Unseen Unknown

From the way we create our identities and manage our health, to the way we employ therapy-speak at work and vote in elections, it’s apparent that people are increasingly being guided by feelings and intuition in places where they may have once relied on reasoning or ideology. This new form of intuitive, noetic knowing is changing how people move through the world, and how brands can speak to them.

Weirdness reveals something profound about human nature, and lately more and more brands have been tapping into the delight of the unconventional. When done right, weirdness is highly relatable and offers brands a unique opportunity to create deep connections, foster loyalty, and shape the future in exciting ways.

What does it mean to be good at thinking? Or more importantly, thinking strategically? It’s the culmination of mental processes that enable us to analyze, reason, solve problems, make decisions, and generate creative ideas in an efficient manner.

In other words, it’s a buildable skill. In this house episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis take a deep dive into how to cultivate that skill effectively.

Culture is moving from the self-indulgence of conspicuous consumption to the self-denial of “conspicuous commitment”: a new status code that will affect every premium and luxury brand. In this episode we speak with Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb about how and why conspicuous commitment is taking over, as well as an interview with author W. David Marx who sees status as still operating by the old rules of wealth, perhaps now more than ever.

The world is starting to reconfigure itself around a very different kind of relationship. Weak ties, the underpinning of social innovation for the last two decades, are declining while strong social ties are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of our social fabric. In this house episode, we’re talking to Concept Bureau’s Chief Strategist Jean-Louis Rawlence, about the huge implications for tech innovation, community building and business. When strong ties become the future of community, community becomes the new brand.

Cults make effective brands, and today, they’re all around us. Perhaps the most insidious way cults have influenced our reality is in everyday language that’s meant to control behaviors and change perspectives. It’s language we use with friends and colleagues, language in our media and content, and language we hear coming from today’s most powerful CEOs, on branded websites and in keynote addresses.

In this episode we’re talking with Amanda Montell, a language scholar and author of the critically acclaimed book, ‘Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism’ to understand why cults have had a resurgence in branding and in real life. Cults and businesses have always been intertwined, and understanding how they use the power of language to move people is the first step to decoding how they work.

Today and throughout history, a mere six competing stories of ownership have dictated how everything in the world is distributed. As resources have become scarcer, everyone from American homesteaders and ranchers, to tech leaders and consumer brands, have created ways to impose their own preferred ownership story in a world where what it means to “own” something is constantly evolving.

We speak with Michael Heller and James Salzman, two of the world’s leading scholars and authorities on ownership, and co-authors of the book Mine!: How The Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives. They explain to us how the rules of ownership change in every generation, and how those changes reveal the true brand landscape, the role of business, and most importantly, a society’s shifting values.

For the fourth and final episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about seemingly new emerging forms of spirituality, and how new spiritual brands are positioning themselves to take advantage of our collective movement towards wanting to be both categorized but at the same time free from conventional binary definitions.

Allegra Hobbs is a journalist who’s explored the phenomenon of the Enneagram. She found that the Enneagram and other categorizing devices like it have also seemingly crossed over into the mainstream because we find ourselves in a perpetual state of isolation and alienation—something Rachel Lo discovered as she developed the dating app Struck, which helps match people based on their astrological signs.

Every single culture and subculture - from states and governments to user segments and brand tribes - falls along the tight-loose continuum. A culture’s tightness or looseness affects people’s perceptions of threat, how they relate to each other, how they consume, and of course the narratives that shape the businesses and brands that form within that culture. In this third episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we speak with Michele Gelfand, cultural psychologist and author of ‘Rule Makers, Rule Breakers’ about the invisible systems that make a culture relaxed or rigid, and the surprising tradeoffs involved.

For the second episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking with brand strategist and sociologist Ana Andjelic about systems of class and taste. In the past 10 years, new brands have emerged, specifically in luxury and premium categories, that point to a divergence in our social systems around what class and taste are, and how they are achieved. Ana talks about the rise of the Modern Aspiration Economy and how the brands of this new economy have done something remarkable: they’ve successfully decoupled class from money, and taste from wealth.