26: How Consumers “Know” Things In Today’s World

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 noetic, direct-knowing way of moving through the world may sound familiar to you. Perhaps a colleague was “guided” to change careers, or a friend decided to “detox” their personal life. Maybe you, yourself, have dabbled in any form of “energy” practices.

None of these major decisions came from religious ideology. None of them came from scientific reasoning. They came from a third place of intuition, and this is an important cultural shift that revalues knowledge in our world.

When 87% of Americans believe in at least one New Age spiritual belief, it's clear this third place of knowing is growing. But what is really interesting is what we see when we drill down into that majority.

What we find is not so much spirituality but instead the very definition of noetics: knowledge that is felt to be true, inside, by the self, with intuition as its defining experiential characteristic. 

In this house episode, Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb gives us a clear, compelling look at what this third epistemology actually is and how we’ve seen this new belief system emerging for the past few years in our work at Concept Bureau.

It is a domain that is both needed and felt, but not yet surfaced in our culture… and that is the formula of a golden opportunity.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• The Noetic Future of Culture and Brands (Concept Bureau)
• High Fidelity Society Is Reorganizing The World (Concept Bureau)
• Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (John Vervaeke)
• The Body Keeps The Score (Bessel van der Kolk, MD.

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

In this house episode, we speak with Concept Bureau strategist Rebecca Johnson about the concept of "weirdness" and brands. 

All humans are weird, and brands that are willing to venture into strange and bizarre territories have a chance to connect with their audiences in a deeply emotional way. From Puppy Monkey Baby to the Pet Rock, we analyze brand weirdness's impact on consumer engagement and differentiation. 

Weird is risky, but it’s also highly relatable when it’s done right. It can engender a form of trust that brands don’t usually experience with their users, while also signaling a brand’s values and vision. 

It’s also a strong force of creativity. Everything new feels weird at first. Instead of shying away, Rebecca talks about how to lean into the odd side of human nature and create something novel.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Drawing Wisdom from the Weird: Understanding the Influence of Weird on Brands and the Future (Concept Bureau)
• Goodbye Relevance, Hello Relatability: The New Industry of Brand Connection (Concept Bureau)
• Interview: Kevin Kelly, editor, author, and futurist (Noahpinion)
• Private Dinner Party: Clothing Not Allowed (The New York Times)
• The Tube Girl is selling confidence — and her audience is lining up (The Washington Post)
• This Man Married a Fictional Character. He’d Like You to Hear Him Out. (The New York Times)

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

What does it mean to be good at thinking? Or more importantly, thinking strategically?

Most people answer this question by saying that in order to be good at thinking, you have to be knowledgeable. And while knowledge is certainly a critical input for good thinking, it’s just an input. It’s not the actual practice of being able to think well.

Good strategic thinking is 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 skill. But we don’t treat it as one.

It’s something we can get better at and refine, a muscle that we can strengthen, and yet outside of our daily work, we do very little to develop that muscle. And it’s a special muscle, because thinking strategically demands that we employ all kinds of cognitive abilities at once.

In this house episode of Unseen Unknown, Jasmine and Jean-Louis break down his steps for how to think strategically, and to keep getting better and better at it.

Don’t take your ability to think strategically for granted. Many of us only do a fraction of what is possible with our minds, but there is a lot more power available to us when we start to cultivate our thinking skills.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• The issue at Houston Airport — Occupied time & design. (Caus)
• Episode 369: Wait Wait...Tell Me! (99% Invisible Podcast)
• The Truth Behind Japan’s “Seven Minute Miracle” (BBN Times)
• Episode 130: Diana Chapman: Trusting Your Instincts (The Knowledge Project Podcast)
• Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns & Leadership (Andrea Mantovani on Medium)
• Conspicuous Commitment Is The Next Era Of Status (Concept Bureau)

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

Brands get lucky once, maybe twice every generation, when the rules of status change and social equity is suddenly up for grabs. Our Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb believes we are in the midst of one of those rare shifts right now, where we are moving from the self-indulgence of conspicuous consumption to the self-denial of what he calls “conspicuous commitment”.

Public figures are devoting themselves to difficult new modalities, diets, spiritual quests, life practices and ideologies. Your friends are going on arduous, painful, yet revelatory, psychedelic retreats. All around us, wellness brands, food brands, medical brands, lifestyle brands tell us that self-denial is the new flex.

No longer are we obsessed with flaunting material possessions and extravagant experiences; instead, we're witnessing the rise of people showcasing their unwavering dedication to self-work, vulnerability and personal growth.

In a time when nihilism is literally everywhere, when pessimism gets clicks on headlines, when post-capitalist hopelessness is a trending aesthetic on TikTok and every meme deals in absurdity, conspicuous commitment stands out.

In this episode, we also speak with W. David Marx, author of “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change” who has an alternative view of how status is tied to money more than ever, and what that means for an increasingly flattening culture.

If you deal in any premium or luxury category, this is a must-listen. The ways we seek to distinguish ourselves have dramatically evolved as we prioritize discipline and personal growth over material success.

That means everyone has to play by new rules.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Conspicuous Commitment Is the Next Era Of Status (Concept Bureau)
• Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change by W. David Marx (Amazon)
• Money Can’t Buy Happiness. It Can’t Even Buy Status, a New Book Says. (New York Times)
• ‘The Most Measured Man in Human History’ (Vice)
• High Fidelity Society is Reorganizing the World (Concept Bureau)
• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt (The Atlantic) 
• Brokenism (Tablet)
• Futurist Predicts Humans Will Achieve Immortality By 2030 (IFLScience)
• How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan (Amazon)

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

What happens when the world suddenly reconfigures itself around a very different kind of relationship? The last 20 years of social innovation has leaned into weak ties: distant social relationships that allowed us to trust and extract value on platforms like Yelp, LinkedIn and Facebook. But the next 20 years are already shaping up to look very different. 

Strong social ties, our close-knit relationships with frequent interactions, are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of the social fabric. In this new era of increased intimacy with our immediate network, what we value and what we create move in a markedly new direction. We co-buy homes with friends, form politically aligned living communities, go deep into conversational chambers and band together in vision-led DAOs. 

The way we relate to one another is more profound, but also more narrow. What we demand of our network communities, and the brand landscape in general, becomes more high stakes.

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.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid (The Atlantic)
• We Went to Anti-Vax Burning Man (VICE News)
• Friends are buying homes together. Here's why. (NBC News)
• The New Get-Rich-Faster Job in Silicon Valley: Crypto Start-Ups (New York Times)
• Community ≠ Marketing: Why We Need Go-to-Community, Not Just Go-to-Market  (Future, a16z)
• Shareholder Democracy Is Getting Bigger Trial Runs (New York Times)
• The Community Garden: The Case for Leaving FAANG Companies for Crypto (Paradigm)
• Crypto millionaires are pouring money into Central America to build their own cities (MIT Technology Review)
• The Town That Went Feral (The New Republic)
• Meet Moxie, a Social Robot That Helps Kids With Social-Emotional Learning (IEEE Spectrum)

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

Cults make effective brands, and today, they’re all around us. We engage with them on some level every day, and cult experiences have come to define so much of who we are as a society that you have to ask, how did we get here?

Perhaps the most insidious way cults have influenced the world around us 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. 

You’d be surprised to know that some of the successful brands of our time were either founded by, owned by, or closely tied to cults. There’s a very good chance that some influencer you’re following has at least borrowed from cult culture or knowingly created a radicalized cult around themselves. There are the cults we joke about like SoulCycle or Supreme, but they use the same dynamics and tools as the cults we like to gasp at in documentaries. 

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.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell  (Amazon)
• What LuLaRoe and Other MLMs Have In Common With Cults (Bustle)
• Elon Musk Is Not Just a Celebrity (The Atlantic)
• Five tactics used to spread vaccine misinformation in the wellness community, and why they work (Washington Post)

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

Have you ever stopped to think about what ownership means to us as a culture? Many of us see it as an artifact of the legal system or something that’s decided in courts. We believe it is a self-evident concept that lives outside of us and isn’t really part of who we are, but rather a set of rules that affects our mortgages and our car payments.

But ownership is in fact very much a part of what makes us human.

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 to understand how the concept of ownership has been upending the brand landscape. 

They explain to us how the rules of ownership change in every generation, and how those changes reveal the true brand frontier, the role of business, and most importantly, a society’s shifting values.  

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives (Amazon)
• Drinking Water: A History (Amazon)
• The Hidden Rule of Ownership (Reason Magazine) 
• Why you don't own the right to recline in your airplane seat (Salon)
• Why barbed wire — yes, barbed wire — was as transformative as the telephone (TED)
• Mine or Not Mine? An Interactive Quiz on the Ownership Secrets Everyone Should Know
• The New York Times Is Giving Up Its Cooking Community Facebook Group With Over 77,000 Members (Buzzfeed News)

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

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. 

Everything is being catered more and more to us as individuals—and religion seems to be shifting in that direction, too. Part of that shift is the way we understand what religion is in the first place, and our youngest generations are pushing us further toward newly remixed ideas of spirituality that borrow from a wide range of traditions. 

Allegra Hobbs is a journalist who’s explored the phenomenon of the Enneagram. The Enneagram is  a newly-revived derivative of the teachings of the Bolivian-born philosopher, Oscar Ichazo, that practitioners believe can lead to improved self-awareness. 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.  

This episode explores what these new forms of spirituality mean and how they’ve come into the mainstream with the emergence of a new spiritual consumer, and while discussions about spirituality can be challenging for a number of reasons, our conversations ended up revealing surprising potential implications for equity and inclusion in everything from how we find meaningful relationships to how we conceptualize our work. 

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• “Mucho Mucho Amor” documentary about the legendary astrologer Walter Mercado (Netflix)
• Psychologist Carl Jung on synchronicity (Arts of Thought)
• The Personality Typing System for Every Personality Type (Allegra Hobbs’ piece on Medium’s Forge) 
• Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World by Tera Isabella Burton (Amazon)
• Like Astrology and Natal Charts? Try the Struck Dating App (LA Times)

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

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’re talking about the invisible systems that make a culture relaxed or rigid, and the surprising tradeoffs involved. 

Michele Gelfand is a cultural psychologist and author of the book ‘Rule Makers, Rule Breakers’. Her life’s work has been spent researching how tight and loose cultures form in the first place, and if and how they can actually be changed. We talk about how this affects every kind of brand, including international brands, political brands, lifestyle brands, service brands, and CPG.

Of all the studied cultural phenomena out there, this is perhaps one of the most important in helping us understand the world at this very moment. 

Once you understand the concept, it will not only reveal a new perspective on the world of business and branding, it will also reveal the deeper logic beneath the many seemingly illogical things in the world that may have been on your mind lately.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Rule Makers, Rule Breakers (Amazon)
• Tightness–looseness: A new framework to understand consumer behavior (Wiley)
• Why countries with 'loose', rule-breaking cultures have been hit harder by Covid (Guardian)
• One Reason Mergers Fail: The Two Cultures Aren’t Compatible (Harvard Business Review)
• Mindset Quiz: How Tight or Loose Are You? (MicheleGelfand.com)

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

For the second episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking 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.

Brand strategist and sociologist Ana Andjelic places brands like Telfar, Blenheim Forge, Fly By Jing and Brightland in the Modern Aspiration Economy. This emerging economy trades in taste, aesthetic innovation, curation and environmentalism. And what’s remarkable about these brands is that they have all successfully decoupled class from money, and taste from wealth. 

In her new book, The Business of Aspiration, Ana explores this decoupling and contrasts the Modern Aspiration Economy to the traditional economy where consumers once signaled their status through collecting commodities, Instagram followers, airline miles, and busy back-to-back schedules. Now, it’s about collecting knowledge, belonging to micro-communities, and leveraging influence.

As Ana points out, this new cultural and environmental capital changes the way businesses and entire markets operate. We talked about where and when this decoupling started, the ways in which it has changed global markets permanently, and how brands can trade in this new capital.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• The Business of Aspiration (Ana Andjelic)
• Big Fashion’s Niche Future (The Sociology of Business)
• How Micro-Communities Transform Aspiration (The Sociology of Business)

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