Consumer Brands

Problem solving is about taking an action to make something go away. Creating is about taking an action to bring something to life. Both can achieve success, but if you look around, some of the most interesting consumer products of our era weren’t solving clearly defined problems, they were bringing creative visions to the world.

I have occasionally been asked why I’m obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are things made out of belief. They are amorphous *meanings* that structure our relationships; they are already the same sort of thing that a religion or a culture is. With the cultural production service economy, and now with cryptocurrencies, all of the ingredi... See more

If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you’d have a pretty good guess about what it would be like. But if Hyatt announced that they were going to start making shoes, you would have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what those shoes would be like. That’s because Nike owns a brand and Hyatt simply owns real estate.

Consumer behavior is never done or satisfied. One of the great things about brands is that magical products or platforms or experiences can delight customers in new ways and create new categories or behavior shifts. This is hard but history shows us it happens repeatedly so buckets are never finished.