Through taste regimes, modern brands introduce new meanings in our everyday activities: cooking, socializing, bathing, decorating, dressing, caring for pets or plants. “Power and pleasure of making food with your own hands” replaces cooking. “Minimizing environmental impact” replaces buying a dress. “Boosting our creativity” replaces buying plants.

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.

Recognize that, for your customers, a slower pace of life is a good thing Before the global pandemic, it was popular to discuss the damage of social media to our brains, psyches, and social lives. Artist Jenny Odell wrote a book titled How to Do Nothing, about resisting the attention economy. Doing nothing is what most of us don’t know how to do.

Veblen goods defy the traditional economic logic where a price of a good or service is inversely correlated with its demand. Instead, they are socially positional: high-end fashion, watches, cars, wine, organic food, travel experiences, and practices of self-actualization visibly and publicly convey the appearance of success, wealth, status,

When we shift our focus from an individual to their network of relationships, we start asking different questions: how the communities an individual belongs to are structured; what is their dynamics; how the influence spreads within them; who are the most active and/or valuable members. This shift reveals not our inferred, but our actual taste.

Membership appeals to human irrationality. A lot of sneakerheads waiting in line all night to score a coveted item don’t do it for resale; they do it for the badge value and the bragging rights.

There’s a bookstore in Ginza that sells only one book. “A single room with a single book” is its tagline. Every week, the owner chooses the book, presents it in the center of the shop, and curates an exhibition with artworks, photographs, or related items around its subject matter. Entering his bookstore is like entering a book.

Thanks to the Internet, products across categories are now more susceptible to trends than to individual preferences. It’s easy to blame algorithms for the sameness of our taste choices, but the real culprit is us. Humans use social signals to quickly orient themselves in the world.

Tone of voice is not a brand Being chatty, witty, and approachable only masks the missing cultural link that ensures brand durability. It also masks the missing unique value proposition. GMO brands do not compete on the actual business value, like technical innovation, design, or product quality. Away’s sells Muji knockoffs. Casper’s subway riddles