October 01, 2024 | Read Online

3 Big Mental Shifts That Can Turn You Into an Incredible Brand Strategist

Here are 3 of the most important things I've learned in my career as a brand strategist, and they aren't things that people normally talk about:

#1) There are no brand strategy tools. YOU are the tool.

You have to sharpen your own mind, work hard to eliminate your biases as much as possible, control your reactions in the face of uncertainty, remove your ego and experience the world from a place of true empathy, and resist lazy pattern-making.

Stop looking for the model or framework that will do the work for you.

The answer is already there, but you can only see it once your mind is clear.

#2) Don't see people's choices as good or bad, right or wrong. Everything is just a tradeoff.

I learned this one from Jean Twenge. Gen Z isn't soft. BookTok girlies aren't delusional. Margaritaville isn't full of cringey retirees.

Every psychographic of people is making the tradeoffs they feel will give them the best life.

Gen Z growing up slowly is a smart tradeoff between resources and aspirations. BookTok girlhood is a smart tradeoff between power structures and bodily autonomy. Living in a senior community like Margaritaville is a smart tradeoff between independence and human connection.

The tradeoff tells you the real desires and motivations of a person.

#3) Let the work change you.

The reason why strategists love what they do is because it allows them to constantly evolve past their own limited beliefs.

Working with a beauty brand made me excited about getting older. Branding a construction tech company made me proud of the American work ethic. Spending time with the fans of a plus size clothing brand made me grateful for parts of myself I once tried to erase.

In fact, "Let the work change you" is our company's first value. It's that important.

It requires a vulnerability and humility not many people are open to, but when the work changes you, you get closer to a real strategy. You get closer to a new perspective that can unlock massive value.

If you're not changing, you're not really doing the work.

And if there was a fourth, I would say don't just learn. Take what you learn and digest it with a community. I would have never had these insights if I didn't have my community.

Your community is the most important strategic advantage you've got.

How To Reach A True Insight

So many useless "insights" are always flying around. A few of my faves:

"XYZ is dead!" No, it's not. It's either not dead or it died a long time ago and everyone already knows it.
"XYZ trend changes everything!" No, it's not even a trend. It's a small wave of TikToks that will die in the next 2 weeks.
Or my perennial favorite, "Industry vet complains about everything we're doing wrong without providing any new solutions!"

But we recently had a real insights mastermind with us at Exposure Therapy who gave us the single, most useful formula for an insight I've ever heard.

Matt Klein is Head of Foresight at Reddit, an incredible thinker, and a great friend who came and shared so many meaningful ideas and approaches with us - things that I'm still thinking about and know I will carry for the rest of my career.

Here's Matt's formula for a true insight:

Trend + Countertrend = Insight

Trends and countertrends don't mean anything on their own. They're radio frequencies that tune us into a larger, unseen insight.

They're opposites on the surface but actually both signals of the same thing.

You need to figure out what they ladder up to. It takes a real breadth of thinking and knowledge to find a true insight because its hidden in the patterns among opposites, not the moments. It's in the contradictions, not the similarities.

And according to Matt, most strategists stop halfway.

It's easy to see something new and call it an insight.

It's far more uncomfortable to hold two conflicting things at once and find what binds them together.

Masters & Disasters of Scale

Here's what we've been consuming.

Breaking Down OnlyFans' Stunning Economics (MatthewBall.co): "In 2024, OnlyFans generated $6.3 billion in gross revenues, up from $300 million five years earlier... Though OnlyFans is based around subscriptions, over 60% over consumer spending is now via transactions (and unlike say, Candy Crush, these are not micro transactions but instead add-on purchases that can cost dozens of dollars or more). Indeed, subscription revenues are up only 9% since 2021 (or $227 million) whereas transactional spending is up 70% (or $1.6 billion), representing 88% of total growth."

The Power of Anomaly (Harvard Business Review): "Ambiguity creates opportunity. If a signal were clear, everyone would see and act on it, making it competitively neutral. As the military strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote, "[Attempts] to equip the conduct of war with principles, rules, or even systems [that] considered only factors that could be mathematically calculated are objectionable…because they aim at fixed values. In war everything is uncertain and variable." Similarly, to imagine and respond to trends before they are clear, leaders must act on uncertain and shifting information."

Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic so Hard to Cure? (The New York Times): "Loneliness is a compound or multidimensional emotion: It contains elements of sadness and anxiety, fear and heartache. The experience of it is inherently, intensely subjective, as any chronically lonely person can tell you. A clerk at a crowded grocery store can be wildly lonely, just as a wizened hermit living in a cave can weather solitude in perfect bliss. (If you want to infuriate an expert in loneliness, try confusing the word "isolation" with "loneliness.") For convenience' sake, most researchers still use the definition… "a discrepancy between one's desired and achieved levels of social relations." Unfortunately, that definition is pretty subjective, too."

The information wars are about to get worse, Yuval Noah Harari argues (The Economist): "And many may wonder why, for a book about information that promises new perspectives on AI, he spends so much time on religious history, and in particular the history of the Bible. The reason is that holy books and AI are both attempts, he argues, to create an "infallible superhuman authority". Just as decisions made in the fourth century AD about which books to include in the Bible turned out to have far-reaching consequences centuries later, the same, he worries, is true today about AI: the decisions made about it now will shape humanity's future."

Turning OpenAI Into a Real Business Is Tearing It Apart (The Wall Street Journal): "Some at the company say such developments are needed for OpenAI to be financially viable, given the billions of dollars it costs to develop and operate AI models. And they argue AI needs to move beyond the lab and into the world to change people's lives. Others, including AI scientists who have been with the company for years, believe infusions of cash and the prospect of massive profits have corrupted OpenAI's culture."

Losing Touch With Reality

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

Just Lovely

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

I gave a keynote at TikTok's GlobalTok conference last week, a closed-door event in San Jose solely for the platform's largest brand partners.

The energy was amazing.

The theme was "moonshots" and I really wanted to add my cultural lens to the conversation.

While the world focuses on technology on the surface of culture, the smartest brands will also be paying very close attention to psychotechnology beneath the surface - the tech of the mind, our models and frameworks that create the reality around us - because as we've seen over and over again, there is not a single technology that can live outside the psychotechnology of its time.

Psychotechnology tells us how to build the future our audiences are asking for - the futures that they are already living in their inner worlds but might not know how to articulate.

When mommunes and communes start trending, it's not about co-living. It's about a desire to de-center marriage and re-center friendship.
When titans of industry stop making public monuments like Rockefeller Center and start buying private islands to build apocalypse bunkers, status is no longer about building society. It's about exiting society.
When bootkok girlies who read the Shadow Work Journal and romantasy books buy perfumes with names like "Laughing With A Mouthful of Blood", fragrance is no longer about attraction but about power. (Credit to the amazing Lily McGonigal for her research here.)

You can be a brand that tries to chase the signs of change, or you can be a brand that plays with the deeper mechanisms of change.

You can be constantly reacting to the market, or you could be creating the future people want.