo each other. Amazon, despite seasonal blowback, has incredible synchronicity between its employer brand, customer brand and Jeff Bezos’ personal brand. They all stand for efficiency. You see it in all three places, from their customer manifesto and investments in delivery to the carefully-placed stories of Jeff’s two-pizza rule, upcycled boardroom tables and the story of a guy who found a way to sell books without having to store them anywhere. It attracts talent, consumer trust and investor money.
11. Treat community like the first layer of brand.
Our world of relationships is shifting from weak ties to strong ties—from wide networks mostly filled with strangers on platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram to narrow but deeper networks where we share intimate values and culture like Discord and Patreon.
In our research, we’ve found that people are coming to expect community to be the first layer of brand, especially in premium spaces where people are paying more in money, time or education in order to use the product or service. The community around Fly By Jing is what sells their premium-priced sauces and spice mixes. The company’s marketing, product and overall experience are solid, but it is the community that signals what this brand is really about. Chances are that if you asked someone about Fly By Jing, they would start by telling you about the brand’s enthusiastic community first. Where we once looked to experts, community now drives the level of trust needed to convert in costly spaces.
12. Solve 5 problems with 1 solution.
One of the best heuristics for a good brand strategy is if it solves multiple problems with a single solution. I personally like a ratio of 1 to 5.
Architectural Digest’s recent rebrand has turned the once stuffy media label into a newly relatable lifestyle hub that represents far more than architecture alone.
According to WANT, the branding agency behind the rebrand, Playbook for living was a new brand positioning idea that “captured in a powerful and simple way, the notion of AD as the definitive ‘dream’ book that could direct and guide the essential aspects of how architecture and design unite to create living spaces.”
This concept allowed AD to successfully make their brand relatable to a much larger audience without alienating their core base of conservative readers, moving from being a utility (an educational resource) to being a lifestyle (a resource for imagination and inspiration). It meant tapping into the emotional opportunities of rule #3—“changing belief means changing identity”—to make themselves relevant to the much larger conversations of life, style and identity. It also positioned the brand as a part of pop culture, which has resulted in natural and impactful collabs with celebrities and influencers and has helped form a strong community of like-minded people around the AD brand. They solved 5 problems with 1 solution, and this ratio is what makes a brand strategic. Having this high ratio means you are creating more equity with significantly less resources while keeping all of the company’s momentum focused on a single direction. It means you are leveraging specific brand choices today that will create a future market which favors your brand over others. You can’t deny that the AD brand has created a new design culture that today sidelines competitors like Dwell and Wallpaper. Planning (5 solutions for 5 problems) creates work. Strategy (1 solution for 5 problems) creates great advantage.
13. Optimism is the only secret weapon.
If strategy lives on a time horizon, brand strategists need to have a strong grasp of where the world is headed. Although it’s very easy to only see the negative outcomes that can happen on that horizon, any futurist or historian can tell you that it is the optimistic future that pushes us forward and usually wins out. Time and time again I have experienced how optimism is a brand strategist’s only secret weapon. When you can forecast the unexpected benefits of technologies, cultural movements, emerging beliefs and behaviors instead of only seeing the negative outcomes of so much change, you can plant your brand’s flag in the right territory. Pessimism is easy, but optimism is very hard, which is part of the reason Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb has dubbed it a status signifier of our modern era. It’s a skill that takes a tremendous amount of imagination and flexibility because it rarely comes naturally. You must cultivate it (and if you’re interested in doing that, I recommend Jane McGonigal’s book Imaginable). It is the optimists, not the pessimists, who make the future and who are able to stand out in the present.
14. Let the work change you.
Never judge your user, even if you see something in them that you don’t like or want to change. My ultimate test for knowing if my team and I or our clients are approaching the user with total empathy is to answer the question, “Has the work changed you?”
Have you looked at the user with enough of an open mind to let it change you as a person? Have you listened with enough presence to connect with a stranger or have a small piece of your worldview shifted?
You can’t experience that kind of change without first asking a certain kind of question. “Can you tell me a little bit about your work?” in a user interview will never get you transformative answers. “If you could have had a job for another life, what would it be? Who would you have been?” demands a degree of openness.
You will understand their deeper value systems, the lies they tell themselves, the struggles they conceal and the lenses through which they make decisions. All of these insights are a goldmine for not only branding, but for UX, UI, pricing, positioning and product.
Your goal with user research shouldn’t be to merely gather data but rather to make people feel seen. Without deep empathy, you are guaranteed to miss an important insight.
The reason why strategists love what they do is because it allows them to constantly evolve past their own limited beliefs. Working with a beauty brand made me excited about getting older. Branding a construction tech company made me proud of the American work ethic. Spending time with the fans of a plus size clothing brand made me grateful for parts of myself I once tried to erase.
In fact, “Let the work change you” is our company’s first value. It’s that important.
Ask yourself the last time the work changed how you related to a population you thought you had nothing in common with. If you’re not changing, you’re not really doing the work.
You don’t need to follow all of these rules to have a successful brand, but it’s crucial that you embody the general spirit of this list, which is to always be questioning and investigating the deeper reasons why people think, behave and believe the way that they do.
The greatest brand strategies have one thing in common: they understood their users. On a fundamental level, that’s what building a company is about, too. Understanding people is what leads to big and impactful ideas.
I believe the path to an incredible brand strategy already exists for every brand. Your job is to keep searching until you find it, and my hope is that this list acts as a wayfinder on your journey there.
We used to pass culture through objects. There was a time for many of us when a vinyl record, a luxury handbag or a Lisa Frank folder were relics that signaled “I am one of you.” They had singular meanings that everyone agreed upon, and appreciation of the object itself was at the center of the culture.
But today, there is perhaps no more effective way to signal “I am one of you” than with a carefully selected meme or perfectly ungrammatical text. A specific mashup, a certain combination of emoji or a self-referential aesthetic can convey multitudes more about a culture now than any physical item ever could.
When we stopped passing culture through objects and started passing culture through digital artifacts, we moved from low fidelity society to high fidelity society.
My cofounder, Jean-Louis Rawlence, coined the term high fidelity society to frame the moment our cultural signals shifted from wide knowledge to deep nuance.
The low fidelity society of just a few decades ago thrived on singularities and binaries. Households had split roles, careers had predetermined trajectories, perceptions of gender ran within clear lanes, lifestyles spread across a simple set of socioeconomic classes, political parties were mirrored images of one another and economics followed the rules of supply and demand.
The spheres of possibility were narrow. We shared the same core values because we all watched the same TV, read the same papers and subscribed to the same institutions.
Less information was the hallmark of a low fidelity society and what made it work. When a world is that small, it can only support a simple set of social rules. If a subculture didn’t fit our neat binaries and categories, it was omitted from the canon or filed down to fit into broader societal trends. It makes sense, then, that our cultural objects took little context to be understood.
But high fidelity society shifted things. Suddenly, with our worlds online and with the ability to capture and codify so much more information, culture ballooned and our digital objects became massively heavy with meaning.
As the sheer volume of culture in our digital worlds inflates every day, the centerpoint of history only gets closer. This phenomenon has rendered trends meaningless as markers of time and place and similarly snapped our connection to what might be called the highest tier of cultural objects: historical art.
We’ve officially cycled through every single decade… whats next? 🔎 Nostalgia has been one of the strongest driving forces for a long time, but now that we are already cycled through Y2K into the early 2010s, we are starting to wonder… what’s comes after nostalgia? Out newsletter dropping on Monday will deep dive into this and give you free stock photos + strategic tips to stay ahead of the curve 🌊 #culturetrend#nostalgia#nowstalgia
Younger collectors are proving to have no regard for the masters or the canon because, as professor Giana M. Eckhardt notes, “If you look back at human development, there were tens of thousands of years in which things didn’t change that much. Humans have not developed enough to be able to react to social change that is this quick. This leads to people putting a value on the new in different ways from the past.”
But I would take this insight a step further. What we’re really seeing is the weakness of physical objects as vessels of culture in our expanding high fidelity society.
When a culture changes its medium, the medium changes the culture. Keep in mind that high fidelity society is not merely about more choice. It is about exactness. Our new medium of passing along culture has allowed for an incredible new fidelity to be had in every way we choose to engage with the world. When we engage in new ways, we create new realities.
Nearly every singularity and binary – gender, family, identity, and so on – has crumbled. Lifestyles and socioeconomic tiers have at once exploded and collapsed into each other. Social rules have become complex (and if you don’t think so, you’re probably breaking them). Career paths are unrecognizable from where they were a decade ago, and a meme page like Litquidity can spin out into a VC, which it did.
If you’ve ever laughed at a “starter pack” meme, you’ve felt the gulf between low fidelity society and high fidelity society.
A Litquidity meme can nod to various cultural touchstones in one simple image. It might make a reference to HENRY culture, self-skewer bruised egos and the need for status regardless of the cost in money or self-respect and embrace the cognitive dissonance of new wealth at a time when the markets have failed to act the way they should, while still reveling in the basic bitchness of it all.
But most importantly, if you understand all of these layers together, you also feel the giddy, feverish camaraderie of those who practice the “farce of high finance”. And even if you don’t understand this meme, you still recognize that there is tremendous information density within it.
The physical objects of low fidelity society worked to homogenize our culture, but the digital artifacts of high fidelity society fragment culture into many pieces. And it is within those fragments that we can begin to see the future of business and branding.
Dating app Feeld operates in high fidelity society. They are part of a cohort of early brands that feel the pressure for a new digital infrastructure to house our high fidelity needs, and my team and I were fortunate enough to work with them to develop their brand strategy.
Feeld has created a platform for dating in all of the ways that low fidelity society could not hold. Polyamory, consensual non-monogamy, homo- and heteroflexibility, pansexuality, androgyny, aromanticism, voyeurism and kink are just a few of the sexual identities that high fidelity society not only holds, but makes increasingly visible. Much like the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis of language, the more ways we have of expressing ourselves, the more we will express ourselves in different ways.
All of these identities demand new forms of connection, and Feeld is creating a unique infrastructure that allows connections to evolve instead of conform. Every feature, whether it’s the typical swipe or the novel “desire” tag, is tested with the question, “Are we letting people create new forms of closeness and intimacy here, or are we forcing people to follow old models?”
One of the clearest insights in our research for Feeld was that people in the dating pool have begun to move away from a destiny mindset of marriage, the American dream or other low fidelity aspirations to a distinctly growth mindset.
Daters today expect relationships to help them grow as individuals, and for many, there is no end state or goal. Instead, dating is a continuous form of growth and opportunity to discover who they are. This user sentiment stands in stark contrast to the dating apps designed for low fidelity society that boasted of being “designed to be deleted”.
Most importantly, Feeld is not the fringes of culture. In our research, we found that heteronormative users, as well as people who had not yet experienced the platform, expressed the same desire for vivid connection, aliveness and a growth mindset. They simply had not found their avenues yet. Feeld is, in fact, all of us.
In a sea of dating apps racing to flatten the human experience, Feeld has opened a portal to something much larger. Dating in high fidelity society is multiplicative. It has become recursive, and that requires a very different kind of platform.
As New York Times reporter Gina Cherelus has astutely said, “To describe yourself as single and in search of a relationship is almost too simple of a label in 2023. The way we seek romantic connections, especially with the influence of social media and dating apps, has naturally altered our behaviors and language around dating.”
Feeld’s world of dating, sexuality and relationships embraces this ever-increasing complexity, in part by utilizing the layered meaning that characterizes high fidelity society.
In high fidelity society, a wellness influencer can at once signal their health practices and political leanings with leetspeak like “medical indu$try”. An aesthetic like corecore can at once signal a certain subculture’s age, nationality, disillusionment with technology and the larger context of absurdist content that gives people room to criticize something while also sheepishly embracing it. Feeld respects the fact that its users are already immersed in a highly contextual world.
Not many brands operate in high fidelity like Feeld does, but more and more are making the jump, and we’ve had the privilege of working with some of them at Concept Bureau.
Companies that are building for high fidelity understand that they are no longer building for the average or the standard. They are building platforms and communities that allow for a fragmenting of experience, giving users room to create net-new realities.
They know that as peoples’ communities and identities become more specific, our many different cultures will only become more narrow and deep. The mechanics of this new culture, then, naturally incentivize the compounding of meaning and with the proliferation of content creation tools (dare I say A.I.), the density of culture will only increase.
In our work, we have seen a growing appetite for high fidelity infrastructure in every single category. Whether it’s work, finance, health, luxury, education, parenting or anything else, people are already living high fidelity lives but are forced to express them on low fidelity platforms.
When we see that tension, we know there is latent demand for new infrastructure. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for brands to leapfrog a market full of low fidelity players by ushering people into a high fidelity experience.
But codifying high fidelity society is a difficult task for any founder. There is no precedent to fall back on, and as the world reorganizes itself, we have to be careful to not use old rulers for measuring new ideas.
There are two major paradigm shifts that can guide you in the right direction and have proven to be fundamental in moving our clients over the line from low fidelity society into high fidelity society.
They require a significant change in how we understand networks, but even more importantly, they begin to show us just how big of an opportunity lies ahead.
Shift #1: From Goalposts to Participation
Low fidelity society is organized around goalposts. Getting a college degree, house, promotion, marriage, kids and retirement are the obvious ones. But there are other goalposts everywhere around us, like being a LinkedIn super connector, being verified on Instagram, making the Forbes 30 under 30, backpacking through Europe, starting your first business or “finding yourself”.
You have or don’t have. You reach the goalposts or you don’t. Up until this point, we’ve been able to measure value in binaries because low fidelity society gave us clear definitions of what mattered.
But high fidelity society resists such clear definitions. What matters to one fragment of culture will not matter to another. What matters to hopepunks vs. nihilists, keto warriors vs. vegans, tiny homers vs. van lifers or anti-natalists vs. mommy tribes will all be different.
The desire to experience progress in one’s life never goes away, but how we measure that progress has become much more nuanced.
In high fidelity society, goalposts are replaced by participation. In a culture where there is no singular end goal, progress becomes invisible and our value is instead measured by how deeply we engage.
We realized that Feeld users across the board were not looking to reach the next goalpost. Their growth mindset resisted everything you might see in a traditional dating environment. Instead, Feeld users, and people in high fidelity society in general, pay attention to participation signals.
It is not how much you have accomplished, but instead how much you have engaged and evolved. Over and over again, people described coming to Feeld in order to feel vividly connected to their minds, bodies and relationships, and they looked to learn from others who had done the same. They sought to participate rather than reach an arbitrary relationship goalpost, because participation proves a genuine interest in growth.
Goalposts run out at some point. Business author Donald Miller has noted that after marriage and kids, life stops giving us scripts for how to matter in the world. Perhaps that’s why midlifers 50 years and older are Feeld’s fastest growing demographic on the app. Even up until then, you can likely sense that the goalposts of low fidelity society are becoming increasingly meaningless.
Polywork, a network for multi-hyphenate professionals, is another early example of a brand experimenting with new ways of measuring participation while de-emphasizing the traditional goalposts of their space. They’ve rethought what work and collaboration really mean in high fidelity society, and have built a creative model for revaluing participation between users. They understand that value systems are changing.
It’s vitally important to note, however, that participation needs to be a currency between people. Platforms have historically made participation a currency between the user and the brand, but that’s meaningless in high fidelity society. We’re exchanging weak ties for strong ties, and deep networks for wide networks (something I have talked about here and here).
Making participation between people something that is valued, measured and highly visible within the platform experience – without the expectation of reaching a goalpost – creates wholly new opportunities for high fidelity brands.
Shift #2: New Ways of Knowing
In high fidelity society, there is more than one way of knowing.
For the past year, my Concept Bureau colleague, Senior Strategist Zach Lamb, has been exploring the new ways of knowing that have emerged in religion, politics and lifestyle. According to Zach, we’ve bypassed the models and institutions that used to mediate higher knowledge for something more immediate and direct.
Knowing in high fidelity society is now firsthand. Self-directed ketamine startups aim to replace the therapist’s office. Mystical Instagram accounts have replaced church. TikTok has replaced school.
Call it spirituality, intuition or being tapped in – whether it’s knowing god, knowing the truth or knowing oneself, the very business of knowing has become a highly personal and emotionally-driven endeavor. We are exploring new, unfettered ways of knowing everywhere around us. And all of these new ways of knowing help us create new stories about who we are in the world.
As culture multiplies and fragments, new ways of knowing will also be the hallmark of brands in high fidelity society. In such a dimensional era of culture, we can no longer determine what we need to know by glancing at a list of LinkedIn recommendations, a work history or a bulleted resume. Nor can we glean what matters from a Tinder blurb, an Instagram profile pic, a list of interests, a badge, a milestone number, a label or a bio.
These rough, often misleading approximations of who people are have never fully worked, even in low fidelity society. And they will stop working entirely as culture becomes more exact.
If we are building for the fragmenting of experience and creating room for nuance and specificity – for people to connect deeper instead of networking wider – then our platforms need to create new ways of knowing that go far beyond anything we see today, because every low fidelity signal will fail in the high fidelity world.
Feeld has the same challenge. Creating new ways of knowing another person (or oneself, a relationship, a couple and so on) will be fundamental to their success. They, like every other high fidelity brand, will need to reconsider how people both express themselves and understand each other, oftentimes rethinking the very mediums through which people can connect.
For us as brand strategists, it also meant engineering a brand experience that leaned into the feelings and emotions of truly knowing oneself and others.
Every great brand sets the expectation of the experience before people cross the threshold of conversion. High fidelity companies need to be especially careful in setting the expectation of new ways of knowing, whatever that might be for a specific brand, because we can’t expect people to behave in high fidelity ways if we do not first make them leave their low fidelity biases at the door.
Your brand is the first stop in shaking people out of their old habits. Every current way of knowing – from bulleted stats to blurbs to recommendations to bios to photo carousels – needs to be rethought. None of these help us feel a person, and absolutely none of them are a strong foundation for greater participation between people.
Brands like Fieldtrip, How We Feel and allUP (a Concept Bureau client launching soon) have built innovative formats for new ways of knowing that historically weren’t available to their users. Each of them makes personal or interpersonal understanding the bedrock of their UX.
The new ways of knowing that will matter are those that help us weave a story about who we are in the world and how others’ stories intersect with our own. That is where high fidelity flourishes.
The Universal Reorg
I’ve found high fidelity/ low fidelity to be a great tool for both organizing the players in a landscape and understanding where behaviors are headed.
Brands that play in high fidelity society create a natural tension with low fidelity players. In branding, tension is a great tool for forcing a decision. Our new digital infrastructures will not just be incremental improvements. They will be invitations to either stand still or step into a new reality.
But more interestingly, as a strategist I have seen just how eager people are to start living in high fidelity society everywhere, although they may not have the words to articulate it. In a particularly moving interview, a Feeld user said that in high fidelity, “You feel like you are able and allowed to glow in every part of your life […] I feel like I can breathe”.
If I took that quote out of the dating space and put it in another space like work or finance or education or social media or fashion or beauty or wellness or anything else, it would still ring true. If you do good user research in your industry, you will eventually uncover this sentiment across your entire population, as well. The desire to live in high fidelity is universal across people and categories.
It is not technology that begets culture, it is culture that begets technology, and in every generation there is usually one major cultural shift that reorganizes all of the technology ahead of us. High fidelity society is an incredible opportunity to position your brand as a force for moving forward.
At the heart of every culturally impactful brand is a wager on what the next 5, 10 or 15 years will look like. Impactful brands make it their job to inch toward that vision in every single action they take.
Parsley Health is about functional medicine but if you experience the brand in any meaningful way, whether its logging into their patient portal, walking into a clinic, or following CEO Robin Berzin on social, you will see that they are betting on a very different kind of medical mentality emerging in the coming years among consumers.
Parsley believes patients will become the new experts: proficient in their own health and wellness, talking from an empowered point of view with their medical providers, and open to exploring complementary therapies that combine mind, body and soul.
Nearly all expressions of the Parsley brand are geared toward making this future a reality. Even though Parsley has great tech that makes the medical experience remarkably different from the usual visit to the doctor’s office, they rest their brand strategy on the changing user instead of their platform.
What Parsley gets right and so many others get wrong is that ideas, not technology, are what impact the future the most.
It was the romanticized notion of the nuclear family, not the mass production of cars, that changed America’s suburban topography. It is the changing notion of career and success, not the advent of laptops or post-Covid remote work, that will alter the world of work forever.
Oftentimes, future-forward brands tend to make technology the center of their strategies rather than a larger idea, but as Tom Vanderbilt puts it, “When technology changes people, it is often not in the ways one might expect.”
The washing machine had the potential to liberate housewives from the home, but instead it freed them up to do the work their housemaids once did. Though the technology changed, the idea behind a woman’s role had not.
Predicting the future is fundamental to your brand strategy but not as easy as it may seem. The correct signals often get lost in the noise of invention.
Taking a look at films from the 1960s that predicted the future, it becomes apparent just how easy technologies are to predict, but changes in behaviors and beliefs are much harder to forecast, even though they are the major drivers of a culture’s evolution.
“The Home of 1999”, a film from 1967 made by appliance manufacturer Philco-Ford predicted where technology would sit in our lives with surprising accuracy, but made glaring omissions in how culture would evolve.
The 1960s futurists behind this video predicted online shopping, but not female financial independence. They predicted emails, but not remote work. They predicted microwaves and other kitchen technology, but did not predict that fewer and fewer people would be eating around a dinner table together.
If this video feels strangely empty to you, it’s because while technology is an important part of the future, it simply is not the future itself.
Ideas, not technology or invention, are what change the future most, and that is what you should be betting on. Parsley has great tech, but it is the shifting cultural convention that will change their future, and every day they are speeding that change along.
The future isn’t new technology. The future is changed people. Your brand should be placing its bets on who we will become.
Starbucks built a brand on the prediction of a changing culture that was lacking places to gather, and the creation of the third space to fill that future need.
On the surface, it seems that perhaps they are pivoting their bet to the technology. Starbucks wants to attract more road warriors, they know that more of those people will have EVs, and so they’re creating a convenient place for them to stop while they charge.
True, yes. But what may be more true is that our third space is changing.
A great deal of Starbucks’ square footage is used for work, and in the era of remote workers, even more laptops and bookbags have popped up in locations across the globe.
Starbucks isn’t betting on EVs. They’re betting on our changing relationship to the commute and work. What they see is EVs eventually becoming autonomous self-driving vehicles, and that presents a huge opportunity for behavior change: the car as the third space, where people who are no longer required to have eyes on the road can instead work on their way to their destination.
Work has already become decoupled from the office and the desk. There is a changing mentality that “work time” and “living time” are not two separate halves of the day, but rather many fragmented windows that splice in between each other. When the belief about when and where we work changes, so does Starbucks’ place in the world.
It’s not a given, but like any good brand, Starbucks is making a prediction and then working to make that prediction a reality.
When a brand has a prediction at the center of its strategy, it sends a signal to the market that the company not only intends to own that future, but that any other brand playing outside of that future will be sidelined.
Last year Kia Motors rebranded to drop the “Motors” from their name and simply become Kia with the tagline “Movement that inspires.” Like General Motors and Mastercard who also released newly minimalist logos around that time, they were working to distance themselves from their original technologies.
With all of these companies, the future prediction at the center of the brand was moving from the technology to a larger idea. Kia President and CEO Ho Sung Song made it clear that, “It’s no longer about machines, it’s about people.”
Moving from motors to movement implies a strong belief of the future for Kia – that it’s not going to be about making a better engine, but rather about changing our beliefs and behaviors around how we move in this world.
The greatest benefit of a brand strategy based on a prediction is that it naturally spells out the business strategy. The expert patient, the third space, the future of movement – all of these predictions lay out strong parameters for the business itself.
They dictate business model, product roadmap, UX, values, org chart and so on, in ways that technologies alone cannot. And when brand strategy begets business strategy, there is a beautiful symmetry that only makes both parts stronger.
Making the right kind of forecast means thinking deeply about where people are headed and what emerging beliefs, behaviors, mentalities, value systems, ideals and cultural ideas can be brought to the surface with the right conditions.
Technology creates new opportunities and branches in the human path, but it is only larger ideas and mindsets that dictate which path is ultimately taken.
The focus of your prediction matters because the brands that predict the future are the brands that make the future. Everybody else is simply following the path laid out by others.
Brand strategy, at its core, is about predicting the future and then making that future a reality.
The outsized benefits of brand live 3, 5, sometimes even 10 years ahead. Brands that pull that future into the present day change users’ consideration sets and bend the will of the market toward their doorstep.
Strategists are futurists. There is no strategy without a prediction.
If you get those predictions right, you will get a brand strategy that amplifies the business strategy rather than trailing it.
There is one future signal that has an immediate impact on branding for nearly every company in the next few years and it can be found in a simple, unassuming chart about C-level job postings that was published in HBR this month.
In the study, researchers found a rapidly growing appetite for CEOs with strong social skills coupled with an equally declining appetite for operational expertise. In other words, companies want leaders who know how to leverage and navigate culture more than they want leaders who know how to direct financial resources and technical expertise — and the inverse relationship between these two needs has only gotten more dramatic in the last 7 years.
It makes sense that as companies have become more complex they need leadership with higher levels of interpersonal fluency, but something else is happening behind the executive curtain.
The trifecta of consumer brand, the CEO’s personal brand and the company’s employer brand are all becoming the same thing.
Company boards are increasingly searching for ‘blue unicorns’ — leaders with powerful social presence who, as Peter Aceto, former CEO of Tangerine once said, “would rather engage in a Twitter conversation with a single customer than see our company attempt to attract the attention of millions in a coveted Superbowl commercial.”
Blue unicorn CEOs are no longer figureheads for the company brand, but rather direct expressions of the brand itself.
Our perceptions of what makes a great leader have changed significantly in the last decade, due in part to lockdowns, unprecedented scandals of all kinds, and never-before-seen market dynamics. Today, we expect leaders to be highly self-aware, open and at times even vulnerable.
In fact, there is growing evidence that the number one predictor of someone’s success in today’s business climate isn’t IQ (intelligence quotient) or EQ (emotional quotient), but something called CQ: the quotient that measures “the capability to function effectively in a variety of cultural contexts.”
CEOs must first and foremost be stewards and navigators of culture. But there is perhaps an even larger brand benefit here.
Celebrity CEOs like Jay-Z, Martha Stewart, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Adam Neuman have created brands that make them impervious to angry boards and poor P&Ls, but also trained the public to demand a certain kind of enigma from its corporate leaders.
Enigma, charisma, whatever it is, we now expect a certain awe-inspiring magnetism from our CEOs, and this is increasingly the yardstick for measuring good leadership, instead of more historically important markers like strategic thinking and industry expertise.
Meanwhile, the public’s growing appetite for business news over the past few years has incented media to not only cover more business, but reduce its happenings into easy-to-follow storylines, which are bedazzled with drama, gossip and mystery.
The CEO has become a cultural bellwether.
And you can’t talk about culture without talking about the third piece of the branding trifecta: employer branding. Knowing how to build, navigate and bridge cultures is the biggest thing we see in employer branding today.
There is the obvious benefit of attracting high-level talent, but as my colleague Zach Lamb has pointed out, markets and consumers are paying attention to employer branding practices and cultures.
In our own research at Concept Bureau we’ve seen that in B2B sales a surprising number of clients will first vet a services partner by their Glassdoor reviews, believing that if that partner doesn’t treat their employees well they won’t treat their customers well, either.
As work memes take over our feeds and what happens inside a company continues to make the news, companies can’t afford to have an employer brand that is not completely synonymous with their overall brand.
In the near future we’ll be seeing Brand Singularity, where personal brand is company brand is employer brand, and the product is the story that emerges in the overlap of all three of these things.
Today’s typical brand addresses the trifecta with three different answers. Netflix’s consumer brand is closely tied to their content. CEO Reed Hasting’s personal brand is visionary at times, while lacking in more recent times. And their employer brand vacillates between ruthless and confused.
On the other hand, we have Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s female-focused media company that has produced hits like Big Little Lies and Little Fires Everywhere in the eight years since it launched. They have not reached brand singularity yet, but already they are making inroads toward it and seeing the benefit.
Their content portfolio is thin, but there is a singular, synonymous brand between Witherspoon’s persona and the consumer brand. She is Hello Sunshine, and Hello Sunshine is her. It’s an overlap that is so powerful that Witherspoon just sold the company for over $900M.
Hello Sunshine is no Netflix when it comes to market cap, but $900M for a fledgling studio in a contracting market is by all measures outsized when compared to the giants in the room.
In the next 5 years, we will see companies reaching Brand Singularity and reaping the early rewards of market share, fandom and talent retention. They will be the companies that have done the hard work of creating a unified brand front — not synchronicity like we have seen with branding in the past, but instead synonymity.
Right now we see only parts of the equation being written. Many companies master personal brand + consumer brand, such as Hello Sunshine, but also the ventures of the Kardashian-Jenner clan and MrBeast. Even with only half of the Brand Singularity equation figured out, these names are making big profits.
As David Friedberg recently said, the influence of these brands is outsized and defensible. They prove that when the CEO is a direct expression of the brand and vice versa, their value takes on exponential proportions.
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On the other side of the equation we see inroads being made with the overlap between employer brand and consumer brand.
Amazon may not be one of the most positive employer brands in their warehouses, but it is one of the most effective employer brands in the executive realm. If you pay attention to all of the messages in their press, good and bad, you will get a clear message about their operational excellence.
It’s no accident that stories about the empty chair in the meeting, the two pizza rule and three good decisions a day not only made their way into public consciousness, they served as signals of what the overall Amazon brand was about. Prospective talent, especially elite leaders, understand that even with rumored cutthroat practices, they would not be hindered by underperforming teams — a common concern among the many high quality leaders I have personally interviewed over the years, and a fact Amazon is banking on.
Amazon’s employer brand and internal culture is in reality a marketing vehicle for both attracting talent and buttressing the consumer brand. As Prime members, we read those stories with disdain, but somewhere in the back of our minds we know that’s likely why our packages miraculously arrive within 24 hours.
I recently wrote that the employer brands that consistently attract elite talent are the ones that lean on vision, not mission. Vision creates the kind of high-risk, high-reward messaging that great brands are built on. Many companies fall to their missions because they help keep the status quo internally, but it’s the vision that keeps a company’s workforce adaptable and responsible to the larger brand.
It’s been my experience that Brand Singularity, even if only partial, creates vast operational efficiencies.
Teams naturally move away from siloed practices that hold the company back as a whole. People in every single department find it easy to act as a brand owner in their own capacity (a CMO’s dream). Values, missions and visions stop being weaponized and start getting used properly. Positive internal cultures build faster and the circle around “who we are and what we do” becomes tighter.
Brand Singularity is just as much an operating principle as it is a branding one.
Having a single identity that captivates and motivates all audiences — customers, employees, prospective talent, board members and investors alike — is the inevitable outcome of a dynamic world where no one group is siloed and no one side of the business works in a vacuum.
Brand Singularity is incredibly hard to reach but will be a major competitive advantage for those that achieve it.
We’ll be seeing more and more brands moving toward this new state over the next 5 years, and it will require a conviction and dedication to brand that we perhaps haven’t seen much of yet. But once it starts popping up across the landscape, it will be the defining factor between brands that attract value from the market and those that chase it.
If your product is a community, or your community is beginning to become the product, you are already living in the future of Strong Ties.
And in this future we need new rules for brand strategy.
Weak ties historically allowed us to extract value from the peripheries of our networks (think LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter), while strong ties extract value from relationships at the center of our networks (think Patreon, Polywork, and the proliferation of like minded living communities).
This is a massive shift considering that weak ties have been the underpinning of social innovation for the last two decades, and are now declining while strong ties are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of our social fabric.
New social innovation means that any meaningful group will be forced to rearrange itself, whether it’s an online community, a movement, employee culture, subculture, club or cult following.
Strong tie communities tend to have the following characteristics:
They naturally incentivize going deeper with smaller circles of people, rather than going wider with larger circles of people.
They prioritize innovation in how people connect, not how many people they connect with.
They allow members to individualize themselves instead of forcing them to standardize themselves.
They give members true ownership, either through literal shares and coins, or by giving them the power to shape the group culture, norms and evolution.
When strong ties become the future of community, community becomes the new brand.
This is how to build that brand strategically.
1. If you break an old system, you must create a new one.
Occupy Wall Street, Anti-Vaxx and Anonymous were all communities based on opposing or tearing down old systems. None of them fulfilled their visions.
That’s because old systems leave vacuums in their absence. You cannot successfully remove an old system without replacing it with a new one.
This is why secular congregation communities like Sunday Assembly and Oasis that offered gatherings without god went nowhere, but fragmented spiritual groups like Nuns & Nones and spiritual leaders like Esther and Jerry Hicks or Gabby Bernstein that give safe haven and new systems of meaning to the post-religious, are thriving.
The first group broke an old system. The second group broke an old system and replaced it with a new one.
Many communities – from online groups to movements to even countries – exist in opposition to something else. Yet if the situation or the rhetoric changes, all value and credibility can be lost in an instant.
The once highly buzzed about r/antiwork community, whose tagline is “Unemployment for all, not just the rich”, works to tear down old systems but offers nothing new.
It’s no wonder that r/antiwork lost nearly all credibility when a short Fox News interview revealed just how directionless the community was in their vision for what would replace the current “work” system.
A mod from the subreddit r/antiwork on Fox News
As New York Times journalist Oliver Whang questions, “Hating your job is cool, but is it a labor movement?” It seems the answer is no, it is not.
Scholars increasingly point out that the problem with many community brands is that they demand “the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.”
The winners consistently create new systems to replace old ones.
2. Know why you gather.
If you don’t know the real reason why you gather, you will miss the few, brief opportunities that could take your brand to greatness.
In 2019, when kids’ drawings emerged from a detention facility in Texas where migrant children between the ages of 10 and 11 years old were being separated from their parents, the Smithsonian made the very interesting decision to try and acquire the artwork.
A drawing by a migrant child at the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas. NPR, July 9th, 2019
The Smithsonian, whose collection spans Apollo 11 pieces, Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, and the Hope Diamond, is a treasure trove of easy-to-love Americana. But over the years the museum has realized that their people don’t gather to marvel at American history. They gather to witness the humanity of America.
When the migrant children’s drawings emerged, it made sense for the Smithsonian to identify it as a collection of art to gather around. Without really knowing why they gathered, the opportunity would have been lost.
Why you gather has huge implications for how your community’s brand is perceived. Knowing why you gather is the same as knowing how your brand creates value.
It’s a crucial truth that many community brands fail to articulate, and even those that do often lose sight of it over time. Knowing why you gather keeps your brand centered.
It’s the only way to seize landscape opportunities that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
The Smithsonian said something when they pursued the artwork of migrant children at the center of a political firestorm and America’s reckoning with its own sense of humanity. And the people that will hopefully one day gather around those drawings will not only know why they are there, but feel where we have been as a country.
3. Embrace optimism.
Or perhaps more accurately, resist pessimism.
As Nat Friedman has said, “Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.” This is true in community branding as well. Pessimistic communities may attract attention, but it’s the optimistic ones that grow and prosper.
Most anti-capitalist groups go some distance on pessimism, but communities like FI/RE or Fat FI/RE run much further on optimism. The perceived merits of each community notwithstanding, it is clear that optimism mobilizes people toward a shared goal much faster.
Optimism is especially important when it comes to employer branding, both within the company culture and in attracting ideal talent.
In my own work and research I’ve seen that truly optimistic brands lean on their visions, not their missions, to rally people. That’s because the best talent moves to be inspired, and that only happens when you have a vivid vision of the future that only your community can create. Visions paint the future, and missions spell out the who-what-how of getting there.
In my interviews with high level talent for employer branding, we consistently see sought after talent be drawn to visions, not missions. This group of people wants to gather and grow around an optimistic ideal and know that in their short time to make a difference in the world (and just as importantly, in their careers) they will be aiming big enough to do something that matters.
Companies that lead with mission tend to focus more on making their audiences happy (missions usually speak to customers and can leave out employees entirely). Making a subgroup of people happy is not the same as changing the world.
Why are cults at an all time high around the world, especially in first world countries, despite education and socioeconomic background? Why do crypto, DAO and NFT communities refuse to die, despite countless news cycles calling the end of these movements?
Because there is a deep seated, stubborn optimism baked into the DNA of those communities and their brands that will not be destroyed.
Yes, even cults are driven by optimism, as cult expert Amanda Montell pointed out in my interview with her:
“The ultimate fatal flaw across all cult followers from folks who joined the Heaven’s Gate, the nineties suicide cult, to folks who strike up with multi-level marketing cults, in scare quotes, was yeah, not desperation, but optimism. This overabundance of idealism, that the solutions to their problems, whether that was racism or classism or for financial insecurity, could be found and if that they affiliated with this group, with this leader, they could be a part of that change. It takes someone really optimistic to sign up for a belief like that…
Optimism that was their Achilles heel more than any of the qualities that the cult documentaries you might watch would lead you to believe.”
Oftentimes that optimism is what carries a young community from near death to new life.
But take care that your optimism doesn’t border on emotional hijacking. Why did this Heineken commercial work so well, while all of those Dove Beauty ads eventually fell to criticism?
Heineken gave us a reason to be optimistic. Dove, and the body positivity community it inspired, however, “put the onus on people living in marginalized bodies to turn their criticism inward. This time, though, those people are told not to be ashamed of their physical selves, based on the premise that there was never anything wrong with them to begin with, as though the same companies that claim to be guiding this “movement” haven’t been selling insecurity for years”, according to journalist Amanda Mull.
Communities need optimism, not emotional hijacking. Don’t mine the trauma of your users for an emotional response, no matter how optimistic it may seem on the surface.
4. Surface your vibe.
Perhaps the most primal reason why people gather in communities is because of how it makes them feel, so it’s worth knowing what that feeling is and how you can surface it. Yes, we all want to feel like we ‘belong’ when it comes to community, but you have to go deeper if you want to create a memorable brand.
Vibes and feelings are user heuristics for what the community represents. In a complex world, vibes are an easy shorthand for knowing if a community makes sense or not.
Your vibe is the emotional read someone has on the brand. Lego has a nostalgic aesthetic. Nike has a distinct voice. Airbnb platforms belonging. All of these brands have communities but none of these qualities alone make a vibe.
A vibe makes someone sense something greater than what they see or read.
We’re Not Really Strangers angles everything toward its vibe. Its content, its products, its language, its aesthetic, its Instagram (and Finsta) create the feeling as if we are all waking up from a dream where we forgot how intertwined humanity is.
Quite literally, their content and brand touchpoints evoke feelings of sudden remembering, of recognizing someone you didn’t remember at first. It is a sweet returning to the human race. Yet what they sell is ice breaker card games and inspirational gear.
Vibes activate our System 1 thinking of intuition and knowing. You know a community and brand like We’re Not Really Strangers even before you understand it.
Vibes are tangential to brand relatability, a topic that my Concept Bureau colleague Rebecca Johnson has studied extensively:
“You have to find moments that tap into your audience’s subconscious. It’s about revealing something that exists at the edges of their identity […]
Relatable brands reflect their audiences’ identity in a way that goes beyond the product they’re selling. They reveal and validate hidden truths to which their audiences can connect and relate.”
Creating a vibe requires great intimacy and great vulnerability, two things which only make sense in the new era of strong ties.
5. Memorialize the good and the bad.
TITSOAK and lossporn are both memorials of the communities they come from.
If you are in either of these groups, you know that each term is a phrase of self-deprecation. TITSOAK is an absurd line that Twilight fans laugh at themselves for loving, and lossporn is the people of r/wallstreetbets memorializing the ridiculous losses and risks they endure in their larger quest to win over the system.
They demonstrate that it’s just as important to memorialize the bad stuff as it is to memorialize the good stuff. The good stuff is a great celebration of the community’s successes, but memorializing the bad stuff does something very different.
In relationship science, it’s been found that the way a couple remembers their fights and low points is a huge predictor of whether that relationship will succeed.
People who remember their arguments with anger or disdain tend to have poor outcomes, but couples who laugh about their disagreements and remember them as endearing and valuable moments of growth are far more likely to stay together. They effectively create a story around those moments. That story becomes part of their mythology.
This is no different in communities. Groups that can memorialize their failures with humor, gratitude and pride strengthen the bonds between their people.
The failures, the goofs, the slip ups, the embarrassments and losses – they’re all valuable moments to continue building your group’s mythology.
At Concept Bureau, my team laughs at how insular our own thinking can be, and how the same topics keep coming up over and over again no matter where the conversation starts.
So naturally we created an annual bingo card to memorialize our folly. Some of the boxes like “Bonkers” and “Minnesota” reference real slip ups or all-out disagreements.
Concept Bureau’s 2022 Bingo Card
We now wear that bingo card on sweaters, tote bags and mugs with appreciation for the group.
6. Strong ties or nothing.
Most of these community examples come from organic communities, but what about brands specifically? How do they employ the same levers for building thriving, meaningful community among their people?
There’s one golden rule that can’t be violated: a community brand’s job is to create strong ties.
Organic communities on reddit or Discord naturally do this, but very, very few brands do.
After decades of culture built on weak ties, strong ties can feel risky. It’s hard to break away from the comfort of a one-to-many approach that is so common with weak ties, where a brand acts as the central voice in a brand community.
The experience is not dissimilar to a fandom gathering around a stage. Something that has immediate payoff and can easily be measured.
Strong ties, however, work very differently. A brand must continuously find ways to deepen relationships not between the brand and the people, but between and among the people themselves.
Harley Davidson has been doing this for a long time through events, gatherings, activations and destinations that deepen and strengthen how every member connects with every other member.
The community has become the brand, and people (users and non-users alike) understand that what you are buying is much more than a bike, and much more than belonging. They are buying the promise of connection.
Other luxury carmakers work in much the same way. A Lamborghini executive once told me that what they sell is a community, and the car is simply the price of entry.
Harley Davidson and others like it work very hard to deepen the connection between each driver. Strong ties are what drive the community brand forward.
Some of these rules may feel more like business strategy than brand strategy, but a solid brand is the basis of any strong business. The two are becoming increasingly intertwined.
How far is the distance between business and brand for Tesla, Apple or Meta? What about Coinbase, ByteDance or Instacart? Squint your eyes and the business and brand begin to look the same. To separate them is a mistake.
And that is what I mean when I say community has become the new brand. As community becomes the prime offering for many companies, it is also the forefront of how their brand is perceived.
Your employee community, user community, category community—all of these groups are becoming stronger signals of brand than ever before.
Be deliberate in how they are built and perceived.
