In this month’s episode of Brands & Outliers, we’re taking a broad survey of all the brands moving their categories forward, and the outliers that signal our coming future.

We’re seeing 3 big themes emerge right now:

1. Foreign Touch: We’re about to feel the physical touch of AI through AI-enabled robotics, gaming and medicine
2. Redrawing The Line of Blasphemy: We’re writing new rules at the extremes with the resurgence of swearing in everyday speech, raunchy Christian brands, and criminalization of alternative meat
3. Anxieties About Our Kids: It’s not just Jonathan Haidt’s campaign against phones. It’s also a glut of low-grade AI content that’s being fed to young minds, deepfake loopholes and antinatalism on billboards

Many of our recent episodes have circled around a sense of confusion in culture, but this one feels more like a turning point.

People and brands are having tough conversations about the future we want for ourselves, and starting to make some decisions about what we will allow, and not allow, into that picture.

What is especially interesting in this month’s report is how god chatbot brands like Mark Wahlberg’s Hallow, and the god-touting-money-minting personal brands of people like Hailey Bieber and Ballerina Farm are branding religion in new ways. It’s bite sized, doesn’t ask you to change, and preaches the prosperity gospel.

Meanwhile, a whole movement around children and mentally damaging tech is starting to gain some real steam. We’ll see if Jonathan Haidt’s crusade leads to actual legislation, but what’s apparent right now is that he and his cohort are drawing a very strong moral line. Bad parents give their kids phones. Good parents don’t.

Overall, we’re in a moment of good versus evil, right versus wrong. If the past year was about change, it’s possible that this year will be about choices. There’s a feeling in our culture right now that, despite years of increasing fragmentation, people are ready to agree on what is allowed and what isn’t… at least in some domains.

Building a brand in that kind of climate is never easy. It’s important to know how people are redrawing the rules, and what that means for how they relate to the brands around them.

Watch the full video here. 

In brand strategy, emerging cultural stories are important, but the real opportunity lies in the unmet needs that underpin those stories.

One of the most important emerging cultural stories of today is “connection”, but brands need to look at the unmet needs that sit under that story in order to create and capture value.

Two major needs are apparent:

1) Play – Low-stakes ways of being vulnerable in our interactions
2) Pleasure – Bringing sensuousness back into daily life

We talked about this in this month’s Brands and Outliers presentation, which was a fantastic discussion full of provocative signals for brands, including:

• (0:07) All of our fundamental institutions are in the exploration phase at once.
• (36:06) As the cultural universe expands, new gravitational centers are emerging.
• (45:47) We’re stuck in the liminal space between AI heaven and AI hell.
• (58:02) Our imagined boundaries are becoming more elastic.
• (1:10:02) With social connection hogging the spotlight, play and pleasure are unmet needs flying under the radar.

My favorite part, however, was our discussion on whether it makes sense to use old schools of philosophy in judging the future.

I mean, does it make sense to reference the ancient stoics and philosophers when considering things like the future of social media and dopamine culture? I’m not so sure, but my team disagrees 😉

It’s a great conversation. Watch the fill video here.

The bustling negativity economy has taken over our homes (see TikTok’s girl with the list), our dogs (see overmedication of pets), and even the night sky (see “Sky Grief”), and its distorted our perceptions of reality.

In this month’s Brands and Outliers, we discuss how negativity has become such big business, that being positive online opens you up to criticism of being “out of touch”, and flexing your suffering wins you influence in the feed.

But there’s a mounting feeling (and some evidence) that all of this hyped negativity is creating real distortion in people’s minds. When there’s a new name or hashtag for things you didn’t even know were bad, you start to believe they really are.

Negativity and the reasons to be negative have always existed. It’s just that now there’s real money to be made off of it.

Timestamps and other topics covered in our call:

• (00:05) The negativity economy is distorting perceptions of reality
• (14:29) 2024 is the year AI comes to work
• (31:03) Reality is increasingly downstream from digital
• (59:25) Maximizing “second life”
• (1:03:24) Wild Cards

I know we’re not supposed to talk about “the generations” because segmentation like that is usually an oversimplification. I get that and it’s true.

But there is a right way to talk about it, and when you do, you see the underlying conditions that explain our beliefs and behaviors, a.k.a. strategic gold. 

In our newest episode of Talks at Concept Bureau, global brand strategist and researcher Martin Karaffa talks to us about “The Cultural Code of the Cool Old Guy”, and the identity of older men in today’s society. It’s a fascinating topic that reveals truths not just about a generation of older men, but about all of us, in any generation.

Some insights from this talk that I still can’t get out of my head:

• How Boomers danced on Soul Train vs. how Gen Z dances on TikTok and what that tells us about anxious cultures 
• Both Boomers and Gen Z were born into unique social and political climates that shaped their tendencies toward self-fulfillment and apprehension, respectively 
• “It’s expensive to live in your head”, or how climbing up Maslow’s hierarchy makes happiness more costly 
• Reinventing the story of age will require us to see the patterns that bridge the people of every living generation

America and much of the western world still hasn’t figured out how to fit old age into its youth-centric narratives. Youth is such a powerful symbol of all that is desirable, but where does that leave the masses who have aged out? Where does that leave the men who hit higher numbers but are living longer and healthier lives?

Why is the matter of age still such a difficult thing for our culture to resolve?

As partner at Hofstede Insights (now the Culture Factor Group), Martin has done a great deal of meaningful study around age, masculinity, global belief systems and values. There is so much to learn and understand here.

This talk will give you an incredible awareness of how generations evolve over time, and a deep respect for the ways in which different people navigate their worlds. 

If you want to reinvent the story of age, start here.

Welcome to another episode of Brands & Outliers, where we survey all of the brands moving the culture of their categories forward, and point out the outliers that give us a signal of the future to come.

There were a lot of interesting brand names and developments this month, but they all pointed to one theme: brands are getting comfortable playing with (un)reality.

Our biggest discussion was around the grief tech brands that have been around for a while but are really starting to gain traction now that AI is an accepted force.

Grief tech brands promise to never let our loved ones die, but they also rob us of the very grief that helps us grow. Experiencing death makes people more open to life and brings the living closer together.

It begs the question, will we let the individual escape the pain of loss, even if it means potentially more pain for the group?

In the shallower end of the (un)reality pool, we have brands like J.Crew and AI Garage Sale test the limits of authenticity.

And it’s a good time for that, too, because being ‘authentic’ (this year’s word of the year) once carried a moral charge in its meaning, but perhaps now has become detached from any moral connotation. Etymologists call that expansion of meaning semantic broadening, and it’s been happening a lot in our language lately.

Here are some more highlights from our discussion:

00:26 Splintering Authenticity

• The definition of the word “authenticity” is morphing yet again, and brands like J.Crew and AI Garage Sale are cleverly moving the line between real and unreal

13:31 Reshaping Ecosystems

• Brands like Thales Alenia Space, COBOD, Neighborhood NYC, Haven Co-living and even WalMart reveal how our most important spaces are getting smaller

26:00 Customized Self

• Grief tech companies like Replika, HereAfter AI, StoryFile, and Seance are trying to get rid of the pain of death altogether, but we debate whether that’s what society is really asking for right now

39:25 Chaotic Masculinity

• On one side we see muscle dysmorphia and hunters who won’t wear pink even if their lives depended on it, while on the other side people like Tony P. practice “Vibrant Masculinity”. Masculinity is in its messy middle phase.

P.S. The short animated film I reference is ‘World of Tomorrow‘ (2016).

Language has the special capacity to express a brand in ways that visual design or UX cannot. Strategic language doesn’t merely communicate, it connects.

At the intersection of human psychology and language, where the right words can change how we experience each other and the world, something magical happens.

It’s not storytelling or copywriting.

It’s the art of rhetoric.

Rhetoric is a toolkit for genuine connection, and it’s based on the rules and conventions that govern each person’s ability to understand.

In our newest Talks at Concept Bureau, “Rhetoric Will Save Your Soul: The Art of Connection In Brand Strategy and Everyday Life“, author and speech expert John Bowe opens up the world of rhetoric and shows us how persuasion is borne of certain invisible rules, captured in the teachings of Aristotle and proven over and over again throughout history.

In this talk he discusses:

• The 3 cardinal rules of speaking
• How people qualify authenticity
• The pillars of effective rhetoric: Logos (facts), Pathos (emotions) and most importantly, Ethos (character)

New technology has a remarkable way of showing us invisible human weaknesses. In this month’s roundup of Brands & Outliers, we see a few interesting patterns where great potential is also mirrored by great limitation.

This is perhaps most apparent in AI, where generative porn and emotional infidelity between humans and chatbots is already exploding. Yet what’s more telling is a new wave of sexting scams aimed at exploiting teen boys, both emotionally and financially.

It begs a big question: can moral trespass only happen between humans, or can it happen between humans and their machines? We are literally writing the new moral code as we live into this future.

Meanwhile, changing values and medical interventions are creating wholesale evolution of the American lifestyle. We’ve started drinking a lot less, eating a lot less, sleeping a lot more, and keeping earlier schedules.

Michael Pollan has famously observed that throughout history, our drugs of choice have determined how we gather. It seems today we are trading in the substances that numb us (alcohol) for the ones that make us more aware (psychedelics).

What the beverage industry seems to miss is that this trade is not just about health, it’s about people craving something more conscious in their gatherings.

But one of my favorite parts of this discussion was a brand called Future Society which has just launched “six scents created using sequenced DNA from extinct flowers, formulated by prestigious perfumers”.

Another moral code is asking to be rewritten here. What happens when nature becomes limitless? Just because you can resurrect that which has become extinct, should you? And did we all just pick up this moral baggage from watching Jurassic Park as kids?

There’s lots of other good brand and culture insight in this discussion. Links and notable timestamps below.

Welcome to our second episode of Brands & Outliers, where our team does a wide sweep of culture and presents every recent finding they think is worth noting.

Culture is going more deep and more human. As the time-space compression of AI becomes more clear, people are grasping for some very specific islands of stability.

One of those islands is the strong tie communities that used to only exist in the fringes, but are now clearly starting to concern platforms like Instagram and TikTok. 

Meanwhile, brands are catering to a fragmenting of human experience, consistent with our projection of High Fidelity Society slowly taking over the world, market by market. New innovations and infrastructures, from TrovaTrip to Asian American malls, aren’t built upon the standard, but rather the exception.

Against this backdrop, the relentless pursuit of optimization is reaching a fever pitch in our gendered spaces, including the rise of T Parties (sort for testosterone parties), male plastic surgery and the quasi-moral discourse around Ozempic. 

And while these forces ensure that we continue to sort ourselves into niche tribes, there is one bastion of social class mixing that stands strong. It is not the church, not the school or the community park, but rather the humble chain restaurant.  

With that in mind, please come and enjoy this delicious buffet of insights. Timestamps of highlights below. 

Each month, our team does a wide sweep of culture and presents every recent finding they think is worth noting.

It’s my favorite meeting ever, and it’s called “Brands & Outliers”: brands because they are the bellwethers of culture, and outliers because every movement begins as an anomaly in the landscape.

Today, we’re sharing this rich discussion with you. I want you to think of this as your smart friends and colleagues getting in a room and freely talking about what they’re paying attention to, because that’s what it is for me.

From this conversation emerges vital second-order insights that help progress our model of the markets. Our rule is to move fast and lean hard into casting the future.

It’s a deep dive primer into innovation, culture, business and future signals, but in a way that ties all of it together in an actionable story.

It will give you clear perspective and new ideas to work with.

I’ve included timestamps of highlights below, but there’s a ton of good stuff in here. 

If you like this video and want to see more recordings of our monthly Brands & Outliers meeting, let me know. We’d love to keep sharing this conversation with you.

Brand myths may seem like undecodable magic, but like Air Jordans and Barbie Dolls, what looks like an enigma on the surface is actually a formula underneath.

Brand myths perform 4 functions: the mystical, the cosmological, the sociological and the psychological. Each one of these functions creates context for understanding the world, and when done right, they create the world’s most significant names.

In this episode of Talks At Concept Bureau, ethnographer and brand thinker Peter Spear shows us how companies like Pinterest, Axe Body Spray and even Bitcoin all filled these functions, and were then able to take on mythical proportions as brands.

To get the inputs you need for brand mythology, Peter proposes Brand Listening – his extremely active and open form of qualitative research that anyone at any company can start doing right now.

It’s based on a few core principles, including the fact that we think in images, that people have experiences not answers, and that awkwardness is a beautiful way of opening people up.

This is a talk about both seeing and listening to your audience in a new way so that the mythology of your brand can do what myths are meant to do: give your people a sense of meaning and purpose.