The Business of Aspiration: How Social, Cultural, and Environmental Capital Changes Brands

Curation gives even mundane objects value by connecting them with a point of view, heritage, a subculture, or purpose that makes them stand out in the vortex of speed, superficiality, and newness.

We are successful in “anticipating” things that are, in some form or to some degree, already happening.

four ways to detect and successfully capitalize on the mood in culture: contradictions, coincidences, inversions, and oddities in the culture; society; business; and consumer behavior.

“premium mediocre” (Rao, 2017), which emphasizes merch and logos that turn everyone willing to spend $600 on a T-shirt, a branded hat, or a belt into a luxury consumer.

The keyword here is not necessarily prestige and exclusivity, but identity and belonging. There’s a pure pleasure in the intimacy of consuming together, along with enjoying status within a community. Thanks to a membership in a community, a hypebeast gets access to new product drops and events. This is the domain of intangibles that most loyalty pr

Knowledge gives products value, and creates a divide between those in the know and those who neither have this Chanel jacket nor know that Vanessa Paradis wore it.

Combined, social classification and social cohesion move culture toward the world that’s harmonized and homogenous in taste (people need to know that they belong to the same community, and to know it quickly; they also need to know that their differences are not mortal.)

Tsundoku is a Japanese word for the uncomfortable feeling of having too many books to read. It’s also the MO of contemporary life.

social shopping means that platforms will bestow the same fate on retailers as they did on publishers. The platforms successfully monetized our attention. They are about to commercialize our social attachments.

More recently, we are witnessing that curators are overtaking influencers as the core vehicle of capturing the cultural mood and starting trends.