the flywheel for brand building

Everything is multi-platform and multimedia. Not just journalist-personalities, but every magazine issue, every feature package, every article. The article is just the intellectual property made to be leveraged in as many spaces as possible. The presentation has to be optimized in every venue: You need good Instagram pinned posts, whether you’re a... See more

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?

Ordinary life has come to give us a narrow set of permissions, usually limited to work and consumption. But potency lives in the delta between what’s normally allowed and what suddenly becomes possible in a special space.

Every insight, every behavioral cue, every loyalty signal risks being swallowed by the assistant layer sitting between you and your audience.

This is the architecture of an AI operating system for daily life. And it raises existential questions for brands:

• Who owns the persistent record of customer context?


• How do you build loyalty when memory and

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As founders, community leaders, and shapers of these new cultures, this is the most important question we have to ask. Because we’ve seen that we’re not only creating culture: we’re producing personality in people. In other words, we’re creating types of guys.

A flywheel, based on Walt Disney’s original concept (seen in the infamous diagram below) was to find new opportunities to build upon the love that people have for the set of characters they’re introduced to however they’re introduced. It couldn’t feel like a money grab. Look how that panned out for the comic book industry in the late ‘90s. No, it... See more

rather than observing and following online trends, brands are fully capable of creating their own, treating social media culture as its peer and equal, rather than a source of culture-mining. What it achieves is a kind of dignity that is hard to come by in the current climate of incessant algorithm-stroking. It reads as effortless, not desperate.... See more