When Ozempic was first becoming a household name last year, the public discourse around semaglutides took on a predictable pattern.
First there was concern about its safety, then skepticism of its effectiveness, and finally the conversation landed on the question of its morality. Was it immoral for obese people to “cheat” and use semaglutides to shed extra weight?
When every other practical concern was rebuffed, and even after offshoot brands like Zepbound were developed and released specifically for weight loss management instead of diabetes, the argument of morality only grew louder.
This is not an uncommon pattern for brands like Ozempic and their counterparts.
If you were paying attention you would have seen a similar pattern playing out in the public discourse around OpenAI, OnlyFans, Oatly, and smaller brands in emerging categories like female hormone replacement therapy, polyamory, end-of-life care, and baby formula.
One of the most interesting brand frontiers I see is companies tackling what I call “moral static”, and I recently wrote about it for Adweek.
We see moral static in categories where new technologies, inventions or ideas are forcing us to face our deeply held, sometimes deeply false, biases. When those biases are laid bare, we resort to an argument of morality.
Moral static isn’t genuine, nuanced moral discourse.
It’s the chaotic buzz of blunt moral objection with no real path to discussion or progress. When new ideas and innovations threaten peoples’ identities, they cling to one-size-fits-all moral arguments even when there is no logical argument left.
Instead of producing a clear conversation about how we can update our models of what is right and wrong, these categories produce static.
Food brands, which operate in a highly identity-driven category, see their fair share of moral static. Oatly faced initial pushback in its native Sweden with critics discounting their oat milk as nutritionally inferior to cow’s milk, and asserting the company’s sustainability promises were inflated.
Oatly easily dismissed or disproved those claims, but it wasn’t until dairy farmers and consumers pointed at Oatly’s slogan “Flush the milk” as attacking a Swedish way of life for both dairy farmers and consumers that Oatly’s narrative was finally complicated with moral static.
America’s own relationship with food is especially plagued by moral static.
Ten years ago, buzzy brands like Soylent and Huel were initially praised for their convenience and nutritional value, but eventually saw themselves in debates about the degradation of meal culture and America’s toxic relationship with food.
Today is no different. When the FDA opened public comments on how to officially define “natural foods”, consumers often invoked moral references to God, what God intended, or Mother Nature instead of more practical definitions that precluded additives or chemicals.
While discussions of morality and ethics are vitally important when culture is faced with any new technological frontier, moral static is different.
Kranzberg’s first law of technology says that ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’ People will always have biased reactions to new ideas, but today moral static is our lazy default. It’s the outrage in TikTok comments and Instagram clapback videos that only scares and confuses people, with no real intention of finding a new moral commons.
Morality is extremely difficult terrain for brands to navigate. Rather than doubling down on the moral question, it’s almost always better to deal with it through humor, irreverence or irony.
However for some brands, moral static is on the critical path to growth and the only way to go through it is to just go through it.
In cases like that, it’s important to remember that moral static places both the brand and the user at the center of a very difficult question: What is the right way to live?
That question can only be answered from the horizon of a new world, not the horizon of our old one, and the one thing brands do really well is build new worlds.
But there are rules to building a new world.
Brands have to be smart about how they support new moral beliefs, how they position themselves against common enemies, and the communities they nurture for their users.
In the business of strategy, you have to consume a lot of information. If you’re responsible for charting the course of a business or brand, then you’re responsible for understanding the world it lives within.
The most successful founders and investors are always the ones who are able to connect the dots before everyone else and cultivate high-conviction predictions of where the future is headed.
In large part, the success of a business is heavily informed by the information diets of its leaders.
In the English language, we think of ideas and information as food – “half-baked ideas,” “digesting information,” “food for thought” – so the metaphor of an “information diet” gives us a lot of intuitive jumping-off points to understand this world better.
When it comes to information, there’s little gap between what we consume and our perception of the world. When people talk about the world ending or techno-utopia, what they’re really telling you is what content they’ve been consuming and what corner of the algorithm they inhabit.
If physical diet is to blame for many of the physical health issues we face today, then our information diet should also be considered a contributor to our mental health issues. Research conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic found the news we seek and consume plays a powerful role in shaping our moods and can even contribute to conditions like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. And there is an increasingly broad consensus of studies pointing to the stronghold social media consumption can have on our overall well-being.
This brings us to the question I’ve been considering: what is the ideal information diet? And how can strategists in particular develop a well-balanced palette?
The first observation is that information diets are to strategists what food diets are to weightlifters. Our consumption behaviors are highly atypical and are designed with a very specific goal in mind.
So, this isn’t just a question of who you should follow. It’s about your relationship with the content you consume and cultivating a structured approach to the information you invest your time in.
The Nutrition Facts of Information
In food, each nutrient is linked to a concrete physiological system in the body. We can similarly interpret the nutrition facts of information by looking at the systems that regulate our emotions and perceptions – our hormones.
Of all the hormones in the body, there are five that seem most responsible for our conscious perception of the world. These are our “macronutrients” – dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, cortisol and adrenaline. (For simplicity I’m combining the effects of epinephrine and norepinephrine under adrenaline.)
Putting this into practice, here’s how we might better approach a more balanced information diet based on each of these hormones.
Understanding Our Diets
Laying out the information we consume this way starts to offer valuable insight.
We all generally have a good intuition of what “unhealthy” content looks like – attention-grabbing, sensational, intense – and we know all too well that too much of it can affect us negatively. What we don’t see as obviously is the harm from low-oxytocin content – think themes of distrust and discord or skepticism and conflict. This type of content is just as pervasive, but it affects us more subtly.
Unlike a spike in adrenaline or cortisol that is easy to observe, low-oxytocin content gradually adjusts our expectations of the kind of world we live in. Given enough engagement, it changes how we view our neighborhoods and our neighbors. It encourages us to be disconnected skeptics.
Sticking with low-oxytocin content also puts us at risk of missing the diverse nutrients from other types of information. The sort of valuable insights that make for successful strategists and leaders are not found where there is skepticism and conflict but where connection and trust are forming. The best insights come from finding what people are running towards, not away from. Those places show us where opportunities can be found.
People talk about how everyone is running away from alcohol, but more importantly, they’re running towards more meaningful gatherings and connections.
People talk about how everyone is running away from buying houses, but more importantly, they’re running towards a more present-focused mindset around goals, spending and experiences. A lot of people are choosing to be “forever-renters” not because they can’t afford a home but as an intentional response to an increasingly uncertain future.
In both cases, there’s far more noise in the negative story but far more value in understanding the positive one.
Focusing your diet on “healthy” information won’t just improve your mental state, it’ll expose you to much higher signal-to-noise content. Content that actually represents reality and progress, not just perceptions of doom and gloom.
When people are inciting fear, dread, or pessimism, they’re often looking to extract value from us. When people are optimistic and actively connected, it’s usually a constructive environment that is far more likely to add value. This is why it’s the optimists who make the money at the end of the day.
If you want to make this framework actionable, go through your typical information sources for 10 minutes and simply observe what hormones the content is designed to trigger. Remove the bottom 20-30% of content sources or creators from your channels, then make a list of the top five creators or sources of high-quality, healthy content. From now on, make a point to start any information consumption with one of those five.
The Food Groups of Information
Information nutrition is only one part of the picture. The genres of content we consume matter just as much, if not more. All information serves a function, so making sure the information we consume is serving us instead of using us is crucial.
So, how should we think about the types of information we consume? At the risk of significantly over-using this metaphor, the food pyramid offers us a helpful framework to structure our thinking.
We can break all information into five distinct functions: to inform, to entertain, to teach, to inspire or to connect. Broadly, this encompasses the full extent of the information landscape.
The information ‘food pyramid’:
For most of us, social media constitutes the majority of time spent consuming information, and depending on how you’ve trained your algorithm, you’ll get your own custom blend of these ingredients (likely with a heavy emphasis on entertainment). The one thing that social media does not provide us with, ironically, is meaningful connection.
Social media doesn’t let us actually absorb the information we consume. We’re blasted with low-context content and given no time to reflect on what we’ve just consumed before the next video starts to play. Functionally, it’s the same as junk food – we absorb the message straight into our psyche without vetting it, contextualizing it or reflecting on what we just consumed.
I recently watched a TikTok summarizing an article that was summarizing a documentary that was summarizing a trial. While there was some insight in there, it’s worth pausing and asking if this information is strategically valuable to me or if it is just interesting. Am I actually educating myself or just entertaining myself? Is this rare information or insight that will help me cultivate a deeper, valuable understanding or is it actually “junk food” for my brain? I didn’t get the chance to ask myself these questions in the moment, I just scrolled to the next video – and therein lies the truth.
What we ought to do instead is chew our food. Take the time to process the information, ideas and concepts on our screens. Would we be better served to consume less but process it more? I think so.
You might think a healthy information diet – especially one for a business leader or strategist – would have information at the bottom of the pyramid, but you’d be missing a crucial insight. Connection is how we process information.
When there’s a big event in the media, it’s our collective discussion of it that makes it make sense to us. If you want to really understand a category, you need to talk to the people in it – it’s only then that the truth will reveal itself.
Musician Brian Eno coined the term “scenius” to describe the collective intelligence of a whole community. Often, the geniuses we look back on in history were one part of a whole collective of people, it’s just that history is better at remembering names than groups. This cannot be emphasized enough: we’ve forgotten what made our heroes so great, which was the collective.
The point here is that, as a society, we seem to dramatically undervalue the importance of human connection as a way of understanding the world, much less centering it in our information diets.
As a strategist, if you want rare insight, you need to have access to rare perspectives and those come from people, not publications or posts on social media.
In business, a heuristic I’ve found to be very consistent is that you can measure the quality of a business’s leadership by how deeply they understand the people they serve and how much intuition they’ve built up from direct engagement with their audience. In the book Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara talks about the all-too-common problem in organizations where the leadership has all of the authority but none of the insight and their staff have all of the insight but none of the authority.
The short of it is that when we think about information diets we might fixate on the quantity of information but ignore the quality and the processing of it. That’s like only looking at calories to determine if a diet is healthy. We need to have a higher-fidelity picture of the information we consume – our entire perception of reality relies upon it.
If you want to build deep insights, you need to cultivate deep sources. If you want to have original thoughts, you need to spend time thinking. It sounds obvious, but many of us fail to make time for anything other than just consuming content when we’re trying to get our information fill.
This thinking about developing an information diet was the driving inspiration behind building Exposure Therapy, Concept Bureau’s private community for strategic minds. Launching this community was an experiment to develop our own scenius and build a culture of connection around the information we consume.
Connecting with more than 60 other strategists, executives and founders from around the world – each tapped into unique facets of culture and the market – has created an incredible forum to go deeper and expand my radar of insights. It’s also been a fantastic opportunity to speak directly with a breadth of experts I would have never otherwise had the opportunity to connect with, from top-ranked pokers to conflict negotiators and financial therapists.
To become a genius, you have to build your scenius.
While launching or joining a community like Exposure Therapy is one example of an actionable application of this framework, you can also start small. Take 30 minutes every day to journal on an idea and explore its repercussions or deeper considerations. Then, go share those reflections with someone. If you don’t have someone to have that conversation with, spend 30 minutes instead reaching out to people who might be interested. This is the real practice of “digesting” our information.
Dieting Your Information
An idea I’ve been contemplating a lot recently is the virtue of ignorance. We know that being ignorant of everything is bad, but the opposite is true, too. To be hyper-aware of everything is terrible for our mental health, unnecessary and also impossible. So, it’s safe to admit to ourselves that some level of ignorance is good for our information diets. The question is: how much?
The law of diminishing returns is a helpful guide here. For every hour I educate myself on a given topic I’m learning fewer new things. During the first hour I spend understanding game theory or Bronze Age history I’m exposed to tons of new ideas, but during the 10th or 100th hour I’m learning far less. Thinking this way, there are two types of knowledge: the breadth of our awareness and the depth of our awareness within each topic.
The challenge as a strategist or leader is that you never truly know where valuable insights come from. Our tangents, side quests or personal passions often lead to the most influential ideas.
When you look at our most influential leaders, they all have one thing in common: a “T-shaped” knowledge graph. They’re in the top few percentile in terms of depth of knowledge in a certain field, but they also have a much broader awareness of things in the world than most.
If the value of insights is proportional to their rarity then being in the top 5% of depth in a specific field and the top 5% in breadth of awareness means you’re maximizing your surface area of valuable insights.
For most, our information diets are closer to resembling a square – we know an average amount of things about an average number of topics. We’re closer to 50% in the breadth and depth of what we consume. The danger in this information diet is that we’ll never see what others don’t because we’re simply not looking in places that others aren’t.
Building a T-shaped knowledge graph means aggressively diversifying your information sources, spreading out wider to seemingly unrelated areas and capturing the advantage of being at the beginning of the diminishing returns curve where you’re constantly exposed to new ideas. It also means being selectively ignorant about certain things. You have to critically evaluate what you consume and choose to place novelty over familiarity. In the few areas you don’t want to be ignorant about, go all the way in by reading lesser-known books, talking to the experts and cultivating your own original thinking through reflections and conversations.
This is what curiosity looks like – making yourself at home in novelty and constantly seeking new connections. Yes, it comes at the tradeoff of depth in other areas, but the leverage gained by not going too deep in depreciating returns means the amount of extra exposure you get is well worth the cost.
The ability to recontextualize old ideas in new ways is the magic of coupling diversity and depth in an information diet. Think of Steve Jobs and how his interest in calligraphy went on to be deeply influential in the philosophy of Apple, a perfect example of how taking mental models and learnings from seemingly unrelated disciplines can unlock new insights. After all, that is pretty much the definition of innovation.
Putting It Into Practice
Building a high-performance information diet requires more effort than your physical diet. It means being mindful of how the information you consume affects you, focusing on connection and reflection over just consumption and prioritizing the diversity and rarity of where your insights come from. Do this and you’ll gain a whole new vantage point on the world.
While I’ve provided you with some actionable steps to begin developing your unique diet, I’ll leave you with one last appeal to find a community that can help you identify and meet your nutritional needs. Make a deliberate practice of connecting with individuals and building collective wisdom. After all, food is best enjoyed in good company.
University of Chicago Philosophy Professor, @agnescollard, on X on 2/18/2024
It doesn’t matter if you believe them. The narrative has the power to shape reality, and major brands are beginning to take notice and to worry. In this Jim Beam ad, the proverbial Sweet Caroline is being belted out in a now-fleetingly-rare moment of brotherly love. Jim Beam is imploring us to get on down to the bar, commune with our brethren and have a bourbon while we’re at it. Imagine receiving this message from a brand ten years ago. You can’t.
Jim Beam’s “People Are Good For You,” 2023
This is the social situation AI is galloping into right now. Our fragile, introverted society is about to be given the Godlike power of world creation. Current AI technology allows us to generate anything we want, personalized and on-demand: newscasts, games, porn, friends, romantic partners, video, the dead – entire worlds.
Soon we’ll be consuming it all, ensconced in the safety of our Vision Pros. Some are already arguing that Open AI’s Sora proves we’re living in a simulation. Whether we’re in base reality or not, we’re all about to become simulators, lording courtly over our personal kingdoms. Your tamagotchi was a tchotchke of simpler times: just the start.
You now have a profound, consequential choice to make: Where will you call home? You can choose the real world, with its highs, and, increasingly, its lows, or you can choose an immersive, AI-powered world of your own creation.
What’s this all going to mean for you? For brands? For society? For our sacred institutions?
In order to reconcile these realities, we have to center the emotional experience they each provide. What does it feel like to live in a society that’s coming apart? What does it feel like to live in a digitally simulated world of your own making? How does each world satisfy (or not) our core human needs for belonging, safety and self-actualization?
The Downsides of Reality Fit – Hand in Glove – With the Upsides of AI
What’s largely missing from both the “AI will radically alter society” discourse (positive or negative) and the “what happened to society” discourse is any attempt at reconciliation. AI is entering our society – this one – and that matters. It’s not coming to us in a vacuum.
Two worlds walk into a bar because “people are good” for you:
It’s not difficult to see which of these is preferable. What’s striking is just how much the emotional experience of AI abets the existing real world trends of isolation, inversion, risk-aversion and societal exit. The popularity of AI worlds is poised to explode.
In 2021, Scientific American reported a finding that went criminally under-discussed: our definitions of personal space have dramatically expanded in both physical and in virtual spaces. We now claim a whopping 4.1 feet of personal space around our bodies, on average, which is up from 2.6 feet before the pandemic.
Similarly, drive through traffic at fast food restaurants is booming, the New York Times reports, such that many chains are considering closing the dining room all together. If you go to a given fast food restaurant in any city in America today, you’re likely to find people dining in their car.
What’s emerged is a new cultural attitude towards risk. Sociologists call this the culture of fear. The shell we’re placing around ourselves has gotten bigger, literally. New research has shown that Gen Z is the most risk-averse generation in history.
Teens are growing up anxious and depressed because their phones have become the medium of their reality. They don’t hang out, have sex, drive, drink or learn about themselves and each other through a healthy flirtation with risk.
The cultural analyst Freya India has recently written an excellent piece on how risk-aversion and the culture of fear affects romance. She convincingly argues that “the most dangerous life is one that demands nothing of you.”
“It’s tragic, all of this. Tragic because it’s putting us on a trajectory to miss out on what’s actually meaningful. There’s no love without vulnerability. There’s no life without fear. And you will no doubt derail romance if you are too risk-averse … We blunt romance and passion with this constant calculation of risk, this paranoid scanning for threats, and by holding back to avoid being hurt. We encourage each other to be emotionally absent, unfazed, uncaring. We even call it empowerment! It’s not. It’s neuroticism. I think we are a generation absolutely terrified of getting hurt and doing all we can to avoid it.”
Our real world culture of risk-aversion is about to collide with the most powerful, emotionally seductive technology the world has ever known. Many are already opting out of reality. These same people will likely choose to inhabit digital worlds that eliminate risk. An AI partner, for instance, will never disappoint you or hurt you. You are totally and completely safe. Replika, the foremost AI companion brand, promises users that their AI is “always on your side.”
In contrast, life in the real world is incredibly challenging. It’s hurtful. It breaks your heart. You can’t design it or control it. You take your lumps and you learn. You get exposed to challenging situations and challenging people. To difference. To risk.
The ability to customize, conjure and control our experience with AI is an incredible power. Throughout human history we’ve been at the mercy of God, never Gods ourselves. Spending time in self-created worlds and designed relationships is a peak experience of personal agency that does not exist in the emotional reality of day-to-day life.
“The Future is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed”
We primarily spend our time in three areas: with our partners, with our families and with our entertainments. How might things play out in these three core areas? What can we know now? What will it feel like for those early citizens of AI worlds?
AI Partnerships
Imagine: It’s 2030 and a friend of yours is in a loving and emotionally fulfilling relationship with an AI. Your friend has designed their partner to completely satisfy their physical and emotional requirements. They spend time together in VR every night, and your friend wears a headset in their apartment. Your friend routinely generates high-fidelity video dates for the two of them. When they have sex, your friend uses sex-technology that is synced with the video they generated – whatever they want in the moment. Your friend’s mirror neurons do not know the difference. At the level of brain chemistry, your friend is experiencing reality.
Technology is advancing rapidly and soon this will be much easier and more common. Sora and Apple Vision Pro will enable us to generate very realistic scenes with our AI companions and to consume them in augmented reality. “Sextech” for simulated romance is already a 37 billion dollar industry and growing. Take a look at what Replika – just one company – is working on:
Early returns are overwhelmingly positive, proving that human beings are capable of developing intense emotional bonds with artificial companions. Below is the response of Replika users after the Italian government cracked down on the company over personal data sharing, changing the way Replikas interact with humans:
Right now men are the primary consumers of AI partners, and this is likely to hold in the near future, but there are signs that women are getting in on the act, too. Women in China say AI boyfriends are better at talking to them than real men.
For now, though, let’s talk about men. Young people have always been the earliest adopters of technology. So, if you think about the dating life course, let’s call it 14 through 74, it’s reasonable to expect that teenage boys and men will dip in and out of AI relationships over the course of their lives. And it’s likely that teenage boys will start with AI partners. Again, AI’s are always available and “always on your side.”
Will this help involuntarily celebate men become less hateful? Will this turn more men into unmarriable men? Will this hurt women in real life? What does an AI experience of complete and total emotional acquiescence mean for real world relationships? I’m not here to pass judgment (there are plenty of good pieces where you can find that), merely to assert that a new world is emerging with new norms we’ve yet to figure out.
AI and Family Life
Imagine: Your son has daily interactions with an AI that is a mentor, friend, therapist and tutor – all at once. This AI is your son’s go to “person” for any need he has. The AI is trained on all of the world’s knowledge of positive psychology, and it models emotional control for your son in their interactions. You no longer need to assist him with homework. That’s now his AI’s job. At first you were skeptical about this relationship, but since he began talking with his companion, you notice a newfound maturity, and he’s starting to thrive at school.
Our Concept Bureau Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Jean-Louis Rawlence strongly believes that in ten years, one of the three most important relationships in a child’s life will be with an AI. We do not have a model for what this relationship is in our current society. What do you call a mentor, tutor, therapist and friend? What is that, actually? What are its boundaries? What’s healthy and unhealthy about a relationship like this?
Children will naturally develop strong emotional attachments to their AI helpers. Early experience with AIs who are operating in this capacity will quickly normalize this type of relationship, likely within a generation, paving the way for still more AI-human romantic relationships in the teenage and adult years.
Fascinatingly, these AIs will share our children’s experiences. As children grow and maintain these relationships over the span of years, a repertoire of shared experience develops between the two, which will make these relationships incredibly difficult – nay, down right painful – to cast off. Life has a habit of always recommending a person be in your corner, after all.
When these children grow up and start dating each other in the real world, their long-time AI companions will likely come into their relationships with them in some capacity. Two will become four, and managing this tension will be a new relationship imperative.
The extent parents allow children to engage with AIs is a choice families will face in the near future, and there will be social pressure. Sociologist Allison Pugh has shown, in her book Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture, that parents readily go into debt to buy consumer goods and electronics for their children because they function as social passports, tickets of entry into peer groups. So what will you do when all of your child’s friends have these companions, and they ask you for one, too? Not to mention the very real fear that not having one of these helpers may put your child at risk of falling behind others in the classroom.
Another choice families will face is how much they will continue to share the same reality in the home. When watching videos of Apple’s new Vision Pro in action, you quickly realize that it represents world choice. Imagine your partner is all about it, and they create a personal virtual layer in your home. They pin relevant windows, tasks and applications in space all over your home. They start spending more time with a headset on. In order to keep up, you have to do the same. This is a choice, again: What world are we, as a family, primarily going to live in? Will you make the same choice as your children?
With a longer horizon, it gets even more interesting. Researchers at NYU successfully trained a multimodal AI system through the eyes and ears of a single child, using headcam video recordings from when the child was six months through their second birthday.
This leap enables AI systems to learn, grow and develop alongside a child, trained on every facet of their lived experience. Effectively, by doing this on a larger scale, we’d be cloning ourselves as AIs. There is no material difference between you and an AI that has been trained on your lived experience of reality. Whoa.
AI and Entertainment
Imagine, as web video producer and podcaster Marques Brownlee posed on X: “A theoretical VR headset that could fully trick all of your senses with perfect fidelity… You put the headset on and see the highest resolution perfect visual of the expansive Grand Canyon or some beautiful natural wonder in front of you
If you could see perfect visuals and hear the birds chirping and feel the wind on your face and smell the grass feel the warm sun on the back of your neck and every sense is fully covered to the point where your brain is basically tricked into believing you’re ACTUALLY looking at the Grand Canyon…
When you take the headset off… would you still want to go to the Grand Canyon?”
Survivors of near-death experiences report that when “beyond,” they observe no distinction between their inner and outer reality because they can change their surrounding environment just by thinking about it.
This is an intentional metaphor on my part. Our newfound ability is miraculous. If you can think it, you can now create it. In the near future, we will all be able to generate personal versions of reality with just our thoughts.
The floodgates of world creation have opened. As I referenced above, current technology enables us to generate newscasts on the topics we want with AI newscasters, gaming worlds for ourselves and others, video content of literally anything, high-fidelity facsimiles of our deceased loved ones, personal pornography, many-to-many AI bot simulations and helpful relationships of all varieties
Right now these experiences mostly exist in 2D, but soon they will take the leap into 3D, consumable in augmented reality headsets powered by spatial computing, making them much, much realer. We will become both Gods and experiencers, creators who walk among their creations.
What’s so seductive about it all is that it gives us the ability to make our fantasies reality by bending the world to our will. Anywhere on the planet you want to “go,” you can. Any experience you’ve daydreamed about having, it’s yours. Any Comic-Con-esque world you’d rather be living in, the real estate is free.
The knock-on implications of this are almost too vast to comprehend. They will disrupt nearly every industry in the long run. Prolific filmmaker Tyler Perry was so freaked out by Sora that he canceled his 800 million dollar plans to expand his Atlanta production studio.
It’s not just Hollywood, any real world form of entertainment is about to face existential competition: travel, live music, sporting events, you name it. Digital inhabitants are going to find digital solutions that enable them to sidestep the real-world challenges these forms of entertainment present.
The scale of “society” is shrinking again. We’ve gone from all of us, to some of us, and now, to me. We’re on the precipice of a true multiverse within the multiverse.
Branding Between Worlds
What’s a brand to do? When we’re caught between worlds, the opportunity for brands is to help us feel comfortable in either one; to move us from the liminal space to a more full and unabashed inhabitance on either side.
Our many-worlds future hasn’t fully arrived yet, but the good news for brands is that we can already anticipate the consumer needs that will emerge, or become more salient, in the future. On the side of old-fashioned reality, that means helping people get more out of life and to experience reality more richly, and on the digital side, that means reducing shame and lowering barriers to entry.
Sure, we all like to dunk on the zoomers who “invent” the classics when they put their phones down – the “silent walking” TikTok trend from last year is the probably the greatest offender – but taken seriously, these inventions betray real desire for a less mediated experience of reality.
Value-added connection will require brands to get deeper, and there’s an exciting emotional roadmap emerging: awe. Awe is on the cutting edge of emotion research today. Experiencing it has been shown to have tremendous benefits for overall wellbeing and happiness, but most of us live in an awe desert.
Awe used to be a daily occurrence. Humanity spent most of its history literally, awestruck by the awesome forces of nature. Just imagine going about your day 60,000 years ago and experiencing a spontaneous total solar eclipse without warning. You’d tremble in fear and bow in reverence. The roots of humanity’s religious impulse most likely arise from a wellspring of awe.
As I’ve previously observed, there is already a loud desire in our culture to experience more awe and wonder in daily life, to re-enchant a disenchanted world. This unmet need is only going to become more glaring as we move further into digital worlds.
For Keltner, there are reliable ways we can bring more awe into our lives. He recommends the obvious things like mindfulness, slowing down, paying attention and truly noticing the world around you, which is of course the foundation of many spiritual traditions. Keltner himself goes on routine “awe walks” for this purpose. Sublimity and danger is another obvious one, which means overcoming challenges and being in the presence of forces greater than yourself.
This is all clear terrain for outdoor brands, but what’s most revelatory about Keltner’s research is that our greatest and most reliable source of awe comes from observing the “moral beauty” of others. When we witness the simple goodness of others – not even the heroism of others – we feel awe. We become happier and more likely to pass on goodness ourselves.
For too long, culture has elevated what David Brooks calls “resume virtues” over “eulogy virtues.” Resume virtues are those most suited to success in markets, like our work ethic, professional achievements and our intellect, but these are not the things mentioned in our eulogies. Virtues such as humility, empathy and compassion are what we get remembered for.
Keltner’s research on awe shows that it’s time for the eulogy virtues to take center stage, which is exciting because what brand can’t surface the goodness of their users? Every brand is capable of making us feel good about each other, something we’ll sorely need in a fractured, many-worlds future.
Take Us to Extremes
As the cost-benefit analysis of engaging in real life changes, as our posture towards reality shifts from default to opt-in, what is reality’s new “job to be done”? What will people want out of their rarified forays into collectivity?
Reality remains unparalleled in its ability to push us to the edge of our experiential possibilities, and consumers will reward the brands that give them permission to go there. This is a sharp pivot away from the saccharine, share-worthy experiences of an earlier era that optimized for photo quality at the expense of actual emotional enjoyment.
The middle – the dreaded zone of neutrality – has always been a danger zone for brands, and we can expect the pressure to ratchet up. Expected, normal and typical are all positions that are poised to become increasingly risky for brands to inhabit in the near future.
It’s likely that consumers don’t want to leave reality. It’s just that reality is letting us down, not having kept pace with the internal changes we’ve all been undergoing in the wake of a pandemic that left an indelible mark on our collective psyche.
Take Fude Experience, for example. Fude is a gathering of strangers in the nude for dinner and conversation. Fude describes itself as a “liberating space that celebrates our most pure selves through soul-nourishing food, art, nudity, and self-love.”
Experiences like these are clearly touching a nerve right now. If rubbing elbows – literally – while dining naked isn’t your thing, rest assured because an exciting crop of startups are popping up to build new social infrastructure to combat our ballooning feelings of alienation.
According to French polymath and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we all feel a vague sense of lack in our being, and we don’t know where it came from. We spend our entire lives trying to fill it, though for Lacan, we can never succeed. Try as we might, our relationship with lack is asymptotic. We can only approach it but never truly fill it.
This nagging feeling of lack is what many brands are in the business of today, whether they realize it or not, and the brands of tomorrow will be increasingly called upon to address it.
The time is now for brands to get weird, to take chances and be anything but neutral. The winning brands of tomorrow will be the ones that recognize our growing desire to live in extremist.
This reflects a collective consciousness raising of just how taken in we’ve become by our phone-based existence. It isn’t a new idea but knowledge of the problem is now much broader.
We’re living in what’s been called “dopamine culture,” most recently by the cultural critic Ted Gioia. For Gioia, the business model of tech platforms is addiction. In the past, gambling, alcohol and cigarettes were our primary addictive businesses, and they were easily sequestered and regulated. Now, addiction as a business model comes in many forms, mostly dressed up in banal clothing.
The problem will only become more pernicious as we move from phones to the more enticing worlds on offer with spatial computing and AI. Consumers will increasingly be looking for slowness, silence, boredom, deliberateness and greater intentionality in their lives as a countervailing energy.
This presents an opportunity for brands to build more ritual into their brand experiences. Rituals provide space for pauses to punctuate our daily rhythms. Pauses create necessary distance to let experience in and help you be in the moment. We already are struggling to stay “grounded” today, and rituals help us do that.
An example of a brand that’s built around ritual is Lapse, which styles itself as the “anti-Instagram.” The point of Lapse is to share photos with only your closest friends. The app functions like a point and shoot camera, but, critically, you can’t see your photos until several hours later after they have “developed.”
By putting friction into the user experience of social media, Lapse is standing out. But any brand is capable of leveraging friction and ritual in their user experience. Your future users will thank you for any gift of pausing you give them.
Give Us Permission to Have Positive Visions of the Future
Have you noticed the lack of optimistic visions for our social future lately? It’s true. Concept Bureau Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jasmine Bina writes that brands are “stuck in an eternal now.” Brands most often talk to the individual, not the collective, and they are oriented towards the present, not the future. They speak to your present, rarely our future.
In polite conversation these days, if you advance a positive vision for the future you’re likely to have your sanity and/or your intelligence questioned. This is a natural result of the negativity economy that ordains in the media and social media.
It’s much easier to find negative takes on human relationships with AIs than it is to find positive ones; at best, the broader culture seems to be ambivalent about it.
Still, AI prognosticators are largely criticized. At SXSW 2024 the crowd booed a sizzle reel of people promising a beautiful AI future. While the rancor is there, and for good reason, the bottom line is that we don’t ultimately know what will happen. The future is always different from what we think it will be.
There are many people who think the future will be incredible and are ready to live in that world right now, breaking from the reality others call home. The techno-optimists among us will badly need new narratives and brands have an opportunity to furnish them, changing culture. We will surely look to brands to help us feel like the early adopters some of us badly want to be.
Who is going to do this but brands? The government is certainly not going to solve this problem, nor will citizens on their own. Edelman’s trust barometer has shown, year after year, that an increasing number of Americans view business as responsible for solving our social problems. Brands have to heed this call and tighten a loose culture. The future, so uncertain, needs to be defined.
The best brands will solve the emerging many worlds tensions and give us permission to be the people we long to be. They will see our unmet needs and advocate for them, conditioning the rest of the market in the process. Those among us who will choose to be initial explorers of AI worlds, relationships and friendships will need permission.
Everyone Will Need to Come Home
Picture the universe expanding – galactic centers of heat, light and gravity that are constantly spreading out, leaving vast empty spaces between them. As we think about what it means to be caught between worlds, this is what it’s like: clustering with vast emptiness in between. It’s now vitally important for everyone to find their strong-tie community, their galactic center of gravity. Above all, this is the job to be done in the next era of branding: helping us come home to each other. Everyone will need to feel comfortable with the fellow citizens of their chosen world. Our most cherished values lurk beneath the surface of our world choice. World choice is, at bottom, the loudest possible assertion of what we find meaningful in life.
We’ll need help moving more fully into whatever world we want to live in. And we’ll need help figuring out the norms and rules of these worlds, managing the friction that naturally occurs between them. Brands must do this for us.
Our rules are built for a shared world that no longer exists. This has been a eulogy for that world. But like any good eulogy, it should not leave you despairing.
What is your deepest, most interesting secret? You don’t have to tell me, but maybe you’ve told ChatGPT about it or confided in Pi AI. Or perhaps you’ve sought advice on meal choices or entertainment options or asked for brunch outfit suggestions (🙋🏽♀️) from another AI offering. It’s not about what you asked or shared; what truly matters is the leap of faith you took. By interacting with AI, you embraced something recently unfamiliar to the masses, integrating it seamlessly into your everyday existence for tasks both trivial and transformative – and therein lies the user experience shift.
AI is not just reshaping brands; it’s redrawing the map of how consumers interact with brands and the world entirely. This revolution is ushering in a new era of user-brand interaction, where AI’s capabilities enable people to craft unique experiences and expectations from the brands they engage with. The evidence is clear, from Forbes highlighting AI’s multi-faceted impact on future consumer behavior to the New York Times discussing the dawn of personalized AI agents. This transition encompasses more than just technological advancements; it signifies a fundamental shift in user behavior and, subsequently, the trajectory of user research.
As brands navigate this new territory, the traditional methodologies of user research and insights gathering simply won’t work anymore. It’s no longer enough to predict user behavior; brands must now, more than ever, adapt to the fluid expectations of their audience by focusing on underlying consumer emotions and worldviews. The dynamic nature of AI-driven consumer interactions demands a fresh approach to understanding and engaging with the market and your audience.
These new rules for user insights aren’t just guidelines; they’re essential for moving your brand forward, given how AI is already conditioning users.
1. No more conclusions.
In the traditional model of user research, the objective often culminates in a definitive conclusion about user behavior, preferences, or trends. But AI’s ability to offer personalized experiences at scale means that consumer preferences and needs are no longer static; they evolve in real time based on new data inputs and interactions. The dynamic nature of AI encourages users to seek new information and experiences with that information continuously. In an era defined by AI-driven dynamism, the journey matters more than the destination.
This fluidity demands user research that prioritizes ongoing exploration. What is most important to understand is if the emotional bedrock underlying these wants and needs is also shifting or if it is remaining static.
Evidence of this change can be seen in how brands like Netflix and Amazon use AI to continuously adapt their recommendations, encouraging users to explore new content rather than settling on a fixed set of preferences. This approach enhances user engagement and provides these companies with a wealth of data on evolving consumer tastes and behaviors. Exploration allows for a deeper understanding of the emotions and motivations driving consumer behavior beyond mere surface-level desires. Looking at the patterns in user exploration over singular conclusions unearths more resonant user insights.
2. Intuition is a stronger signal than reason.
In TikTok videos and on other social media platforms, users are sharing how AI tools have helped them make choices more confidently and swiftly. What we’re seeing here is a broader trend towards valuing intuitive responses, which can provide deeper insights into user preferences and decision-making processes.
When people use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, they receive fast, condensed answers, allowing them to quickly hone in on the information they need in a highly iterative way. This teaches users to make rapid decisions based on brief hits of information rather than needing the time to source and synthesize their own findings.
AI is training the user to ask questions quickly and directly and then move on. It’s a very different process that will ultimately hone users’ gut or intuitive thinking. This is a huge shift that changes everything we know about formulating research questions and a resonant overall brand strategy.
Brands must adapt their research methodologies to capture gut reactions, employing interviews, surveys and other research vehicles that capture instinctual responses over reasoned ones. That means asking questions that are both clear and specific but also open-ended enough to allow for personalization. This approach not only aligns with the changing user behavior but also offers a more direct window into less filtered preferences and biases of your audience.
TikToker @the.rachel.woods discussing how AI can help people make better decisions.
3. Embrace the raw, unfiltered essence of your user.
In an era where AI technologies foster personalization at an unprecedented scale, the capacity to understand and celebrate users’ real, multifaceted natures becomes critical. AI won’t judge or make demands of who they want the user to be, so why should your brand? Too often, when working with brands at Concept Bureau, we find a common user worldview that brands need to speak to, but for one reason or another, this does not line up with how brands view their users. User research must allow for the multitudes we all contain.
The more users interact with AI, the more they are conditioned to expect relationships with no judgments or expectations put on them. I know people who have confided in AI about relationships, parenting, mental health challenges and career progression, sometimes using AI to help launch conversations in their real life that have made a positive difference. In each of these scenarios, AI was an adaptive, nonjudgmental conversation partner to help work out all of the kinks. This sets a new standard for how brands should approach their audience and user research: with openness, flexibility and a genuine appreciation for individuality.
Applying this principle requires a departure from traditional marketing strategies that often segment consumers into broad, static categories or personas. Tools like user personas can be helpful when building brands and new products, but they can also box you in when the market and, ultimately, people are more dynamic than a persona allows. Time and time again in user research, I see brands and leadership that do not allow their users to change or be who they really are, which are two things I can guarantee your user will do.
Ryanair is one brand that illustrates the value of recognizing and immersing itself in the reality of its users. Their clear vision of their patrons — who place primary regard on budget-friendly cheap air travel — guides the company to tailor its public engagement. In one TikTok post, a Ryanair customer talks about how Ryanair is so cheap and doesn’t care about other parts of the travel experience so much so that they will probably make a meme out of this video of him complaining — and they do.
Ryanair memes a video on TikTok of their user discussing how Ryanair is cheap and does not care about customer service
Ryanair’s ability to lean into and celebrate the position that its riders are, above all, in search of cheap pricing has translated into the brand capitalizing on this often funny dynamic and creating a large social media following in the process. What Ryanair is doing here is recognizing and valuing the intrinsic diversity, complexity and authenticity of its users rather than adhering to rigid or idealized user narratives and placing judgments if users don’t fit their ideals of what a traveler should be. Meet users where they are rather than where your brand assumes or wishes them to be because AI already is.
4. Go macro, not micro with insights.
Unlike micro insights focused on optimization and incremental improvements or mid-level insights for broader general user understanding, macro insights forecast future consumer trends and behaviors. They unearth patterns and are anchored by users’ emotions. Macro user insights enable brands to anticipate changes in consumer emotions, guiding proactive strategic decisions. AI will become decently good at micro and mid-level insight generation, but it takes nuance and context to unearth macro user insights that set strategic direction for a brand. In an article titled The UX Research Reckoning is Here, Judd Antin proposes that UX researchers focus too much on what he calls middle-range research, which he defines as “a deadly combination of interesting to researchers and marginally useful for actual product and design work. It’s disproportionately responsible for the worst things people say and think about UXR. Doing so much of it just doesn’t deliver enough business value.”
Antin’s critique underscores the importance of macro insights in not only predicting future trends but also in aligning research efforts with the broader strategic goals of a brand. Emphasizing macro insights does not diminish the value of micro or mid-level research, but it places them within a strategic framework where their contributions to incremental improvements and understanding serve the higher goal of strategic brand direction and foresight. This approach helps ensure research not only informs design and product development in the present but also contributes to the long-term strategic positioning of a brand in a competitive and ever-changing market. By reorienting focus toward macro insights, your brand can forge deeper connections with your users, anticipate shifts in the market and innovate proactively, securing your place as a leader in the AI-enhanced future of the user brand experience.
Remember the leap of faith you took by telling your secrets to an AI chatbot? It was never just about help with a difficult relationship, choosing the next binge-worthy series or finding the right brunch outfit. It was about embracing the unknown, trusting the process and learning a bit about yourself along the way. AI anticipates our needs but also becomes a trusted confidant, guiding us through mundane and meaningful choices.
The real secret isn’t just in the questions we ask or the advice we seek but in the profound shift towards a future where our interactions with AI reflect a deeper understanding of ourselves. The most interesting secrets are those that lead us to discover more about what it means to be human.
The ground of our cultural landscape is always moving, quietly and imperceptibly. Country music has taken decades to change in its sounds and stories. The designs of our buildings evolve iteratively and over generations. Our spiritual relationship to nature, from the naturalist poetry of Thoreau to the nature-shaping ideology of Roosevelt, took nearly a century to evolve. Flipping through the pages of culture, it’s hard to know when something ended and something new began.
But unlike music genres and architecture, I can tell you the exact moment when modern environmentalism took hold of the public consciousness.
The 1968 “Earthrise” photo taken on the Apollo 8 mission, among the first photos of earth taken from space, immediately changed our understanding of what it meant to be a human on this planet. Seeing the Earth through the universe’s eyes, a planet whose entirety we could suddenly hold in our heads, fundamentally changed the way we measure our relationship to it.
There were famous ecologists like John Muir and conservationists like Rachel Carlson that came before that photo, but none of them compelled us to recalibrate so quickly. “Earthrise” snapped our brains to a new grid because it gave us a new ruler to measure by.
“Earthrise” photo taken from the Apollo 8 mission, 1968.
Shifts in values and beliefs slowly change the topography of our cultural landscape, but in some places we experience landslides that happen so quickly, we can lose our bearings. Cultural borders that we thought fell in one place now, strangely, fall in another, and the way we measure the distance between our values requires an update.
The spaces in which we are using old rulers to measure new things hold tremendous opportunity. These are the spaces with latent demand, waiting for someone or something to give us new units of measurement, so that we may experience a culture in the way we have been waiting to experience it.
New rulers always unlock value, and there has perhaps never been a period when so many of our rulers have been out of date at the same time.
The protracted debate over working from home isn’t really about quality of work. It’s about the fact that we cannot shift our measurement of work from people-in-seats to output-of-people, and there’s a very good reason for that.
Western culture has a unique interpretation of time. How you spend your time, how much time something costs you, deciding if something is worth your time, or if you should invest more time into it, are all linguistic reminders that time is money.
This intimate time-money relationship has also shaped our infrastructure, from hourly wages and yearly budgets to interest on loans.
Without the metaphor of money, we simply cannot talk about time. It’s such a strong mental model that it’s quite literally written into our language and systems. In their book Metaphors We Live By, linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that metaphors like this mediate our experiences of the world. They are the rulers by which we measure our lived experiences.
Remote work is a proven success, and a clear indicator that our work-time relationship is changing. So why is there such tension here? It comes from the fact that while our work culture has changed, our implicit measurements of it have not.
Our language and metaphors – meaning the medium through which we filter our experiences – make it impossible to decouple time from money. Using this ruler to measure the world tells us that if you cannot control time, you cannot control revenue. You could argue that without a new ruler having really taken hold, businesses and leaders simply cannot rise above the horizon to see a new possible future.
Old rulers do not get replaced easily. We build infrastructure and systems around them, buttress them with language and rituals over time, and escalate our commitments to them as a society.
A measurement is only useful when everyone can agree to it, or as Anil Seth has said, reality is just a hallucination we can all agree on. Changing our rulers, even a little, is impossible without a critical mass of people willing to change their realities at the same time. That critical mass can take generations to materialize.
Relationships are no longer just about “love”, but about self-actualization according to Northwestern psychology professor Eli J. Finkel’s incredible research on the Suffocation Model of Marriage. Yet we still use the old ruler of “love” to measure our romantic lives.
“The Suffocation of Marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow Without Enough Oxygen,” by E. J. Finkel, C. M. Hui, K. L. Carswell, and G. M. Larson, 2014, Psychological Inquiry
From the mid-1800s up until the 1960s, the measurement of a good marriage was love. As America became wealthier, more urbanized and social safety nets began to form, the “functions of marriage became increasingly sentimental. Its primary purpose was to help spouses fulfill needs like loving, being loved, and experiencing romantic passion—the sorts of belonging and love needs toward the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy.”
That measurement of love stays with us today, in our myths, media and marriage vows. What most people don’t consciously realize, however, is that around 1965 the culture of marriage had already changed:
“In the self-expressive era (1965–present), diverse forces—including the civil rights and feminist movements, the Vietnam War, and the rise of humanistic psychology— converged to generate the countercultural revolution, which fostered an increased emphasis on self-discovery, self-expression, and authenticity… Americans continued to look to their marriage to fulfill their love and belonging needs, but they also increasingly looked to it to fulfill needs like self-esteem, self-expression, and personal growth—the sorts of esteem and self-actualization needs toward the top of Maslow’s hierarchy.”
Looking at the steep incline of the mountain in Finkel’s Suffocation Model, one thing becomes abundantly clear – the institute of marriage is begging for a new yardstick. Love is an outdated ruler that measures the wrong thing, potentially leading us away from what we’re really searching for.
Once you see it in love, you start to see it everywhere. The 75 Hard Challenge and Bryan Johnson have emerged because status is no longer just about ease, but about sacrifice (see our senior strategistZach Lamb‘s great thinking on this topic). Gwynneth and her disciples rose from the failures of women’s medicine to show us that wellness was no longer just about health, but about rebirth. Hotels made us measure travel in units of leisure, until Airbnb changed it to units of belonging, and now concepts like psychedelic retreats and sleep tourism are changing it to units of emotional restoration.
If your brand is in a space where old rulers are still being used, there is tremendous opportunity in teaching people a new way of measuring what matters to them. It creates new language and new context. Most importantly, it has the potential to put your brand in a consideration set of one.
Just like the Suffocation Model indicates, getting people to do the hard work of changing their perspectives may leave laggards struggling at the bottom of the mountain, but those that make it to the top experience far more satisfaction than those who never make the trek to begin with.
The concept of childhood is only a few hundred years old but once it was established during the Enlightenment, this new ruler created a cascade of new labor laws, changed the way children were depicted in fine art and literature, and led to the evolution of childhood education. Children were no longer seen as small adults, taking on adult roles and responsibilities (and oftentimes abuses). Childhood was now a protected and measured part of early life.
A great deal of our early culture around childhood was molded by philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke and Sigmund Freud who explored notions of innocence, tabula rasa (a child’s blank slate mind) and childhood traumas.
But then came children’s media in the form of Disney and Warner Brothers and they gave us some of the most powerful measures of childhood that continue to unlock value for us today, moving us from innocence and purity to new measures of imagination and awareness.
Disney cemented the ideals of childhood in the form of boundless imagination. Through cartoons like Fantasia, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and the magic of Disneyland and its Imagineers, a whole nation came to see a good childhood as a measure of creativity. We continue to exalt creativity in the toys we buy our children and the preschools we send them to today.
Warner Brothers saw the need for a different kind of ruler. The humor in ‘Looney Toons’ and ‘Merrie Melodies’ was far more sophisticated and subversive than anything else at that time. The artwork was strikingly modernist, the jokes were complex and satirical, and the storylines sometimes referred to current events and politics. Warner Brothers saw childhood as a measure of awareness. The belief that kids could understand and appreciate more adult themes is the same belief that fuels box office hits like the Lego Movie and Barbie today.
Left: The art of imagination in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, 1937. Right: The modernist artwork of Warner Brothers’ Wile E. Coyote in Looney Tunes, 1949.
Interestingly, both Disney and Warner Brothers created measurements that welcomed adults into the world of children, another unique value unlock that we are still enjoying as a culture. They’re proof that every ruler we use has the potential to dampen or amplify our lived experiences.
Our measurements are our agreed-upon codes for what matters, but once they are installed into our culture, it can be very hard to know when it’s time to rethink how we measure things in the first place. Our beliefs and feelings have a tendency to move forward before we have the models to describe them and the artifacts of culture – language, norms, systems – are a lagging indicator of who we really are.
If we’re not measuring the right things anymore, that’s your brand’s opportunity to change the landscape. How we measure is how we know the world, and new rulers can not only give us new experiences, but also make us new people.
Culture has a way of cherry picking its defining concepts. The portrait of the American cowboy has undoubtedly shaped America’s national identity, not only in mythology and media, but in its brands, its games and its politics. Such an enduring image must have deep roots in the very genesis of a nation, right?
The truth is the era of cowboys was short lived, and they roamed the American landscape for a brief 20-30 years before barbed wire and private property laws made them obsolete.
Cowboys, but also beatniks, the Oregon Trail and the nuclear family are proof that the most impactful concepts of our culture are often the most fleeting, and yet for some reason they are still strong enough to anchor down the most vital parts of our collective identity.
That’s because whether we’ve lived it or not, or whether we’ve known it or not, we have a deep emotional connection to the cowboy and its peers which keeps them beating and alive within us. We remix, engender, and nurture it within each new generation.
But it’s hard to imagine what the emotional anchor of the past decade will be in hindsight. Will it be January 6th, celebgate, social distancing, any number of wars, millennial burnout, Greta Thunberg, or the year of the girly?
I doubt most, if any, of those will make the cut despite how resounding they may have felt at the time. Aside from the fact that culture has become so bloated, fractured and subsequently stuffed into echo chambers, we have also endured so much upheaval that the nature of our connection to the past is changing, and with that change, our emotional anchors have begun to dissolve.
There are a couple reasons for this. First, histories exist because memories are shared among people. It’s why when a close friend dies, people often describe the loss akin to losing a part of their own pasts. If there isn’t someone else in the world that can attest to, relive and celebrate that history with you, it starts to feel less real.
You could say the same thing is happening on a much larger scale in our culture. There’s a multitude of familiar factors pushing us all into different histories, from misinformation to identity politics, and as a country, there is less and less of a singular timeline that the majority of us can agree on.
But a second, and perhaps more important, reason relates to how the brain changes when it experiences a sustained period of chaos.
We’ve lived through an unprecedented amount of change in a short period of time – not just technological, but political, environmental, social, and personal – and extended periods of stress and accelerated change don’t just warp our sense of time, they crumble it.
Any sense of emotional connection to the anchors that made us become so taught that they finally snap.
This is the most apparent in our own histories and personal anchors. The inside jokes, the 15-year old TV satire that felt like home, the social dance trend, the “Yes we can”, the Netflix moment shared by a nation, and maybe even the loaves of sourdough no longer feel like parts of our personal chronologies. They instead feel foreign, as if they’ve broken off of our timelines.
When #liminalspaces and #nostalgiacore became trends over the past couple of years, it wasn’t just the sense of longing that made them arresting aesthetics. It was the disembodiedness of it all. Archival images without context, jump cuts without story, vibes without meaning. These visual experiences were, above all else, about disconnection.
This feeling of estrangement from the past is broadly called temporal disintegration, and it’s a unique loss that goes beyond the boundaries of healthy, personal growth.
It’s the sudden realization that a series of acute experiences has made the comfort of our own pasts emotionally inaccessible. When so much life happens in so little time, the anchors behind us no longer hold. We lose the emotional connection. It’s hard to even access who we were in those moments – moments that now feel like remembering a stranger instead of an old version of ourselves.
It also makes nostalgia a tricky thing to capitalize on. As Vulture journalist Lux Alptraum said of 2022’s Pam & Tommy, one of the many nostalgia-hacking shows of the past few years, “When we watch Anderson and Lee now, it’s not the sex that’s startling. It’s their innocence.” It’s impossible to emotionally access parts of our past when our sense of time has become severed in so many places.
But the loss of our past is only half of the story. While our sense of history has been disintegrating, any clarity into the future has also started to evaporate.
We already know that uncertainty awaits us on the horizon. It always has to some degree, but what’s startling is the fact that more than ever, we are struggling to connect to our own futures, even if it’s just a few years ahead.
People are impulse spending no matter how high interest rates and cost of living go, baffling economists and financial advisors. The very human reasoning behind it all tells us what economic principles can’t: consumers don’t fear regretting purchases. They fear regretting not making purchases.
“It’s not a regret-filled, spur-of-the-moment decision. It’s the opposite of that, where I would regret not having done it,” according to Michael Liersch, Head of Advice & Planning at Wells Fargo. When we don’t see a clear future, we can’t assess if or how to save for tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the belief systems that have compelled us to invest in the future since the dawn of America are also being upended. People on the corporate ladder saw their friends get rich in the YOLO economy of crypto, trading, startups and social media influencing. Even though we’re in more sobering circumstances now, a certain mentality has stuck per Kevin Roose who called it, “a deeper, generational disillusionment, and a feeling that the economy is changing in ways that reward the crazy and punish the cautious.”
From AI and COVID, to heightened tribalism and perceived loss of security, the pace of change that has separated us from the past is also what alienates us from the future. In her article How To Live on the Precipice of Tomorrow, author Rose Eveleth describes what happens when we compulsively try to predict what stands before us in a time when both the signals and the noise have grown exponentially.
Standing at the edge of the precipice is thrilling, but “if you’re forced to stand there, lean over it constantly, something else happens. There’s an exhaustion and a numbness. It’s like you’re listening to a song that just keeps building and building and building. And you’re waiting for the beat to drop, and it just doesn’t. That level of frenetic, anticipatory energy simply isn’t sustainable.”
Our strongest sense of self comes from a sense of time. Who you are right now is a triangulation of who you’ve been and who you will become. Without knowing your past and future, it’s hard to know your present.
That is where we are today, stuck in the eternal now.
Gabor Mate tells us that loss of self is the essence of trauma, and I think that’s a fair way to characterize what the eternal now feels like for many. A sense of self is tenuous when you don’t know what direction to look in. All that is left is the present. The ephemeral, hard-to-grasp present is all we have to define ourselves by.
And all of this now brings us to the matter of brand.
I’ve been feeling for a while that the forms of branding that dominated the past decade – namely lifestyle, aspirational, and heritage branding – have lost their gravitational pull. Something about these branding modalities fails to fully connect on an emotional level in the present day. They do not spark the feelings of joy, hope, potential or integrity that they once did.
The eternal now explains this transition. Lifestyle and aspirational branding doesn’t land when people can’t see into tomorrow and have lost their desire to plan for who they may become. Heritage branding doesn’t land when our history is slipping through our fingers and begins to feel alien.
Branding has always relied on our sense of the past or the future. What happens when we are no longer connected to either?
The more I wrestle with this thought experiment, the more I come to believe that radical new forms of community will be the answer. Community is the final form of every brand.
When we’ve lost ourselves and all we have to stand in is a shaky present, community is the only thing that makes sense. Genuine community, where people are incented to form deep relationships with one another (not solely with the brand) is the only way to allow people to find themselves once again in an ever-present world where identity is hard to figure out.
Community branding of the future reverses the storytelling format that most brands rely on today. Social scientists will love to tell you that while beliefs may change behavior in some cases, there is a whole body of research that shows behavior is in fact what drives beliefs. Give people a safe space to change their behavior, a natural environment to act differently in, and they will begin to change their beliefs soon after.
This is diametrically opposed to how most branding is carried out today, and only community can create spaces for this reverse process. Community is the only real vehicle for creating the kinds of conditions people need to try behaving differently, changing their beliefs, and finding a sense of self in the process.
Another crucial factor that will define the future of community and brand is the level of fidelity a community can afford its users. In my article High Fidelity Society Is Reorganizing The World, I explored how the sheer levels of expression and individuality the next generation of communities will need to provide their users goes beyond anything we see today. That’s because culture has already outgrown the singularities and binaries of the old world, but our systems have not.
Any brand or community that hopes to survive the future needs to capture the full spectrum of the human experience for its users. Niche, strong-tie communities are currently flourishing in the shadows of the internet because they allow people to express themselves in gradients that go beyond a thumbs up or a thumbs down, beyond trending motifs, and have built-in vehicles for nuanced self-disclosure. People can manifest themselves and their relationships in much deeper ways.
When a brand becomes a legitimate community, every filter for engagement changes. It no longer relies on a strong sense of the future like aspirational or lifestyle branding, nor does it rely on a sense of the past like heritage branding. What community branding relies on is a willingness to find oneself in the here and now.
A consistent sense of self is so important that we will continually invest in our beliefs, even ignoring contradictory evidence of those beliefs willfully, in order to maintain who we are. We’re not necessarily looking for an objective truth, or growth, or pursuit. Now, more than ever, we are looking to find ourselves and to remember who we are.
When the public’s mentality changes in such a material and fundamental way, all of the structures that sit on top of it have to be rebuilt. Brand is no exception, and it warrants a closer look at how branding needs to evolve in the eternal now.
This won’t happen overnight and it won’t apply evenly to every industry. It won’t even look the same across the landscape. But it does apply to nearly every person in your audience. They are all experiencing the timecrushing aftermath of a tumultuous world. If your aim is to meet them where they are, look in the present.
P.S. We just launched Exposure Therapy, a guided community for strategic minds. Come join us and open up your world.
I am incredibly thrilled to share something new with you today.
Exposure Therapy is a community for strategic minds that will open up your world.
We’ve created a space where you’ll always be exposed to provocative new insights, will understand the future of markets, culture and human behavior, can connect deeply with other strategic thinkers, and 10x your strategic abilities.
It’s exposure for your strategic mind, and therapy for your strategic soul.
This is not another glorified group chat.
We’ve made this a very intentional community with immersive events, cultural and future explorations, and provocative ideas:
Each month we’ll expose you to a big idea that is either strategically or culturally relevant.
Then we go deep. You’ll have a chance to join expert roundtables and community discussions, explore shared ideas, and see our original research focused on that topic. Our goal is to explore from every possible angle.
The topics are exciting and far-ranging, from “Positioning & Storytelling” and “Personal Branding” to “Modern Riches” and “Eternal Youth”.
Individually, they will help you understand the landscape.
Together, they help you understand how the world works, and help you predict the future so you can own it.
See our full 2024 calendar of topics below:
If you’re a brand strategist, marketer, CEO, CMO, futurist, culture & behavior thinker, researcher, or anyone doing exciting things in branding and the strategic front, Exposure Therapy will speak to you.
This whole community started with a single belief: Strategy is everything.
It’s how you build a brand, win a market, move in the world, and live meaningfully. It’s also a demanding lifelong practice.
But so many of us have to do it alone, without a roadmap or community of inspiration. Being a true strategist means cultivating a fearless mind and staying in constant pursuit of knowledge. It means understanding culture and behavior, and grasping the forces that govern the future of markets.
Strategy is how you thrive.
If you’re reading this and you know us at Concept Bureau, you probably already feel this in your bones, but you also probably don’t feel like you get the exposure and connection you need.
Time has become the single most important variable in business and strategy.
Agile teams, speed to market, real-time marketing, expedited R&D cycles, Chief Transformation Officers, real-time analytics, and even operating innovations like predictive shipping point to one truth: to understand something is to understand how it is changing.
Time is also at the core of brand, where we know there is no brand strategy without a prediction and to build a brand you have to know how time will change the playing field.
Yet one of our most crucial building blocks for brand strategy – the competitive analysis – conspicuously leaves time out of the equation.
There are many models for competitive analysis, from SWOTs and perception 2x2s to growth-share matrices. All of them reveal different insights, but none of them truly explain how the competitive landscape is changing over time, and what impact that will have on the market and user.
They’re static snapshots (with the occasional inclusion of a moving dynamic like “threats” on the horizon) that don’t prepare brands for how quickly things will inevitably change.
Nothing about business or brands can be understood in the absence of time, and as the poet Victor Hugo said, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
Your market is going to change because right now your competitors are working in ways to make that happen. Over time, those changes will evolve your users, and when your users reach that new point of evolution, they will be ready for a new idea.
And if you’re smart, your brand can be the new idea whose time has come.
What you need is a new perspective for understanding the competitive landscape and a new model for unpacking that perspective into actionable insights.
We developed the Temporal Competitive Analysis to do exactly that.
It’s 4 steps, each building on the last, to see how the market will evolve over time and how to win over that horizon:
Follow the influence. Remember that your competitors are not the ones building the same products as you. They are the ones envisioning the same future as you.
Pull out the conditioning narratives. Look for the future-forward stories your competitors are propagating. Those stories are how your competitors are conditioning your market to think, feel, behave and buy in the next 3-5 years.
Roll the dice forward. If those conditioning narratives play out over the next few years, what is the second-order insight that arises? When people change the way you know they will change, how does that alter the rules of the game?
Build for the new game. A brand’s job is to bring the future forward. Don’t build for today’s game, build for tomorrow’s.
Below, I go through each of these four steps. You will be required to both drop your comfortable biases and make uncomfortable predictions – things you should be doing as a strategist anyway – and every time you do, you will gain a sharper focus on your market.
Step 1: Follow the influence.
The first step is to roundup all of the market players that should be a part of your perspective. Most brands have direct competitors that are either making the same product or solving the same problem. They’re easy to spot and easy to compare to.
More important, however, is to look for other players on the sidelines that may not be direct competitors but are capable of having an outsized influence on the same future that you are trying to create with your brand. Players that are envisioning the same future as you, regardless of their product, are the ones who stand to sway your market the most, and the ones you will likely be the least prepared for.
I’ve worked with many education startups across different technologies, user ages, content topics and target buyers. I can tell you that education is a very hard industry to disrupt. Tech founders selling to public schools face the same difficulties as career educators selling to parents – habits in how we learn are extremely hard to break. Change is slow, and even if change is possible, it is very rarely scaleable.
But there has been one player that has changed US education faster than any other that has come before it in the past decade. The change was swift, felt in all corners of the education market, and came from a brand that was initially completely outside of the education ecosystem when it first took root in America: TikTok.
One in four people use TikTok for education, and 69% of those people use it for their homework. That’s had an outsized effect on how people expect to learn today.
In just the past few years, TikTok has wired learners to expect quick-hit learning rather than deeper discovery and analysis and to understand with a lot less nuance, but at the same time it’s also conditioned them to expect education to feel highly emotive and exciting, and to expect stronger storytelling.
That’s tremendous sway for a brand that didn’t look like an education company, but TikTok’s mission is to “inspire creativity and bring joy”, and they have a clear vision for how people of all ages are to consume and understand content.
If you look at it through that lens, it’s suddenly clear that TikTok would very much be an influencing force in how we learn and what we learn. Their mission and vision don’t seem any different than many edtech startups.
Look for the brands that are influencing your category, not just in the tech or products they are bringing to market, but in how they are changing the expectations and behaviors of your users, now and into the future.
Oftentimes the biggest influencers are on the sidelines.
The easiest way to open your mind is to look at the category, not the niche. If you’re a medical device company, look at all players in health and wellness, not just devices. If you’re a makeup brand, don’t just look at makeup, look at every brand that sits within beauty including grooming, plastic surgery and even feminism. If you’re a fintech brand, look at every brand that touches wealth, from banks and trading platforms all the way to luxury goods and lifestyle services.
Another way to expand your lens is to look at it through Richard Rumelt’s notion of “attractor states”, where naturally desirable future outcomes are driving the actions and strategies of different brands. If your brand is in the automotive industry, the future state of EVs is also driving a lot of innovation and capital into sustainable energy solutions, advanced battery technologies, and smart transportation systems.
Go wide. You need a wide consideration set in order to start seeing the patterns that will pop up in step 2.
Step 2: Pull out the conditioning narratives.
Take a close look at all of the brands and innovations bubbling up in your category and decipher the future-forward stories they are propagating.
What’s crucial to understand about those stories is that they’re how your competitors are conditioning your market to think, feel, behave and buy in the next 3-5 years.
Stories don’t just come from a brand’s website and content. They come from the nature of the innovations a brand is pursuing. They come from implied narratives in the product experience, user experience, packaging, organizational structure, collabs and partnerships, public relations and media pieces, and so on.
I’ve written before that brands tell stories between the lines. In this step, looking between the lines is imperative.
The parenting and motherhood industry is wide and deep, and rife with emotionally charged narratives. Influencer brands in this space are usually tackling big topics around fear, anxiety and shame, but also joy, sanctity and identity.
A brand like Boram Care, which I’ve written about recently, simply describes itself as a postnatal retreat, but its high-touch services focusing on gently training new mothers in a luxe environment, press hits, carefully selected language that mentions “judgment-free” care and “calm, comfortable and secure” spaces, and massage and food menus tell a very different story.
For the uninitiated, Boram may come across as a luxury hotel for moms, but new mothers see something very different.
The nature and experience of motherhood is being challenged on all fronts right now. A massive amount of discourse both in mainstream publications and in hidden blogs, online communities, and group chats is raising alarm over what has been stolen from American mothers.
Without a village, without social infrastructure, without a financial safety net and without traditions, new motherhood has become a very disempowering and sometimes even shame-inducing stage of life.
The Boram Care brand, on the other hand, is conditioning new mothers to expect dignity instead.
As I wrote in my article, “Boram isn’t about luxuries. It’s about honoring the integrity of a woman who has just given birth […] In this experience, mothers… are not forced into failure. They are lifted into possibility.”
Consider all of the conditioning narratives in your landscape just as deeply, for each brand.
As you go through, you will begin to see patterns emerge. Brands will usually cluster around two or three overarching conditioning narratives in any given market. Not all brands will have conditioning narratives, but the influencers will, and they act as pillars in the space.
If we took a very high level look at this space, these are the three major conditioning narratives we might see:
Dignity
Brands and innovations are re-centering the mother, conditioning the market to expect and believe in a strong sense of self-worth, value, self-respect and ethical treatment in the user experience.
High-touch pre and post-partum care centers like Boram Care and Origin
A new league of brands is redefining motherhood through ritual, creating a strong feeling and expectation of connection, sanctity and nurturance that is currently missing pre-and post-birth.
These three conditioning stories, taken together, start to paint a picture of the landscape that is being molded by brands and consumers. We can see that people in this early parenting space are going to become more expectant of dignity in their experiences, in search of more and more control, and craving a missing sense of ritual and ceremony.
These will become the unspoken qualifiers for their purchases and the experiences they are willing to pay a premium for.
But reaching these narratives isn’t enough to build a brand.
Now we have to ask ourselves, what are these conditions leading us to?
Step 3: Roll the dice forward.
If we know these conditioning narratives of dignity, control and ritual are going to play out over the next couple of years, what is the second order insight that arises?
What is the “so what?” that naturally follows these conditions? When people change the way you know they will change, how does that alter the rules of the game?
When doing this step for any brand in any category, it’s important to keep in mind that second order insights are going to lead you to a new truth about the user. This step 3 is where the evolved user comes in, and step 4 is where we can then create the idea whose time has come.
The only way to roll the dice forward is to completely immerse yourself in the narratives. Feel, think, see, imagine what this new market and new user are like. Push yourself to go further than feels comfortable because things change faster than we realize.
A few years ago, mental health therapy wouldn’t have been the flex that it is today, astrology was not a mainstream language, and AI seemed promising, not scary. Roll the dice harder and farther than you think you might need to.
Rolling the dice forward in the early motherhood space might lead us to an interesting second order insight: the arrival of customizable motherhood.
Motherhood has always been a monolith, but imagine a world where the motherhood journey becomes fragmented and multidimensional, highly unique between mothers.
Imagine a new mother who doesn’t just expect, but demands, that everything from her birthing style to her medical care, postpartum rituals, recovery practices, food choices, self-care philosophy, family formation and every detail of every experience all be fully customizable to her tastes. No two women’s journeys would look the same.
I can assure you, having worked in this space and studied these mothers for many years, that very few mothers think like this right now.
No one thinks the full spectrum of motherhood is customizable, at least not for long. Nor do they know how it would feel to have complete agency, being at the center of the motherhood experience, to craft a journey that allows themselves to be reborn as someone’s parent.
Today the child is centered, and outside of a birth plan that is often ignored and the rare woman who can work with a doula, motherhood feels like it “happens” to women.
But customizable motherhood means that women will expect to be able to piece together a patchwork of services, philosophies and products that create their overall journey. They will demand not only to do what they want, but how they want it.
They will feel like motherhood is no longer a string of abstract challenges and difficulties, but rather a clear and transparent set of choices that make them more confident with each step forward.
And it’s very possible that all of this results in a shift in what the moral imperative in motherhood is, that instead of the blanket goal of raising a child no matter the sacrifice, motherhood becomes about choosing what kind of motherhood experience you want to have.
When a woman expects customizable motherhood, how will this whole space change? Who will this new woman be? What kind of a brand will she be demanding?
In your own category, begin to map out what the new rules of the game will become. Predict what the new norms will be, what our lived experiences will feel like, how our behaviors will evolve, and who we will evolve into.
Step 4: Build for the new game.
You know how your competitors will work to condition the market. You know how that conditioning will change your users’ beliefs and behaviors. You know how those things together will create a different landscape, with new rules, norms and consumer expectations. Now you can build for this new game.
I won’t speculate what a brand for the new motherhood game would look like (we would need to sign a contract first) but any number of successful brands have done exactly this.
With the force of a primed market, and the timing of a smart strategy, they were able to deliver what an audience needed, right before they realized they needed it.
Patagonia didn’t win on their values alone. For decades, they saw environmentalism, global culture and travel change in the market. They saw how millennials had grown up to crave brands and experiences that made them feel engaged with the world instead of just consuming it. They saw how travel that was once about leisure was becoming more and more about meaning. They realized that environmentalism was becoming a story about how people from different parts of the Earth are connected to one another. They knew this cohort would soon be primed for a brand that made eco-conscious living a proper lifestyle, and that’s precisely what they built for.
Blockbuster, Pay-Per-View and Napster conditioned us to interface with media differently, and that created a market primed for Netflix’s model. Netflix not only ushered in the shift to digital streaming but helped condition a market to binge-watch TV shows and expect on-demand entertainment, which then primed us for platforms like TikTok.
Time was the biggest factor in all of these examples, and is the biggest factor for your brand as well. You can’t afford to look at your competitors in the absence of time.
What matters most is not where your competitors are today, but where they will be tomorrow, especially as the rate of change in markets only accelerates.
Temporal Competitive Analysis is especially important for companies in categories where there is a lot of innovation and consumer conditioning happening at the same time, like consumer health and medicine, personal technology, and food and agriculture. If you’re in these categories, you likely already feel there is a major blindspot in your approach to competitive strategy, and I hope this model helps.
Culture, environments, major events will change your user, but a lot of brands forget that oftentimes the most significant thing to change your consumer will be your competitors.
When you understand how competitors are conditioning your user to think and behave in the future, you don’t have to wait for the future to come. You can start building for that future right now.
Have you ever felt that you don’t relate to certain brands anymore? It doesn’t even have to do with their products; a brand you previously loved might now just seem stale or out of touch, leaving you less excited about their offerings. Or maybe you can feel, and perhaps validate, that users are pulling away from your brand, and you don’t know why.
This unconscious retreat of users speaks to a discontinuity that businesses often fail to recognize:a divergence in the worldviews between your brand and your audience.
In the broadest sense, a worldview encapsulates a collection of beliefs, values, attitudes and experiences that define our understanding of reality. Worldviews are intricate tapestries woven from the fibers of our conscious and subconscious minds. They are thestories and myths we tell ourselves and feel deep within us to be true — whether they actually are or not.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild posits an intriguing idea: our worldviews — or, as she more evocatively labels them, “deep stories” — aren’t merely constructs of logic, morality or necessity. Rather, they serve as emotional landscapes built from our individual and collective hopes, fears and anxieties. These narratives resonate not at the level of intellect but deep within the emotional core of our being. It is this profound, intrinsic nature of worldviews that makes them a potent tool in brand strategy.
As a brand, if you don’t think you have worldviews, you may have adopted the default ones from your category, which puts you at a disadvantage when looking to become a leader in your field.
Focusing on worldviews offers a more intense and meaningful connection with audiences than the traditional approach of demographic and psychographic segmentation or values-based and social-purpose marketing. While these tactics have been instrumental in helping brands navigate the consumer landscape, they fail to paint an accurate and comprehensive picture of today’s interconnected, rapidly changing society.
Contemporary consumer behaviors and preferences are increasingly fluid. Technological advancements, such as machine learning algorithms and advanced analytics, now allow for personalized, real-time engagement — but even this strategy needs to evolve.
What’s missing is a more holistic approach, one that includes not just what people buy or how they act but why they make the choices they do at a primal, emotional level. The next frontier in marketing segmentation must delve into these narratives — these “deep stories” that shape consumer identity — offering a more nuanced, emotionally resonant connection between brands and their audiences.
On an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, host Shankar Vedantam spoke with psychologist Jer Clifton about how an individual’s beliefs shape their reality. Clifton and his research team found that there are three overarching beliefs they named “primal world beliefs”: belief the world is a safe place versus a more dangerous place, belief the world is enticing versus dull and belief the world is alive rather than mechanistic. These worldviews are often with us for the long haul — while consumers will change in a myriad of ways throughout their lifetimes, research shows us that oftentimes, our deeply ingrained worldviews do not. In fact, as we move through life and our worldviews are challenged, they tend to become more deeply ingrained. Carl Jung was clearly onto something when he stated, “People don’t have ideas; ideas have people.”
In essence, a brand strategy tied solely to demographics and psychographics is oblivious to the richness and intricacies of the human experience that each individual has worked to construct.
So, how can a brand go about discovering its customers’ worldviews? The answer is to change your mindset around how you see your brand in relation to your users.
We have a saying at Concept Bureau that our CEO and co-founder, Jasmine Bina, often reminds us of when we are confronted with friction in our brand strategy process – “remain curious.” Great brands do not treat their users as passive consumers of information but as active co-creators of meaning, capable of exploring and developing a worldview together. Here are some starting points to begin that process.
Listen for Deep Language
Language is the gateway into the human mind — our words unveil the metaphors we live by. Analyze the vocabulary and figures of speech your users employ and listen for repeated words and themes. See how users literally visualize your brand — is it portrayed as a companion, an authority figure or a burdensome obligation? Look out for omissions to see what language is avoided — certain words might be taboo for your audience, which could betray their fears and anxieties.
For example, Rare Beauty built its brand identity around concepts like self-love, mental health and inner beauty. If you examine the user conversations and language patterns on Rare Beauty’s social media feeds, you will notice recurrences of words like “acceptance,” “understanding,” “struggle,” “stigma,” “authenticity” and “support.” This lexicon betrays an emotional longing to be seen and embraced as one’s true self, without judgment. Rare Beauty has echoed this language into its own communications and even the color names of products like Soft Pinch Liquid Blush shades “Worth,” “Encourage” and “Hope.”
Rare Beauty understands that its customers are not defined by demographic or psychographic labels but by an emotional narrative of wanting to show their true selves. The brand further aligns with this mission by focusing on mental health awareness and advocacy. The company launched the Rare Impact Fund, which aims to raise $100 million over the next 10 years to provide access to mental health services for underserved communities. Rare Beauty also partners with mental health organizations and experts to provide resources and support for its customers and employees.
Rather than relying on surface-level consumer attributes, Rare Beauty grounds its identity in the deeper belief system and emotions of its users, echoing their longing to be truly seen, accepted and valued. This allows the brand to establish an aligned bond with its audience. Its authenticity is solidified through the actions of its founder, Selena Gomez, who has been a vocal advocate for mental health, even documenting her own struggles and co-founding Wondermind, a mental health multimedia company. This proves to users that it’s not just lip service — the brand subscribes and lives by the same worldviews that shape their choices.
The official trailer for Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me
Map the Mental Models Governing Users’ Beliefs
If you want to understand what makes your users tick, you have to dig into their mental models. Think of these as the rulebooks people use to navigate life. They’re the brain’s shortcuts for understanding how the world works, making decisions and even predicting what’s going to happen next. But here’s the thing: these mental shortcuts aren’t always 100% accurate. They can be influenced by biases, emotions and even where someone grew up. Understanding these mental models isn’t just interesting, it’s essential for knowing what your users really value and expect from you.
Look at how your users view society’s inner workings. Examine the stories they are telling themselves to explain how things happen. Who do they think holds the power, and who’s just along for the ride? Get to know their fears – this can tell you a lot about what matters to them.
Next, follow their thought processes to see how they believe progress happens. Investigate their goals and the steps they think are needed to get there. Watch out for any biases they might have — are they only paying attention to facts that support their views? And don’t forget to check out where they see themselves fitting into the grand scheme of things. Explore if they feel they have the power to influence outcomes or are at the mercy of bigger forces.
Deciphering the web of worldviews that influence consumer behavior is akin to tapping into a rich vein of gold — it not only establishes a profound connection but fosters a community anchored in shared values and beliefs. Worldview-based user brand alignment is vividly exemplified in the story of Artipoppe, a company that has successfully transformed its desire to sell artfully crafted baby carriers into a resource for intuitive autonomous parenting.
Artipoppe understands that its users crave freedom beyond the bounds of traditional parenting paradigms, wanting to keep their own identities while growing their families. They state on their website: “Artipoppe is a baby carrier, but it’s also a lifestyle and revolves around a powerful movement. At Artipoppe, we aim to unite women and you with yourself – in a world that’s full of noise and distractions. We want to make a mother’s life easy, but also challenge her to stay true to herself. Ignite that spark to follow your own instincts and embrace imperfections.”
Artipoppe knows that its consumers feel shackled by the expectations and societal pressures of traditional parenting and see themselves as free-thinkers who question conventions. It speaks to those disenchanted with the overly-curated and perfectionist images of parenting presented by many brands and — let’s be honest — pretty much every influencer in our social feeds. Artipoppe taps into this desire for freedom and selfhood and offers, in return, flexibility, mobility and independence in parenting. With a commitment to ethical and sustainable production, they also uphold their users’ core values.
By infusing these worldviews into rather functional products — baby carriers and wraps — Artipoppe allows users to feel grounded in their sense of self and carry their identities into parenthood. This is reflected in the company’s marketing strategies, with videos and social media imagery that embody freedom by showcasing the multifaceted identities of women with children; women in powerful poses and nude imagery that celebrates women in their free and raw form, as well as mothers speaking of what they do and their hopes and dreams for their children.
By accurately mapping the prevailing mental model of its user base around parenting as another facet of self rather than a separate identity, Artipoppe built a brand that aligned with their users’ visions of parenthood. The result is a fascinating case study of how tapping into audience worldviews, rather than surface demographics, can turn products into a lifestyle choice with fervent advocates.
Find Where Users Are in Denial
Worldviews often contain soft spots, contradictions, and denial revealing inner tensions. Remember when I referred to worldviews as tapestries of different experiences, values and influences? Well, tapestries often have some loose threads and knots, which in this metaphor are these inconsistencies.
Concept Bureau CEO, Jasmine Bina, wrote in a recent article, “Strong brands have cognitive dissonance at their core. They understand that while the product may solve a real-world problem, the brand is solving a much more valuable identity problem.” When you notice someone saying one thing but doing another, don’t just gloss over it — this is your chance to really get to the core of who they are. For example, if someone claims to be all about “going green” but then maybe pulls out a water bottle from their purse and throws it away, that’s a sign of a deeper struggle, maybe between convenience and their eco-friendly ideals.
People are masters at justifying their actions, especially when they’re at odds with their stated beliefs. Listening to these justifications can be like hitting the jackpot. You’ll often find that the stories people tell themselves to resolve these contradictions reveal a lot about their true worldviews. And let’s not forget about virtuous principles that people love to talk about but sometimes fall short of practicing. These aren’t just “oops” moments, they’re opportunities to understand the hurdles people feel they’re facing.
Zeroing in on these contradictions isn’t just about pointing out flaws or gaps. It’s about understanding the emotional factors that steer people’s choices. Once you get that level of understanding, you’re well on your way to building a brand that doesn’t just meet basic needs but actually resonates with the often unspoken worldviews of your users.
The success of Rare Beauty and Artipoppe illustrates the immense power of building brands around a shared worldview. Both companies have been able to carve out niches in crowded, competitive markets by listening to more than just what their target audience wants but what they believe in. When a brand taps into its users’ emotionally driven belief systems, those users see their innermost values and aspirations reflected back, binding them to the brand in a profoundly personal way.
In a world that is increasingly fragmented and impersonal, a brand that speaks to your worldviews offers a comforting sense of familiarity and belonging, validating your understanding of how the world works. This alignment with what consumers fundamentally perceive to be true, good, beautiful and meaningful fosters a deep-seated sense of loyalty and belonging — a connection that transcends trends or spur-of-the-moment purchase decisions. Brands that can align with and embody users’ worldviews are not just more likely to grab attention in the short term, they’re more likely to sustain it, no matter the changes ahead.
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:
Where categories intersect
Strong tie communities
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.
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.
