Mike Renaud

Even back in the command-and-control days of the production line, Henry Ford’s decision to manufacture automobiles was driven by intuition rather than market research. “If we had asked the public what they wanted,” he explained, “they would have said ‘faster horses.

Today’s most vital cultural forms are your identity, personality, and image. And in this new cultural paradigm, the artist’s performance of themself is often more important than the art they make. The persona is the message.

A charismatic brand includes a dedication to aesthetics. Why? Because it’s the language of feeling, and in a society that’s information-rich and time-poor, people value feeling more than information.

Who’s going to bother with all the work it takes to make a track successful on streaming services, if you can net more revenue faster through much more pleasant dynamics on your own terms?

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