Second-order insights in strategy. — Welcome to our second episode of Brands & Outliers, where our team does a wide sweep of culture and presents every recent finding they think is worth noting. Culture is going more deep and more human. As the time-space compression of AI becomes more clear, people are grasping for…

How to spot change and predict the future — When Moonjuice was founded in 2011 by Amanda Chantal Bacon, it was easy for people (like myself) to dismiss it as out of touch branding. The company’s hero product, Sex Dust, was an adaptogen-laden powder that promised support for “your sex life, sexual arousal, or sexual performance” with a hefty…

A brand playbook for behavior and perception — Brands exist in the space between how people perceive themselves and how they behave. Our self-perceptions are the building blocks of our reality, and when the way we act doesn’t measure up to who we believe we are, it feels very uncomfortable. Oftentimes it’s the kind of pain that we…

Second-order insights in strategy. — 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…

…straight to your brand’s doorstep — Here’s the only definition of brand strategy you will ever need: Strategic brands bend the will of the market. It doesn’t matter if you’re the coolest brand, the biggest or the most innovative. None of those things are defensible on their own. Real strategy is when you make moves today…

How to win in every phase — Your brand can only exist within the culture of its time. If you get too far out ahead of that culture, you lose touch with your user. If you trail behind the culture, even a little bit, your user loses touch with you. Any given culture generally moves between 4…

What looks like magic on the surface is actually a formula underneath. — 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…

A case study on how to build and brand our new digital infrastructures — We used to pass culture through objects. There was a time for many of us when a vinyl record, a luxury handbag or a Lisa Frank folder were relics that signaled “I am one of you.” …

How to bet on the right thing. — At the heart of every culturally impactful brand is a wager on what the next 5, 10 or 15 years will look like. Impactful brands make it their job to inch toward that vision in every single action they take. Parsley Health is about functional medicine but if you experience…