HIGH FIDELITY SOCIETY IS REORGANIZING THE WORLD

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.” They had singular meanings that everyone agreed upon, and appreciation of the object itself was at the center of the culture.

But today, there is perhaps no more effective way to signal “I am one of you” than with a carefully selected meme or perfectly ungrammatical text. A specific mashup, a certain combination of emoji or a self-referential aesthetic can convey multitudes more about a culture now than any physical item ever could.

When we stopped passing culture through objects and started passing culture through digital artifacts, we moved from low fidelity society to high fidelity society.

My cofounder, Jean-Louis Rawlence, coined the term high fidelity society to frame the moment our cultural signals shifted from wide knowledge to deep nuance.

The low fidelity society of just a few decades ago thrived on singularities and binaries. Households had split roles, careers had predetermined trajectories, perceptions of gender ran within clear lanes, lifestyles spread across a simple set of socioeconomic classes, political parties were mirrored images of one another and economics followed the rules of supply and demand.

The spheres of possibility were narrow. We shared the same core values because we all watched the same TV, read the same papers and subscribed to the same institutions.

Less information was the hallmark of a low fidelity society and what made it work. When a world is that small, it can only support a simple set of social rules. If a subculture didn’t fit our neat binaries and categories, it was omitted from the canon or filed down to fit into broader societal trends. It makes sense, then, that our cultural objects took little context to be understood.

But high fidelity society shifted things. Suddenly, with our worlds online and with the ability to capture and codify so much more information, culture ballooned and our digital objects became massively heavy with meaning.

As the sheer volume of culture in our digital worlds inflates every day, the centerpoint of history only gets closer. This phenomenon has rendered trends meaningless as markers of time and place and similarly snapped our connection to what might be called the highest tier of cultural objects: historical art.

“Nowstalgia” and the loss of time and place.

Younger collectors are proving to have no regard for the masters or the canon because, as professor Giana M. Eckhardt notes, “If you look back at human development, there were tens of thousands of years in which things didn’t change that much. Humans have not developed enough to be able to react to social change that is this quick. This leads to people putting a value on the new in different ways from the past.”

But I would take this insight a step further. What we’re really seeing is the weakness of physical objects as vessels of culture in our expanding high fidelity society.

When a culture changes its medium, the medium changes the culture. Keep in mind that high fidelity society is not merely about more choice. It is about exactness. Our new medium of passing along culture has allowed for an incredible new fidelity to be had in every way we choose to engage with the world. When we engage in new ways, we create new realities.

Nearly every singularity and binary – gender, family, identity, and so on – has crumbled. Lifestyles and socioeconomic tiers have at once exploded and collapsed into each other. Social rules have become complex (and if you don’t think so, you’re probably breaking them). Career paths are unrecognizable from where they were a decade ago, and a meme page like Litquidity can spin out into a VC, which it did.

If you’ve ever laughed at a “starter pack” meme, you’ve felt the gulf between low fidelity society and high fidelity society.

Photo: high earner, not rich yet finance guy in Montauk starter pack meme showing high fidelity society

A Litquidity meme can nod to various cultural touchstones in one simple image. It might make a reference to HENRY culture, self-skewer bruised egos and the need for status regardless of the cost in money or self-respect and embrace the cognitive dissonance of new wealth at a time when the markets have failed to act the way they should, while still reveling in the basic bitchness of it all.

But most importantly, if you understand all of these layers together, you also feel the giddy, feverish camaraderie of those who practice the “farce of high finance”. And even if you don’t understand this meme, you still recognize that there is tremendous information density within it.

The physical objects of low fidelity society worked to homogenize our culture, but the digital artifacts of high fidelity society fragment culture into many pieces. And it is within those fragments that we can begin to see the future of business and branding.

Dating app Feeld operates in high fidelity society. They are part of a cohort of early brands that feel the pressure for a new digital infrastructure to house our high fidelity needs, and my team and I were fortunate enough to work with them to develop their brand strategy.

Feeld has created a platform for dating in all of the ways that low fidelity society could not hold. Polyamory, consensual non-monogamy, homo- and heteroflexibility, pansexuality, androgyny, aromanticism, voyeurism and kink are just a few of the sexual identities that high fidelity society not only holds, but makes increasingly visible. Much like the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis of language, the more ways we have of expressing ourselves, the more we will express ourselves in different ways.

All of these identities demand new forms of connection, and Feeld is creating a unique infrastructure that allows connections to evolve instead of conform. Every feature, whether it’s the typical swipe or the novel “desire” tag, is tested with the question, “Are we letting people create new forms of closeness and intimacy here, or are we forcing people to follow old models?”

One of the clearest insights in our research for Feeld was that people in the dating pool have begun to move away from a destiny mindset of marriage, the American dream or other low fidelity aspirations to a distinctly growth mindset.

Daters today expect relationships to help them grow as individuals, and for many, there is no end state or goal. Instead, dating is a continuous form of growth and opportunity to discover who they are. This user sentiment stands in stark contrast to the dating apps designed for low fidelity society that boasted of being “designed to be deleted”.

Most importantly, Feeld is not the fringes of culture. In our research, we found that heteronormative users, as well as people who had not yet experienced the platform, expressed the same desire for vivid connection, aliveness and a growth mindset. They simply had not found their avenues yet. Feeld is, in fact, all of us.

In a sea of dating apps racing to flatten the human experience, Feeld has opened a portal to something much larger. Dating in high fidelity society is multiplicative. It has become recursive, and that requires a very different kind of platform.

As New York Times reporter Gina Cherelus has astutely said, “To describe yourself as single and in search of a relationship is almost too simple of a label in 2023. The way we seek romantic connections, especially with the influence of social media and dating apps, has naturally altered our behaviors and language around dating.”

Feeld’s world of dating, sexuality and relationships embraces this ever-increasing complexity, in part by utilizing the layered meaning that characterizes high fidelity society.

In high fidelity society, a wellness influencer can at once signal their health practices and political leanings with leetspeak like “medical indu$try”. An aesthetic like corecore can at once signal a certain subculture’s age, nationality, disillusionment with technology and the larger context of absurdist content that gives people room to criticize something while also sheepishly embracing it. Feeld respects the fact that its users are already immersed in a highly contextual world.

Not many brands operate in high fidelity like Feeld does, but more and more are making the jump, and we’ve had the privilege of working with some of them at Concept Bureau.

Companies that are building for high fidelity understand that they are no longer building for the average or the standard. They are building platforms and communities that allow for a fragmenting of experience, giving users room to create net-new realities.

They know that as peoples’ communities and identities become more specific, our many different cultures will only become more narrow and deep. The mechanics of this new culture, then, naturally incentivize the compounding of meaning and with the proliferation of content creation tools (dare I say A.I.), the density of culture will only increase.

In our work, we have seen a growing appetite for high fidelity infrastructure in every single category. Whether it’s work, finance, health, luxury, education, parenting or anything else, people are already living high fidelity lives but are forced to express them on low fidelity platforms.

When we see that tension, we know there is latent demand for new infrastructure. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for brands to leapfrog a market full of low fidelity players by ushering people into a high fidelity experience.

But codifying high fidelity society is a difficult task for any founder. There is no precedent to fall back on, and as the world reorganizes itself, we have to be careful to not use old rulers for measuring new ideas.

There are two major paradigm shifts that can guide you in the right direction and have proven to be fundamental in moving our clients over the line from low fidelity society into high fidelity society.

They require a significant change in how we understand networks, but even more importantly, they begin to show us just how big of an opportunity lies ahead.

Shift #1: From Goalposts to Participation

Low fidelity society is organized around goalposts. Getting a college degree, house, promotion, marriage, kids and retirement are the obvious ones. But there are other goalposts everywhere around us, like being a LinkedIn super connector, being verified on Instagram, making the Forbes 30 under 30, backpacking through Europe, starting your first business or “finding yourself”.

You have or don’t have. You reach the goalposts or you don’t. Up until this point, we’ve been able to measure value in binaries because low fidelity society gave us clear definitions of what mattered.

But high fidelity society resists such clear definitions. What matters to one fragment of culture will not matter to another. What matters to hopepunks vs. nihilists, keto warriors vs. vegans, tiny homers vs. van lifers or anti-natalists vs. mommy tribes will all be different.

The desire to experience progress in one’s life never goes away, but how we measure that progress has become much more nuanced.

In high fidelity society, goalposts are replaced by participation. In a culture where there is no singular end goal, progress becomes invisible and our value is instead measured by how deeply we engage.

We realized that Feeld users across the board were not looking to reach the next goalpost. Their growth mindset resisted everything you might see in a traditional dating environment. Instead, Feeld users, and people in high fidelity society in general, pay attention to participation signals.

It is not how much you have accomplished, but instead how much you have engaged and evolved. Over and over again, people described coming to Feeld in order to feel vividly connected to their minds, bodies and relationships, and they looked to learn from others who had done the same. They sought to participate rather than reach an arbitrary relationship goalpost, because participation proves a genuine interest in growth.

Goalposts run out at some point. Business author Donald Miller has noted that after marriage and kids, life stops giving us scripts for how to matter in the world. Perhaps that’s why midlifers 50 years and older are Feeld’s fastest growing demographic on the app. Even up until then, you can likely sense that the goalposts of low fidelity society are becoming increasingly meaningless.

Polywork, a network for multi-hyphenate professionals, is another early example of a brand experimenting with new ways of measuring participation while de-emphasizing the traditional goalposts of their space. They’ve rethought what work and collaboration really mean in high fidelity society, and have built a creative model for revaluing participation between users. They understand that value systems are changing.

It’s vitally important to note, however, that participation needs to be a currency between people. Platforms have historically made participation a currency between the user and the brand, but that’s meaningless in high fidelity society. We’re exchanging weak ties for strong ties, and deep networks for wide networks (something I have talked about here and here).

Making participation between people something that is valued, measured and highly visible within the platform experience – without the expectation of reaching a goalpost – creates wholly new opportunities for high fidelity brands.

Shift #2: New Ways of Knowing

In high fidelity society, there is more than one way of knowing.

For the past year, my Concept Bureau colleague, Senior Strategist Zach Lamb, has been exploring the new ways of knowing that have emerged in religion, politics and lifestyle. According to Zach, we’ve bypassed the models and institutions that used to mediate higher knowledge for something more immediate and direct.

Knowing in high fidelity society is now firsthand. Self-directed ketamine startups aim to replace the therapist’s office. Mystical Instagram accounts have replaced church. TikTok has replaced school.

Call it spirituality, intuition or being tapped in – whether it’s knowing god, knowing the truth or knowing oneself, the very business of knowing has become a highly personal and emotionally-driven endeavor. We are exploring new, unfettered ways of knowing everywhere around us. And all of these new ways of knowing help us create new stories about who we are in the world.

As culture multiplies and fragments, new ways of knowing will also be the hallmark of brands in high fidelity society. In such a dimensional era of culture, we can no longer determine what we need to know by glancing at a list of LinkedIn recommendations, a work history or a bulleted resume. Nor can we glean what matters from a Tinder blurb, an Instagram profile pic, a list of interests, a badge, a milestone number, a label or a bio.

These rough, often misleading approximations of who people are have never fully worked, even in low fidelity society. And they will stop working entirely as culture becomes more exact.

If we are building for the fragmenting of experience and creating room for nuance and specificity – for people to connect deeper instead of networking wider – then our platforms need to create new ways of knowing that go far beyond anything we see today, because every low fidelity signal will fail in the high fidelity world.

Feeld has the same challenge. Creating new ways of knowing another person (or oneself, a relationship, a couple and so on) will be fundamental to their success. They, like every other high fidelity brand, will need to reconsider how people both express themselves and understand each other, oftentimes rethinking the very mediums through which people can connect.

For us as brand strategists, it also meant engineering a brand experience that leaned into the feelings and emotions of truly knowing oneself and others.

Every great brand sets the expectation of the experience before people cross the threshold of conversion. High fidelity companies need to be especially careful in setting the expectation of new ways of knowing, whatever that might be for a specific brand, because we can’t expect people to behave in high fidelity ways if we do not first make them leave their low fidelity biases at the door.

Your brand is the first stop in shaking people out of their old habits. Every current way of knowing – from bulleted stats to blurbs to recommendations to bios to photo carousels – needs to be rethought. None of these help us feel a person, and absolutely none of them are a strong foundation for greater participation between people.

Brands like Fieldtrip, How We Feel and allUP (a Concept Bureau client launching soon) have built innovative formats for new ways of knowing that historically weren’t available to their users. Each of them makes personal or interpersonal understanding the bedrock of their UX.

The new ways of knowing that will matter are those that help us weave a story about who we are in the world and how others’ stories intersect with our own. That is where high fidelity flourishes.

The Universal Reorg

I’ve found high fidelity/ low fidelity to be a great tool for both organizing the players in a landscape and understanding where behaviors are headed.

Brands that play in high fidelity society create a natural tension with low fidelity players. In branding, tension is a great tool for forcing a decision. Our new digital infrastructures will not just be incremental improvements. They will be invitations to either stand still or step into a new reality.

But more interestingly, as a strategist I have seen just how eager people are to start living in high fidelity society everywhere, although they may not have the words to articulate it. In a particularly moving interview, a Feeld user said that in high fidelity, “You feel like you are able and allowed to glow in every part of your life […] I feel like I can breathe”.

If I took that quote out of the dating space and put it in another space like work or finance or education or social media or fashion or beauty or wellness or anything else, it would still ring true. If you do good user research in your industry, you will eventually uncover this sentiment across your entire population, as well. The desire to live in high fidelity is universal across people and categories.

It is not technology that begets culture, it is culture that begets technology, and in every generation there is usually one major cultural shift that reorganizes all of the technology ahead of us. High fidelity society is an incredible opportunity to position your brand as a force for moving forward.

Make new MEANING

We build powerfully strategic brands that create categories, win markets and move the collective experience forward.

STRATEGY THAT SPEAKS TO CULTURE

BRANDS THAT CHANGE THE RULES OF THEIR SPACE

We build brands that act as an inflection point, the before-and-after symbols of their space. These are the brands that make new meaning for users and change the rules of their categories.

We’re obsessed with culture, behavior, mental models, market dynamics and business strategy because we know that a brand is the predictive interpretation of all of these signals.

Brand strategy, big or small, is the only way to pull your users into the future you envision.

Services

SHAPING NEW AND DEFENSIBLE SPACES

BRAND

STRATEGY

Our high-touch process isn’t just about creating a good brand for today. It’s about creating a strong brand that lives in the future, and creates just enough tension to pull your users into a new world with new meaning.

That’s the world that your brand is positioned to win in.

We work in deep collaboration with your team to unpack the hidden forces and perceptions emerging in your space, and create a compelling identity that lives across all divisions and functions of your business. Our strategy will inform every decision you make – from marketing and communications to talent and operations – so that each move only accelerates growth and defensibility.

HOW WE MOVE BRANDS FORWARD

Create Markets

Innovations don’t thrive in legacy markets. We push our frameworks and processes to the edge of your space. That creates opportunities for new markets that compel users to drop their biases, change their behaviors, and filter competitors out of the consideration set.

Create Movements

Movements can be subtle or profound, but they are always happening beneath the surface. We know how to spot the early signals of a consumer shift and how to leverage them for future-focused brands that want to capture a market instead of being forced to follow it.

Create Bonds

The brand-consumer bond is evolving to include a lot more than quality, price and convenience. The new intangibles of a strong user connection need to be woven into the fabric of a brand experience, and engineer the kinds of bonds that go deeper than a product can.

FUNDAMENTALS OF OUR APPROACH

Deep research that walks us into the future.

We believe a powerful brand strategy is also a powerful business strategy. Every decision you make, today and into the future, will be based on the deeper patterns, signals and intel that we will surface in our work.

Real growth that comes from strong defensibility.

Growth doesn’t just happen in conversion. We also focus our strategies to earn attention capital, loyalty and reputation. Your message doesn’t need to be the loudest. It needs to be the most resonant with your audience.

A tightly woven culture across your company’s teams

Our strategies create a shared context across your users, your employees, and all of your business activities. Through our process and comprehensive onboarding, your team will learn to think and act strategically, with confidence and commitment to your brand’s identity.

List of our services :

BRAND STRATEGY & IDENTITY

MARKET STRATEGY

CATEGORY CREATION

MARKET FORECASTING

CONSUMER/ INVESTOR NARRATIVE

VOICE AND LANGUAGE

MEDIA NARRATIVE

TACTICAL PLANNING

CONTENT PLANNING

CREATIVE IDEATION

VIRTUAL WORKSHOPS & TALKS

We currently offer bespoke corporate workshops and speaking engagements with some excellent, needle-moving frameworks and topics (if we do say so ourselves) that will uplevel your team in a day.

These are highly engaging, provocative sessions that will mobilize your team in a unified direction in brand building. We bring our proprietary processes and insights, you bring your people. It’ll be a good time.

About us

EXPLORING THE EDGE

OF STRATEGY

We have a personal passion for understanding why the world works the way that it does. We’re constantly working to decode hidden structures in our culture, the reinvention of identities and ideas, and most importantly, the stories that force people to move.

We continuously publish our latest thinking in articles, podcasts, videos and seminars because part of our exploration is about sharing our ideas and inviting other thinkers into the mix. We’re glad you’re here in the mix with us now, too.

Come back often. There’s always a new conversation happening.

https://conceptbureau.com/

THERE IS NO BRAND STRATEGY WITHOUT A PREDICTION

How to bet on the right thing.

BRAND STRATEGY, FEATURED, FUTURISM

OCTOBER 26, 2022

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 the brand in any meaningful way, whether its logging into their patient portal, walking into a clinic, or following CEO Robin Berzin on social, you will see that they are betting on a very different kind of medical mentality emerging in the coming years among consumers.

Parsley believes patients will become the new experts: proficient in their own health and wellness, talking from an empowered point of view with their medical providers, and open to exploring complementary therapies that combine mind, body and soul.

Nearly all expressions of the Parsley brand are geared toward making this future a reality. Even though Parsley has great tech that makes the medical experience remarkably different from the usual visit to the doctor’s office, they rest their brand strategy on the changing user instead of their platform.

What Parsley gets right and so many others get wrong is that ideas, not technology, are what impact the future the most.

It was the romanticized notion of the nuclear family, not the mass production of cars, that changed America’s suburban topography. It is the changing notion of career and success, not the advent of laptops or post-Covid remote work, that will alter the world of work forever.

Oftentimes, future-forward brands tend to make technology the center of their strategies rather than a larger idea, but as Tom Vanderbilt puts it, “When technology changes people, it is often not in the ways one might expect.”

The washing machine had the potential to liberate housewives from the home, but instead it freed them up to do the work their housemaids once did. Though the technology changed, the idea behind a woman’s role had not.

Predicting the future is fundamental to your brand strategy but not as easy as it may seem. The correct signals often get lost in the noise of invention.

Taking a look at films from the 1960s that predicted the future, it becomes apparent just how easy technologies are to predict, but changes in behaviors and beliefs are much harder to forecast, even though they are the major drivers of a culture’s evolution.

“The Home of 1999”, a film from 1967 made by appliance manufacturer Philco-Ford predicted where technology would sit in our lives with surprising accuracy, but made glaring omissions in how culture would evolve.

The 1960s futurists behind this video predicted online shopping, but not female financial independence. They predicted emails, but not remote work. They predicted microwaves and other kitchen technology, but did not predict that fewer and fewer people would be eating around a dinner table together.

If this video feels strangely empty to you, it’s because while technology is an important part of the future, it simply is not the future itself.

Ideas, not technology or invention, are what change the future most, and that is what you should be betting on. Parsley has great tech, but it is the shifting cultural convention that will change their future, and every day they are speeding that change along.

The future isn’t new technology. The future is changed people. Your brand should be placing its bets on who we will become.

Starbucks built a brand on the prediction of a changing culture that was lacking places to gather, and the creation of the third space to fill that future need.

So when Starbucks announces that they are piloting EV charging stations in their parking lots, it naturally makes one wonder if they’re still betting on that future.

Fast Company, October 26, 2022

On the surface, it seems that perhaps they are pivoting their bet to the technology. Starbucks wants to attract more road warriors, they know that more of those people will have EVs, and so they’re creating a convenient place for them to stop while they charge.

True, yes. But what may be more true is that our third space is changing.

A great deal of Starbucks’ square footage is used for work, and in the era of remote workers, even more laptops and bookbags have popped up in locations across the globe.

Starbucks isn’t betting on EVs. They’re betting on our changing relationship to the commute and work. What they see is EVs eventually becoming autonomous self-driving vehicles, and that presents a huge opportunity for behavior change: the car as the third space, where people who are no longer required to have eyes on the road can instead work on their way to their destination.

Work has already become decoupled from the office and the desk. There is a changing mentality that “work time” and “living time” are not two separate halves of the day, but rather many fragmented windows that splice in between each other. When the belief about when and where we work changes, so does Starbucks’ place in the world.

It’s not a given, but like any good brand, Starbucks is making a prediction and then working to make that prediction a reality.

When a brand has a prediction at the center of its strategy, it sends a signal to the market that the company not only intends to own that future, but that any other brand playing outside of that future will be sidelined.

Last year Kia Motors rebranded to drop the “Motors” from their name and simply become Kia with the tagline “Movement that inspires.” Like General Motors and Mastercard who also released newly minimalist logos around that time, they were working to distance themselves from their original technologies.

With all of these companies, the future prediction at the center of the brand was moving from the technology to a larger idea. Kia President and CEO Ho Sung Song made it clear that, “It’s no longer about machines, it’s about people.”

Moving from motors to movement implies a strong belief of the future for Kia – that it’s not going to be about making a better engine, but rather about changing our beliefs and behaviors around how we move in this world.

The greatest benefit of a brand strategy based on a prediction is that it naturally spells out the business strategy. The expert patient, the third space, the future of movement – all of these predictions lay out strong parameters for the business itself.

They dictate business model, product roadmap, UX, values, org chart and so on, in ways that technologies alone cannot. And when brand strategy begets business strategy, there is a beautiful symmetry that only makes both parts stronger.

Making the right kind of forecast means thinking deeply about where people are headed and what emerging beliefs, behaviors, mentalities, value systems, ideals and cultural ideas can be brought to the surface with the right conditions.

Technology creates new opportunities and branches in the human path, but it is only larger ideas and mindsets that dictate which path is ultimately taken.

The focus of your prediction matters because the brands that predict the future are the brands that make the future. Everybody else is simply following the path laid out by others.

BRAND SINGULARITY WILL DEFINE THE NEXT 5 YEARS

Divisions between consumer brand, employer brand and personal brand have all but disappeared.

BRAND STRATEGY, FEATURED, MARKETING

SEPTEMBER 14, 2022

Brand strategy, at its core, is about predicting the future and then making that future a reality.

The outsized benefits of brand live 3, 5, sometimes even 10 years ahead. Brands that pull that future into the present day change users’ consideration sets and bend the will of the market toward their doorstep.

Strategists are futurists. There is no strategy without a prediction.

If you get those predictions right, you will get a brand strategy that amplifies the business strategy rather than trailing it.

There is one future signal that has an immediate impact on branding for nearly every company in the next few years and it can be found in a simple, unassuming chart about C-level job postings that was published in HBR this month.

The C-Suite Skills That Matter Most, Harvard Business Review August 2022

In the study, researchers found a rapidly growing appetite for CEOs with strong social skills coupled with an equally declining appetite for operational expertise. In other words, companies want leaders who know how to leverage and navigate culture more than they want leaders who know how to direct financial resources and technical expertise  —  and the inverse relationship between these two needs has only gotten more dramatic in the last 7 years.

It makes sense that as companies have become more complex they need leadership with higher levels of interpersonal fluency, but something else is happening behind the executive curtain.

The trifecta of consumer brand, the CEO’s personal brand and the company’s employer brand are all becoming the same thing.

Company boards are increasingly searching for ‘blue unicorns’  —  leaders with powerful social presence who, as Peter Aceto, former CEO of Tangerine once said, “would rather engage in a Twitter conversation with a single customer than see our company attempt to attract the attention of millions in a coveted Superbowl commercial.”

Blue unicorn CEOs are no longer figureheads for the company brand, but rather direct expressions of the brand itself.

Our perceptions of what makes a great leader have changed significantly in the last decade, due in part to lockdowns, unprecedented scandals of all kinds, and never-before-seen market dynamics. Today, we expect leaders to be highly self-aware, open and at times even vulnerable.

In fact, there is growing evidence that the number one predictor of someone’s success in today’s business climate isn’t IQ (intelligence quotient) or EQ (emotional quotient), but something called CQ: the quotient that measures “the capability to function effectively in a variety of cultural contexts.”

CEOs must first and foremost be stewards and navigators of culture. But there is perhaps an even larger brand benefit here.

Celebrity CEOs like Jay-Z, Martha Stewart, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Adam Neuman have created brands that make them impervious to angry boards and poor P&Ls, but also trained the public to demand a certain kind of enigma from its corporate leaders.

Enigma, charisma, whatever it is, we now expect a certain awe-inspiring magnetism from our CEOs, and this is increasingly the yardstick for measuring good leadership, instead of more historically important markers like strategic thinking and industry expertise.

Meanwhile, the public’s growing appetite for business news over the past few years has incented media to not only cover more business, but reduce its happenings into easy-to-follow storylines, which are bedazzled with drama, gossip and mystery.

The CEO has become a cultural bellwether.

And you can’t talk about culture without talking about the third piece of the branding trifecta: employer branding. Knowing how to build, navigate and bridge cultures is the biggest thing we see in employer branding today.

There is the obvious benefit of attracting high-level talent, but as my colleague Zach Lamb has pointed out, markets and consumers are paying attention to employer branding practices and cultures.

In our own research at Concept Bureau we’ve seen that in B2B sales a surprising number of clients will first vet a services partner by their Glassdoor reviews, believing that if that partner doesn’t treat their employees well they won’t treat their customers well, either.

As work memes take over our feeds and what happens inside a company continues to make the news, companies can’t afford to have an employer brand that is not completely synonymous with their overall brand.

In the near future we’ll be seeing Brand Singularity, where personal brand is company brand is employer brand, and the product is the story that emerges in the overlap of all three of these things.

Today’s typical brand addresses the trifecta with three different answers. Netflix’s consumer brand is closely tied to their content. CEO Reed Hasting’s personal brand is visionary at times, while lacking in more recent times. And their employer brand vacillates between ruthless and confused.

On the other hand, we have Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s female-focused media company that has produced hits like Big Little Lies and Little Fires Everywhere in the eight years since it launched. They have not reached brand singularity yet, but already they are making inroads toward it and seeing the benefit.

Their content portfolio is thin, but there is a singular, synonymous brand between Witherspoon’s persona and the consumer brand. She is Hello Sunshine, and Hello Sunshine is her. It’s an overlap that is so powerful that Witherspoon just sold the company for over $900M.

Hello Sunshine is no Netflix when it comes to market cap, but $900M for a fledgling studio in a contracting market is by all measures outsized when compared to the giants in the room.

In the next 5 years, we will see companies reaching Brand Singularity and reaping the early rewards of market share, fandom and talent retention. They will be the companies that have done the hard work of creating a unified brand front  —  not synchronicity like we have seen with branding in the past, but instead synonymity.

Right now we see only parts of the equation being written. Many companies master personal brand + consumer brand, such as Hello Sunshine, but also the ventures of the Kardashian-Jenner clan and MrBeast. Even with only half of the Brand Singularity equation figured out, these names are making big profits.

As David Friedberg recently said, the influence of these brands is outsized and defensible. They prove that when the CEO is a direct expression of the brand and vice versa, their value takes on exponential proportions.

E95: Winter is Coming, Europe’s energy crisis, Kim Kardashian’s new PE firm & more

On the other side of the equation we see inroads being made with the overlap between employer brand and consumer brand.

Amazon may not be one of the most positive employer brands in their warehouses, but it is one of the most effective employer brands in the executive realm. If you pay attention to all of the messages in their press, good and bad, you will get a clear message about their operational excellence.

It’s no accident that stories about the empty chair in the meeting, the two pizza rule and three good decisions a day not only made their way into public consciousness, they served as signals of what the overall Amazon brand was about. Prospective talent, especially elite leaders, understand that even with rumored cutthroat practices, they would not be hindered by underperforming teams  —  a common concern among the many high quality leaders I have personally interviewed over the years, and a fact Amazon is banking on.

Amazon’s employer brand and internal culture is in reality a marketing vehicle for both attracting talent and buttressing the consumer brand. As Prime members, we read those stories with disdain, but somewhere in the back of our minds we know that’s likely why our packages miraculously arrive within 24 hours.

I recently wrote that the employer brands that consistently attract elite talent are the ones that lean on vision, not mission. Vision creates the kind of high-risk, high-reward messaging that great brands are built on. Many companies fall to their missions because they help keep the status quo internally, but it’s the vision that keeps a company’s workforce adaptable and responsible to the larger brand.

It’s been my experience that Brand Singularity, even if only partial, creates vast operational efficiencies.

Teams naturally move away from siloed practices that hold the company back as a whole. People in every single department find it easy to act as a brand owner in their own capacity (a CMO’s dream). Values, missions and visions stop being weaponized and start getting used properly. Positive internal cultures build faster and the circle around “who we are and what we do” becomes tighter.

Brand Singularity is just as much an operating principle as it is a branding one.

Having a single identity that captivates and motivates all audiences — customers, employees, prospective talent, board members and investors alike — is the inevitable outcome of a dynamic world where no one group is siloed and no one side of the business works in a vacuum.

Brand Singularity is incredibly hard to reach but will be a major competitive advantage for those that achieve it.

We’ll be seeing more and more brands moving toward this new state over the next 5 years, and it will require a conviction and dedication to brand that we perhaps haven’t seen much of yet. But once it starts popping up across the landscape, it will be the defining factor between brands that attract value from the market and those that chase it.

HOW TO BRAND A COMMUNITY

6 Rules For Binding People

BRAND STRATEGY, FEATURED, MARKETING

AUGUST 31, 2022

If your product is a community, or your community is beginning to become the product, you are already living in the future of Strong Ties.

And in this future we need new rules for brand strategy.

Weak ties historically allowed us to extract value from the peripheries of our networks (think LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter), while strong ties extract value from relationships at the center of our networks (think Patreon, Polywork, and the proliferation of like minded living communities).

This is a massive shift considering that weak ties have been the underpinning of social innovation for the last two decades, and are now declining while strong ties are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of our social fabric.

New social innovation means that any meaningful group will be forced to rearrange itself, whether it’s an online community, a movement, employee culture, subculture, club or cult following.

Strong tie communities tend to have the following characteristics:

They naturally incentivize going deeper with smaller circles of people, rather than going wider with larger circles of people.

They prioritize innovation in how people connect, not how many people they connect with.

They allow members to individualize themselves instead of forcing them to standardize themselves.

They give members true ownership, either through literal shares and coins, or by giving them the power to shape the group culture, norms and evolution.

When strong ties become the future of community, community becomes the new brand.

This is how to build that brand strategically.

1. If you break an old system, you must create a new one.

Occupy Wall Street, Anti-Vaxx and Anonymous were all communities based on opposing or tearing down old systems. None of them fulfilled their visions.

That’s because old systems leave vacuums in their absence. You cannot successfully remove an old system without replacing it with a new one.

This is why secular congregation communities like Sunday Assembly and Oasis that offered gatherings without god went nowhere, but fragmented spiritual groups like Nuns & Nones and spiritual leaders like Esther and Jerry Hicks or Gabby Bernstein that give safe haven and new systems of meaning to the post-religious, are thriving.

Sunday Assembly London, August 31, 2022

The first group broke an old system. The second group broke an old system and replaced it with a new one.

Many communities – from online groups to movements to even countries – exist in opposition to something else. Yet if the situation or the rhetoric changes, all value and credibility can be lost in an instant.

The once highly buzzed about r/antiwork community, whose tagline is “Unemployment for all, not just the rich”, works to tear down old systems but offers nothing new.

It’s no wonder that r/antiwork lost nearly all credibility when a short Fox News interview revealed just how directionless the community was in their vision for what would replace the current “work” system.

A mod from the subreddit r/antiwork on Fox News

As New York Times journalist Oliver Whang questions, “Hating your job is cool, but is it a labor movement?” It seems the answer is no, it is not.

Scholars increasingly point out that the problem with many community brands is that they demand “the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.”

The winners consistently create new systems to replace old ones.

1. Know why you gather.

If you don’t know the real reason why you gather, you will miss the few, brief opportunities that could take your brand to greatness.

In 2019, when kids’ drawings emerged from a detention facility in Texas where migrant children between the ages of 10 and 11 years old were being separated from their parents, the Smithsonian made the very interesting decision to try and acquire the artwork.

A drawing by a migrant child at the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas

A drawing by a migrant child at the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas. NPR, July 9th, 2019

The Smithsonian, whose collection spans Apollo 11 pieces, Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, and the Hope Diamond, is a treasure trove of easy-to-love Americana. But over the years the museum has realized that their people don’t gather to marvel at American history. They gather to witness the humanity of America.

When the migrant children’s drawings emerged, it made sense for the Smithsonian to identify it as a collection of art to gather around. Without really knowing why they gathered, the opportunity would have been lost.

Why you gather has huge implications for how your community’s brand is perceived. Knowing why you gather is the same as knowing how your brand creates value.

It’s a crucial truth that many community brands fail to articulate, and even those that do often lose sight of it over time. Knowing why you gather keeps your brand centered.

It’s the only way to seize landscape opportunities that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

The Smithsonian said something when they pursued the artwork of migrant children at the center of a political firestorm and America’s reckoning with its own sense of humanity. And the people that will hopefully one day gather around those drawings will not only know why they are there, but feel where we have been as a country.

1. Embrace optimism.

Or perhaps more accurately, resist pessimism.

As Nat Friedman has said, “Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.” This is true in community branding as well. Pessimistic communities may attract attention, but it’s the optimistic ones that grow and prosper.

Most anti-capitalist groups go some distance on pessimism, but communities like FIRE or Fat FIRE run much further on optimism. The perceived merits of each community notwithstanding, it is clear that optimism mobilizes people toward a shared goal much faster.

Optimism is especially important when it comes to employer branding, both within the company culture and in attracting ideal talent.

In my own work and research I’ve seen that truly optimistic brands lean on their visions, not their missions, to rally people. That’s because the best talent moves to be inspired, and that only happens when you have a vivid vision of the future that only your community can create. Visions paint the future, and missions spell out the who-what-how of getting there.

In my interviews with high level talent for employer branding, we consistently see sought after talent be drawn to visions, not missions. This group of people wants to gather and grow around an optimistic ideal and know that in their short time to make a difference in the world (and just as importantly, in their careers) they will be aiming big enough to do something that matters.

Companies that lead with mission tend to focus more on making their audiences happy (missions usually speak to customers and can leave out employees entirely). Making a subgroup of people happy is not the same as changing the world.

Why are cults at an all time high around the world, especially in first world countries, despite education and socioeconomic background? Why do crypto, DAO and NFT communities refuse to die, despite countless news cycles calling the end of these movements?

Because there is a deep seated, stubborn optimism baked into the DNA of those communities and their brands that will not be destroyed.

Yes, even cults are driven by optimism, as cult expert Amanda Montell pointed out in my interview with her:

“The ultimate fatal flaw across all cult followers from folks who joined the Heaven’s Gate, the nineties suicide cult, to folks who strike up with multi-level marketing cults, in scare quotes, was yeah, not desperation, but optimism. This overabundance of idealism, that the solutions to their problems, whether that was racism or classism or for financial insecurity, could be found and if that they affiliated with this group, with this leader, they could be a part of that change. It takes someone really optimistic to sign up for a belief like that…

Optimism that was their Achilles heel more than any of the qualities that the cult documentaries you might watch would lead you to believe.”

Oftentimes that optimism is what carries a young community from near death to new life.

But take care that your optimism doesn’t border on emotional hijacking. Why did this Heineken commercial work so well, while all of those Dove Beauty ads eventually fell to criticism?

Heineken gave us a reason to be optimistic. Dove, and the body positivity community it inspired, however, “put the onus on people living in marginalized bodies to turn their criticism inward. This time, though, those people are told not to be ashamed of their physical selves, based on the premise that there was never anything wrong with them to begin with, as though the same companies that claim to be guiding this “movement” haven’t been selling insecurity for years”, according to journalist Amanda Mull.

Communities need optimism, not emotional hijacking. Don’t mine the trauma of your users for an emotional response, no matter how optimistic it may seem on the surface.

1. Surface your vibe.

Perhaps the most primal reason why people gather in communities is because of how it makes them feel, so it’s worth knowing what that feeling is and how you can surface it. Yes, we all want to feel like we ‘belong’ when it comes to community, but you have to go deeper if you want to create a memorable brand.

Vibes and feelings are user heuristics for what the community represents. In a complex world, vibes are an easy shorthand for knowing if a community makes sense or not.

Your vibe is the emotional read someone has on the brand. Lego has a nostalgic aesthetic. Nike has a distinct voice. Airbnb platforms belonging. All of these brands have communities but none of these qualities alone make a vibe.

A vibe makes someone sense something greater than what they see or read.

We’re Not Really Strangers angles everything toward its vibe. Its content, its products, its language, its aesthetic, its Instagram (and Finsta) create the feeling as if we are all waking up from a dream where we forgot how intertwined humanity is.

Quite literally, their content and brand touchpoints evoke feelings of sudden remembering, of recognizing someone you didn’t remember at first. It is a sweet returning to the human race. Yet what they sell is ice breaker card games and inspirational gear.

Vibes activate our System 1 thinking of intuition and knowing. You know a community and brand like We’re Not Really Strangers even before you understand it.

Vibes are tangential to brand relatability, a topic that my Concept Bureau colleague Rebecca Johnson has studied extensively:

“You have to find moments that tap into your audience’s subconscious. It’s about revealing something that exists at the edges of their identity […]

Relatable brands reflect their audiences’ identity in a way that goes beyond the product they’re selling. They reveal and validate hidden truths to which their audiences can connect and relate.”

Creating a vibe requires great intimacy and great vulnerability, two things which only make sense in the new era of strong ties.

1. Memorialize the good and the bad.

TITSOAK and lossporn are both memorials of the communities they come from.

If you are in either of these groups, you know that each term is a phrase of self-deprecation. TITSOAK is an absurd line that Twilight fans laugh at themselves for loving, and lossporn is the people of r/wallstreetbets memorializing the ridiculous losses and risks they endure in their larger quest to win over the system.

They demonstrate that it’s just as important to memorialize the bad stuff as it is to memorialize the good stuff. The good stuff is a great celebration of the community’s successes, but memorializing the bad stuff does something very different.

In relationship science, it’s been found that the way a couple remembers their fights and low points is a huge predictor of whether that relationship will succeed.

People who remember their arguments with anger or disdain tend to have poor outcomes, but couples who laugh about their disagreements and remember them as endearing and valuable moments of growth are far more likely to stay together. They effectively create a story around those moments. That story becomes part of their mythology.

This is no different in communities. Groups that can memorialize their failures with humor, gratitude and pride strengthen the bonds between their people.

The failures, the goofs, the slip ups, the embarrassments and losses – they’re all valuable moments to continue building your group’s mythology.

At Concept Bureau, my team laughs at how insular our own thinking can be, and how the same topics keep coming up over and over again no matter where the conversation starts.

So naturally we created an annual bingo card to memorialize our folly. Some of the boxes like “Bonkers” and “Minnesota” reference real slip ups or all-out disagreements.

Concept Bureau’s 2022 Bingo Card

We now wear that bingo card on sweaters, tote bags and mugs with appreciation for the group.

1. Strong ties or nothing.

Most of these community examples come from organic communities, but what about brands specifically? How do they employ the same levers for building thriving, meaningful community among their people?

There’s one golden rule that can’t be violated: a community brand’s job is to create strong ties.

Organic communities on reddit or Discord naturally do this, but very, very few brands do.

After decades of culture built on weak ties, strong ties can feel risky. It’s hard to break away from the comfort of a one-to-many approach that is so common with weak ties, where a brand acts as the central voice in a brand community.

The experience is not dissimilar to a fandom gathering around a stage. Something that has immediate payoff and can easily be measured.

Strong ties, however, work very differently. A brand must continuously find ways to deepen relationships not between the brand and the people, but between and among the people themselves.

Harley Davidson has been doing this for a long time through events, gatherings, activations and destinations that deepen and strengthen how every member connects with every other member.

The community has become the brand, and people (users and non-users alike) understand that what you are buying is much more than a bike, and much more than belonging. They are buying the promise of connection.

Other luxury carmakers work in much the same way. A Lamborghini executive once told me that what they sell is a community, and the car is simply the price of entry.

Harley Davidson and others like it work very hard to deepen the connection between each driver. Strong ties are what drive the community brand forward.

Some of these rules may feel more like business strategy than brand strategy, but a solid brand is the basis of any strong business. The two are becoming increasingly intertwined.

How far is the distance between business and brand for Tesla, Apple or Meta? What about Coinbase, ByteDance or Instacart? Squint your eyes and the business and brand begin to look the same. To separate them is a mistake.

And that is what I mean when I say community has become the new brand. As community becomes the prime offering for many companies, it is also the forefront of how their brand is perceived.

Your employee community, user community, category community—all of these groups are becoming stronger signals of brand than ever before.

Be deliberate in how they are built and perceived.

A TIME TO BUILD TIGHT BRANDS IN THE CHAOS OF LOOSE CULTURES

How To Create Norms When Your User Is Lost

BRAND STRATEGY, FEATURED

AUGUST 17, 2022

The one thing humans can’t handle is chaos. It’s why the Soviet Union fell only to install Putin, and the brief moment of hope that was the Arab Spring led to a familiar regime of autocrats.

It’s also why when there is a decrease in government stability, there is an increase in religiosity in both Eastern and Western cultures. In a 1978 Gallup poll it was found that 80% of people who leave their religion ultimately come back to it, and although researchers are only just beginning to study this phenomenon, I can tell you from my own work with both religious and atheistic brands, people who leave organized religion quickly become eager to replace the void with another system of meaning—a dimension most atheist groups have failed to consider.

In all of these instances, people swung from an extremely tight culture to an extremely loose one, and then curiously, back to a tight culture once again.

No matter the magnitude, sudden freedom brings a normlessness (and in some cases, disorder) so uncomfortable that we would rather subscribe to clear rules than to wade into the unknown without any at all.

It’s a facet of human nature that cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand has studied extensively. Every culture falls on the spectrum from tight to loose: from highly structured and normative to loosely held and evolving. When a culture veers too far in one direction, there is often a reaction in the opposite direction.

When it comes to branding in today’s world, however, we’re seeing an emerging trend where tightness is especially effective in loose places.

It’s easy to see the value of tightness in hindsight. Tight brands like Greenpeace, Trumpism or the modern Académie Française may appear like anomalies, but they are in fact deeply human—and highly predictable—reactions to loose cultures. The people in these groups felt destabilized by evaporating social codes, and in that mental state, welcomed in the strong voice of certainty. Where there is chaos, there is someone promising a new order.

But sometimes the most destabilizing chaos isn’t on the world stage. Nor is it a public outrage or even a shared experience.

It’s found instead in the quiet chaos of our everyday lives: making a home, raising a family, putting a meal on the table. These mundane corners of the human experience are also where we find the loosest pockets of culture today: places where there is a glut of information but few steadfast rules. Where despite incredible progress and empowerment, normlessness has taken over.

And it’s in these well-traveled but chaotic spaces that a new generation of brands has stepped in to tighten the vice.

The Religion of Food and Nutrition

In America, we don’t know what to eat, where to eat or how to eat, and the more one tries to figure it out, the more confused they can become.

A favorite anecdote of mine is a note hidden in the comments section of a 2017 New York Times article about clean eating. A reader named Ellen, below, describes the chaos of having to cook Thanksgiving dinner for a family that has one person who is gluten free, another who is dairy free, one who is keto, and another who is low fat.

As journalist Julia Belluz has pointed out, we’ve entered the “United States of Divided Dinner Tables. We’ve shifted from a culture where everyone eats the same thing at supper to a hyper-individualized one, where guests almost certainly won’t be willing to break the same bread, or eat any bread at all.”

Generally speaking, the American diet looked much simpler up until the 1940s, when dinner tables across the country had more in common than not.

Social propaganda films streamed into homes, telling women not only what to cook at dinnertime, but daughters how to set a table, sons how to greet their fathers before the meal, what was appropriate to talk about, and so on. Programs like this continued to proliferate onto colored screens in the early 1950s.

But after WWI, and with an influx of GIs coming home with expanded palates, things began to change.

Soldiers had developed a taste for things like pizza, french wine and oregano (to give you an idea of how intense the appetite for new flavors was, sales of oregano in the U.S. rose by a remarkable 5,200% from 1948 to 1956). Meanwhile, post-war Americans had more wealth and began to travel, taking in the smells, tastes and methods of new cuisines.

Suddenly, America’s new foodie culture was born and for the first time we began to see food less as sustenance and more as experience. The rules of food were breaking and an outgrowth of exploration began. Food was now an “aesthetic choice”, a decision mired in context.

Today, grocery stores carry an average of 50,000 items, but in the 90’s, there were a mere 7,000 SKUs on store shelves. That means in the past 30 years alone, we have had to navigate a shopping experience with over 40,000 more options than before. Consider the fact that in 2014 there were already 12 flavors of Thomas’ English Muffins and 19 different varieties of Cheerios, each one promising a slightly different experience.

The problem here is not the paradox of choice. Choice can be a wonderful thing if people know how to navigate it.

The real problem is the lack of norms around what foods are good or right to eat.

Despite growing mountains of research, we still don’t know what the ideal diet is, we don’t know why adult onset food allergies have skyrocketed, and of all the lies that hurt any American generation, the food pyramid was probably one of the biggest. It is a plight on American health that will take decades upon decades to undo.

Even something as simple as bread can surface how normless American food culture is. French bread is baked with limited unprocessed ingredients, with most French people living within 5 minutes of a bakery, and 50 times more bread bakeries per capita than in America.

French norms around baking bread also inform their social norms around eating it. There are strong codes around how to buy it, how to eat it, and how it relates to the larger meal that is understood among all.

American bread, on the other hand, has been industrialized, contains many ingredients that are banned and considered carcinogenic in other countries, and is only found aging on grocery store shelves for the large majority of people.

It’s inspired a cottage industry of food activists like alittlelesstoxic and thefoodbabe who make it their job to decode food labels and expose dangerous American food regulations and policies. Yet the irony of many wellness influencers in the larger community is that in the process of dispelling food falsehoods, they often propagate other falsehoods around medicine, politics and conspiracy theories.

In France, food norms are powerful and cohesive forces, while in the US food is simply a whirlwind of chaos.

But the chaos begins even before our meals get to the table are served. In 2019, before Covid forced us to bake sourdough and throw together whipped coffees, people were already migrating away from eating at the dinner table.

In a survey of 1,000 adults, it was found that 30% of people were eating dinner on the couch, and 17% of people were eating it in their bedrooms—two places where there is likely a screen and likely no conversation or interpersonal gathering. Remember that rooms have rules, and when we change the room, we create a vacuum of norms.

Scholars have also noted how fewer and fewer people are eating together, and only about half of families who live together have dinner together. As food and screens got closer to one another, it makes sense that open plan kitchens began to blend meals and entertainment even more., and made eating and watching the same thing, and the room itself disappeared.

Despite progress and an abundance of information, there is an anxiety-inducing looseness all around us when it comes to food.

Food culture has become chaotic and normlessness has taken over.

But what is interesting is the way in which some brands have created cultural tightness by leveraging our deepest beliefs.

Between 2016 and 2018, three lawsuits were lodged against Whole Foods and Lacroix collectively. All of them were concerned with the use of the word “natural” in their food labeling. In all cases, the plaintiffs had felt duped—that the “natural” branded language and imagery were in fact lies once they interrogated the ingredients list, where they found confusing (at times questionable) chemicals.

Whole Foods settled two of those claims, while La Croix was able to dodge theirs when the plaintiff publicly retracted her statements. But controversy over the word “natural” is nothing new.

In 2009, there was a spate of lawsuits aimed at food makers using the same term, including Snapple, Ben & Jerry’s, Häagen-Dazs, and Nature Valley. In fact, the FTC had tried to come up with a definition for the word “natural” as early as 1974, and the FDA has been trying (and failing) since 1991.

These cases have been hard to navigate because the word “natural” is so much more than just a word. Author and religious scholar Alan Levinovitz has written extensively about food and language, and he reveals the larger complexity hiding under such a simple term.

According to him, the word “natural” has become a “sort of a secular stand-in for a generalized understanding of goodness, which in religion you’d call holiness, or purity, or something like that. “Nature,” with a capital N, [has taken] the place of God. In a secular society, we don’t look to religions to tell us what to eat or how to heal ourselves, so you need a secular substitute when it comes to generalized guidance for what you can eat, and that secularized substitute is nature.”

Levinovitz has observed that many of the public comments on the FDA case to define the word “natural” take a religious tone, hundreds going so far as to refer to Mother Nature or God directly, with arguments such as, “Natural is as Mother Nature intended. No manipulation or addition by man” and “If it has anything other than what God intended then it is NOT natural”.

It seems that defining what “natural” means, then, would be the same as understanding God’s own will.

Knowing what to eat has indeed become a godly quest. When we talk about food, we talk about “good” and “evil” foods, “clean” and “dirty” foods, “pure” and “impure” foods, and so on. (Even the Q Shaman refuses to eat non-organic food in jail, citing his religious beliefs.)

Whole Foods, La Croix and Snapple didn’t misuse the word “natural”. They leveraged it to tighten the vice in a very loose culture. They understood and surfaced what people were already starting to believe—that food is not about sustenance. It is about righteousness.

Today, highly popular brands like Lesser Evil snacks, Ezekiel 4:9 and Genesis 1:29 breads, and Garden of Life food supplements do the same thing, starting with their thinly veiled biblical brand names. True, their products may be great, but they have done the incredible task of creating a signal in the noise. They broadcast tight norms in the normless world of food, saying “Eat what is Godly.” And there are few cultures tighter than that of godliness.

If food is a religion, then diet culture is a cult (I write that figuratively but in some cases, it’s literal truth). As Ellen from Tucson can attest, Keto, Paleo and veganism have very little room for breaking the rules, even during Thanksgiving.

Both Paleo and Keto are actually reboots of the 1960s fads of Atkins and the back-to-the-land movement respectively.

They also both purport to be the natural way for humankind to eat (a paleo diet limits foods that became common when farming emerged about 10,000 years ago), and trace their validity back to our ancestors. Countless blogs and Reddit posts claim that a ketogenic diet was how our forebears ate for the majority of the year. An equally countless number support Paleo with the same argument.

Both aim to take us back to some natural, purer state we’re meant to be in, and the brands in this space, like Primal Kitchen, Hu Kitchen (short for Human) and Epic Provisions play with this notion. The brand belief here is that the truth about food exists in the limited scope of the past, when we were restrained creatures, closer to Mother Nature.

To be Keto or Paleo, to eat bread from the bible, to have a pure palate—eating is no longer about the chaotic world of nutrition but about the narrow confines of moral superiority.

The looseness or tightness of a culture in a category is tied to its norms, or lack thereof. Simply having an abundance of choices doesn’t mean the category is loose. What matters is whether among those choices there are clear, culturally agreed-upon rules and guideposts that help people consistently move forward with confidence.

We’re imbuing food with incredible meaning because we don’t know which way us up. We crave these rules, subscribe to them, fall in and out of belief, but always come back to them as a source of comfort.

It’s consistent with the reality that people buy with emotion, not logic.

Tight brands like the ones we’ve surveyed here raise the emotional stakes for their users. They create emotionally provocative norms so that we don’t just know the rules, but feel them deep in our bones.

The Branded Plight of Family and Parenting

The American family in the American home can be such a clear image from afar, and yet a mirage of confusion up close.

It’s been well documented that the nuclear family was a lie, and statistically speaking, only existed in the majority of homes for about 15 years, from 1950 to 1965. But like most social constructs, the lie held a normative value that was especially important in America, a country that arguably has very few proven norms around the meaning of the home, the structure of the family, or the rules of parenting.

There are no strong social codes that tell us how to parent in the US as we might find in other countries. In Norway, it’s understood that kids go to school at one year old and should be learning in fresh, outdoor air. In Japan, toddlers run errands around town unattended, and was an adorable sight that had us on the edge of our seats in Netflix’s Old Enough! In Spanish and Iranian cultures, it’s not uncommon for little ones to stay awake until 9 or 10pm because it is in the evening that the family socializes and forms bonds.

TIME, August 17, 2022

Norway and Japan’s parenting norms make sense because both cultures have agreed that childhood should be spent developing a sense of independence. Spain and Iran’s cultures hold firm conviction that childhood is instead about interpersonal relationships. And parenting norms in all of these cultures are accordingly defined.

It’s hard to think of a single, widely accepted American norm that can be added to this list. Despite being popular and running in Japan for over 30 years, the mixed American backlash to Old Enough! revealed just how confused we are in this country, and yet how dogmatic we can be about that confusion.

This all illustrates Amy S. Choi’s point that, “The crisis of American parenting, as anyone who has looked at the parenting section of a bookstore can attest, is that nobody knows what the hell they’re doing.” Indeed, parenting advice is a booming industry built on mountains of information cut by valleys of uncertainty.

Intimate portraits of the home reveal even more family dynamism.

IKEA’s annual Life At Home Report shows a steady decline of comfort, trust and meaning in the idea of home. In 2016, people longed for more privacy in their own homes. In 2018 a whopping 1 in 3 people said there were places where they felt more at home than the space they lived in. In 2019 only 48% of people felt a sense of belonging in their own home. In 2020, while in the throes of Covid, 42% of people felt uncomfortable negotiating space for themselves in the home (which is probably why in that same year 38% of people found the bathroom the best place for a quiet moment of reflection.)

That’s provided that home even is home anymore.

People are using Airbnbs as part-time housing, others are trading in homes for the or, and at least one couple is living from cruise ship to cruise ship because it’s more affordable than the American dream.

And all of this is underscored by a family structure that is evolving. As of 2014, America ceased to have a dominant family structure (what many of us used to imagine as two parents with 2.5 kids). Diversity and fluidity have shot up, driven by cohabitation, divorce, remarriage and non-marital recoupling. In one study over a three-year period, about a third of kids who were younger than six years old had already experienced a major structural shift brought on by divorce, separation, marriage, cohabitation or death.

Chaos abounds in this wide and relatively new space. That chaos has also ushered in tight, norm-building brands that offer rules for getting our bearings straight.

There are currently over 5,000 Montessori schools in the US, and they are growing. 700 of those Montessori schools are public, and of those public ones, the vast majority were opened in the last 20 years even though Montessori came to the US over 100 years ago. Montessori is an alternative school format that talks about all the things parents want—social skills, independence, community—but quickly moves into ideology.

My own children go to a Montessori school and I can see a prescriptive ideology in nearly everything they do, especially when it comes to how things are described and labeled.

Play is called “work” because founder Maria Montessori believed that a child’s play should be elevated and respected, and was in fact work that required concentration and large blocks of free time to explore independently. When kids are done with an activity they are asked to make it “beautiful” again, meaning to clean up and put things back in order.

Classrooms only contain objects and toys made of natural materials in calming hues—no plastics, logos or characters. Kids partake in practical life exercises that “resemble the simple work of life in the home: sweeping, dusting, washing dishes, etc. These purposeful activities help the child adapt to his new community, learn self-control and begin to see himself as a contributing party of the social unit.”

Montessori schools across the US post their doctrines on their websites, and it’s easy to see that this is not just a mode of education. Instead, this is a clearly defined philosophy of child raising.

Even your neighborhood preschool is likely to have a manifesto posted somewhere, and it’s likely to read like a charter for a new parenting movement. Oakwood School in Los Angeles offers an incredible curriculum for their students, but more importantly, their philosophy goes far beyond education, calling out moral obligations, social change and the need for kids to understand “the nature of the world”.

Oakwood School – August 12, 2022

Oakwood School – August 12, 2022

It’s no wonder that Montessori is flourishing, along with other highly ideological school formats like Waldorf, Reggio Emilia, forest schooling, worldschooling, and many, many others.

These schools focus the chaos of parenting into something manageable, tightening the vice of parenting and family with heavy norms. They know their job is not to merely educate, but to promise order in the storming mind of the mother and father. There are heavy rules to tell you when you are on the right track, and when you are not.

But parents feel the storm long before their children go to school.

Once the Meta or TikTok algorithm figures out you’re expecting a baby, you’ll be deluged with parenting experts offering bite-sized pieces of advice up and down your feed. And you will undoubtedly learn about two schools of thought: attachment parenting and gentle parenting.

Attachment parenting is an approach that preaches extremely high amounts of physical contact between parent and baby throughout the day and night, and high responsiveness to a baby’s needs in the form of on-demand feeding and co-sleeping, because “babies learn to trust and thrive when their needs are consistently met by a caregiver early in life.”

Gentle parenting is “a means of parenting without shame, blame, or punishment. It is a partnership between parties and both parents and children have a say in this collaborative style… a softer approach to parenting, and parents and caregivers that practice gentle parenting do so by guiding their children with consistent, compassionate boundaries—not a firm hand.”

Both brands of parenting have created incredibly tight cultures and communities, and both are arguably ideologies with strict norms and articulated principles.

The tightness of these brands, however, really comes through in influencer content. People like dr.siggie, themompsychologist and biglittlefeelings slowly indoctrinate viewers into the world of their practices, so that they quickly become familiar with insider language like, “holding a boundary” or “connect before you correct” and begin to understand that each parenting philosophy is not simply a way to raise children. It is a way to signal your specific set of values to the world.

People like Dr. Becky, who consults parents on modern parenting techniques including gentle parenting, talks openly about how if CEOs and athletes can have coaches and consultants that help them do their jobs better, then parents should have them, too.

I do not disagree with Dr. Becky, who has personally taught me a lot. She is right in saying how we value parenthood is revealed in how little value we assign parenting experts. But what is really interesting is how she, and the vast number of people like her, are beginning to institutionalize tight norms in such a loose culture. In their online courses, membership communities, podcasts, books, practices, and social content one can see a growing tightness emerge.

They know that building normative structure around something that feels so chaotic is critical to the success of brands in this space.

Note that gentle parenting and attachment parenting come to the same ultimate benefit, but from two different angles. One can tend to induce more guilt while the other embodies a greater spirit of forgiveness.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that tight brands need to create negative feelings like fear, shame or guilt, as we’ve already seen with other brands. It is a strategy, but a weak one.

I have written before that in branding, relief beats guilt, and reward beats fear. In parenting, and in other highly emotionally charged categories like climate change or even war, relief and reward will nearly always enjoy outsized gains.

But be sure that you first understand the mechanics of tightness and looseness in your space.

There is an excess of choice in the world of sports, but our collective norms around sport and athleticism are both strong and widely understood. Personal finance is similar. There are a million apps for saving and spending, but in America we have strong norms around credit and consumerism (even more so in most other countries).

Creating tight brands in tight categories will do little other than to reinforce a culture that is already there and accepted. Looser categories like politics, cannabis or end-of-life, however, create opportunities for tighter brands.

But don’t just look at a category with a narrow lens. Personal finance may have strong norms in a world of abundant choice, but if you zoom out past credit and consumerism to tangential behaviors like investments and wealth, things start to change.

We have begun to reconsider what wealth even means anymore, and as such, have begun to qualify investments with the strong “feeling that the economy is changing in ways that reward the crazy and punish the cautious”. The steadfast norm of being rewarded for working hard is starting to disappear, and in its place we see a new appetite for risk.

Peter Zeihan, geopolitical strategist and one of my favorite thinkers, has recently raised the point that the underpinnings of the economy have broken apart. Indeed, what happens when our measurements of the economy (inflation) are no longer accurate, and our tools for controlling the economy (interest rates) no longer work?

When measurements change, rules change, and things get loose, not only in the market but in people’s behaviors and belief systems.

A Snug Fit

The strongest norms, in the tightest cultures, that best wield the power of branding tend to be the ones that elevate meaning so that school is about more than school, food is about more than food, and so on.

Nearly every industry is expanding or contracting right now, and it’s worth understanding whether or not your space is loosening to the point of cultural normlessness.

Look not only at the industry as a whole, but the constellations of businesses forming around it.

Traditional education is a very noisy space but also highly normative. For the countless startups that have tried to sell into the school systems of the US, a very tiny fraction ever make any headway. Cultural norms at the district, school and classroom levels are so deeply entrenched, even the most obscene amounts of branding investment and innovation often fail to upend incumbent brands.

But if you zoom out to homeschooling, supplemental education, private institutions, and perhaps even edutainment, the story is changing. As we lose trust in the institution of education, we also see a proliferation of viable options that move us toward normlessness.

Relationships and dating, wellness, and media are also categories where we see the same thing—a loss of trust in institutions that leads to a newfound looseness. In some cases things may not be loose enough yet. In other cases, the looseness is already beginning to feel uncomfortable.

Loose cultures tend to create a signature set of emotions: usually stress, fear and uncertainty. That is because threat and chaos run together, and as Michele Gelfand said in a conversation I was fortunate enough to have with her, “When people feel threat, whether it’s perceived or it’s actual, then it makes sense that they want stricter rules and stricter leaders who are going to deliver that kind of structure.”

Your goal is to create tension that forces people to move, not to create a panic that causes people to react. Although we’ve surveyed some fear-based brands in this discussion, it’s still very much a limited approach. It may produce clicks, but it doesn’t create long lasting loyalty.

Tighten the vice so people feel snug, not strangled. Find ways, either through context, belief systems or vision to tether all of the chaos down to something that makes sense of the world, that creates tension against the looseness.

When a brand creates tension, it forces the user to act. They must either follow that brand or walk away from it, but the one thing people cannot be in the face of a tension-making brand is apathetic.

Tight brands in loose cultures work much the same way. They force people to choose between the chaos and freedom of normlessness or the comfort and limits of a narrow set of rules. Neither one is universally right, but for an individual, the right choice is usually clear.

That’s the magic of forcing tightness in loose places. It expedites our decision making, producing brand converts and defectors much quicker.

With so much new dynamism coming into the markets and our lives in general, being attuned to tight and loose cultures is a meaningful way to understand how people are moving. Consider where tightness or looseness is headed in 3–5 years, and how the rules of today may not be enforced tomorrow.

When things tighten or loosen, behavior begins to flow, and new behaviors mean new brand opportunities that may not have existed before.

HOW TO BRAND A COMMUNITY

6 Rules For Binding People

BRAND STRATEGY, FEATURED, MARKETING

AUGUST 31, 2022

If your product is a community, or your community is beginning to become the product, you are already living in the future of Strong Ties.

And in this future we need new rules for brand strategy.

Weak ties historically allowed us to extract value from the peripheries of our networks (think LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter), while strong ties extract value from relationships at the center of our networks (think Patreon, Polywork, and the proliferation of like minded living communities).

This is a massive shift considering that weak ties have been the underpinning of social innovation for the last two decades, and are now declining while strong ties are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of our social fabric.

New social innovation means that any meaningful group will be forced to rearrange itself, whether it’s an online community, a movement, employee culture, subculture, club or cult following.

Strong tie communities tend to have the following characteristics:

They naturally incentivize going deeper with smaller circles of people, rather than going wider with larger circles of people.

They prioritize innovation in how people connect, not how many people they connect with.

They allow members to individualize themselves instead of forcing them to standardize themselves.

They give members true ownership, either through literal shares and coins, or by giving them the power to shape the group culture, norms and evolution.

When strong ties become the future of community, community becomes the new brand.

This is how to build that brand strategically.

1. If you break an old system, you must create a new one.

Occupy Wall Street, Anti-Vaxx and Anonymous were all communities based on opposing or tearing down old systems. None of them fulfilled their visions.

That’s because old systems leave vacuums in their absence. You cannot successfully remove an old system without replacing it with a new one.

This is why secular congregation communities like Sunday Assembly and Oasis that offered gatherings without god went nowhere, but fragmented spiritual groups like Nuns & Nones and spiritual leaders like Esther and Jerry Hicks or Gabby Bernstein that give safe haven and new systems of meaning to the post-religious, are thriving.

Sunday Assembly London, August 31, 2022

The first group broke an old system. The second group broke an old system and replaced it with a new one.

Many communities – from online groups to movements to even countries – exist in opposition to something else. Yet if the situation or the rhetoric changes, all value and credibility can be lost in an instant.

The once highly buzzed about r/antiwork community, whose tagline is “Unemployment for all, not just the rich”, works to tear down old systems but offers nothing new.

It’s no wonder that r/antiwork lost nearly all credibility when a short Fox News interview revealed just how directionless the community was in their vision for what would replace the current “work” system.

A mod from the subreddit r/antiwork on Fox News

As New York Times journalist Oliver Whang questions, “Hating your job is cool, but is it a labor movement?” It seems the answer is no, it is not.

Scholars increasingly point out that the problem with many community brands is that they demand “the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.”

The winners consistently create new systems to replace old ones.

1. Know why you gather.

If you don’t know the real reason why you gather, you will miss the few, brief opportunities that could take your brand to greatness.

In 2019, when kids’ drawings emerged from a detention facility in Texas where migrant children between the ages of 10 and 11 years old were being separated from their parents, the Smithsonian made the very interesting decision to try and acquire the artwork.

A drawing by a migrant child at the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas

A drawing by a migrant child at the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas. NPR, July 9th, 2019

The Smithsonian, whose collection spans Apollo 11 pieces, Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, and the Hope Diamond, is a treasure trove of easy-to-love Americana. But over the years the museum has realized that their people don’t gather to marvel at American history. They gather to witness the humanity of America.

When the migrant children’s drawings emerged, it made sense for the Smithsonian to identify it as a collection of art to gather around. Without really knowing why they gathered, the opportunity would have been lost.

Why you gather has huge implications for how your community’s brand is perceived. Knowing why you gather is the same as knowing how your brand creates value.

It’s a crucial truth that many community brands fail to articulate, and even those that do often lose sight of it over time. Knowing why you gather keeps your brand centered.

It’s the only way to seize landscape opportunities that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

The Smithsonian said something when they pursued the artwork of migrant children at the center of a political firestorm and America’s reckoning with its own sense of humanity. And the people that will hopefully one day gather around those drawings will not only know why they are there, but feel where we have been as a country.

1. Embrace optimism.

Or perhaps more accurately, resist pessimism.

As Nat Friedman has said, “Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.” This is true in community branding as well. Pessimistic communities may attract attention, but it’s the optimistic ones that grow and prosper.

Most anti-capitalist groups go some distance on pessimism, but communities like FIRE or Fat FIRE run much further on optimism. The perceived merits of each community notwithstanding, it is clear that optimism mobilizes people toward a shared goal much faster.

Optimism is especially important when it comes to employer branding, both within the company culture and in attracting ideal talent.

In my own work and research I’ve seen that truly optimistic brands lean on their visions, not their missions, to rally people. That’s because the best talent moves to be inspired, and that only happens when you have a vivid vision of the future that only your community can create. Visions paint the future, and missions spell out the who-what-how of getting there.

In my interviews with high level talent for employer branding, we consistently see sought after talent be drawn to visions, not missions. This group of people wants to gather and grow around an optimistic ideal and know that in their short time to make a difference in the world (and just as importantly, in their careers) they will be aiming big enough to do something that matters.

Companies that lead with mission tend to focus more on making their audiences happy (missions usually speak to customers and can leave out employees entirely). Making a subgroup of people happy is not the same as changing the world.

Why are cults at an all time high around the world, especially in first world countries, despite education and socioeconomic background? Why do crypto, DAO and NFT communities refuse to die, despite countless news cycles calling the end of these movements?

Because there is a deep seated, stubborn optimism baked into the DNA of those communities and their brands that will not be destroyed.

Yes, even cults are driven by optimism, as cult expert Amanda Montell pointed out in my interview with her:

“The ultimate fatal flaw across all cult followers from folks who joined the Heaven’s Gate, the nineties suicide cult, to folks who strike up with multi-level marketing cults, in scare quotes, was yeah, not desperation, but optimism. This overabundance of idealism, that the solutions to their problems, whether that was racism or classism or for financial insecurity, could be found and if that they affiliated with this group, with this leader, they could be a part of that change. It takes someone really optimistic to sign up for a belief like that…

Optimism that was their Achilles heel more than any of the qualities that the cult documentaries you might watch would lead you to believe.”

Oftentimes that optimism is what carries a young community from near death to new life.

But take care that your optimism doesn’t border on emotional hijacking. Why did this Heineken commercial work so well, while all of those Dove Beauty ads eventually fell to criticism?

Heineken gave us a reason to be optimistic. Dove, and the body positivity community it inspired, however, “put the onus on people living in marginalized bodies to turn their criticism inward. This time, though, those people are told not to be ashamed of their physical selves, based on the premise that there was never anything wrong with them to begin with, as though the same companies that claim to be guiding this “movement” haven’t been selling insecurity for years”, according to journalist Amanda Mull.

Communities need optimism, not emotional hijacking. Don’t mine the trauma of your users for an emotional response, no matter how optimistic it may seem on the surface.

1. Surface your vibe.

Perhaps the most primal reason why people gather in communities is because of how it makes them feel, so it’s worth knowing what that feeling is and how you can surface it. Yes, we all want to feel like we ‘belong’ when it comes to community, but you have to go deeper if you want to create a memorable brand.

Vibes and feelings are user heuristics for what the community represents. In a complex world, vibes are an easy shorthand for knowing if a community makes sense or not.

Your vibe is the emotional read someone has on the brand. Lego has a nostalgic aesthetic. Nike has a distinct voice. Airbnb platforms belonging. All of these brands have communities but none of these qualities alone make a vibe.

A vibe makes someone sense something greater than what they see or read.

We’re Not Really Strangers angles everything toward its vibe. Its content, its products, its language, its aesthetic, its Instagram (and Finsta) create the feeling as if we are all waking up from a dream where we forgot how intertwined humanity is.

Quite literally, their content and brand touchpoints evoke feelings of sudden remembering, of recognizing someone you didn’t remember at first. It is a sweet returning to the human race. Yet what they sell is ice breaker card games and inspirational gear.

Vibes activate our System 1 thinking of intuition and knowing. You know a community and brand like We’re Not Really Strangers even before you understand it.

Vibes are tangential to brand relatability, a topic that my Concept Bureau colleague Rebecca Johnson has studied extensively:

“You have to find moments that tap into your audience’s subconscious. It’s about revealing something that exists at the edges of their identity […]

Relatable brands reflect their audiences’ identity in a way that goes beyond the product they’re selling. They reveal and validate hidden truths to which their audiences can connect and relate.”

Creating a vibe requires great intimacy and great vulnerability, two things which only make sense in the new era of strong ties.

1. Memorialize the good and the bad.

TITSOAK and lossporn are both memorials of the communities they come from.

If you are in either of these groups, you know that each term is a phrase of self-deprecation. TITSOAK is an absurd line that Twilight fans laugh at themselves for loving, and lossporn is the people of r/wallstreetbets memorializing the ridiculous losses and risks they endure in their larger quest to win over the system.

They demonstrate that it’s just as important to memorialize the bad stuff as it is to memorialize the good stuff. The good stuff is a great celebration of the community’s successes, but memorializing the bad stuff does something very different.

In relationship science, it’s been found that the way a couple remembers their fights and low points is a huge predictor of whether that relationship will succeed.

People who remember their arguments with anger or disdain tend to have poor outcomes, but couples who laugh about their disagreements and remember them as endearing and valuable moments of growth are far more likely to stay together. They effectively create a story around those moments. That story becomes part of their mythology.

This is no different in communities. Groups that can memorialize their failures with humor, gratitude and pride strengthen the bonds between their people.

The failures, the goofs, the slip ups, the embarrassments and losses – they’re all valuable moments to continue building your group’s mythology.

At Concept Bureau, my team laughs at how insular our own thinking can be, and how the same topics keep coming up over and over again no matter where the conversation starts.

So naturally we created an annual bingo card to memorialize our folly. Some of the boxes like “Bonkers” and “Minnesota” reference real slip ups or all-out disagreements.

Concept Bureau’s 2022 Bingo Card

We now wear that bingo card on sweaters, tote bags and mugs with appreciation for the group.

1. Strong ties or nothing.

Most of these community examples come from organic communities, but what about brands specifically? How do they employ the same levers for building thriving, meaningful community among their people?

There’s one golden rule that can’t be violated: a community brand’s job is to create strong ties.

Organic communities on reddit or Discord naturally do this, but very, very few brands do.

After decades of culture built on weak ties, strong ties can feel risky. It’s hard to break away from the comfort of a one-to-many approach that is so common with weak ties, where a brand acts as the central voice in a brand community.

The experience is not dissimilar to a fandom gathering around a stage. Something that has immediate payoff and can easily be measured.

Strong ties, however, work very differently. A brand must continuously find ways to deepen relationships not between the brand and the people, but between and among the people themselves.

Harley Davidson has been doing this for a long time through events, gatherings, activations and destinations that deepen and strengthen how every member connects with every other member.

The community has become the brand, and people (users and non-users alike) understand that what you are buying is much more than a bike, and much more than belonging. They are buying the promise of connection.

Other luxury carmakers work in much the same way. A Lamborghini executive once told me that what they sell is a community, and the car is simply the price of entry.

Harley Davidson and others like it work very hard to deepen the connection between each driver. Strong ties are what drive the community brand forward.

Some of these rules may feel more like business strategy than brand strategy, but a solid brand is the basis of any strong business. The two are becoming increasingly intertwined.

How far is the distance between business and brand for Tesla, Apple or Meta? What about Coinbase, ByteDance or Instacart? Squint your eyes and the business and brand begin to look the same. To separate them is a mistake.

And that is what I mean when I say community has become the new brand. As community becomes the prime offering for many companies, it is also the forefront of how their brand is perceived.

Your employee community, user community, category community—all of these groups are becoming stronger signals of brand than ever before.

Be deliberate in how they are built and perceived.

THE 14 RULES OF IDENTITY

• ### PSYCHOLOGY

• JANUARY 10, 2021

Image credits clockwise from top left: Mihai Stefan , Carlos Arthur , Emil Vilsek, Erik Lucatero , Kyle Loftus, Almos Bechtold , Ethan Haddox , Ali Marel .

How to radically change your brand’s relationship with the user: A companion piece to The 16 Rules of Brand Strategy .

The 16 Rules of Brand Strategy

Identity precedes everything in brand strategy.

Before your company, before your product, before your market, there is your user’s identity, and that identity dictates the world your brand gets to play in.

Everything we do as consumers is an expression of who we are.

From conversion to consumption to churn, every action we take is aligned with how we see ourselves, and identity is the underlying code that makes those behaviors happen the way they do.

Identity triggers behavior.

If you can understand that code, you can radically change your relationship with the user — so radically, that your users pivot even their most deeply rooted behaviors and beliefs.

We’re constantly feeding our minds with meaning and narrative, bringing our identities to life every day through the stories we tell ourselves.

Whether it be zoning out during the ride to work or the way we treat the barista at the coffee shop, we not only live in these moments, but also observe ourselves through a third (extremely subjective) eye as they happen — “Beautiful woman is lost in her thoughts on the the way to the office”…“Man with kind eyes tips the barista a little extra because he has character.”

It’s the nature of identity to experience something in the moment while also contextualizing that experience for meaning.

That eye is a perpetual reinforcement of who we are and where we belong, and the single most personal story we tell ourselves.

The story is also the world in which your brand will live.

While most brands only consider the observable world of their ideal users, truly smart brands look for the hidden inner world that operates within each user.

That’s the world where decisions get made. If you can understand that world, you can make the right decisions happen.

In order to know how to speak to your user, you have to first understand how they speak to themselves when no one else is listening.

The best brands among us already demonstrate this:

• TED created a new world of ideas, but also let us see ourselves as casual experts without the usual mental and emotional labor involved. They realized that while we may have wanted to learn, what we really wanted was to just know something.

• Trader Joe’s started a food movement, but also constantly evolved their inventory and rearranged their stores, creating the thrill of discovery so that we could tell ourselves we were not only healthy people, but health tastemakers on the bleeding edge.

• HBO’s daring and intelligent content changed television, and also allowed us to see ourselves no longer as just viewers, but as active participants. We once told ourselves we were an audience, but now believe we are active agents.

These brands changed not only the outer world, but our private inner worlds as well… and that is the most powerful way to build a brand.

They understood that identity was the starting point.

The quickest way to get there for your own brand is to understand how our identities form in the first place.

This is a list of the most important identity constructs we’ve learned at our agency. They are the rules and truths that guide any internal monologue in any audience.

Time and again, they’ve helped us get past the distractions on the surface and into the minds of the people we’re trying to speak to.

There is an inner world hiding in plain sight.

Use these guidelines to get there.

1. If you believe something, you will find the proof to support it.

I never thought I was very athletic, although I desperately wanted to be athletic growing up in high school. The story (which felt as real and deep as my DNA) was that I just didn’t get that gene.

I dropped out of tennis lessons and chickened out of kayaking not because the story was true, but because I was looking for proof of the story I believed.

Then I had my DNA sequenced at the age of 36 and it turns out I have the ACTN3 gene, which is in fact associated with athletic performance in elite power athletes.

My surprising 23andMe result instantly changed my internal story.

The moment I read that, my relationship to my body changed and a new script started playing. I suddenly felt something inside of me that was always there, but I simply did not believe in.

Nothing in reality had ever changed. I had that gene for 36 years, but when my internal monologue shifted, so did my beliefs, and thus my behaviors. I got a personal trainer, started tennis and kayaking, and began to treat my body very differently.

We will always find proof for the stories we believe.

Our internal scripts are so powerful, it’s nearly frightening.

• Vice changed our script about serious journalism

• WeWork changed our script about work that doesn’t look like work

• Tinder changed our script around the shame of casual sex

You, too, can change the script for the betterment of your users.

Look for the story that needs changing and then create a new reality where that story can live. Give your users new proof, new evidence, new rules. Give them a new architecture to build their stories on top of.

Give them all of the props and staging they need in order to step inside the new narrative.

(More on this here: .) Dig Deeper — The Secret To Gripping Brand Narratives

2. Income doesn’t really mean anything.

If people want it, they’ll find the money for it.

Most of the people in your local Verizon store shouldn’t be spending $1k on an iPhone. But they do. And most of them upgrade every year, too.

Don’t waste your time with two-dimensional demographic info that only tells you what peopleshoulddo, instead of what peoplewantto do.

We spend our money on the things we believe in.

Look at psychographics instead.

Understand what permissions people give themselves in order to do or buy something outside of their usual scope… or better yet, what permissions they’re still waiting for.

Remember that Apple gave us the permission to make electronics a signal of our self-worth, before we even knew we wanted it.

Oftentimes gender, age and socio-economic background don’t matter, either. The people who can afford your product are the people who can afford to have their minds changed.

Ask yourself who those people are, and what drives their purchase behaviors more than their budgets.

That’s where you’ll find your answer.

(More on this here: .) How To Create Powerful Brand Messaging — 5 Truths and a Framework

3. What people really want is to learn about themselves.

Most brand positioning takes one of three forms:

1 This is what our product does.

2 This is what you can do with our product.

3 This is who you can become with our brand.

The third positioning, This is who you can become with our brand, is the most powerful position to come from, and the only direction that the consumer mindset is headed for in the foreseeable future.

Ikea knows that even affordable modular furniture can reveal something on an emotional level.

This year, they’ve announced a slew of daring collaborations with not only breakthrough fashion icons like Virgil Abloh and OFF WHITE, but also musicians like Solange and her arts and culture hub Saint Heron, perfume creator Ben Gorham, and childhood throwback Lego.

The message is clear — you can become a creator with IKEA. This isn’t about furnishing your apartment anymore.

It’s a realization that changes your relationship with both the company and yourself.

There is perhaps nothing more valuable for your user than the experience of realizing who they are.

Every action your brand takes is a reflection of your positioning. It’s easy to go with This is what our product does, or This is what you can do with our product,but that’s leaving money on the table.

Push yourself to create a different a story that weaves both you and the customer into the future. A story that will deeply change both of you.

(More on this: .) How To Be Different, Not Better

4. Values rarely change. Beliefs change easily.

Short of a life changing event, consumer values typically don’t budge.

The beliefs that sit on top of those values, however, do change easily.

Cannabis startup MedMen knew that changing peoples’ anti-drug values was a dead end, but changing the belief that sat on top of that value — the belief that drug users are bad people —could in fact be changed.

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MedMen ads challenge your beliefs with a heavy dose of empathy.

MedMen’s new narrative gave people room to understand that you can be a drug userand still be a good person.

And logic only dictates that if you want to use marijuana, you can still maintain your values and stay a good person, too.

The ads above literally crossed out the old belief and inserted the new one. Now your drug use didn’t define you. Your humanity did.

Changing our values is extremely uncomfortable. Changing our beliefs is a lot easier.

Brands that keep your values in tact but change your subsequent beliefs allow you, the user, to grow without the pain of changing your worldview.

Make sure you separate beliefs from values and know where to insert your narrative.

Yes, you can change values if that’s really where you want to go, but sometimes people only have room to shift their belief systems.

5. Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t always correlate with wealth.

Somewhere along the line, we started believing wealth pushes people up Maslow’s hierarchy.

But oftentimes it doesn’t.

Not everyone gets to the top of the pyramid. Not even the wealthiest among us.

Source: Big Think

While it may be largely true that increased prosperity moves people up the bottom three tiers, we’ve found in our work that the top two tiers actually correlate a lot less with wealth than you’d expect.

Many consumers in the top 5% have the disposable income to donate to charity, give back to their communities, volunteer, partake in immersive travel, become more spiritual, expand their world views or philosophies (all behaviors that reflect self-actualization and self-transcendence), but get stuck somewhere between the love/ belonging and esteem stages.

Wealth doesn’t move you up the pyramid. Confidence does.

It takes more than money to move up Maslow’s hierarchy.

Mindset, not money, defines where we are.

If you’re surprised that your wealthy neighbors hold xenophobic views, or your prosperous family members won’t give change to homeless people, it’s likely because their money moved up the pyramid faster then their hearts could.

Similarly, just because your customer is affluent doesn’t mean your corporate social responsibility program will resonate or your environmentally friendly practices will keep them from churning.

Make sure you understand where your customer is before you make any assumptions.

If you can help them move up a little faster with your brand, that’s even better.

6. People can have different identities in different parts of their lives.

I call this Poly Identification, and as more and more rules about class, gender and social roles begin to evaporate around us, the more comfortable we have become with letting people carry multiple identities at once.

As I wrote in Business of Fashion last year:

When dresses in head-to-toe Chanel one day and Supreme and sneakers the next, she’s not just mixing styles, she’s moving between spaces. Chiara Ferragni

It’s indicative of a much larger trend of millennial consumers willing to simultaneously identify as preppy, bohemian, emo, street, glam or any other number of subcultures.

Indeed, young consumers increasingly travel between styles instead of committing to a singular diehard identity. Rather than breaking out of the box, they collect boxes that reflect different senses of self at any given moment, on any given day.

It’s obvious in fashion, but also evident in our careers, love lives and social circles.

Kim Kardashian and Howard Stern can travel between wildly different identities without friction.That wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago.

Instead of fitting into boxes, people are increasingly moving between them.

Identities are a mosaic.

You can find a way to let people explore a different dimension of their identities or make a certain dimension fit in with others, but you can’t assume your user looks the same to you as they do in other parts of their lives.

7. You can’t leapfrog fear.

No matter how positive, hopeful or uplifting your brand promise is, you have to resolve any fear that may precede it.

Food tech companies tend to struggle with this.

Impossible Foods, Memphis Meats and Perfect Day have compelling brand messaging, but it all sits on a house of cards. Consumers still have a fear of the unknown in modified foods just as they always have with GMOs.

You can’t skip messages when it comes to fear.Fear must be resolved before any higher message can be adopted.

You already know a confused buyer never buys. Confusion is a form of fear. There are other common forms of fear, too:

• Hate

• Anger

• Misunderstanding

• Phobia

• Bias

A2 Milk is from regular dairy cows while Perfect Day creates dairy without the animal.

Granted, A2 doesn’t have the same battle against consumer biases that Perfect Day has, but they still understand that the fear must be alleviated first before the optimistic horizon can be introduced:

A2 Milk homepage .

Their messaging turns unspoken fear into a simple story that consumers can tell themselves whenever those uncomfortable feelings crop up.

Perfect Day, on the other hand, let’s an unspoken fear sit in the mind of the consumer:

Perfect Day Homepage .

Do a sense check of your brand and see if fear is creeping up anywhere in your user experience. It can be sitting right under a positive sentiment.

Consumers can skip over most other emotions if something bigger is on the horizon, but fear is like quicksand.

Don’t let people get stuck.

8. Everyone has a garden.

Everyone has something they hold dear. Something they nurture often. A place where they focus the expression of their identity.

The mistake we make as brand strategists oftentimes is stopping short of finding that garden.

The garden is that one expressive outlet that reveals far more about your user than any other insight.

You’ll know it when you find it:

• It will be where you user feels the most comfortable to be themselves

• It will reveal what your user values the most

• It will usually tell you when and where you can break the rules

Life hacking is a fascinating garden that reveals a lot about the men and women who spend time in it. Tim Ferris podcasts, Bulletproof Coffee and https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/ all live there.

It’s a garden where men, especially, can obsess freely over their bodies, reveal values that can easily be mistaken for vanity, and give you one important insight that goes against many other commonly held beliefs — that men will pay a lot of money to feel good.

HVMN knows this. That’s why their branding taps directly into a psychographic that wants to “Be Impossible”.

The video’s adrenaline-laced visuals tie in things like aging, mood and cognition, metabolism, obesity, inflammation, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.

This is hyper self-care for men.

It’s compulsive wellness. All-consuming self indulgence.

And if you didn’t look in that garden, you may have kept believing the stereotype that men are far less concerned about those things than women.

There is always something valuable in the garden.

If you can find it for your consumers, you’ll hit on something important.

9. We will do a lot to ease our cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance occurs whenever we believe something about ourselves, but act in a way that diverges from those beliefs. For example, we may believe we are healthy lovers, but fail to stay in any long term relationships.

That rift between what we believe and what we do creates an unease, and usually points to where we have the most dissatisfaction in our lives.

That’s why the love industry is so big and people are willing to spend immense amounts of money on both legit forms of help (books, therapy) and more questionable ones (reiki practitioners, fortune tellers and energy workers).

Sometimes our entire identities are driven by the motivation to narrow that cognitive gap.

Esther Perel understands that as desperately as we want to see ourselves as enlightened romantic partners, we do very little to actually get there. That’s why she’s positioned herself as a relationship explorer.

Instead of offering relationship advice in the traditional form that only creates more distance between who we are and how we see ourselves, she offers a path for self-discovery.

The Esther Perel experience allows people to see themselves as experts instead of disciples, and that brings our behavior a lot closer to our beliefs. She teaches us not how to fix, but how to think.

Look for gaps that need closing in the minds of your own audience.

Solving a problem for your user is great, but easing their cognitive dissonance can have a much greater emotional impact.

There is likely something that your user wants more than just a solution.

[More on that here: .] The Cognitive Dissonance Hiding Behind Strong Brands

10. “Everyone is a hero in their own story” … but there are different kinds of heroes.

If you’ve read my writing, you know this is one of my favorite quotes.

It forces you to identify with anyone, and without judgement. I often refer to this quote when I find myself bothered or turned off by a customer profile because it brings me back to a place of empathy right away and helps me see the goal my user sees.

Empathy is a great homing device.

Keep in mind, however, that different people are different kinds of heroes:

• There are the anti-heroes that look like villains on the outside and need someone to see them for who they truly are

• There are the reluctant heroes that not only need the motivation to take on their destinies, but are secretly hoping and waiting for someone to give it to them

• There are the catalyst heroes who act heroically, but rarely want change much themselves in the process

• There are the tragic heroes that believe they will continue to stumble and fail, and may resist a narrative that says otherwise

• There are the willing heroes who are eager to take on the challenge, and expect to get the Hollywood ending

Every kind of hero needs a different kind of message, but every one of them can be motivated to act.

Understand your hero, and you will understand how to make them move.

An anti-hero (like Harley Davidson’s customer) needs to be discovered while a willing hero (like Nike’s customer) expects you to already know who he is.

11. The journey is starting to matter more than the destination.

Something has started to change in the psyche of most post-boomer American consumers.

The end goal is starting to matter less, and the experience of getting there is starting to matter more.

Consumers are gradually entering a constant state of evolution.

Rather than defining themselves as who they are (a state of being), they are defining themselves by who they are turning into (a state of becoming).

Our ever-evolving co-working setups, our daily experiments in beauty and nutrition, and the transformative experiences we fervently search for in everything we do (from spiritually uplifting SoulCycle sessions to healing travel) show how the becoming piece matters more and more.

I refer to this as the treadmill vs. the step ladder. Previous generations understood social class and the incremental step ladder you moved up into in each rung.

Today we are moving along something that looks far more like a treadmill — no destination and no gatekeepers, but a constant experience of moving upward.

When people move from a ladder to a treadmill, you need to center your brand around the journey, not the end point.

That’s an important difference.

[More on this here: .] In The Transformational Economy, ‘Being’ and ‘Becoming’ Have Started To Merge

12. There are utility users, and there are premium users. You can’t speak to both, but you can turn one into the other.

Every client we work with wants to move upmarket to a more premium user, but many of them get scared when they realize that premium positioning will likely box out their core utility user base… even when that core is limiting them.

You can’t win over both with the same branding, but you can turn a utility user into a premium one.

Utility users need to be educated into caring about the right things. You need to find something more important than value-for-price that they can latch onto.

Lululemon didn’t miss out on a mainstream market. They turned a mainstream market into a premium one by educating and transforming those users into discerning yoga wear addicts.

Lululemon hired Vice to help explain and expand to the mainstream.

If you feel yourself sweating in the brand strategy process because you don’t want to leave your non-premium core behind, change your perspective.

You don’t have to leave them behind. You have to change them so they’ll come with you.

Give them a message that will make price irrelevant.

13. There is value in the ‘in-between’ spaces.

Consumers in every vertical of every category are looking for greater meaning, and they’re finding it in the connections between spaces.

Health is no longer just a doctor’s visit. It’s mind-body-spirit. It’s a juice cleanse, a heart-to-heart with your partner and a colonic. It’s a trainer and a nutritionist and therapist.

Beauty is no longer just an eye cream. It’s a non-inflammatory diet, a 24 karat facial and stem cell serums.

Career success is no longer a well paying office job. It’s a personal brand, an active blog and a creative side gig.

The connections between spaces have put new life into old paradigms.

Connections give consumers the answers (and narratives) they’re looking for.

All of these examples create a narrative of how and why we do things.

They add meaning and value in a way we can control. Instead of just trusting a drugstore eye cream brand, you have an empowering story of how and why your beauty routine is working.

Just like religion and folklore, connective stories become part of our hardwiring.

Look for how your brand can connect to more than just one part of someone’s life. There is a story to be told that is much bigger than your product.

Make the connection and go deeper into your consumer’s world.

14. Identity is a story.

Truth has very little to do with identity. How we interpret that truth is what matters.

To change a person is to change the stories that define them.

Every construct on this list culminates in this one, simple fact.

If you want to really see a person, look beyond the ‘truth’ of their external lives — listen to the stories they tell themselves internally.

Behavior, belief, bias, conversion all weave together to tell a tale. No one of these things can demonstrate who your consumer is. But together, they do just that.

Don’t get distracted by facts and statistics. Don’t chase after trends.

Instead listen for the story arc that emerges from them.

Reaching For Identity

Searching for identity can feel like grabbing at clouds. Just when you think you’re holding the truth, it slips through your fingers.

That’s because truly understanding someone else’s identity is an out-of-body kind of experience. It’s one thing to see it on paper. It’s another thing to feel it your bones.

“The shortest distance between two people is a story.”

― Patti Digh

But no matter how you cut it, identity is where it all starts.

You can’t know where your brand belongs if you don’t know what world it’s living in.

The 16 Rules of Brand Strategy

How to radically assert your position in the market.

OK, well maybe not scare you, but definitely make you a little nervous. If you look at this list and think, “Oh yeah, my brand is totally on it,” then you’re not trying hard enough and your company is leaving money on the table.

Brand strategy is a moving target and no matter how many strategies I create for clients big or small, new or established, I always get nervous at the beginning of the process.

Finding the hidden truth — that one giant opportunity in the landscape —

These two things that perfectly connect consumer behaviors, beliefs, trends and time to your company’s core competencies while making competitors irrelevant feels like fitting a key into a lock. Finding that key is rarely an easy process.

Branded vs. Brand-Led

The difference matters.Branded companies have an identity, but consumers truly identify them by their products. When a product supersedes the brand, a company is always at the mercy of the consumer and their needs.

American Apparel and Old Navy are branded companies. They have an identity, but if the market demands lower prices or generic styles, American Apparel and Old Navy are forced to follow.

This principle holds true in all spaces, from tech to food to consumer packaged goods.

Brand-led companies, in contrast, play the long game and require more investment. The identity of the brand supersedes the product and allows a company to resist certain market forces.

Nike and Shinola are brand-led companies that can release distinct new product categories and occupy different price levels. The brand vision, not mass consumer pressures, dictate growth.

Only One Wrong Choice

Know what you’re doing.Brand-led may sound better than Branded, or the other way around, but there is no right or wrong option here.

Each has pros and cons.

Branded companies tend to grow quickly and extract a lot of market value early on. Brand-led companies create movements and have more market authority once they find their ideal positioning.

The only wrong option is to not make a conscious decision about which kind of company you are. I meet many founders who fail to ask themselves what kind of brand strategy they want to employ, and as a result default into the Branded category… when they want to be Brand-led.

The list below can work as a cheat sheet for anyone, but it’s focused for Brand-led startups that want to define a clear, defensible strategy.

If nothing else, remember that if you want your Brand-led company to attract more upmarket customers, it’s critical to maintain a specific point of view — a key differentiator between Branded and Brand-led.

While product is at the heart of any business, you’re building a strong, compelling narrative that lives outside of it.

16 Rules To Guide You

If you’re developing your strategy, use this list to guide you. If you already have one in place, use this list to test it.

Most importantly, read this through a brand lens. When I mention companies below, measure them by their brand identities, not their product offerings.

1. Don’t play in someone else’s backyard.

Strong brands are unique. They say and do something different than other brands. They take a unique tone, follow a controversial belief or see the future through a different lens.

Many spaces with two major players fall into a “better” trap. Box’s brand is a better version of Dropbox, but that does nothing to differentiate them. Better is actually worse. Different is what matters.

2. Be specific.

This is truer than ever. In such fragmented and noisy markets, you can either speak loudest (a huge marketing budget) or be the most resonant (the right message for the right audience.) For 99% of companies, being the loudest is not a viable option.

Specific wins hearts and minds. [I get deeper into the matter of specificity here: Two Questions At The Heart Of Every Great Brand Strategy .]

3. Lead with the story, not the product.

Even when it’s about the product there needs to be an emotional narrative. Otherwise you’re just another branded company with a smart product, but no real brand vision.

Even tax software can give you the feels.

4. Answer the why.

Simon Sinek pioneered the concept of answering the ‘why’ and it’s worth your time to watch .

This will seem deceptively simple, but once you get it, you’ll see branding very differently.

I’ll admit even I brushed this off as overly obvious marketing jargon when I first watched it, but there’s a great deal of depth to this simple concept.

The why is not your vision, not your mission, and not your promise. It’s your reason for existing, and it answers the question, “Why should I care?”

5. Look for triggers. Speak to the subtext.

What your consumers say and what they mean are oftentimes two different things. Pay attention to what’s really being said. Margo Aaron captures this idea brilliantly in her discussion of how the best marketers read minds :

She says: “I try to cook 3x a week. I just don’t have time.”

Untrained ear hears: “She’s busy. She really wants to be healthier. We need to emphasize convenience and low-cal in our marketing!”

Trained ears hear: “She wants to cook because she thinks sheshould, but honestly she doesn’t give AF. It’s not a priority for her. She just feels guilty about how much she orders take out. She’d be happier if she allowed herself tonot feel like shit about how much she orders out.”

6. Easing cognitive dissonance is good. Cheating cognitive dissonance is better.

Cognitive dissonance occurs “when your ideas, beliefs, or behaviors contradict each other.” If you think you’re financially responsible but then feel guilty spending $400 on a new pair of shoes, you’re experiencing the weight of cognitive dissonance.

If you can find ways to ease cognitive dissonance with your product, great. But if you can find ways to cheat it through your brand narrative, it can be incredibly powerful. P.S., that’s exactly the mechanism at play in the example for rule #5 above.

I dive into cheating cognitive dissonance here: The Cognitive Dissonance Hiding Behind Strong Brands .

7. Spotlight the customer, not the company.

This is an iteration of the age-old best practice, “benefits not features.” When looking at user experience, content, packaging, even homepage menus, you should position language not only to speak to the benefits, but benefits that spotlight the customer. Marie Forleo gives a quick overview of it here .

8. Don’t define against a competitor.

As long as you define yourself against a competitor, your identity is tethered to theirs and will always be limited. People make this mistake in a variety of different ways: creating nearly identical (but perhaps “better”) website experiences, referencing competitors in content or mimicking sales strategies.

If you’re truly a brand-led company, you need to send the signal that those other players don’t even register on your radar.

9. Speak your secret language.

Strong brands have their own secret language. One of my favorite examples is Milk Makeup, where I’ve had my own secret language experience as a consumer:

In a sea of gold black and red, you will always be able to spot the sterile white Milk Makeup kiosk in Sephora. In fact, you’ll be drawn to it. Models faces are captured at odd angles, whose looks range from androgynous to tomboyish to ultra feminine.

This isn’t just good point of sale marketing. This is a conversation. You’re immediately forced to identify or dis-identify with the brand and its subjects.

Milk’s visual language is so specific, that you either get it or you don’t. And when you get it, you fully realize that the 10 girls behind you didn’t. You speak a language that others aren’t privy to.

Another great example that I love is Atlassian’s outdoor billboards:

It’s clear their secret language creates a private moment between the brand and those who “get it.”

10. Make your future bet.

Have a hypothesis about where the world will be in 2, 5 or 10 years and place your bets on that vision. Solving a problem that exists today completely ignores the fact that your consumers are dynamic and always changing. Cultures, beliefs and behaviors are evolving faster than ever.

Your brand strategy needs to look into the future , and what you see there should be informing your approach today.

11. Take bold risks.

If you’re placing your bet on a specific future vision, then you’re taking a risk. Placing bets on the future should feel risky.

But risk cuts another way, too. Old brands demand authority among consumers… and they’re quickly losing marketshare because that’s an old model that simply doesn’t work today. Most founders already realize that.

What they don’t always get is that new and emerging brands must earn authority by taking bold risks. This is especially evident in luxury (which is basically an exercise in pure brand strategy).

12. Force hard decisions.

A good brand strategy will force you to make difficult decisions. Having a point of view means you won’t please everyone. It also means you’ll be pushing your core consumers to continuously walk into the future before they’re 100% ready.

Snap’s Spectacles, Tesla’s pre-orders, 23andMe’s story of human connection — all of these brands had heavy narratives that pushed consumers to take a leap forward. They were hard decisions for both the company and the customer.

13. Create tension.

Tension earns attention. Being specific, taking bold risks, speaking your secret language… all of these things create tension. They captivate your core audience and keep secondary audiences on the sidelines.

No one explains this better than Seth Godin . Different brand narratives create different levels of tension and engagement:

The tension of how it might turn out.

The tension of possibility.

The tension of change.

[…]

Stories work because we’re not sure. We’re half there, half not.

This might work.

This might not work.

The tension of maybe.

Tension comes from juxtaposing what is, with what could be.

14. Empathize with your customer.

One of my favorite quotes is, “Everyone is a hero in their own story.” Your customer is trying to be the best version of themselves that they can. You must empathize with them if you expect to uncover the triggers, behaviors and beliefs that will underlie your brand strategy.

Sound obvious? Yeah, I think so too, but plenty of founders fail to do this.

15. Relief beats guilt. Reward beats fear.

You will always have the choice to go positive or negative in your strategy. Tell the scary, shame-based story or the positive, goal-oriented story. Neither is inherently wrong, but some do work better than others.

Charity, global warming, war — why do none of these narratives work to permanently move people? Because they’re shame based. They inspire guilt. They create a feeling that may motivate in the short term, but most people want to avoid and escape in the long term.

Brands like Do Something, Teach for America, and Habitat for Humanity reverse the negative story and move in a positive direction.

16. The opposite must also be a strategy.

Roger L. Martin’s simple strategy test asks, “Is the opposite of our strategy also a strategy?”

The point is this: If the opposite of your core strategy choices looks stupid, then every competitor is going to have more or less the exact same strategy as you.

If you’re a wealth management company looking to “target wealthy individuals who want and are willing to pay for comprehensive wealth management services […by] providing great customer service across the breadth of wealth management needs”, you’re not really saying anything.

The opposite would be to target poor individuals who don’t want to pay for your services, with crappy customer service across a narrow set of tools. No one would go for this opposite strategy… so it’s safe to say you’re basically going after the same thing everyone else is.

That means that you are likely to be indistinguishable from your competitors and the only way you will make a decent return is if the industry currently happens to be highly attractive structurally.

Don’t fall into the trap of being indistinguishable.

GOODBYE RELEVANCE, HELLO RELATABILITY: THE NEW INDUSTRY OF BRAND CONNECTION

• ### MARKETING

• JUNE 1, 2022

‘Relevance’ Is Losing Relevance

There is a new industry of cultural relatability emerging that has moved the benchmark of brand connection. The brands that are winning today have already discovered that “being relevant” is a dying industry , and the only way to move forward is through relatability.

With apps like TikTok at the helm, individuals today only have to engage with brands that relate to who they are and what they care about. Being relevant – i.e., making your brand and product matter in the moment at hand – is no longer enough. Instead, the new frontier of relatable connection facilitates deeper relationships that go beyond what brands are selling. Brands must now behave like mirrors of our psyches and attempt to forge relatable, intimate connections.

Relevancy flourished in the 2010s with the rise of the D2C model. Aesthetic homogeneity defined the relevancy era as every startup capitalized on the “ millennial aesthetic ,” We saw homogeneity in logos as luxury brands rebranded themselves in san-serif font. Even within the model itself, every D2C brand focused its efforts on marketing a single product to everyone. When you think Glossier you think of Boy Brow. For Casper , their Original Mattress. For Article , the Sven Charme Tan Sofa.

These brands set the tone in our culture. They gave us a model for relevancy in our own lives. The premiumization of these products made us fit into the norms of what was presented to us as popular and mainstream. It started taking over our Instagram feeds as we worked hard curating the perfect aesthetic to fit the aspirational standard of the millennial lifestyle. The goal being, “I want to be relevant” as opposed to “I want to feel relatable.”

Facebook’s advertising platform drove the success of these brands. For D2C companies, this was their retail space, and buying more ads further established their relevance. We saw the same ads, and we were all drawn to buying the same products. Whoever spent the most money on ads would be the most relevant. Having the single best product at first felt enough.

Casper was one of many D2C brands that spearheaded the industry of relevancy. The disruptor of the “sleep” category, Casper became known for their “Original Mattress”. By making one perfect mattress for everyone, they made one product relevant to everyone.

Source: Antler

Buying for relevance led to their demise. As Casper’s competitors, like Leesa and Purple, came out with their own version of the “one best mattress.” What we thought disrupted the mattress category ended up becoming an online version of the traditional mattress store. The only loyalty was determined by the number of eyes bought through millions spent on buying space instead of building relationships.

In 2021, Casper took itself off the market, going private for less than half its original IPO price and has become the poster child of DTC death.

Questions to consider:

• Consider how your brand is being perceived today. If everything is premium, how is your brand differentiating itself from others in your category?

• If your brand stopped all of its performance marketing today, who are the people that remain? These are the relationships you should be building and paying attention to.

TikTok, The Relatability Platform

Relatability is the only way to cut through the noise of relevancy.

TikTok has become the ultimate relatability platform and has pushed brands to change the way they communicate.

The TikTok experience thrives on discovery and how we curate our feeds is based on our interests instead of the people we follow. Although there is a “following” feed, unlike Instagram and Facebook you’re more likely to spend your time on the For You Page (FYP) to discover what’s new, what’s going viral, and watch content that is most interesting to you. Instagram has never been able to figure out its discovery features, and despite its attempts to catch up, it’s clear that the culture of Instagram is drastically different from the culture of TikTok.

On TikTok, we create . We teach our algorithms to reflect only what’s relatable to us and our inner selves virtual mirrors . Our views, likes, and shares are all validations of what feels deeply true to who we are. It creates a kind of intimacy, a reflection of our subconscious.

Knowing this, brands have to compete for our attention differently. In order for your brand to show up on a user’s FYP, there is a deeper level of relatability and intimacy that’s required. Talking about the benefits of your product will leave your content unengaged. You have to find moments that tap into your audience’s subconscious. It’s about revealing something that exists at the edges of their identity.

This has also forced brands to put a face to their brand, bringing relatability face-to-face. It’s no longer enough to have curated products displayed on a simple background. Even if it’s a person in an owl suit ( Duolingo ) or a humanized version of an airplane ( Ryanair ), when you’re looking at someone face-to-face, you also look for the things that relate to you.

As with every other social media platform, we will eventually get inundated with ads that flood our TikTok feeds. However, the brands that succeed won’t be the ones that make themselves relevant but create content that feels relatable.

Questions to consider:

• Besides TikTok, where else in your brand communication strategy are there opportunities you can reveal moments of someone’s subconscious identity?

• How can your brand validate the feelings they’re experiencing through a “face” in which they can see themselves?

• What they care about and what their values are is just the first step. When you go deeper, what are the things that are being left unsaid? These are the “a-ha” moments that facilitate a deeper connection.

Relatability in Action

On TikTok, we see clear depictions of brands leveraging relatability. The ones that succeed thrive more on relatable content rather than relevant content, either through original media or strong proxies.

Duo’s “unhinged” personality on TikTok is an example of a brand that is leveraging this kind of relatability. Learning a new language on Duolingo may feel relevant to a young audience of Gen Z, who typically take a language course in high school, but simply talking about the benefits doesn’t feel relatable. However, the experience of shooting your shot for someone who is completely unattainable is 100% relatable. This, along with their frequent use of trending sounds and “ absurd ” entertainment, have made who they are as a brand completely relatable to a human experience that many can feel intuitively, even if it has nothing to do with their business.

Doja Cat is a strong proxy for relatability.

This was an ad for JBL. It received 23.8M views, and 5.2M likes.

This was her “ contractual ” jingle for Taco Bell. Together they accumulated 59.8M views, and her jingle alone got 8.6M likes.

Would you consider these relevant or relatable? If you said relatable, you know it’s because it has everything to do with who Doja is and how she’s perceived. In addition to its absurdity, you too might be rallying for the comeback of Mexican Pizza and forever pronouncing JBL, “jibble.”

Her fame rose because of TikTok, but in addition to good music, she makes herself feel completely relatable to her audience.

She often gets comments such as “Does Doja know she’s famous?” because of her raw and unfiltered behavior. She uses trending filters and sounds like every other person on the app. She is tapped into the culture and knows her audience because she is one of them.

One of many similar comments in Doja Cat’s comment section

This video of her shows perfectly how in tune she is on TikTok, reciting the obscure trend of flooding comment sections with “ brownie recipes ,” “ chupagetti ,” “ story time,” “crop time,” and “you don’t have this emoji .” There is no purpose, no promotion, no makeup, hair undone, and all done on her phone. It’s so unhinged that there’s no way you could believe this was produced. She is both Grammy-winning and a hot mess.

For an audience that is ad-jaded, having her deliver your message will cut through the noise.

Questions to consider:

• Where are the places your brand can also be the audience?

• Who are the proxies you can leverage that have a genuine understanding of the people you’re trying to reach? This is more than getting someone who can put together a sales pitch or an influencer that your audience follows. Really consider who and how you want to deliver your message.

Understanding Relatability

What’s relatable today may not be relatable tomorrow, but creating relatability is key to developing deeper relationships with your audience. It’s not to say relevance isn’t important, but understanding the difference will shape the way you strategize, position, and communicate your brand.

As brands, we tend to ask, “How can I stay relevant?” But, the question we should really be asking is “How can I be relatable?”.

To be relevant is to establish context. Relevant brands create the setting that makes their brand feel relevant to their audiences.

To be relatable is to facilitate a deep connection through this context. Relatable brands reflect their audiences’ identity in a way that goes beyond the product they’re selling. They reveal and validate hidden truths to which their audiences can connect and relate.

Venmo is relevant. They’ve made P2P payments incredibly easy to use for anyone who engages with the app.

Cash App , in contrast, is relatable. Their brand goes further, tapping into a subculture that goes beyond P2P payments. They facilitate a deeper connection beyond finance as a category. Cash App is a culture .

Both of these brands are relevant, but only one of them is relatable.

Relatability Moving Forward

Although TikTok is a catalyst for the relatability industry, the platform signifies a larger shift in the way we navigate and experience our digital worlds. As brands make their way into the Metaverse, relatability will become more critical.

A truly decentralized digital world promises that users will own and govern their own spaces and have full autonomy to choose how they identify or want to be perceived (i.e., digital avatars that might not look anything like their physical selves, controlling their own data). This means the ways in which we connect will be led exclusively by similar interests and values in very tight-knit communities . Establishing relevance won’t work in the Metaverse. Instead, you’ll have to find ways to create, build, and facilitate relatability.

On TikTok, it’s Duo, Ryanair, and Doja Cat, but in the Metaverse, virtual influencers like Lil Miquela will take the stage. As the first virtual social media influencer, some may say that she isn’t relatable because she isn’t human. Yet in the age of filters and photo editing apps that completely alter our human faces and bodies, Miquela is arguably as real as it gets. Although she isn’t AI-powered, her success has sparked the creation of many after her . Miquela forces us to consider what it means to be “real.” She fully acknowledges that she’s not human. There is no room for ambiguity or skepticism, only honesty.

When you create moments of relatability, what you’re really creating is moments of authenticity.

Look for the places where people are searching for deep truth. Learn their language, understand their culture, and go beyond face value, because where there is a lot of noise, people will focus on the voices that look, sound, and feel the most familiar.

When you create a relatable connection, you become a part of their identity. These are the brands people will remember.