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

Tight brands like the ones we’ve surveyed here raise the emotional stakes for their users. They create emotionally provocative norms so that we don’t just know the rules, but feel them deep in our bones.

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

No matter the magnitude, sudden freedom brings a normlessness (and in some cases, disorder) so uncomfortable that we would rather subscribe to clear rules than to wade into the unknown without any at all.

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

It’s no wonder that Montessori is flourishing, along with other highly ideological school formats like Waldorf, Reggio Emilia, forest schooling, worldschooling, and many, many others.

These schools focus the chaos of parenting into something manageable, tightening the vice of parenting and family with heavy norms. They know their job is not to merel

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.

As of 2014, America ceased to have a dominant family structure (what many of us used to imagine as two parents with 2.5 kids). Diversity and fluidity have shot up, driven by cohabitation, divorce, remarriage and non-marital recoupling. In one study over a three-year period, about a third of kids who were younger than six years old had already exper

Tighten the vice so people feel snug, not strangled. Find ways, either through context, belief systems or vision to tether all of the chaos down to something that makes sense of the world, that creates tension against the looseness.

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