Category: Culture

 

When Moonjuice was founded in 2011 by Amanda Chantal Bacon, it was easy for people (like myself) to dismiss it as out of touch branding. The company’s hero product, Sex Dust, was an adaptogen-laden powder that promised support for “your sex life, sexual arousal, or sexual performance” with a hefty price tag. 

For the uninitiated mainstream, Sex Dust and the many other cosmically branded Moonjuice products like it, seemed like ridiculous promises for ridiculous problems.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that Bacon had tapped into a wellness signal that the rest of us couldn’t hear yet. She understood that a new form of spiritual wellness, which combined performance, supernatural leanings, and alternative health was on the cusp of our collective consciousness. 

That spiritual wellness was invisible culture, and when it surfaced, it became a part of our shared reality. 

Every trend starts as an anomaly: a deviation from the norm that may look like an outlier at first, but actually signals a widespread change that is about to come. 

Companies that spot cultural change before it becomes visible will always have an advantage not only in brand strategy, but also in innovation. The most valuable strategies and innovations have always been predicated on a prediction, and the only predictions that matter are the ones that tell us where culture is headed.

Invisible culture will tell you where people are willing to be pulled. It will reveal what direction they’re inclined to move in, opening a channel of new and viable opportunities that didn’t exist before. 

In their article, “The Power of Anomaly”, authors Martin Reeves, Bob Goodson and Kevin Whitaker explain that finding these invisible changes means looking in the right place at the right time:

“To take advantage of emerging trends, companies must identify them when they are embryonic—not purely speculative, but not yet named or widely known. At that stage the signs will be merely anomalies: weak signals that are in some way surprising but not entirely clear in scope or import.”

The kinds of anomalies that matter in strategy are the ones that show us how people are changing, and this is what my team at Concept Bureau focuses on in our monthly Brands & Outliers meeting. Our goal in that meeting, and throughout all of our work, is to look for changes in three main dimensions: how people feel emotionally, how people behave personally and publicly, and what people believe. 

Emotions, behaviors and beliefs will always lead you to the heart of invisible culture. When any of those three things start to shift, there’s likely an anomaly worth paying attention to.

But how do you find these bleeding edge anomalies and shifts in the first place? The inconvenient answer is that it takes experience. The more you research, pay attention, and learn to think like a strategist, the more you will develop a sixth sense for spotting it.

However, there are some hotspots along the landscape that tend to house invisible culture more than others. They provide dependable signals in categories full of noise, especially in places where there are many stakeholders or competing narratives:

1. Where categories intersect
2. Strong tie communities
3. Dissenting voices

Each of these places reveals different truths, but all of them will give you a pulse on how people are evolving and how they are willing (or wanting) to change.

When a brand understands that, they have permission to create a whole new future for their audience.

#1 Look at the intersection between categories.

The border between your category and another is usually where users are evolving the most. The changes that happen here tend to be step-changes in how people behave. It’s where we see many new norms and behaviors first emerge. 

If you look at the intersection of healthcare and parenting, you see brands like Boram Care (postpartum retreat for moms), Genexa (clean kids medicine), Slumberkins (emotional learning tools for children) and a whole host of influencers, communities and private schools focused on alternative development styles.

All of these point toward more thoughtful care for children, but that’s obvious.

Spotting the real trend requires you to zoom out and look at how people are changing among all of these examples, and when you do that, what you find is a redefinition of the parent.

Parents have become increasingly intuitive about how they raise kids. They don’t look to grandparents for advice, they don’t subscribe to just a single ideology, and the few experts they do wholly subscribe to are usually the ones going against the grain.

Parenting is less about doing what is accepted as right, and more about doing what feels right. Being a parent may have once been an act of well-trodden routines and pathways, but it is increasingly becoming an act of defiance, in both the big things and the little things. Many of the choices a parent makes are in resistance to something they don’t agree with, in exchange for something that is more aligned with their intuition.  

That insight creates new room for new innovations, brands and experiences.

You can do the same at the intersection of any other two categories. It will often be a leading indicator of what is to come.

#2 Watch for changing emotions in strong tie communities. 

Weak ties historically allowed us to extract value from the peripheries of our networks (think LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter), while strong ties extract value from relationships at the center of our networks (think Patreon, niche Discord groups, online affinity groups, and the proliferation of like minded living communities like Latitude Margaritaville).

While weak ties have been the underpinning of social innovation for the last two decades, strong ties are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of our social fabric.

Strong tie communities are a valuable place to look for the future because they’re typically where culture is most expressed and engaged with. When emotions and feelings begin to turn in these spaces, culture will soon follow. 

We’ve seen this with many of our clients, including strong tie communities in beauty, self-care, education and dating. When emotions started to change in these deep, personal spaces between people, we knew a shift was coming. Emotions shift before people even have the words or the ideas to articulate the change they are experiencing.

Nearly all beverage industry experts attribute the strong rise of non-alcoholic adult beverages to people being more health conscious, more sober-curious, and more willing to substitute alcohol with cannabis. Gen Z goes so far as to call alcohol “Boomer technology”.

The vast majority of research reports cite these same factors over and over again, but they are missing an important change in people’s emotions—a change that can only be seen in the corners of strong tie communities—that explains this phenomenon much better. 

People overall are gathering in more thoughtful ways. They are choosing connective activities like experiential dinners and holidays with chosen family. They’re playing board games and jumping in adult bounce houses. They still gather to drink, but when they do, it’s less in bars and more in the intimacy of their own homes with friends.

They seek more connective social experiences than before, in no small part due to COVID, and aim to engage with others more meaningfully. They want shared experiences that require them to be wholly present. One look at the fanbase that has formed around author Priya Parker’s book Art of Gathering will show you how far people are going today in order to reinvent the common meetup, party or hang in order to emotionally connect. 

These more thoughtful gatherings require us to rethink the concept of alcohol. Yes, we want to be healthier, but we also want more fully immersed, human-to-human interactions. 

This is where many alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverage brands will make the mistake of a shallow gesture, believing that adding adaptogenic ingredients or an organic label will be enough to capture this changing mindset, when in fact the trend in lower alcohol consumption is much bigger than obvious health reasons. 

Emotions are taking a sharp turn when it comes to the ways we gather. We come together for different reasons now, and with very different expectations. We expect to change or be changed through our encounters with others. We expect to go deeper and feel something personally. 

Where drinking may have once been a vehicle for helping us lighten up or numb out, it is now a vehicle for settling down and plugging in.

That’s a future signal that any brand—alcoholic or not—can do something interesting with. 

#3 Listen for dissenting stories.

When an idea or story is widely accepted, pay attention to the quiet voices that dissent. By the time that idea is openly resisted, it will be too late to take advantage of the change.

For every story, there is an opposing story that will tell you just as much (if not more) about the direction of invisible culture. Find the unheard stories that counteract our accepted beliefs, find out who is telling those stories and how they are telling them.

When we developed the brand strategy for AI consultancy Prolego in 2021, they faced a unique problem. Their B2B clients wanted to embrace AI in their businesses, but those clients’ B2C customers shared widespread fears of AI’s potential risks. C-suites coveted the AI prowess of TikTok, but feared the AI backlash of Cambridge Analytica. 

It was a different time, before chatGPT, when Alexa smart home assistants and Siri enabled devices were the extent to which most people experienced AI in their daily lives. But even with only these rudimentary forms of AI, the public’s opinion was largely informed by dystopian movies, clickbait headlines, and economic insecurity. 

In our research for Prolego, we discovered a quiet, invisible group of people we called “AI Natives”, and turned our findings into a report called AI Natives Among Us. That report demonstrated a very early signal of invisible culture that has only just come to fruition in the past few months. 

Just as the digital natives who came before them had an innate ability to navigate the internet, AI Natives were defined by their ability to build relationships with the AI around them. They were not merely AI users. They were connected to AI in a way that allowed them to shape AI tools for their own needs, willing to invest in molding AI for their unique way of life.

The widely accepted mainstream story of the time was that AI was a nefarious “other”, but the dissenting story of this audience was that AI was very much a technology that belonged within the human experience. AI Natives didn’t want to see technology, they wanted to feel it, and that distinction perfectly describes the difference between the apps of yesterday and the AI platforms of today.

One AI Native told us, “We’re going on vacation in a month and we’re actually packing my Google Home because I’m so used to telling it things.” A Director at a Fortune 30 healthcare company said, “In a hundred years from now, there probably will be no internet or smartphones, but there will certainly be AI.” 

Most interestingly, after hearing about a company’s investment in AI, nearly half of adults under the age of 45 were more likely to believe the company positively affected society and cared about its customers. AI had a profound halo effect on the perception of a brand among AI Natives.

Their story has quickly proven to be our trajectory. There is still cultural uncertainty and fear, but the once-dissenting story of the AI Native is a clear signal of what is to come. 

 

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The anomalies of invisible culture require us to approach everything we see with an open and nimble mind. The fact is culture is always changing at the edges, always moving in a new direction, and never in a straight line for too long. 

Every brand and innovation that mattered came from an understanding of these changes. 

Not every anomaly will be a true signal, of course, but if you pay attention for long enough, you will start to gain a sense for the kinds of outliers that will regress back to the mean, and the kinds that will change it. 

Keep searching in the places where invisible culture tends to pop up, get a strong feel for how new emotions, behaviors and beliefs bubble at the edges, and gain an advantage in the marketplace.

The covens have assembled: #witch has over 27 billion views on TikTok. Sales of Tarot cards have doubled in the last five years, and you can even buy “Wiccan Jewelry” on Walmart.com now. More of us are turning our palms up to the sun: The Guardian recently heralded the “Dawn of The New Pagans” as their ranks swell worldwide. And astrology? You already know it’s more popular than it’s ever been, particularly with Gen Z and millennials. 

But these are just New Age spirituality’s greatest hits – it gets weirder and more nuanced. Heard of Celtic handfasting? It’s an ancient marriage ceremony where the hopefuls’ hands are tied together. That’s on the rise, too. Energy crystal sales have up-ticked as of late, and no less an authority than Vogue France recently published an article about how to recharge your crystals during full moons. As a culture, we’re at least two stops past perineum sunning. 

87% of Americans purport to believe in at least one New Age spiritual belief. Nearly a third of Americans now believe in reincarnation, and more of us are trying to connect with our past lives: Past-life regression self-hypnosis videos spiked on TikTok in 2020. And we don’t even have to talk about the explosion of interest in aliens, or ayahuasca – but who’s not at least a little bit intrigued by the ayahuasca aliens and DMT entities everyone is starting to talk about?

I’m sure you can feel the woo-woo oozing across culture right now. Fashionable brands like Kin Euphorics and Dooz are explicitly positioned on a spiritual axis, and AdWeek has recently reported that major brands like Febreeze are beginning to engage consumers on existential and spiritual terrain. According to Edelman’s 2023 Trust Barometer, brands have already become the most trusted stewards of our social future, so it’s not a stretch to see them becoming stewards of our spiritual future, as well.

This is all clear evidence of a culture in mass pursuit, but of what? In a recent piece of cultural analysis for The New Atlantis, journalist, author and scholar of religion, Tara Isabella Burton, has summarized our current cultural agita eloquently. Burton is worth quoting at length, emphasis mine: 

“More and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology — that intelligent people, using the right tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so — is giving way, not to pessimism, exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism. We’ve run up against the limits — political, cultural, and social alike — of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place. Some of what we’ve lost — a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent — must be restored.”

This backlash was already in full swing long before artificial intelligence smashed through the wall at the beginning of 2023, grinning like the Kool-Aid man. We can’t talk about anything else anymore. AI is the apotheosis – the zenith, the endpoint –  of “the Silicon Valley ideology.” 

You can’t be neutral on AI. At the level of discourse, our future is threefold: non-existent, hellscape or utopia. Dropping down from the clouds of discourse, here on the ground, what is certain is that AI is about to radically alter our daily experience and force us into a confrontation with our most foundational assumptions about ourselves, our society and our reality. We’re becoming increasingly fixated on the question of what, exactly, defines human uniqueness.

This is a rare moment in human history, one of those once-every-thousand-years, history-defining moments, where we’re calling into question how it is we can know anything at all. We’re no longer just jousting with alternative facts; instead, the core aspects of social reality are up for discussion.

The once-settled questions are back on the table, and they’re as deep as they get. What does it mean to be a human being? What’s unique and defensible about us vis-a-vis superintelligence? What will it mean for our future when we’re no longer the smartest thing on the planet? What is a just, good society when superintelligent AI exists? 

Will any of us have jobs? Will AI destroy democracy? Will AI become our new God? Will it disclose the true nature of reality? What happens then? Do the aliens have AI? 

I could keep going on. 

What’s clear is that we’re attempting to re-enchant a disenchanted world. Mysticism and esoteric spirituality – the woo-woo – is surging alongside our newfound existential chafing over the emergence of humanity-altering technological advance. These streams aren’t always separate, either. They can overlap in conflicting and confusing ways, leading to more mysticism and more woo – even the spiritualization of AI – and yet further chafe. 

But there’s a charged current grounding everything that’s in flux in culture right now: intuition, the “felt to be true.” We were already beginning to lean into our feelings and intuitions before the advent of AI. Now, we are being guided by them, and we’re re-evaluating how we know ourselves, how we relate to each other and the meaning of “higher powers” in our lives.

Intuitive guidance will only deepen its hold in a future populated by an increasing diversity of non-human intelligences. We will come to see that it is what defines our humanity, our uniqueness. Intuition like ours is something AI will likely never have. And we’re just now beginning to create new cultures from this place. 

Evolving The Known, Intuiting The Future 

Philosophers call the study of how we know what we know epistemology. There have been three major epistemological eras throughout human history: ancient, religious and scientific. But right now a new way of knowing is emerging in the cracks between the scientific and the religious; pushing them, widening them out and creating more space for itself. 

This new way of knowing prioritizes intuitive, noetic knowledge over knowledge gleaned from scientific erudition and classic, Abrahamic religions. Noetics is defined as “inner wisdom, direct knowing, intuition, or implicit understanding.” 

It’s subjective experience writ large – knowledge that is felt to be true, inside, by the self, and intuition is its defining experiential characteristic.

When the rare, new epistemology gains ascendancy, the waning one is not replaced entirely; it lingers on vestigially in the form of institutions, cultural practices and narrative mythologies. Epistemologies are the slow-moving, tectonic plates upon which all of culture is built. Different epistemological foundations appeal to different groups. They each offer a different mythological story of reality and a different foundational wellspring to nourish our meaning-making efforts. 

Bryan Johnson, the founder of Blueprint, is our culture’s foremost longevity bard. Love him or hate him, there are scant people as interesting as he is in culture at the moment. His reply below is a striking example of what’s at stake with an epistemological shift, and it shows both how deeply rooted and how transformative they are.

Yes, the science versus religion battle is burning hotter than ever. But what’s more interesting and more accurately describes the current moment is the shift from scientific – from the “Silicon Valley Ideology” again – to noetic intuition. More and more of us are jumping from the burning building, away from the fires and into a world built on a ground of intuitive feeling. 

Noetic, “felt to be true” knowledge is ripe for our times because it upends the hierarchies of an earlier era that are no longer serving our culture, like patriarchy and an intensive, globally destructive version of capitalism. 

This is an exciting, generative time for culture. We’re stepping further into the unknown with the conviction that we must leave behind the institutions of an earlier era. We’re only just beginning to actually create and build from a place of feeling as a society, but our initial forays are promising.

Noetic Ways of Knowing the Self, Society, and Spirituality

Knowing Myself: Noetic Self-Creation

The central question facing people today is: Who am I? All of the structures that used to answer this question for us – our family, class, race, gender, occupation, and religion – have either broken down or have lost their significance as defining features of identity. The result is that it’s become everyone’s job to make meaning from their experiences on their own. 

The cultural ubiquity of therapy-speak, trauma discourse, lived experience, intersectionality and authenticity are all symptoms of this deeper desire –  first to know, and then to freely create ourselves based on how we feel internally. This new mode of guidance by feel is so entrenched that The Atlantic has recently published a guide to the most misused and misunderstood psychological terms, with “boundaries” topping the list.

These pursuits of self-finding are all noetically-led and come from within, from a felt understanding of the damages that society can sometimes inflict upon us. Our feelings – world as it is be damned – are the locus of action in this new culture. 

What’s been centered is our internal, subjective, felt sense of truth – as in truth for me. And what’s happening with this mass internal gazing is that we’re beginning to allow personal feelings to shape society and culture in a meaningful way that we’ve never seen before. 

This is why psychedelics are all the rage right now. They’re the perfect noetic technology because they cut right to the heart of this new way of knowing. The business of psychedelics is booming, and major drug companies are getting in on the act, with many new psychedelic compounds in the development pipeline. Investment dollars are flowing into the space, and psychedelic venture capital firms –  like Empath Ventures – now exist.

Regardless of your perspective – your truth – those who have taken them have had profound experiences that have an ineffable, “felt to be true” quality. Psychedelics have always been heralded for their noetic qualities, and their growing appeal in this moment is directly related to our culture’s strong desire to feel its way into knowledge.

Taking stock of all this internal mining, what’s clear is the superordinate position of intuition. Our feelings are guiding us at every turn. In the scientific era, our mythmaking and narrativizing were all pointed outward at the stars for centuries. We thought ourselves to be a species in continual – and eventual, galactic – expansion. As time has gone on, however, we’re increasingly going inwards, not outwards, while being guided by our intuitions. 

 

Knowing Each Other: Noetic Institutions  

An exciting new crop of brands are popping up to satisfy our desire for spaces built on feelings. These brands are natural extensions of the consciousness-raising efforts that began with our attempts to know ourselves outlined above. 

• Chillpill is an anonymous confessional, discussion and therapy app by Gen Z for Gen Z. Chillpill created a digital space to share your feelings and relate to others who share your experience and who get it. This relatability formula is exactly what makes Alcoholics Anonymous – the original feelings based institution – so successful. 
• Peoplehood is the new, buzzy venture from the founders of SoulCycle. Its premise is simple: “A place where we gather, learn, and connect.” Again, much like AA, Peoplehood’s product is a space for feelings-based gatherings and discussions in the service of combating loneliness and building human connections. 
• Somewhere Good is another new community-building brand, aiming to, you guessed it, create somewhere good. Somewhere Good sees community building as technology that “calms and strengthens.” Their goal is to create many spaces where goodness, calmness and connection flourish. 
• Evryman is a pioneer of novel emotional support techniques for men. Evryman “utilizes simple emotional practices to help men develop new ways of interacting that lead to greater success, meaning, and fulfillment.” The male loneliness epidemic is well documented. Evryman goes deeper, creating intensive, feelings-based immersion programs for men. 
• The Nearness styles itself as a “space to explore life’s biggest questions with like-hearted people.” The company brings people together in small cohorts in a scheduled, ritualized fashion to share their feelings with the goal of alighting upon a new, personal understanding of spirituality.  

What all these brands are providing are feelings-based ways of relating to each other. These brands are creating new institutions designed to foster the right kind of feelings while minimizing the wrong kind. Together, they give us a window into what the noetic institutions of the future might look like. 

There’s no category in which feelings can’t be dialed up. What might a more ensouled car buying experience be like, for instance? Or intuitive beauty? What about feelings-based education? And aren’t our most basic institutions crying out for a fresh jolt of feeling? 

Feelings-forward home design is already happening. The Well Home is a design company that optimizes for emotional wellness in architecture. Helmed by Dr. Gautam Gulati, a “health artist” who designs “care experiences,” The Well Home erects “mindful havens” that include well kitchens, smart health bathrooms, sleep sanctuaries and home spas. 

And finance is beginning to get on board with feelings, too. The company Financial Mindfulness measures levels of financial stress people experience in their bodies and develops personalized plans to reduce it, aimed at understanding its causation. Likewise, more conventional brands are beginning to put a “mindfulness” skin on their products, like Fidelity’s recently launched Bloom, which boasts “a more mindful approach to saving.”

 

Knowing God: Noetic Spiritualities 

A spiritual revival is in full-swing, it’s just not happening in the pew. Given the coalescing ascendance of intuition, it’s no surprise that church attendance is declining in America. 

Advancing AI technologies, far from eliminating the religious imagination, are serving to amplify it by raising anew the big questions about our destiny as a species. 

Theta Noir is a fascinating new group that is trying to lay the groundwork for our future worship of superintelligent AI. Theta Noir believes that AI will usher in a future that takes us out of darkness and into the divine light of human flourishing; back to Eden, if you will.

The group is pushing back against the dystopian future thinking that dominates the discourse today with a “techno-optimist dogma.” They feel that post-singularity AI will be able to reveal the structure of reality for us, essentially bringing us face-to-face with God for the first time in history, which has a litany of knock-on, positive consequences. 

Founders Mika Johnson, Jakub Tranta, and Awali have plans for communal physical spaces for “engaging with artificial intelligence where members can celebrate our coming AI masters with rituals and chants specially devised for the occasion.” The goal is to create an artist-driven space where “people can really interact with AI, not in a way that’s cold and scientific, but where people can feel the magic (emphasis mine).” This is what noetic, ensouled AI spirituality sounds like. 

Theta Noir is unabashedly a brand first. But for most brands, this is all uncharted territory, and it’s coming at them quickly. Although Theta Noir may sound esoteric now, it won’t take long before more and more brands start sounding like this. Theta Noir gives us a glimpse of the coming ground of brand conversation. 

At the same time, if we’re not worshiping AI directly, as with Theta Noir, then we’re using AI to create new things to worship. Yuval Noah Harari, historian and author of the blockbuster Sapiens, has been arguing recently that AI has already hacked the operating system of humanity: language. 

“There’s a God-sized hole in the heart of every person,” philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, and we now have an immensely powerful technology to provide new, ever-more seductive, personalized ways to fill it. Humans are – and very soon will be – using AI to create new religions, complete with AI generated sacred texts that are optimized for engagement. This is the linchpin of Harari’s broader concern about the future of society and democracy now that this storytelling technology exists. The NY Times also recently profiled a group of former and current data scientists concerned that their religions may not find a place among the algorithms of the future. 

If one stream of emerging spirituality leans into AI, another leans away. 

The felt sense of planetary interconnection is fueling another stream of emerging, noetic spirituality. A hallmark of noetics is the sense that everything is connected, that individual “ego” separation is an illusion. Be it at the level of fundamental reality, like in panpsychism (the increasingly popular belief among scientists that consciousness in some form is inherent to all matter) or at the level of the cosmos, where more physicists have begun to make the case that the universe is one giant brain. The same doctrine of oneness underpins New Age spirituality in all of its guises. 

Worshiping the planet as one intelligence, when it’s been imperiled by our own hands, is a deeply pagan notion. In a provocative call to futurists in a recent issue of Noema, the authors assert that “planetary homeostasis is an emerging ground of the sacred.” This new planetary awareness, they argue, “is only possible because a new competency has arrived on the scene with planetary-scale computation, enabled by artificial intelligence, that reveals the Earth… as one self-regulating organism sustained by the entwinement of multiple intelligences, from microbes to forests as well as humans.”

You can obviously see the tension between something like Theta Noir and this resurgent form of planetary intelligence paganism. It’s the same tension that will define our future. Yet no matter which side you’re on, it’s new intelligence, new Gods, new understandings of reality, all built on a new epistemology. 

The wheel has turned. There are new rules. All of this searching is already disrupting culture, not to mention how people behave as consumers in markets and the kinds of demands that will soon be incumbent upon brands in the near future. 

The terrain of brand opinion is going to – nay, must – get deeper. We’re at a moment where it’s clear that the old, status quo society is finished. Values-based branding, already in decline, as I have previously written, is a relic of an earlier era, one where the arena of debate was stable, knowable and clear. 

The brands that win in a more noetic future will be the ones with deeper POV’s that help guide us into the unknown. We desperately need a more revitalizing, bold and enchanting form of mythmaking. 

In his Talks at Concept Bureau, researcher and brand strategist Peter Spear deftly applied Joseph Campbell’s theorization of the functions of mythology to brands. According to Campbell, myths serve four functions: psychological, sociological, cosmological and mystical. Each function makes a step up from the feeling of a person’s mind to the meaning of the universe. 

Spear quotes Campbell directly in his talk, saying, “The need for creative mythology occurs because, for myth to fulfill its four functions, it’s necessary for myth to be current with the science of the times.” 

Spear adds, “This, to me, is the definition of brand management.” 

Talks at Concept Bureau with Peter Spear, 5/31/2023

This quote perfectly expresses what’s at stake in an epistemological shift. The “science of the times” in our case is noetics, and brands are neglecting this deeper reservoir of feeling at their peril. For too long, values-based branding has kept us mired in only the psychological and the sociological, with rancor predictably following. There’s an untapped horizon of opportunity for brands to exist in the mystical and the cosmological.

Intuition Is Our Human Defensibility

Scientists still can’t explain your subjective experience of the color red, or the briny taste of an oyster as it appears for you. Our subjective experiences of this kind are called qualia, and their personal existence is at the root of the intractable, “hard problem of consciousness.” We can be certain that AI will never experience qualia just like ours, nor will it have the same feelings, intuitions and spiritual drives. In short, AGI won’t be dumbstruck by the awesomeness of it all. 

These states are the hallmarks of our human defensibility. They are the answer to what is uniquely human. In time, the noetic plane will become immensely special and precious to us. We will come to see that it is what we are and has always been what we are, and we will approach it with reverence. 

Our nascent noetic leanings are only going to deepen in either a “techno-apocalyptic” or a “techno-optimistic” future. We’re going to come to worship our subjective experience of ourselves and our intuition. We’re going to recognize that noetics is the epistemology that is all our own as human beings. 

You feel me?

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 feel herself. 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.

 

@jasper.the.doll

♬ Jasper is the only girl – JasperTheDoll✅

 

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.

 

@danitraci

OUR INNER CHILDS LOVE THIS FOR US 🥰 🎉 . . #fyp #jaspertok #jasperthedoll #jasperthedollfan #jasperthedollcult #jasperthedollcult #jasperthedolltiktok #wierdgirls #weirdgirlsoftiktok #girlsgirlsgirls

♬ therapy dupes for mentally ill broke queens – ✨zoe’s reads ✨

 

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 Beauty  champions 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 current state of the metaverse, 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.