Cultural Strategy

One important thing to remember throughout all of these phases is that ideas, not technology, impact culture the most. With AI advancements rattling nearly every industry, it’s easy to forget that technology can only express itself within the boundaries of the culture it’s born into.

Companies like Crossfit and Soulcycle create a sense of consistent space and ritual that inculcate deep loyalty and community among their participants. Reimagine, an organization that describes itself as “the world’s leading end-of-life events platform,” hosts paid gatherings and festivals related to death and healing. Casper ter Kuille and Angie T

In the new cultural economy, the culture is the product. It is composed of practices, ideas, and discourses. Products are auxiliary, supportive, but not the main event. And most importantly, people now opt into these designed cultures with full knowledge and awareness that these cultures might change who they are.

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