nicolas cevallos

Cuteifying something was a way of making oneself its protector, rendering it powerless in a nonadversarial manner. One famous example took place in 1988, when high-school girls reportedly remarked that the dying Hirohito was kawaii, making a nonissue of his responsibility for the war. Hello Kitty, the white cat with a pink bow on her ear, is the ul... See more

Substack sells intellectual taste as cultural currency and contemporary belonging.

“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.

No amount of trend research will help if findings are not integrated much earlier in the strategy process.

What so many organizations get wrong about marketing today is that they treat foresight, cultural intelligence and social listening as downstream efforts.

Too often, every single day, we attempt to map already finalized products to a mismatched ... See more

Gen Alpha is growing up in this space from a much younger age. Their online selves are, to them, even more directly tied to their physical selves than they were for us growing up. What happens when they think growing and experimenting in a certain direction isn’t right for them because their TikTok algorithm keeps pushing them another way? Their fr... See more