In branding, the context has become the product

As a brand strategist, your most important job is creating a world of context and experience for people to travel through. The product is just the souvenir.

Author

Jasmine Bina
August 06, 2024

Everywhere you look, our cultural rulers have become outdated. Marriage is about self-actualization but we still measure in units of love. Travel is about emotional restoration but we still measure in units of leisure. Wellness is about rebirth but we still measure in units of health.

My talk, “How Brands Create New Units of Culture To Win New Audiences”, has been selected for the SXSW PanelPicker and it’s a deep dive on how brands can seize tremendous opportunities in the places where we’re using old rulers to measure new things.

If you want to see this talk, help us get it on stage by voting for it here. And a BIG THANK YOU to all of our readers - every single one of you.


Context is everything now

There’s a famous Virgil Abloh quote where he says, “If I put a candle in an all-white gallery space it looks like a piece of art. If I put it in a garage it looks like a piece of trash.”

Abloh understood something that very few brand strategists get: the context is what creates the need for the product in the first place.

  • Merit Beauty could only feel like a calming Millennial brand once it was positioned in the chaos of Sephora’s Gen Z aisles.

  • Costco spends a lot of money to make their warehouses look stripped down, so what you buy off the crate feels like a good deal.

  • Red Bull didn’t mean anything until Dietrich Mateschitz and Chaleo Yoovidhya started placing empty cans outside of trendy nightclubs.

But context isn’t just about the physical space.

It’s the emotional world you create around your users. It’s the permissions and guardrails you create so that they can show up the way you want them to.

Nara Smith’s wardrobe is context. Ezekiel’s bible verse recipes are context. Mindbloom’s ketamine therapy tracks for ailments such as “heartbreak” and “rejection” are context.

It’s that carefully crafted context that creates a very specific need among their users.

That’s incredibly powerful - being able to define how your user shows up - but how is a brand supposed to balance between creating the context and creating the product?

I recently spoke on this topic with the incredible brand master Rory Sutherland for Exposure Therapy, and asked him about the importance of context in branding.

When you have limited resources and have to choose between investing in the candle or investing in the room, which one matters more?

For Rory, context makes the product.

The right context can make food taste good or taste awful, art look inspiring or look depressing, laughter sound hopeful or sound sinister.

But I would take this even further and say that context is in fact more important than the product.

And you don’t need to look further than any celebrity beauty brand, health startup, functional food company, or the entire luxury category to see that it’s true.

As a brand strategist, your most important job is creating a world of context and experience for people to travel through. The product is just the souvenir.

Don’t ask yourself what souvenirs you want to sell.

Ask yourself what experience would be worth the souvenir.


Reality Creep

Here's what we've been consuming.

Our New Religion Isn’t Enough (GIRLS): "People say Gen Z follow these new faiths because we crave belonging and connection, but what if we also crave commandments? What if we are desperate to be delivered from something? To be at the mercy of something? I think we underestimate how hard it is for young people today to feel their way through life without moral guardrails and guidance, to follow the whims and wishes of our ego and be affirmed by adults every step of the way. I’m not sure that’s actual freedom. And if it is, I’m not sure freedom is what any of us actually wants."

Sex in the metaverse isn’t all fun and games (Hunger): "Yet while we are aware of this disparity between how we act online and how we act in person, the results of a Statista study last year still prove shocking. When asked “What things would you do in the metaverse but never in real life?”, 20% of respondents said they would play adult games that engage in extreme violence and/or sex; 18% would conduct unethical experiments on virtual humans; 18% would watch virtual executions; 17% would own a virtual harem; and 14% admitted they would engage in hate speech."

Gambling Enters the Family Zone (The Atlantic): “The restaurant-and-arcade chain announced a new way to help people part with their money: gambling[...]But make no mistake: The company’s new initiative is a move into commercialized betting, a symptom of a larger and troubling trend. Suddenly, gambling seems to be everywhere. This sort of vice creep, a societal normalization of what used to be seen as unsavory habits—gambling, smoking marijuana, watching porn—is accelerated by people’s addiction to devices, in this case giving casual bettors the tools to become compulsive wagerers and easing the way for gambling to become a constant part of life."

The New Generation of Online Culture Curators (The New Yorker): “Digital platforms are largely devoted to making users consume more, faster—think of TikTok’s frenetic “For You” feed or Spotify’s automated playlists. Curators slow down the unending scroll and provide their followers with a way of savoring culture, rather than just inhaling it, developing a sense of appreciation.”

You Might Be A Late Bloomer (The Atlantic): "It turns out that late bloomers are not simply early bloomers on a delayed timetable—they didn’t just do the things early bloomers did but at a later age. Late bloomers tend to be qualitatively different, possessing a different set of abilities that are mostly invisible to or discouraged by our current education system. They usually have to invent their own paths. Late bloomers “fulfill their potential frequently in novel and unexpected ways,” Karlgaard writes, “surprising even those closest to them.”"

America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety (The Atlantic): “By 2013, the number of disorders listed in the DSM had swelled to nearly 300. In his 2013 book, Saving Normal, Frances warned that “a looser definition of sickness” could make people worse off. “DSM-V opens up the possibility that millions and millions of people currently considered normal will be diagnosed as having a mental disorder,” he told the Canadian Medical Association Journal that year.”

The search for the random numbers that run our lives (BBC): “People have long sought external sources of randomness as the basis of random number generators. In this search for true randomness, they have looked practically everywhere for chaotic phenomena that can't be predicted or manipulated. They have listened to the racket of electrical storms, captured pictures of raindrops on glass, and played with the tiniest particles in the known Universe. The search is far from over.”
 

I'm finding that the core of all great strategic thinking is really just about knowing how to play and leverage the element of time.

Time and strategy go hand in hand. The best strategists are exceptional at futures thinking, knowing when to make a move, how to create conditions for certain outcomes, reaching tipping points, and making the future feel like the present.

All of these are just expressions of time.

When we ignore the element of time, we make weak decisions that at best will work in the present, but do nothing to propel us forward into the future.

To be a great strategist, you have to learn to understand time as another dimension that changes the playing field, and get comfortable with time as both a threat and an opportunity.

If it doesn't account for time, it's not a strategic.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO

If you’re looking for brand strategy, workshops and talks for your company, check us out at Concept Bureau. If you want to develop yourself as a brand strategist, come join us at Exposure Therapy.