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Strong Ties vs. Weak Ties in the Next Era of Brand Innovation
What happens when the world suddenly reconfigures itself around a very different kind of relationship?
Jasmine Bina
May 26, 2022
Hello friends,
It’s been a minute, I know, but it feels so good to be back with you. Concept Bureau has expanded this past year and in the midst of all the excitement, we put insights on the backburner. But no more! There is so. much. good. stuff. coming your way.
If the distance was too much for you to bear, you can break up with us here. If it only made your heart grow fonder, we’ve got an eye-opening new podcast episode for you this week.
The world is starting to reconfigure itself around a very different kind of relationship.
The last 20 years of social innovation leveraged weak ties: distant social relationships that allowed us to trust and extract value on platforms like Yelp, LinkedIn and Facebook. But the next 20 years are already shaping up to look very different.
Strong social ties, our close-knit relationships with frequent interactions, are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of the social fabric. In this new era of increased intimacy with our immediate network, what we value and what we create move in a markedly new direction.
We co-buy homes with friends, form politically aligned living communities, go deep into conversational chambers and band together in vision-led DAOs.
More and more, we’re foregoing the incremental value of the people at the edges of our network for the core value of the people who are at the center. In this week’s house episode, Jean-Louis and I explore the huge implications for tech innovation, community building and business.
Although, it’s not hard to see the signs bubbling up around us. Brands like Contra, Peoplehood, Polywork, Patreon and Discord are already banking on the strong tie era. Capital markets continue to put money into the space, while young users are leaving weak tie networks like Facebook and Instagram en masse. Strong ties are the future of community.
And when strong ties become the future of community, community becomes the new brand. People are increasingly looking to brand communities as the first signal of not only trustworthiness, but identity.
The depth of your community ties, the tightness of the community culture, and the strength of the connections within it are the first branded touchpoints your user will come to understand you by. That’s wildly different from the brand signals of the past two decades.
Ask yourself: If your user looked at your community today, would they understand who you were and why you matter?
In this new world, the way we relate to one another is more profound but also more narrow. What we demand of our network communities, and the brand landscape in general, becomes more high stakes. If the past 20 years were about the individualism of ‘find your passion’, then the next 20 years will be about the comfort of ‘find your people.’
But don’t miss the point here. This is not merely about creating a place to gather, nor is it the kind of community you see around you in the digital world of today.
You have to look at the anomalies in the landscape - the outliers, the experiments, the weirdos - to understand how the nature of community itself is rapidly evolving.
That’s where our conversation starts. Come listen.
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:
Is The Future Here Yet?
Here's what we've been consuming.
Welcome to the Era of Unapologetic Bad Taste (Time): “We have entered an era of exuberant, even apocalyptic, bad taste. Call it a vibe shift if you must. Certainly, there is a youthful element to this bad-taste renaissance... But what we’re witnessing goes far beyond cool teens and the extremely online to encompass anyone with free time, disposable income, and internet access.”
The Age of Trauma (Harvard Public Health): “The last five or six years have been nothing if not traumatic—and in ways that overlapped, piled up, and influenced each other [...] In recent years, many researchers have come to recognize that any lasting remedy will have to encompass changes that are deeper, broader, more difficult, and more sustainable than simply treating immediate trauma."
The Experiment Podcast: Judge Judy’s Law (The Atlantic): “Peter Bresnan has been watching Judge Judy with his mom ever since he was a kid. But recently, he began to wonder how the show managed to become such a force in American culture, and what impact it’s had on the thousands of litigants who stood before Judy’s TV bench. What he found was a strange story about what happens when the line between law and entertainment starts to blur.”
Is Everything Falling Apart? (Nonzero Newsletter): "The psychology of tribalism is an extremely hard thing to grapple with. But at least grappling with it is a single, identifiable challenge. Having a big and difficult challenge that’s the key to curing epic troubles is probably better than having a zillion little challenges that are the key—and is way better than not being able to figure out what the key is. "
Trends are dead (Vox): "Trend brain operates on dichotomies: relevant vs. irrelevant, good vs. bad, buyable vs. unbuyable, cool vs. uncool. This mentality extends to how people perceive and react to the internet, where even a whimsical aesthetic can become a commodified status signal — a way to demonstrate that you’re a distinct individual who is in the know."
The Most Common Dream in Every Country (Mornings.co.uk): “The most Googled dream in the world is about snakes — 52 countries Google this dream more than any other. To see a snake or be bitten by one in your dream can signify hidden worries, according to dream theorists. The next most Googled is the dreaded teeth falling out dream (17 countries), which might imply a lack of self-confidence.”
