VISIONS by Future Commerce

This season on VISIONS will explore the content of VISIONS: Volume IV by Future Commerce. VISIONS is an audio-visual Annual Trends report that examines the changes in culture and commerce and their impacts on the technology industry that serves them. VISIONS: Volume IV took place over three months, from April to June 2023, bookended by two events.

Today we go live to the first of those events at the Celeste Bartos Theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where we'll speak with a panel of modern culture reporters, foresight analysts, and media creators and ask them the question, “Where is the counterculture?”

Trends are Change

• {00:04:11} “What we have right now is a lot of interesting niche subcommunities with their own cultures and then countercultures to those. And I think the result of that is it's very hard to know what's trending because trends really exist within these sort of niche subcultures and microspheres. And then by the time they exit, they're no longer a trend, they're more like a trend discourse.” - Daisy Alioto
• {00:06:47} “You can't really talk about counterculture without talking about the capitalization of it all. You can capitalize on these weird trends, whether it's something like Dimes Square, and then you see a year later, the entire Marc Jacobs campaign for a massive fashion brand is these characters. So is that really counterculture if that's cool now?” - Emily Sundberg
• {00:09:00} “Sometimes I do get bummed about the lack of existence of new things, and that's why we're going so hard on fashion history because everything feels really referential. But also there's something fun about new combinations and seeing a couch where there's a guy from the White Lotus on it, but there's also a girl that you saw at a party last week.” - Alexi Alario
• {00:11:26} “Is there counterculture or subculture or monoculture? It's completely dependent upon the sample size in which we're looking at. And for the most part, I think it behooves us to really broaden our aperture of really understanding what's most important to the most amount of people, because if we have to select too small of a sample size, we're just speaking to ourselves and really ignoring the masses.” - Matt Klein
• {00:16:14} “When we're talking about nostalgia and memory as some of the strongest mechanisms for marketing and the relationship that nostalgia and memory have to certain mediums, like the type of film or camera you were using when you first encountered something or the type of car you were driving when you first encountered something, it's very hard to package that in an authentic way, but if you can, that becomes the brand moat. And that's the thing that allows you to excel past all of your competitors.” - Daisy Alioto
• {00:24:02} “The thing about de-influencing is, yes, there's a little bit of stoicism of screw it, don't buy this thing, but it's still a form of influencing.” - Matt Klein
• {00:28:42} “Daisy Alioto: it's also important to remember that, for every counterculture movement, the response to it will be part of the cycle of the next culture, even if it's happening in this very fragmented way now.” - Daisy Alioto
• {00:35:34} “Nothing gets better without criticism. So I feel like it's okay that everyone is a critic as long as I think it creates a heightened awareness. And especially with algorithms. If you're not a critic, you're just going to let them like run over you.” - Alexi Alario

Guests

• Daisy Alioto, CEO and Co-Founder of Dirt
• Emily Sundberg, Writer, Creative Strategist, and Publisher at Feed Me Substack
• Alexi Alario, Co-Host of the Nymphet Alumni Podcast
• Matt Klein, Cultural Theorist and Publisher of Zine

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

What makes people happy? Are brands capable of instilling happiness? In today's episode, we go live to the Visions Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, to engage in a frank conversation about what motivates a consumer, and what power we truly have in fulfilling their needs and desires. Listen now.

Show Notes

• Are we able to make customers happy? Is that our job? Brands may have given themselves a role in society that nobody asked them to fulfill.
• There’s a value system change taking place where more is not better, it’s damaging to the consumer and to the brand. More products, more drops, more collabs. At some point it becomes mimetic and overwhelming.
• “Utility” is an over-exercised phrase. In the philosophy of brands, to be utilitarian is to lack joy or purpose. But in web3 circles, utility has a different meaning — it means that it provides exceeding value. To be a utility means to be indispensable.
• The lack of true “discourse” in the retail and eCom industries is that we’re not modeling that behavior between the brand and the customer, let alone between teams or competitors. True conversation between silos will help us to achieve mutual understanding and result in a better experience — for employees and customers alike.
• “It doesn't matter what role you have in the company. Go to the CX team, sit down, plug in, and talk to three or four people a day. And I think we do get so worried about some things being anecdotal in a world where there is this burden of statistical significance that we've lost some of that.” — Mike Lackman
• “So every company needs to build a culture of being curious in every single level of the business. And everybody has to be a behavioral psychologist. There's no way around it, no matter who your customer is. You have to understand, to everyone's point here, what it is that they want.” — Grace Clarke
• “It's actually not necessarily about [products and brands making a consumer] happy. It's about peace. It's about feeling whole. And when you're just looking at a screen and you're scrolling through, that doesn't make you feel that.” — Brian Lange
• “And I think where we've come from has been, particularly in terms of eCom, the opportunity to have endless scroll, endless aisle means I can have endless numbers of choices, but actually, that works in reverse for consumers. It actually destabilizes them, makes them feel insecure. Does that give them the security that they've walked away with a purchase that they're going to be happy with for a lifetime?” — Miya Knights
• “We're moving towards more silos, I think, in terms of distribution, and more intermediaries vying for space, that valuable space between the brand and the customer and getting in between being able to collect that data and sell it back to the brand.” — Kiri Masters

Guests

• Miya Knights, author and retail analyst
• Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Marketplace Strategy at Acadia
• Michael Miraflor, Chief Brand Officer
• Grace Clarke, brand and omnichannel strategist
• Mike Lackman, CEO of Trade Coffee

Associated Links:

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners.

Has the push for engagement over enlightenment led to a rise of insincerity from brands and the way they interact with the public? Should brands comment on controversial topics such as politics and how can they do so authentically without perpetuating this celebration of insincerity we see among us? This is a conversation that needs to be had because it affects all of us. Listen now!

Show Notes

• “Brands need a point of view. And the question to me is more how it gets communicated and where it gets communicated. But I think if a brand is participating in a capitalist society, which by virtue of being in America it is, it should be transparent enough to have a point of view.” - Grace Clarke
• “By virtue of understanding the opposite of something, I started to really understand what the problem was or what the conversation was. I think there's definitely a fine line between insincerity, malicious intentional insincerity, and then satire. Because satire isn't insincere, it's actually extremely earnest in its attempt to prove a point.” - Grace Clarke
• “Overhype is a form of insincerity.” - Brian Lange
• “You then maybe cross the line when you're trying to manufacture something artificial.” - Miya Knights
• “There are elements of a meme bringing people together and then something genuine in the world that is sincere and beneficial can come out of it.” - Grace Clarke
• “Is it important that brands are transparent or is some element of insincerity actually protective for the business to grow in the long term?” - Grace Clarke
• “It is very easy to lose sight of who you are as a brand. And that's really important in teaching customers how to talk about you, not just because consistency is important for consistency's sake, but if companies are missing the chance to reroute themselves and their brand.” - Grace Clarke
• “In the past, before technology democratized the transactional experience all the power was with the brand, "I'll build it. You'll come. You're going to bust down my door and queue for hours for Black Friday," that kind of thing. And now I think consumers are voting with their dollars and they're voting with their feet. And so in terms of following that customer, the dynamics changed, flipped, where I feel the consumer is more in control.” - Miya Knights
• “Different groups are demanding different messaging from me or demanding different things from me, I'm only going to stretch myself for the best customers because that's where the money is.” - Miya Knights

Guests

• Miya Knights, author and retail analyst
• Grace Clarke, brand and omnichannel strategist

Associated Links:

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners.

How can brands differentiate themselves while remaining intuitive and familiar to consumers? Are your car, phone, or shoes an outward sign of your personality? What is leading to the trend of odd-ball, zany web designs?

Different but Familiar

• When it comes to experiencing a brand, the desire for something more than utilitarian varies from person to person
• “You're expecting certain types of content to be delivered in a specific way. And that's part of the attraction is for it to be this really intuitive, familiar experience. So I sort of put that to the side and think about DTC sites and retailer sites as having a lot more scope for variation and a different experience.” - Kiri Masters
• “There needs to be a balance between solving the homogenization issue and solving the problem of differentiation or distinction, and still being able to be intuitive, still being able to get your consumer to do the flow {from discory to checkout}.” - Roger Figeuiredo
• “It's really tough to stand out but not stand out so far that you're doing something unintuitive.” - Ben Marks
• “That discovery and awareness stage of the funnel is where there's a real opportunity to be different. And after that, you kind of want to bring it back to what's normal.” - Kiri Masters
• Maybe visual design inspiration coming from some of the same places contributes to such boredom online because too many brands are overusing trends rather than being original
• “You build your mood board, and you're going to go to other brands and you build your mood board off of other brands, and naturally is just going to lead to more of the same.” - Roger Figeuiredo
• “When you're building your mood board for the look and feel, maybe don't go look at other brands. Look for analogies in design. Then build your mood board off of things that are maybe real life stuff instead of other websites.” - Roger Figeuiredo
• “Don't do what your competitors, people in your category are doing, do things differently from the start. And you will be more likely to have a less boring, homogenized experience.” - Ben Marks
• Has Shopify both helped and harmed the growth of eCommerce? Helped by democritizing, removing the barrier of entry, but also harmed by too many template based sites, and also flooding the market with more competitors

Guests

• Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Marketplace Strategy at Acadia
• Roger Figueiredo, VP of Marketing at #paid
• Ben Marks, Director of Global Market Development at Shopware

Associated Links:

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners.

There's been a lot of talk about this place that brands take in our lives that tries to fulfill meaning and purpose and community in all of our lives. And we've given a term to this today. We're talking about The Sacraments of Commerce. A lot of brands today ask us to put some faith in them or to believe in them. And what about the algorithm gods?

Bigger Than Me

• “You can't have integrity, you can't be building for the long term unless you are sustainable underneath. It's easy as a customer to believe in that because you see it proven true.” - Grace Clarke
• “That feeling of belonging and community that's been disrupted over the past couple of years because of our digital lifestyles, was something that could be infiltrated and addressed directly. Brands scaled to address that.” - Michael Miraflor
• “You need to have the values underpinned and then follow through with the customer experience for it to seem authentic and sincere and lead to that level of fervor and loyalty that verges on religious intent.” - Miya Knights
• A lot of traditions that we all grew up with are deeply rooted in a practice that came from our ancestors, that came from our parents. It's a tradition you hand down. Can we say the same about brands?
• “There's a lot of value in being a very deep part of very frequently repetitive, tactile, human, utilitarian things.” - Mike Lackman
• “Everyone does at this point have a responsibility to be proactive about their own algorithm. And it is something that has been such a net benefit for serendipity and discovery. It's incumbent on humans to have a front foot there and not simply be passengers in the experience that they're having.” - Grace Clarke
• People are becoming brands. Brands are becoming religions. Religions are becoming brands unto themselves. And brands are becoming people. Is this true?
• “There's a greater degree of individual humanity being injected into some of these other entities. I do think there's an opportunity that if we do it right, there's a chance for that to be a way to propagate a greater degree of decency.” - Mike Lackman

Guests

• Miya Knights, author and retail analyst
• Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Marketplace Strategy at Acadia
• Michael Miraflor, Chief Brand Officer
• Grace Clarke, brand and omnichannel strategist
• Mike Lackman, CEO of Trade Coffee

Associated Links:

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners.