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Brands & Outliers
Second-order insights in strategy.
Jasmine Bina
August 23, 2023
Each month, our team does a wide sweep of culture and presents every recent finding they think is worth noting.
It's my favorite meeting ever, and it's called "Brands & Outliers": brands because they are the bellwethers of culture, and outliers because every movement begins as an anomaly in the landscape.
Today, we're sharing this rich discussion with you. I want you to think of this as your smart friends and colleagues getting in a room and freely talking about what they're paying attention to, because that's what it is for me.
From this conversation emerges vital second-order insights that help progress our model of the markets. Our rule is to move fast and lean hard into casting the future.
It's a deep dive primer into innovation, culture, business and future signals, but in a way that ties all of it together in an actionable story.
It will give you clear perspective and new ideas to work with.
I've included timestamps of highlights below, but there's a ton of good stuff in here.
If you like this video and want to see more recordings of our monthly Brands & Outliers meeting, let me know. We'd love to keep sharing this conversation with you.
00:20 VC, Startups and Innovation
09:39 Cultural Narratives
10:58 We’re a culture obsessed with “detox”. We detox our bodies, relationships, dopamine addictions, social media and environments. The idea of shedding and purging is everywhere.
12:36 We’re in an awkward transition out of optimized tech culture into something more ‘feeling’, and it's decidedly surreal.
15:15 #humancore and NPC streaming may be bizarre, but they also get you in your feelings. (It’s all very High Fidelity Society.)
29:21 So many new brands are just skins over chatGPT. It’s therapy dressed up as a buzzfeed quiz or an editor clothed as a writing coach. Reminds us of the disaggregation of Craigslist.
42:43 What happened to the irredeemable bad guy/ girl? They became complicated, human, nuanced when we left Low Fidelity Society.
45:46 Death doulas, operatic escapism, people getting over alcohol… we are reassessing the vices and fears we subscribe to.
57:54 Brand Activations
01:02:44 Future Signals
01:02:52 Population collapse meets fertility tech: the first babies conceived with a sperm injecting robot have been born, and IVG (In-Vitro Gametogenesis) is here.
01:03:49 Biophilic design speaks to our desire to bring nature indoors. The home is for healing now, and that has big implications for the industry.
01:04:56 Language is the operating system of democracy, and that has significant implications when large language models begin to shape how we interface with the world.
Childlike Wonder
Here's what we've been consuming.
What UFOs Say About Us (Now & Then Podcast): "What can UFOs tell us about American hopes and fears? It permeates into popular culture, it potentially has an impact on politics, it infuses itself with religion, it has an impact on conceptions of race, that in one way or another the idea of aliens from someplace else beaming down here and, for better or worse, choosing us, has a real power to it that certainly helps explain some of the reasons why this is such a pervasive thread throughout American history."
America Is Becoming a Nation of Early Birds (Wall Street Journal): "Trendy new restaurants are closing their kitchens at 8 p.m. And movie theaters are swapping late-night screenings for matinees. Hybrid and remote workers itching to leave the house as soon as they close their laptops are fueling the shift. Restaurants are now seating 10% of diners between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m., up from 5% in 2019, according to Yelp. Dinner parties are starting as early as 5 p.m. Some night owls think we’re all getting a bit dull. Others embrace the mass backward slide of our activities."
Adult Fandoms Are Driving The Lego Market To New Heights (Dwell): ""When you’re an adult, you get to buy things that make you happy and that are stupid, and no one else can tell you otherwise," says Gail. Her Lego edibles bring her joy mostly because, as she explains: "The whole world is so dark and gray and black and white, or weird droopy, depressing colors. When I come home and my whole house is filled with colorful Lego bricks, it makes me happy. Every time I open my fridge and see all that colorful Lego mixed in with my real food, I laugh.""
The funnel is in full meltdown (The Other 90): "The report, part of Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer series, summarizes that “consumers are looking for ongoing engagement after the point of purchase and their need for trust grows with feelings of vulnerability.” Among the key supporting stats, Edelman found that 78% of people agree with the statement "I uncover things that attract me and make me loyal to a brand AFTER my first purchase" and 50% of people that actively research important attributes of the brands they buy say they do most of that research AFTER they’ve made a purchase."
Stop Firing Your Friends (The Atlantic): "Psychologists tell me there is a kinder, more realistic way to maneuver through a friendship that’s lacking in some area. You don’t need a guide for breaking up with your friends, because you don’t need to break up with your friends. You just need to make more friends."
All In This Together
Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.
Big Feelings
Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.
One of my favorite lines of strategy is "If you want peace, prepare for war" by the Roman general Vegetius.
There are many interpretations of that line and it has been rewritten and adapted at different points in history, but underneath it lies an interesting idea: the things we desire can often only exist by way of the things we do not.
There are four generations living alongside one another in the world right now. Four generations whose statistical charts will forever have one big dip where the pandemic made its mark in nearly every aspect of life. And all four generations are tip-toeing back into the world with a new, more thoughtful perspective.
They're making choices they would have never made before - about the work they do, how they raise their children, how they treat their neighbors, how they treat their bodies, how they treat their minds - because the war of the pandemic has led to the peace of survival.
I often wonder who I would have been if 2019 rolled into 2020 without event. I was such a completely different person that I have to believe the original version of me branched off into a very different future than this version.
A life unlived, but I don't mourn it. Life in a straight line offers us no chance to experience our own complexity, to see how we can fold and pop open again in new shapes.
And that is where the interface between war and peace (whatever form you experience it in, it doesn't always have to be a global catastrophe) creates something bigger than its parts.
We are not who we are in good times and we are not who we are in bad times. We are the moments between those two states, when we are the most complicated and tangled.
These moments of transition are special. They're when we get to most experience who we actually are.
Yours,
Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.