The world’s most recognizable brands employ artists and storytellers to preserve their legacy.  Today, on Episode 2 of the second season of VISIONS, we're going live to the VISIONS Summit, recorded in June of 2023, in Chicago, and we'll listen in to our special guest, José Cabaço, the former Global Creative and Storytelling Director of Adidas and Orchid Bertelsen, the COO of Common Thread Collective and former Head of Innovation at Nestle Foods. Two experts who discuss the very real challenges we face in an ever more artificial world.

• {00:03:25} “It's easy to get into the fandom business, but it's really, really hard to be genuinely adopted by the culture that you're trying to be a part of, engage with, promote to the benefit not just of your brand, but that culture that you're putting the spotlight on. I think there are very few brands that do it nicely.” - José Cabaço
• {00:07:07} “Oh, innovation happens. It happens because you listen, you collaborate. The outcome, the data conversion of that is product that then betters your performance, becomes desirable beyond the function it was created for.” - José Cabaço
• {00:18:28} “It absolutely takes courage from a brand to very meaningfully and intentionally open up a platform and use a very iconic product that they have that has a lot of history, a lot of legacy.” - Orchid Bertelson
• {00:19:52} “You already mentioned the notion that if it's generated in AI, it's not property of anyone or a brand can claim the property of it or the ownership of it. Kind of. Because, for example, if you look at these two brands and you see the amount of archives that they have of their own products, if that is their prompt, that is theirs still.” - José Cabaço
• {00:23:35} “The line is very clear. You either are willing to be led in a conversation that you decided to engage with a certain culture, or you're not.” - José Cabaço

• Orchid Bertelson, Chief Operating Officer and Common Thread Collective
• José Cabaço, Artist and Global Creative Director and Head Storyteller at brands like Hurley, Nike, and Adidas

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

This season on VISIONS will explore the content of VISIONS: Volume IV by Future Commerce. VISIONS is an audio-visual Annual Trends report that examines the changes in culture and commerce and their impacts on the technology industry that serves them. VISIONS: Volume IV took place over three months, from April to June 2023, bookended by two events.

Today we go live to the first of those events at the Celeste Bartos Theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where we'll speak with a panel of modern culture reporters, foresight analysts, and media creators and ask them the question, “Where is the counterculture?”

• {00:04:11} “What we have right now is a lot of interesting niche subcommunities with their own cultures and then countercultures to those. And I think the result of that is it's very hard to know what's trending because trends really exist within these sort of niche subcultures and microspheres. And then by the time they exit, they're no longer a trend, they're more like a trend discourse.” - Daisy Alioto
• {00:06:47} “You can't really talk about counterculture without talking about the capitalization of it all. You can capitalize on these weird trends, whether it's something like Dimes Square, and then you see a year later, the entire Marc Jacobs campaign for a massive fashion brand is these characters. So is that really counterculture if that's cool now?” - Emily Sundberg
• {00:09:00} “Sometimes I do get bummed about the lack of existence of new things, and that's why we're going so hard on fashion history because everything feels really referential. But also there's something fun about new combinations and seeing a couch where there's a guy from the White Lotus on it, but there's also a girl that you saw at a party last week.” - Alexi Alario
• {00:11:26} “Is there counterculture or subculture or monoculture? It's completely dependent upon the sample size in which we're looking at. And for the most part, I think it behooves us to really broaden our aperture of really understanding what's most important to the most amount of people, because if we have to select too small of a sample size, we're just speaking to ourselves and really ignoring the masses.” - Matt Klein
• {00:16:14} “When we're talking about nostalgia and memory as some of the strongest mechanisms for marketing and the relationship that nostalgia and memory have to certain mediums, like the type of film or camera you were using when you first encountered something or the type of car you were driving when you first encountered something, it's very hard to package that in an authentic way, but if you can, that becomes the brand moat. And that's the thing that allows you to excel past all of your competitors.” - Daisy Alioto
• {00:24:02} “The thing about de-influencing is, yes, there's a little bit of stoicism of screw it, don't buy this thing, but it's still a form of influencing.” - Matt Klein
• {00:28:42} “Daisy Alioto: it's also important to remember that, for every counterculture movement, the response to it will be part of the cycle of the next culture, even if it's happening in this very fragmented way now.” - Daisy Alioto
• {00:35:34} “Nothing gets better without criticism. So I feel like it's okay that everyone is a critic as long as I think it creates a heightened awareness. And especially with algorithms. If you're not a critic, you're just going to let them like run over you.” - Alexi Alario

• Daisy Alioto, CEO and Co-Founder of Dirt
• Emily Sundberg, Writer, Creative Strategist, and Publisher at Feed Me Substack
• Alexi Alario, Co-Host of the Nymphet Alumni Podcast
• Matt Klein, Cultural Theorist and Publisher of Zine

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

The fight for our attention is key to understanding the modern media landscape, startup culture, capital allocation, and more importantly and ultimately, our economic system as a whole. Today we go live to the Visions Summit to ask the question, "Just how profitable can distraction be? And can we claw back any semblance of mindfulness without sacrificing prosperity?" Listen now!

• Companies have a carbon footprint but also an attention footprint
• With so much consumed passively, it’s easier than ever to fill the pipe, but is that creating rich outcomes for all parties involved?
• With the expense of durable web traffic ever increasing, will there be innovations ahead to help businesses win that game?
• What are we addicted to in the attention economy and how can looking at our devices as a dopamine hit help us accurately assess that?
• “If the resistance to iteration is too high, you're never going to find those new things you want to do.” - Mike Lackman
• Customers have to spend so much time scrolling through our websites now that it actually begins to waste time because as the technology has become easier, we’ve stopped focusing on providing something enjoyable and worthwhile for consumers
• Brands have the opportunity to delight their customers and deliver something that’s really great, and the more we innovate to provide those high-quality experiences, the more the subpar will be drowned out

• Ben Marks, Director of Global Market Development at Shopware
• Mike Lackman, CEO of Trade Coffee

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Has the push for engagement over enlightenment led to a rise of insincerity from brands and the way they interact with the public? Should brands comment on controversial topics such as politics and how can they do so authentically without perpetuating this celebration of insincerity we see among us? This is a conversation that needs to be had because it affects all of us. Listen now!

• “Brands need a point of view. And the question to me is more how it gets communicated and where it gets communicated. But I think if a brand is participating in a capitalist society, which by virtue of being in America it is, it should be transparent enough to have a point of view.” - Grace Clarke
• “By virtue of understanding the opposite of something, I started to really understand what the problem was or what the conversation was. I think there's definitely a fine line between insincerity, malicious intentional insincerity, and then satire. Because satire isn't insincere, it's actually extremely earnest in its attempt to prove a point.” - Grace Clarke
• “Overhype is a form of insincerity.” - Brian Lange
• “You then maybe cross the line when you're trying to manufacture something artificial.” - Miya Knights
• “There are elements of a meme bringing people together and then something genuine in the world that is sincere and beneficial can come out of it.” - Grace Clarke
• “Is it important that brands are transparent or is some element of insincerity actually protective for the business to grow in the long term?” - Grace Clarke
• “It is very easy to lose sight of who you are as a brand. And that's really important in teaching customers how to talk about you, not just because consistency is important for consistency's sake, but if companies are missing the chance to reroute themselves and their brand.” - Grace Clarke
• “In the past, before technology democratized the transactional experience all the power was with the brand, "I'll build it. You'll come. You're going to bust down my door and queue for hours for Black Friday," that kind of thing. And now I think consumers are voting with their dollars and they're voting with their feet. And so in terms of following that customer, the dynamics changed, flipped, where I feel the consumer is more in control.” - Miya Knights
• “Different groups are demanding different messaging from me or demanding different things from me, I'm only going to stretch myself for the best customers because that's where the money is.” - Miya Knights

• Miya Knights, author and retail analyst
• Grace Clarke, brand and omnichannel strategist

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners.

How does looking around at what others are buying affect purchasing behavior and why does that matter? Why do companies have to be aware of their own tendencies to be tempted to keep up with the Joneses and how can they balance risk taking and differentiation with also building on a secure tech stack?

• “People do things differently, they behave differently, when they think someone's observing them or when they are actually being observed.” - Brian Lange
• The more contextually we look at purchasing behaviors and the more data is industry-specific, the more we can understand these behaviors
• “It’s okay to buy the same,” when it comes to what back end systems are in place, “but you better be dang sure that it's in context to your brand where you're trying to be relevant.” - Dan Griffin
• “Don't make it about the merchant purchasing a stack. Support the stack by being really good at what you do. And I almost look at a responsibility back to the technology company to ensure that they're staying focused on that.” - Dan Griffin
• When it comes to bundling and unbundling your technology, “It's an interesting balance because there're pros and cons to both. I think both from a software company’s growth and just overall trajectory, like how they grow, then in tandem with the merchant because it's a dance. Both matter and they're both in concert with one another.” - Scott Elchison
• “If you're a merchant getting into this stuff, here's the thing. You need to understand your pain points and try not to get too far ahead of yourself.” - Dan Griffin
• “In areas where you don't know, lean into best practices. That's when you lean into best practices is when you feel like you don't have expertize and then you go like get after those things and start to think, "Okay, what's beyond best practices? How do I actually differentiate myself?” - Brian Lange
• FOMO drives a lot of keeping up with the Joneses. “Fear actually drives a lot of purchasing. A lot. And that's not a good thing.” - Brian Lange
• How have brands tried to keep up with other brands when it come to Web3, blockchain, NFTs, etc?
• “The idea here is that they weren't investing in blockchain technology, but they're like, "How do we invest in the culture, in the fandoms around that?" And that's where I saw from the brand level where people were all about it. There's attention, and where there's attention there is value, there's money to be made. And so, throw your brand at it, see what sticks.” - Scott Elchison

• Scott Elchison, SMS Partner Manager at Yotpo
• Dan Griffin, Former Head of Partnerships at Klevu 

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners.

How can brands differentiate themselves while remaining intuitive and familiar to consumers?   Are your car, phone, or shoes an outward sign of your personality? What is leading to the trend of odd-ball, zany web designs? 

• When it comes to experiencing a brand, the desire for something more than utilitarian varies from person to person
• “You're expecting certain types of content to be delivered in a specific way. And that's part of the attraction is for it to be this really intuitive, familiar experience. So I sort of put that to the side and think about DTC sites and retailer sites as having a lot more scope for variation and a different experience.” - Kiri Masters
• “There needs to be a balance between solving the homogenization issue and solving the problem of differentiation or distinction, and still being able to be intuitive, still being able to get your consumer to do the flow {from discory to checkout}.” - Roger Figeuiredo
• “It's really tough to stand out but not stand out so far that you're doing something unintuitive.” - Ben Marks
• “That discovery and awareness stage of the funnel is where there's a real opportunity to be different. And after that, you kind of want to bring it back to what's normal.” - Kiri Masters
• Maybe visual design inspiration coming from some of the same places contributes to such boredom online because too many brands are overusing trends rather than being original
• “You build your mood board, and you're going to go to other brands and you build your mood board off of other brands, and naturally is just going to lead to more of the same.” - Roger Figeuiredo
• “When you're building your mood board for the look and feel, maybe don't go look at other brands. Look for analogies in design. Then build your mood board off of things that are maybe real life stuff instead of other websites.” - Roger Figeuiredo
• “Don't do what your competitors, people in your category are doing, do things differently from the start. And you will be more likely to have a less boring, homogenized experience.” - Ben Marks
• Has Shopify both helped and harmed the growth of eCommerce? Helped by democritizing, removing the barrier of entry, but also harmed by too many template based sites, and also flooding the market with more competitors

• Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Marketplace Strategy at Acadia
• Roger Figueiredo, VP of Marketing at #paid
• Ben Marks, Director of Global Market Development at Shopware

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners.

There's been a lot of talk about this place that brands take in our lives that tries to fulfill meaning and purpose and community in all of our lives. And we've given a term to this today. We're talking about The Sacraments of Commerce. A lot of brands today ask us to put some faith in them or to believe in them. And what about the algorithm gods? 

• “You can't have integrity, you can't be building for the long term unless you are sustainable underneath. It's easy as a customer to believe in that because you see it proven true.” - Grace Clarke
• “That feeling of belonging and community that's been disrupted over the past couple of years because of our digital lifestyles, was something that could be infiltrated and addressed directly. Brands scaled to address that.” - Michael Miraflor
• “You need to have the values underpinned and then follow through with the customer experience for it to seem authentic and sincere and lead to that level of fervor and loyalty that verges on religious intent.” - Miya Knights
• A lot of traditions that we all grew up with are deeply rooted in a practice that came from our ancestors, that came from our parents. It's a tradition you hand down. Can we say the same about brands?
• “There's a lot of value in being a very deep part of very frequently repetitive, tactile, human, utilitarian things.” - Mike Lackman
• “Everyone does at this point have a responsibility to be proactive about their own algorithm. And it is something that has been such a net benefit for serendipity and discovery. It's incumbent on humans to have a front foot there and not simply be passengers in the experience that they're having.” - Grace Clarke
• People are becoming brands. Brands are becoming religions. Religions are becoming brands unto themselves. And brands are becoming people. Is this true?
• “There's a greater degree of individual humanity being injected into some of these other entities. I do think there's an opportunity that if we do it right, there's a chance for that to be a way to propagate a greater degree of decency.” - Mike Lackman

• Miya Knights, author and retail analyst
• Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Marketplace Strategy at Acadia
• Michael Miraflor, Chief Brand Officer
• Grace Clarke, brand and omnichannel strategist
• Mike Lackman, CEO of Trade Coffee

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners.

• “Being a retailer of a brand, there are a number of different pressures that I think they have to address, but in doing so, it will only make them stronger companies. It'll only make consumers want to shop with them more.” - Miya Knights
• When it comes to sustainability, are consumers really adhering to their convictions or are convenience and practicality leading to incongruent behavior there?
• “Retailers are going to have to be a lot more transparent and a lot more in the same way that they've had to cope with the diversification of channels, the complexity of just selling in terms of transparency and choice when it comes to sustainability, particularly around fulfillment, they're going to have to offer a lot more choice than they currently do.” - Miya Knights
• “It doesn't matter if you're 100 plus year old brand or if you're like a six month DTC brand. If you don't have that {sustainability}, it's going to be like trying to be a brand now without an eCommerce offering. It's just you're going to be missing out on so much opportunity.” - Michael Miraflor
• “My experience of people and how they spend their time with digital products is that they diligence them a little bit less, but classify them as generally bad, much faster, just to say, "They have all my information, so they're probably doing something bad with it, but I don't have as much intensity to scrutinize them." Yet, we interact with those products way more often for the most part.” - Grace Clarke
• “Fifty-one percent of our study said you have to fake it till you make it. Forty-nice percent said authenticity at all costs. And I think that that is that's actually the undercurrent of tension that we have in the world, even in our own businesses, is that we have to project outwardly like we are doing everything because we've got to fake it till we make it. When it becomes operationally efficient for us to do it all, we'll really do it all. Maybe. But there's the other side of that which says, "I just want you to tell me the truth. Just tell me the truth.’" - Phillip Jackson 
• “Folks that care about the purpose of the business, where they want to work and customers that care about who they want in their dollars with you can't sandbag those things. And so it's a very fine line between under-promise and then failing to compel versus pitch the best pitch you can come up with right now in this room and fail to think through whether you can do that the next 52 weeks of the year.” - Mike Lackman
• “If we're 100% outcome-focused, I think that leads to insincerity.” - Brian Lange
• “Tthere is sort of like the old saying, "People don't buy from companies, they buy from other people." And it's sort of democratized like it's bringing a face, not just one face, but individual faces to a brand and bringing that brand to life in a similar way that we've seen influencers drive sales and be the face of a brand.” - Kiri Masters

• Miya Knights, author and retail analyst
• Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Marketplace Strategy at Acadia
• Michael Miraflor, Chief Brand Officer
• Grace Clarke, brand and omnichannel strategist
• Mike Lackman, CEO of Trade Coffee

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners.

We live in a world that doesn’t work all the way. Is the amount of automation and machine learning and AI and even robotics that we're implementing in the world, displacing people's jobs and having a human impact?

Show Notes

• “It's creating some dynamics where a much smaller number of people can drive outcomes with a much larger number of dollars. If we're not really effective at promoting financial literacy and asking some big questions about what's different looking 20 years ahead from what the last 20 years were like, then there's going to be some collateral damage in the system that I think is really bad for everybody involved.” - Mike Lackman
• “You can automate things to make them more efficient, but you have to know how to do it well in the first place with a certain level of agency and authority and getting your hands dirty with it.” - Michael Miraflor
• How often are we designing the software stack before we even have a product and before we have even have addressed the customer’s problem?
• “Just blatantly throwing software at problems to solve problems, thinking that it's the software that overcomes the deficiencies of an impractical product or business, I think is itself inherently a challenge that we're all facing in our industry.” - Phillip Jackson
• What are some of those things that we're bringing into being or what we're building in the world that are laden with our biases?
• “One of the most frustrating things about customer service is when you end up on the phone with a system that is trying to replicate that of a human voice, human interaction, or human way of answering questions... You don't have to try to trick me to think that you're a person because you're just not. I would rather hit a series of numbers…to get you to answer versus me interacting with this AI as if you were human.” - Michael Miraflor
• “You have to get a gauge on what young people are thinking as expressed by what they're wearing and what they're doing. If you can't really get a sense of that, because the dominant form of social media is encouraging the proliferation of micro trends that really aren't a reflection, but they send a smoke signal, then you might have something that's a bit problematic on your hands.” - Michael Miraflor
• “The interesting piece here is that when we talk about this dystopian sort of like, well, this AI future, we're all going to get pushed around this and that. The alternative to that has to be an institution with enough trust and credibility that we're willing to let them become tastemakers, editors of newspapers, curators of fashion, pairers of coffee, those kinds of things.” - Mike Lackman
• “There was a dark side to those things that we do see as unifying, which is they tend to have some sort of pretty strong editorial, perhaps even tyrannical authority associated with them to be able to set those standards in place. And I guess my point of jousting with you on that when we think about AI, the counterpoint to letting the system just run the algorithm unchecked is that someone has to put guardrails on that.” - Mike Lackman
• Will the outputs of AI technology like Dall-E applied to commercial uses be a good thing or a bad thing in the long run?
• Michael Miraflor, Chief Brand Officer
• Mike Lackman, CEO of Trade Coffee

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners!

Live from the Visions Summit in West Palm Beach, FL, the conversation in this episode is around what we call Brand Romanticism. We’ve seen such an amazing proliferation of brand. There's more choice than ever before. Some say that brands are our canvas and the products are these new pieces of art that are being brought to the world. Are brands artists and our products their canvas?

Show Notes

• Are some brands fooling themselves thinking of their role as one of art when really their product is more about commodity and their role is really about commerce?
• Have we romanticized brands more than what is due to it? “Brands have an opportunity to support art and not delude themselves into thinking that they are the creators of product.” - Grace Clarke
• “Consumers are going to know if you're dressing up something that's basic and adding a couple of zeros to it because you've romanticized it by using some kind of art style to style it. But at the same time, I think it's important that brands understand where there might be adjacencies to their product.” - Miya Knights
• “You can make an argument that the brand is not art, but the brand is an excellent curator of the culture that it is participating in. Are you co-opting something that exists in culture for marketing purposes or for promotional purposes? Or are you a participant?” - Michael Miraflor
• “It seems like everyone who talks passionately about what they're working on automatically goes from 0 to 100 talking about getting venture-backed and shooting for a big exit, which is totally fine. I mean, that would be an amazing outcome. But I would love to see the story of more founders working hard on their projects regardless of that outcome.” - Michael Miraflor
• “Art is something that I would rather companies, specifically founders who are perhaps at an earlier stage and they're still understanding who their customer is and how their brand can grow, maybe borrow the principles of what it is to be an artist rather than trying to see yourself as one.” - Grace Clarke
• “Artists have to be true to themselves. A brand has to be true to its customers.” - Miya Knights
• “We affix ourselves to certain products or brands because it helps us understand who we are, and it also helps us relate to other people in our own niche. It gives us this shorthand in this other language. We can find each other quickly. We can converse on Twitter with this other language. So that belonging is a huge part of brand identity for me. That romanticism of art and gathering is really about social sharing.” - Grace Clarke
• “There are so many dynamics emerging that probably drag brands towards feeling that they should be more like art. But I think they have to be really clear on their purpose as a merchant and whether or not they have an artisanship or an artisanal story to tell.” - Miya Knights

• Miya Knights, author and retail analyst
• Michael Miraflor, Chief Brand Officer
• Grace Clarke, brand and omnichannel strategist

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!