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D2C's New League of Burnout Brands Know How To Capture Our Hearts

The emotional underpinning of modern branding.

Author

Jasmine Bina
February 13, 2020

The undercurrent of burnout in American society has opened the doors to a whole new breed of D2C branding that promises to heal us from the ills of the modern world.

From analyses to antidotes, our obsession with burnout is changing the way we consider products and consider ourselves. What was once a badge of honor is now a meme-ified disease we continually embrace in different parts of our lives.

But above all else, burnout has become a story. That story has become big business. And the biggest businesses built around burnout are rewriting the brand playbook. 

In this week's podcast, we speak with the branding master that helped author many of the breakout companies in the space, and a therapist who sees how burnout is permuting for millennials and Gen Z.

Emmett Shine and Dr. Abby Krom

Emmett Shine is the cofounder of Pattern Brands, and previous cofounder of the lauded branding agency Gin Lane.

Emmett and his team have created some of the most powerful D2C brands of the past decade including Harry’s, Hims, Recess, Quip, Smile Direct, Everlane and Warby Parker, and now his own sub-brands Equal Parts and Open Spaces.

All of these brands, in some way or another, have created the ultimate D2C rulebook.

We also speak with psychotherapist Abby Krom who has researched an emerging form of burnout among millennials called The Burden of Potential.

She sees an even deeper shift in millennials and Gen Z who are negotiating the tension between wanting to achieve, and not wanting to be vulnerable. Her work explores how these conflicting needs are exhausting us emotionally and physically.

This podcast is about all of us - including your brand's audience - and how burnout is changing the way we consume.

P.S. Let's make "loser canoe" a thing.

You can also listen and subscribe on Google Play, Spotify and Stitcher.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode:

Choose your own adventure.

Here's what we've been consuming.

From Loyalty to Membership (The Sociology of Business): True loyalty is emotional and irrational, and often at odds with our survival instinct. To achieve it, brands are better off with membership programs than the point schemes. Figuring out a good membership scenario is even more important today with a proliferation of subscription models, private chat rooms, and an ever-increasing costs of paid social as the customer acquisition tool.

Understanding the 2020 election as brand marketing (Fortune): Why did virtually every top pollster and pundit get the 2016 election screamingly wrong? A radically different kind of analysis, entirely overlooked at the time, got it right. This assessment considered the candidates not as politicians or even as people but rather as brands to be marketed, like cars or toothpaste.

The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias (New York Times): It wasn’t until the decades after World War II, when large numbers of Americans began questioning their nation’s sociopolitical and environmental policies, that the desire to create alternative societies was renewed [...] Many of these communes eventually faltered, but they had already achieved a kind of dubious cultural immortality, ultimately becoming the nation’s measure for the alternative living arrangements and utopian enterprises that followed.

If You Can Say It, You Can Feel It (The Cut): "It does make a certain intuitive sense to think that uniquely human social emotions are socially constructed [...] But take that a step further: If, as Barrett argues, all human emotions are constructed, then that means they can also be deconstructed, or even reconstructed. In December 2017, Barrett gave a TED Talk in which she argued that you have more control over your emotions than you think you do... The notion that you can transform your emotions through words."

From Tiffany Blue to Louboutin Red: The Power of Owning a Color (Business of Fashion): "Connection to a color also depends on the brand concept and the lifestyle aspirations it wants to project.... Brands are branching out to experiment with sonic and sensory branding, like smells and sounds, but visuals are still key, according to Interbrand’s Robins. “In an Insta-world where brands are fighting for share of sight, investing in the protection of a color as a source-identifier for the brand has never seen more potential.”"

(Let's just stay in.)

Strategy Thought Of The Day

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.