Unseen Unknown

We’re leaving the current age of social media and entering a new one where our symbols and our languages are changing. Any time a new age is born, the rules get harder, the audience becomes more discerning, and all of us - people, brands, identities - are separated into those that move ahead and those that are left behind.

The question now is, what is this new age that we’re walking into?

In this episode we speak with two experts on opposite sides of the spectrum in order to answer this question.

Erin Weinger is the Vice President, Social Editorial, at Sony Pictures Television who has also worked with some of the biggest influencers and publishers in the game. Her vision of the new age of social media is a stark departure from where we are now.

We also speak with Dr. Therese Mascardo, a licensed clinical psychologist and founder of the wellness community Exploring Therapy. Dr. Mascardo is in a unique position to talk about the cultural shifts happening in social because she’s both in the practice of mental health, where much of social media can be more clearly understood, and in the practice of building a social media brand... as an influencer herself.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode:

• The Changing Language of Luxury: Experience, Education, and Poetry (Luxury Society)
• Is social media influencing book cover design? (The Guardian)
• Americans are reading poetry again because of Instagram (Quartz)
• Instagram appeal: How social media is changing product development in beauty (Glossy)
• How To Optimize Your Apology (Freakonomics)
• Yelp Reviewers’ Authenticity Fetish Is White Supremacy in Action (Eater)
• Dr. Gabor Mate on Attachment and Conscious Parenting (YouTube)

Learn more about Dr. Therese Mascardo and Exploring Therapy here.

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Influencer-led beauty veteran Ria Muljadi gets deep with us about the current role of a women’s brand, what it means to have a realization about yourself through a brand experience, the personal impact of reconsidering your national identity, and how burnout is the new cause.

“When this conversation started, it was almost like a floodgate. People felt it but never knew what it was until somebody said it.“

Ria is the CFO of Em Cosmetics, and formerly Head of Finance for Ipsy. She has the unique perspective of being someone who literally helped build the modern influencer-first beauty industry, but also seeing it more objectively from a non-branding role.

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

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, that point to a divergence in our social systems around what class and taste are, and how they are achieved.

Brand strategist and sociologist Ana Andjelic places brands like Telfar, Blenheim Forge, Fly By Jing and Brightland in the Modern Aspiration Economy. This emerging economy trades in taste, aesthetic innovation, curation and environmentalism. And what’s remarkable about these brands is that they have all successfully decoupled class from money, and taste from wealth.

In her new book, The Business of Aspiration, Ana explores this decoupling and contrasts the Modern Aspiration Economy to the traditional economy where consumers once signaled their status through collecting commodities, Instagram followers, airline miles, and busy back-to-back schedules. Now, it’s about collecting knowledge, belonging to micro-communities, and leveraging influence.

As Ana points out, this new cultural and environmental capital changes the way businesses and entire markets operate. We talked about where and when this decoupling started, the ways in which it has changed global markets permanently, and how brands can trade in this new capital.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• The Business of Aspiration (Ana Andjelic)
• Big Fashion’s Niche Future (The Sociology of Business)
• How Micro-Communities Transform Aspiration (The Sociology of Business)

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

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 midst of one of those rare shifts right now, where we are moving from the self-indulgence of conspicuous consumption to the self-denial of what he calls “conspicuous commitment”.

Public figures are devoting themselves to difficult new modalities, diets, spiritual quests, life practices and ideologies. Your friends are going on arduous, painful, yet revelatory, psychedelic retreats. All around us, wellness brands, food brands, medical brands, lifestyle brands tell us that self-denial is the new flex.

No longer are we obsessed with flaunting material possessions and extravagant experiences; instead, we're witnessing the rise of people showcasing their unwavering dedication to self-work, vulnerability and personal growth.

In a time when nihilism is literally everywhere, when pessimism gets clicks on headlines, when post-capitalist hopelessness is a trending aesthetic on TikTok and every meme deals in absurdity, conspicuous commitment stands out.

In this episode, we also speak with W. David Marx, author of “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change” who has an alternative view of how status is tied to money more than ever, and what that means for an increasingly flattening culture.

If you deal in any premium or luxury category, this is a must-listen. The ways we seek to distinguish ourselves have dramatically evolved as we prioritize discipline and personal growth over material success.

That means everyone has to play by new rules.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Conspicuous Commitment Is the Next Era Of Status (Concept Bureau)
• Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change by W. David Marx (Amazon)
• Money Can’t Buy Happiness. It Can’t Even Buy Status, a New Book Says. (New York Times)
• ‘The Most Measured Man in Human History’ (Vice)
• High Fidelity Society is Reorganizing the World (Concept Bureau)
• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt (The Atlantic)
• Brokenism (Tablet)
• Futurist Predicts Humans Will Achieve Immortality By 2030 (IFLScience)
• How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan (Amazon)

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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 intuition in places where they may have once relied on reasoning or ideology.

This noetic, direct-knowing way of moving through the world may sound familiar to you. Perhaps a colleague was “guided” to change careers, or a friend decided to “detox” their personal life. Maybe you, yourself, have dabbled in any form of “energy” practices.

None of these major decisions came from religious ideology. None of them came from scientific reasoning. They came from a third place of intuition, and this is an important cultural shift that revalues knowledge in our world.

When 87% of Americans believe in at least one New Age spiritual belief, it's clear this third place of knowing is growing. But what is really interesting is what we see when we drill down into that majority.

What we find is not so much spirituality but instead the very definition of noetics: knowledge that is felt to be true, inside, by the self, with intuition as its defining experiential characteristic.

In this house episode, Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb gives us a clear, compelling look at what this third epistemology actually is and how we’ve seen this new belief system emerging for the past few years in our work at Concept Bureau.

It is a domain that is both needed and felt, but not yet surfaced in our culture... and that is the formula of a golden opportunity.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• The Noetic Future of Culture and Brands (Concept Bureau)
• High Fidelity Society Is Reorganizing The World (Concept Bureau)
• Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (John Vervaeke)
• The Body Keeps The Score (Bessel van der Kolk, MD.

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.