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.

When brands create tension, they force people to move.

Tension turns people into lovers and haters, but the one thing it doesn’t allow is for people to sit still. That’s good, because the last thing you want is a brand that’s ’nice’ or a brand that people are indifferent to.

Tension can come from a few places, such as comparing what is to what could be, or unearthing a new belief. Whatever the source of tension is, it 1) has to be about the user and 2) has to be consistent.

When done right, it creates loyalists and avid fans.

When done wrong, it can make people angry (Pepsi, anyone?) This video shows you the right and wrong way to create tension that actually moves people.

Read the full case study on “The Magical Art of Making People Move With Brand Tension” with examples, here.

You may not realize it but the world can be divided into two kinds of brands: those that ask the questions, and those that answer them.

Leaders are often compelled to create the kind of brands that answer. ‘This is how you should shop. This is the best way to dress. These are the products that will solve all of your problems.’…

But smart brands don’t fall into the answer trap. Instead, they exist to pose the big questions that matter.

Pantone vs. Crayola, Google and Facebook vs. everyone else, Unilever and P&G vs. a world of upstarts – all of these spaces have brands that were shortsighted enough to answer compared to those that were smart enough to ask.

Asking questions leads to a path forward, while answering questions leads to a dead end.

This is an abstract concept, but an extremely important one. I dive into all of these examples and show you exactly how an asking approach differs from one that answers.

Once you see the pattern around you, you’ll understand how to navigate your space in order to create a powerful brand position.

Read the full case study on “Strong Brands Ask, Weak Brands Answer” with examples, here.

There are two deceptively simple questions that will reveal a world of strategic opportunity for your brand.

They actually reveal a tremendous amount of information about the mindset of a company’s leadership team while posing a much more difficult challenge than most people realize.

Taken together, I like to call them the Perception Queries, and everyone can benefit from answering them.

You can use these queries to get laser focus on the direction of your brand strategy from the point you’re at today to where you need to be in 1, 3 and 5 years from now. I will show you the right and wrong way to answer the queries, how to best leverage these answers in your work, and how to unlock their deeper power.

Most importantly, they will prove valuable at every juncture in your company’s trajectory, especially when easy short term growth opportunities gently nudge you away from your ultimate long term vision.

Read the full case study on the Perception Queries, with examples, here.

War stories have always had a special place in American culture – the War on Cancer, War on Drugs, War on Poverty, the Battle of the Sexes, Fight Against Climate Change… the list goes on and on.

How has all of this war rhetoric, much of it false, shaped our thinking? Where did these stories even come from, and most importantly, where will they take us?

Jasmine Bina, CEO of Concept Bureau, shares her thoughts on how these stories have taken root in American culture and why they will likely never go away.