Cultural Strategy

Any given culture generally moves between 4 stages: Entrenchment, Tension, Exploration and Transformation

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

The gold standard for corporate cultural participation was Red Bull Music Academy, a branded cultural institution which over two decades became a legitimately respected music and arts organization. But it’s difficult to find a single other example that lives up to RBMA.

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

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

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.