the future of brands

If the early modernists sold method and mastery, this next wave began inserting personal stakes more clearly; client briefs still set the parameters, but designers were claiming more space within them.

Media companies will increasingly have to choose what to own and what to co-pilot. Not every new venture needs to exist as an O&O product, nor does it have to exist within a centralized environment. Licensing out characters to various retailers, or allowing small merchants to use beloved characters in their own designs sought out by different... See more

The question becomes: have they drifted so far into experience that they're vulnerable to someone undercutting them on basics?

Successful Brand Universes are those that when come in contact with, we as consumers instantly react, “Wow, thats SO [insert brand here].”

The brand should be more living, the world lives on social, the brand needs to fit within that world and that world is made up of real people and real interesting stuff. It's not made up of brands and it doesn't have these rigid rules. It's less of a brand and more of a character and a writers room.”

For anyone building brands, communities, or cultural movements, this is both the challenge and the opportunity. You can keep chasing width in activations, collabs, and photo walls, or you can engineer depth by creating spaces that allow rupture from the norm. True rituals, not hollow ones. Risk that transforms. Potency is the only real measure of... See more

it’s just getting harder for brands, particularly new brands, to achieve and sustain that kind of fame because there are fewer opportunities for them to send messages that everyone sees, due to the way media has shattered into a million tiny pieces. Thus common knowledge is rarer, more valuable and more expensive than ever. The price of Super Bowl... See more

The companies thinking furthest ahead are already prototyping for this world:

• Commerce will be conversational, not navigational.


• Brand interactions will be proactive, not reactive.


• The frontline of loyalty will be invisible.

In the ambient future, brands will compete not for screen real estate, but for mental bandwidth and emotional resonance.