Unseen Unknown

We’re leaving the current age of social media and entering a new one where our symbols and our languages are changing. Any time a new age is born, the rules get harder, the audience becomes more discerning, and all of us - people, brands, identities - are separated into those that move ahead and those that are left behind.

The question now is, what is this new age that we’re walking into?

In this episode we speak with two experts on opposite sides of the spectrum in order to answer this question. 

Erin Weinger is the Vice President, Social Editorial, at Sony Pictures Television who has also worked with some of the biggest influencers and publishers in the game. Her vision of the new age of social media is a stark departure from where we are now.

We also speak with Dr. Therese Mascardo, a licensed clinical psychologist and founder of the wellness community Exploring Therapy. Dr. Mascardo is in a unique position to talk about the cultural shifts happening in social because she’s both in the practice of mental health, where much of social media can be more clearly understood, and in the practice of building a social media brand… as an influencer herself.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode:

• The Changing Language of Luxury: Experience, Education, and Poetry (Luxury Society)
• Is social media influencing book cover design? (The Guardian)
• Americans are reading poetry again because of Instagram (Quartz)
• Instagram appeal: How social media is changing product development in beauty (Glossy)
• How To Optimize Your Apology (Freakonomics)
• Yelp Reviewers’ Authenticity Fetish Is White Supremacy in Action (Eater) 
• Dr. Gabor Mate on Attachment and Conscious Parenting (YouTube)

Learn more about Dr. Therese Mascardo and Exploring Therapy here.  

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We’re used to looking at history in order to understand the present, but what happens when we look to the future? In this house episode we conduct ‘100 Year Thought Experiments’ - a simple mental device for brand strategists - to better understand the current cultural mechanics of health, careers, environmentalism and food.

“When the definition of something changes, the stigma around it changes, too.“

In all of these areas, definitions are starting to change. Our words and language, our perceptions and beliefs are shifting in exciting new ways that are more readily revealed when we look to the future first.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode:

• Playing With FIRE Documentary
• Why “natural” food has become a secular stand-in for goodness and purity (Vox)
• How American Masculinity Creates Lonely Men (NPR/ Hidden Brain) 
• The History and Nature of Man Friendships (The Art of Manliness)

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Influencer-led beauty veteran Ria Muljadi gets deep with us about the current role of a women’s brand, what it means to have a realization about yourself through a brand experience, the personal impact of reconsidering your national identity, and how burnout is the new cause.

“When this conversation started, it was almost like a floodgate. People felt it but never knew what it was until somebody said it.“

Ria is the CFO of Em Cosmetics, and formerly Head of Finance for Ipsy. She has the unique perspective of being someone who literally helped build the modern influencer-first beauty industry, but also seeing it more objectively from a non-branding role.

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

We speak with luxury branding expert Ana Andjelic about the imagined communities that form around identity brands, the importance of hacking subculture over hacking growth, and the gendered stories that tap into our collective psyche.

“Brands now create a sense of belonging to a specific community which is imagined, because we don’t know those people, we just know we like similar things and we share the same values.”

Ana is the former Chief Brand Officer for Rebecca Minkoff, former SVP and Global Strategy Director for Havas’ LuxHub, and currently serves as an Executive Brand Consultant for companies like David Yurman and Mansur Gavriel.

She’s also a Doctor of Sociology, prolific writer on all things retail, consumer behavior, branding and strategy.

Read all of Ana’s writing: http://www.andjelicaaa.com/

Read the article we discussed where Ana describes the value of hacking culture: https://medium.com/@andjelicaaa/hacking-culture-hacking-growth-a0cbf22917cf

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It’s the edge cases that hint at what’s to come in the next 5-10 years of brand strategy: the coming wave of new consumerism, reaching peak complexity as a society, and the fallacy of the D2C model.

In this launch episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis talk about how to create brand strategy frameworks that expand and contract so that you arrive at a defensible position, and explore current movements in especially noisy verticals like CPG, politics and education.

“So much of brand strategy is creating frameworks that deconstruct why the world works the way that it works, and then reconstructing it so it works differently.” 

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.