Hello friends, 

I'm wondering how many of you are in the throes of ownership anxiety right now: a term I just made up to capture both at once our anxiety to truly own a piece of our lives (house, work, digital anything), and the anxiety of realizing that by accident or by design, ownership doesn't mean what it used to.

We're at a weird point in our generation where we believe everyone is making more than us and our buying is fueled by equal parts anxiety and hope, or as journalist Kevin Roose puts it, "A feeling that the economy is changing in ways that reward the crazy and punish the cautious."

Even the rules of acquiring ownership - work hard, save smart, invest safe - seem to be evaporating.

But like so many behavioral trends in the brand landscape, this is part of something much bigger. To really understand what this all means and how it impacts business (and especially brand storytelling), we need to first interrogate the nature of ownership itself. So let's start with a question:

What does ownership mean to us as a culture?

Many of us see it as an artifact of the legal system or something that’s decided in courts. We believe it's a self-evident concept that lives outside of us and isn’t really part of who we are, but rather a set of rules that affects our mortgages and our car payments.

But ownership is in fact very much a part of what makes us human.

Adam and Eve, Jason and the Argonauts, Goldilocks and the Three Bears are all part of a long tradition of ownership narratives that define the human experience. What may surprise you is that the stories are many but the laws underlying them are very few, and those laws are in a constant struggle for power.

Today and throughout history, a mere six competing stories of ownership have dictated how everything in the world is distributed. As resources have become scarcer, everyone from American homesteaders and ranchers, to tech CEOs and CPG companies, have created ways to impose their own preferred ownership story in a world where what it means to “own” something is constantly evolving.

Brands are no exception. Southwest Airlines consciously plays with the psychology of ownership and the airline seat. HBO send subtle signals about ownership in their brand messaging to set behavioral (and legal) precedents that Netflix can't seem to get right. Apple deliberately creates a sense of ownership before the purchase decision has been made. Amazon weaves ownership stories into its branding to blur the line between the real and the not-so-real.

In this week's episode of Unseen Unknown, we speak with Michael Heller and James Salzman, two of the world’s leading scholars and authorities on ownership, and co-authors of the book Mine!: How The Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives to understand what the six laws of ownership are, and how the changing concept of ownership has been upending the brand landscape. 

In nearly every brand encounter, the unspoken rules of ownership are either reinforced or revised. For the first time in modern history, we are untethering those rules from the physical world, and it's causing us to anxiously renegotiate what belongs to who.

Salzman and Heller explain to us how the rules of ownership change in every generation, and how those changes reveal the true brand frontier, the role of business, and most importantly, society’s shifting values.  

You can also listen on Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify and Simplecast.
Or read the full episode transcript while you listen here.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives (Michael Heller and James Salzman)
   

• Drinking Water: A History (James Salzman)
   

• The Hidden Rule of Ownership (Reason Magazine)
   

• “Why you don't own the right to recline in your airplane seat” (Salon)
   

• “Why barbed wire — yes, barbed wire — was as transformative as the telephone” (TED)
   

• “The New York Times Is Giving Up Its Cooking Community Facebook Group With Over 77,000 Members” (Buzzfeed News)
   

• Mine or Not Mine? An Interactive Quiz on the Ownership Secrets Everyone Should Know 

ATTACHMENT THEORY

Here's what we've been consuming.

How many American children have cut contact with their parents? (Economist): "Though people tend not to talk about it much, familial estrangement seems to be widespread in America. The first large-scale nationwide survey, recently conducted by Cornell University, found that 27% of adult Americans are estranged from a close family member [...] A rise in individualism that emphasizes personal happiness is the biggest factor. " 

Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy (New York Times): "For years, these subsidies allowed us to live Balenciaga lifestyles on Banana Republic budgets [...] Now, users are noticing that for the first time — whether because of disappearing subsidies or merely an end-of-pandemic demand surge — their luxury habits actually carry luxury price tags." 

The human factor — why data is not enough to understand the world (Financial Times): "Will it fix the issue? Sadly not by itself, given the deep-seated societal roots of the problem... but the experiment has already had one benefit: it has made some Google techies understand what they don’t understand with their data tools — and why techies sometimes need “fuzzies”, or people with qualitative, not quantitative, analyses."

How America Fractured Into Four Parts (Atlantic): "All four of the narratives emerged from America’s failure to sustain and enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and lacks ones that the others have... All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment."

The World Economy Is Suddenly Running Low on Everything (Bloomberg): "The difference between the big crunch of 2021 and past supply disruptions is the sheer magnitude of it, and the fact that there is — as far as anyone can tell — no clear end in sight. Big or small, few businesses are spared." 

Has America had enough of war? (Financial Times): "The US has questioned its role in the world before... yet if this anti-exceptionalism gains the intellectual upper hand as geopolitical dynamics shift and the US enters a new competition with China, it will entirely change how America relates to the world and the claims it makes on the 21st century. Will the US really countenance any vision of global geopolitics where it isn’t sole superpower?" 

Real brand strategy always starts with a prediction.

But are we even capable of credible foresight in a world that gestures wildly looks like this?

This is where I turn on boozy lounge music, bring you a cocktail, and whisper, No. Not even close, dear friend. Turns out none of us are good at predicting the future.

Researchers have found that our brains make a decision a full 10 seconds before we realize we've actually decided something. That gap is your gut instinct quietly taking over what you believe to be your logical reasoning. 

That (literally) mind-blowing fact, along with a bunch of other dispiriting human quirks and biases, is why we're notoriously bad at seeing over the horizon.

But no matter where we are on the wavelength chart of business or life, we can always count on the direction changing. It's a truth that's so easy to see when we look behind us, yet so hard to see when we're staring ahead into the sun.

And if we know that no matter where we are today we will be somewhere different tomorrow, then its our responsibility to make a flawed prediction. National parks, marriage equality, micromobility, canned food, pet insurance, commercial spaceflight and on-demand-anything all came because someone decided to accelerate us toward (or away from) an imperfect prediction they made. Most likely many upon many imperfect predictions made by many people over time.

Predictions force actions that just don't happen when you're looking at the present. What I've learned is that the predictions are ultimately less important than the roads we build toward them, but you need predictions to lay brick in the first place. 

And if you're lucky enough to build something meaningful in this world - company, community, family or movement - you'll get to gently bend the road toward something more exciting.

(Image via @newhappyco)

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.