This modern capital is also rooted in FOMO (fear of missing out) and in being in the know:

Across categories, there has been a move toward smaller, more decentralized offerings revolving around personalization and hyper-focused inventory.

Investing to make the each customer experience touchpoint rewarding in itself through small perks and attentive care is more motivating and creates greater brand affinity than just getting points. A pure behavioral economics is behind it: consumers prefer many small repeated gains and many incremental rewards instead of big infrequent ones. They’d

“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.

Snap judgments simplify the world.

An imagined community is bound together by a deep horizontal comradeship between people who haven’t met and don’t know each other, but have similar affinities, beliefs, interests, and attitudes.

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.)

By their very nature, brands trade in status: they promise us to be younger, more attractive, smarter, happier, more accomplished, richer. For the longest time, brands operated according to Veblen logic that status is linked to wealth and desirability to price. Now we all have the opportunity to flip the script and link worth and values to our

Social. People are not only individuals but also belong to communities and are members of a society. Their behaviors are shaped by those around them and by collective symbols and stories. The new target unit for brands are a community and a society, not an individual. Modern brand strategy aims to address not just “jobs to be done,” but jobs to be