Unseen Unknown: A Different Kind of Brand Strategy Podcast
If we can’t see it in our culture, we can’t know it in the market.
This is the podcast we always wanted to create for our readers.
Unseen Unknown is a brand and business strategy podcast about the hidden threads that connect even the most distant of cultural concepts. We look at the emerging trends and behaviors, and ask the bigger question, “Why is society moving in this direction, and how can we apply it to business?”
This is where Jean-Louis, my partner at Concept Bureau, and I combine our futurist thinking with our brand strategy experiences.
We believe if we can’t see it in our culture, we can’t know it in the market.
Before we saw the same wellness brands appear on both Goop and InfoWars, we couldn’t know that America’s warring sides were searching for the same myth.
Until clean and natural foods became top of mind, we couldn’t understand that religion was being reinvented.
Even the most vigilant cultures fail to understand their outcomes until they can see the root of their behaviors, like how the CIA was possibly too ethnically homogenous to see 9/11 clues.
These are the kinds of connections we’ll be working to discover.
We’ll publish two episodes a month — one house discussion with me and Jean-Louis, and one expert discussion with an exciting thinker in a domain. Expect to hear from people from all walks of life including artists, scientists, CEOs, journalists, professors, technologists and everyone in between.
If you’re a founder, leader, storyteller or creator, this podcast will compel you to think at a macro level you haven’t considered before.
Our first three episodes are live now and you can listen to them on Apple Podcasts, Google Play , Spotify or Stitcher.
Here’s a rundown:
Episode 1: The New Rules of Brand Strategy
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 Rawlence 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.”
Listen to this episode:
Episode 2: Where Identity Meets Behavior
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 Bebecca 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, and is on the Forbes CMO Next list.
Listen to this episode:
Episode 3: Women, Beauty, Money and Motherhood
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.
Listen to this episode:
We’ve been wanting to give you this podcast for a very long time and I can’t wait to hear what you think. Reach out to me at the channels below.
And if you like what you hear, please rate and review!
The next step in branding.
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… and don’t miss our Brand Strategy + Culture podcast, Unseen Unknown. I promise you’ll love it.
This article is based on what we’ve learned at our Brand Strategy agency Concept Bureau.
