Mike Renaud

‘Emotional generosity’ is the ability to see beyond behaviours we don’t understand by proactively looking for compassionate ways to explain them. Sometimes, this is easy; if a toddler starts crying or throwing a tantrum, we might wonder if they’re hungry, or tired, or hurt. Sadly, it’s not so simple for adults — and especially for our co-workers.... See more

To systematically build iconic brands, companies must reinvent their marketing function. They must assemble cultural knowledge, rather than knowledge about individual consumers. They must strategize according to cultural branding principles, rather than apply the abstracted and present-tense mind-share model. And they must hire and train cultural... See more

In the race to the top of responsive innovation and experience-building, a few recent trends are resurfacing as powerful approaches to the intersection of brand, behavior and psychology. The concept of “tribal branding,” of understanding and activating our collective behaviors and unmet evolutionary needs, cuts through the clutter of motivations,... See more

Type specimens are time capsules of typographic history. There is no substitute for seeing them in person, but you can now use a web browser to track the evolution of type design through the pages of over two hundred manufacturer catalogs from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. For years, I accessed these books via an unwieldy pile of... See more

“The artists who were pioneering the modern movement in the visual arts looked widely for inspiration, breaking away from the old hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ that had long divided visual culture into fine art and decorative art,” said business historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk.