A Time to Build Tight Brands in the Chaos of Loose Cultures

To systematically build iconic brands, companies must reinvent their marketing function. They must assemble cultural knowledge, rather than knowledge about individual consumers. They must strategize according to cultural branding principles, rather than apply the abstracted and present-tense mind-share model. And they must hire and train cultural a... See more

That's right. I keep going. Something in what you were just talking about reminded me of, you talked about how you're about cultural futurism now. Is that a recent shift or how did you find that place? And what does that mean in how you work?

It is and it isn't. We've always been doing our work like this, where it's always predictive. The whole ide... See more

Something sinister happened over the past algorithmically driven decade: brands took a sharp turn toward efficiency and benefits mindshare, often focusing on a laundry list of functional and emotional whoop-de-doos.

It’s this paint-inside-the-lines mentality that stokes irrelevancy and meaninglessness. And the whole point of a brand is to create an ... See more