Cultural Strategy

What interested me was the way that different subcultures and brands were feeding off one another. Lifestyle brands and DTC needed to draw on these subcultural elements—they needed to be the products people buy in order to participate. And in the other direction, product imagery was beginning to play an important role in subcultural formation. In m

As futurists we look for signals—small, often weird things. They are usually new technologies, new behaviors, new narratives that don’t fit into the mainstream, but that are often precursors of important transformations. We then try to discern the larger patterns that these signals herald to understand where they might lead ten or more years down t

As a consumer, you subscribe to one vision or another: what’s your version of hiking out doors? What type of vibe are you about? Purist? Gorpy? High intensity? Meditative? But in all cases, the branded subculture itself is the main thing, while the role of physical goods is diminished. Their job is not to drive value, but to add another layer of de

what would it mean for brands to stop pointing to culture, and to start being it? To do so, they would have to go far beyond marketing, to offer meaningful modes of participation. Is it even possible for companies to be in service of something greater than themselves?