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

hen there is a decrease in government stability, there is an increase in religiosity in both Eastern and Western cultures.

Every culture falls on the spectrum from tight to loose: from highly structured and normative to loosely held and evolving. When a culture veers too far in one direction, there is often a reaction in the opposite direction.

Relationships and dating, wellness, and media are also categories where we see the same thing—a loss of trust in institutions that leads to a newfound looseness. In some cases things may not be loose enough yet. In other cases, the looseness is already beginning to feel uncomfortable.

According to him, the word “natural” has become a “sort of a secular stand-in for a generalized understanding of goodness, which in religion you’d call holiness, or purity, or something like that. “Nature,” with a capital N, [has taken] the place of God. In a secular society, we don’t look to religions to tell us what to eat or how to heal ourselve

people who leave organized religion quickly become eager to replace the void with another system of meaning—a dimension most atheist groups have failed to consider.

IKEA’s annual Life At Home Report shows a steady decline of comfort, trust and meaning in the idea of home. In 2016, people longed for more privacy in their own homes. In 2018 a whopping 1 in 3 people said there were places where they felt more at home than the space they lived in. In 2019 only 48% of people felt a sense of belonging in their own h

Peter Zeihan, geopolitical strategist and one of my favorite thinkers, has recently raised the point that the underpinnings of the economy have broken apart. Indeed, what happens when our measurements of the economy (inflation) are no longer accurate, and our tools for controlling the economy (interest rates) no longer work?

When measurements chang

In France, food norms are powerful and cohesive forces, while in the US food is simply a whirlwind of chaos.

in branding, relief beats guilt, and reward beats fear.

Tight brands like Greenpeace, Trumpism or the modern Académie Française may appear like anomalies, but they are in fact deeply human—and highly predictable—reactions to loose cultures. The people in these groups felt destabilized by evaporating social codes, and in that mental state, welcomed in the strong voice of certainty. Where there is chaos,