Unseen Unknown

From the way we create our identities and manage our health, to the way we employ therapy-speak at work and vote in elections, it’s apparent that people are increasingly being guided by feelings and …

In this house episode, we speak with Concept Bureau strategist Rebecca Johnson about the concept of "weirdness" and brands. 

All humans are weird, and brands that are willing to venture into strange a…

What does it mean to be good at thinking? Or more importantly, thinking strategically?

Most people answer this question by saying that in order to be good at thinking, you have to be knowledgeable. An…

Brands get lucky once, maybe twice every generation, when the rules of status change and social equity is suddenly up for grabs. Our Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb believes we are in the …

What happens when the world suddenly reconfigures itself around a very different kind of relationship? The last 20 years of social innovation has leaned into weak ties: distant social relationships t…

Cults make effective brands, and today, they’re all around us. We engage with them on some level every day, and cult experiences have come to define so much of who we are as a society that you have t…

Have you ever stopped to think about what ownership means to us as a culture? Many of us see it as an artifact of the legal system or something that’s decided in courts. We believe it is a self-evide…

For the fourth and final episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about seemingly new emerging forms of spirituality, and how new spiritual brands are positioning themselves to take ad…

Every single culture and subculture - from states and governments to user segments and brand tribes - falls along the tight-loose continuum. A culture’s tightness or looseness affects people’s percep…

For the second episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about systems of class and taste. In the past 10 years, new brands have emerged, specifically in luxury and premium categories, …

Whether it’s brand, behavior, or culture, the more you dig into the systems that affect our lives the closer you’ll come to a conversation about capitalism. 

In this house episode, Jasmine and Jean-Lo…

From the gig economy to the passion economy, changing consumer values are inspiring new brands and business models for creators. 

Today we’re seeing the emergence of yet another model that’s challengi…

Self-care and wellness are everywhere around us. From cereal boxes to the makeup counter to furniture rental, CBD sticks, mobile apps and coffee - a new mindset about how to be… but also how to consu…

There is no doubt that right now we are living through the most consequential time of our generation to-date. Today’s social and political climate begs the big question, ‘Who are we, really?’ 

As BLM,…

When Steven Galanis and his cofounders launched Cameo in 2016, they noticed two things happening in the celebrity landscape: 1) fame itself has blown up, with more celebrities existing than in any ot…

Brands are facing the fact that loneliness has become a part of our identities, crisis or not. But you can’t talk about loneliness without talking about the meaning of rituals first. 

As society becom…

A lot has been said about branding and behavior at the individual or tribal level, but perhaps even more interesting is how these concepts work at the government level. How can government bodies use …

The big question: how is a brand supposed to act during a pandemic? How can CEOs and brand owners serve their users in a meaningful way while still struggling to survive themselves? It’s a difficult …

Times of uncertainty have a way of revealing the mindset of a society, and today’s imminent threats - from COVID-19 to political instability and global warming - are revealing a mental shift that emo…

Brands like Ring and Billie leverage the uncertainty of our changing value systems to create new interest in old paradigms. In other words, they play with cultural constructs: arbitrary systems deter…