All humans are weird. We know that, and yet few brands are willing to engage with the odd parts of their user base.

Earlier this year, our Concept Bureau Strategist Rebecca Johnson wrote about weirdness and relatability in branding (both popular pieces that I recommend reading if you haven't already), but in today's podcast episode she explores something that unites both of these concepts: how and why the most bizarre things tend to also create the greatest affinity. 

There's the autotelic kind of weird (shock value, Liquid Death), and then there's the richer kind - the kind that makes people feel something so intimately they are forced to engage with it because even though it's odd, it's also extremely familiar (think South Korea's Space-Out Competition).  

As relevance becomes more impossible for brands to attain, this new form of relatability, in all of its strange manifestations, is a signal of something much bigger: people are gathering around the very things that make them human. 

For brands, that means leaning into an uncomfortable unknown.

In our discussion, Rebecca talks us through the history of weird in branding, which signals matter and which don't, the thin line between drawing your customer near and pushing them away, and what it all means for the future of innovation.

Sometimes the most effective way to make people feel like they belong is to grab hold of the things that also make them feel strange. 

Or read the full episode transcript while you listen here.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode:

• Drawing Wisdom from the Weird: Understanding the Influence of Weird on Brands and the Future (Concept Bureau)

• Goodbye Relevance, Hello Relatability: The New Industry of Brand Connection (Concept Bureau)

• Interview: Kevin Kelly, editor, author, and futurist (Noahpinion)

• Private Dinner Party: Clothing Not Allowed (The New York Times)

• The Tube Girl is selling confidence — and her audience is lining up (The Washington Post)

• This Man Married a Fictional Character. He’d Like You to Hear Him Out. (The New York Times)

Missing Pieces

Here's what we've been consuming.

How Purple Became Pop Music’s Favorite Color (Nylon): "Purple’s link to discovering new societal norms feels rebellious and headstrong, both qualities necessary to navigate a world constantly on fire. The color is linked to queerness—a mix of both pink and blue, an androgynous color that represents both and something new simultaneously— and finding alternative forms of gender identity. But it also seems tied to doom."

Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence (The Journal of Pediatrics): “Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults."

I Live In My Car (New York Times): "Around the country, real estate is being set aside for people like Ms. Audet in the form of parking lots. Dozens of such lots have opened in the last five years, with new ones being announced every few months... They dot the spine of the Pacific Northwest, providing a safe harbor for a growing cohort of working Americans who are wedged in the unforgiving middle. They earn too little to afford rent but too much to receive government assistance and have turned their cars into a form of affordable housing."

Develop a “Probabilistic” Approach to Managing Uncertainty (Harvard Business Review): "The deterministic approach that kept our ancestors alive while hunting in the savannah won’t help you make good decisions in complex, unpredictable environments when your natural mental shortcuts and heuristics start to fail you. One of the best ways to embrace uncertainty and be more probabilistic in your approach is to learn to think like a professional gambler."

Why the rise of ‘natural beauty’ is a scam (Dazed): "There are reasons why we prize a natural look over a heavily made-up look – and it’s not to do with self-acceptance. It’s about concealing the labour that goes into meeting the beauty standard, and attaching a moral superiority to women who don’t need to try to be beautiful. “This helps obscure the fact that the things that are expected of women in the public sphere are really expensive and effortful,” says Jessica DeFino."

Super Vision

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• Some proper truths
   

• The Disneyland pitch deck
   

• The most common success trait
   

• How sampling transformed music

Close Gatherings

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• Temporal commons
   

• Rich people are weirdos
   

• The fastest way to get to know someone
   

• Tied together at the waist

Book sales are in steady decline, except for one surging category: romance. 

Print copies of romance novels grew by 52% in 2022 alone, which is especially impressive considering overall book sales fell by 6.5% in the same year.

Within romance, fantasy-romance (often referred to as romantasy) is having an especially powerful run. Derided for decades for being airheaded, these rich human stories spin up multi-dimensional female main characters, punctuated by high action, sweeping worldbuilding, and the occasional spicy bedroom scene. 

Books in this genre remedy fact with fiction, oftentimes reversing real-world injustices in their fantasy-world confines. In some novels, women earn positions of power and find themselves in reverse harems, while in others, men go from gods to demigods and survive abuse.

One device you will consistently see in nearly all of these novels, however, is a female lead that gains strength and skill very quickly. Perhaps too quickly to be believable. 

In the world of fantasy, it's called Power Scaling: the notion that characters develop skill and strength at a rate that makes sense in that world.

And for some men of BookTok, understandably, romantasy novels violate this scale. 

Female leads that start as weaklings at the beginning of the hero's journey develop their powers and skills very fast. Powers that could take other characters lifetimes to master might take a mere months for the female lead. 

And yet women love this device. So why do men and women see it so differently?

If I had to venture a guess, it might be because women are reading a different story.

They are not reading the story of a hero being born by fire. They are reading the story of a woman underestimated, who finally gets a chance to see what she is made of, coming into her true power. The backdrop of romance only raises the stakes.

As one reader of a Baltimore book club put it, "I think this world does such a good job of telling us why we're not good enough, and finding love tells you that even if you are a little bit broken, you are good enough, if not for somebody else then for yourself."

A story can only be understood through the reader. People require different things of different narratives, and the parts of the story that we are given are just as telling as the parts we add ourselves. 

You can't dismiss a skyrocketing $1.44 Billion sub-industry that is defying all odds. Nor can you dismiss the underserved market of women that is propping it up. This is just one genre and one audience.

It's both crazy and thrilling to know are so many other people out there, just waiting to hear the story they need to hear. 

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.