THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Nick Liddell on Architecture & Anthropomorphism

Nick Liddell [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickliddell/] is a brand strategist, author, and founder of Baron Sauvage [https://baronsauvage.com/], an independent consultancy based in London. Previously Director of Consulting at The Clearing, he has over 25 years of experience working with brands including Google, Prada, McLaren, and Samsung. His most recent books are You Are a Fish: The Truth About Brands and The Brand Architecture Book [https://www.library-street.com/products/the-brand-architecture-book], which argues for understanding brands as coherent systems rather than singular entities. So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine, who’s a neighbor also, who helps people tell their story. And it’s such a big question and a beautiful question is why I borrow it, but it’s so big, I over explain it the way I am doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control. And I think it’s really great that you asked this at the beginning of all of these conversations because I had some time to prepare for it, although I’m not sure you’re ever fully prepared. Yeah, I think as with a lot of people, it’s a complicated one to answer. I was born in Paris. I only moved to the UK when I was three years old. And I initially lived in the north of England near a place called Carlisle. And then I moved down to London when I was 10. So if I just want to give someone a short answer to it, particularly given that London is a pretty great place to work, if you’re working in branding, then I’ll just say London. But from a personal point of view, I’ll always feel I come from the north of England. I don’t sound remotely like I do anymore. But yeah, I’m a northerner spiritually. And what does that mean to be from the north of England? When do you feel most northern? Well, I think professionally, it means that it’s super easy to get sucked into the belief that everywhere is London. You grow up or you live in a bubble, particularly when you work in branding or marketing. And so it’s a really healthy way to remind myself that most of the world is not remotely like London or any major city for that matter. And also just personally, it means that the further north I go, the happier I tend to be. And what was it like growing up? Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up? Well, certainly not a brand consultant. I had no idea a brand consultant was even a thing until I started looking for work. And then I saw in the list of things that aren’t being an accountant, a management consultant, a doctor or anything else that I wasn’t remotely qualified to do. Brand consultant was one of the few things left. And so it sounded fun and I went for it. I think I wanted to be a different thing every week when I did it, including ballet dancer and professional footballer and spaceman and everything. And where are you now? And what is the work that you do? So now I am, to all intents and purposes, still London. I’m just outside London. And I still do pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last 26. So helping organizations of all sorts of shape and size understand how they can better use their brands to improve their relationships with the people that they need to have good relationships with in a way that ultimately benefits them and helps them achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve as an organization. Yeah. And when would you say you first discovered that you could make a living doing this thing? Only really when I started doing it. I went to a careers fair and there were a couple of sad looking types in a corner. No one was speaking to them. They had an easel with a couple of British Airways planes with some funky tail fins on the back of them. And I don’t think anyone was remotely interested in speaking to them because they didn’t have a really snazzy stance. They weren’t handing out free things like the Unilever guys and the P&G guys were. So I went and talked to them and asked them what they did. And they told me that they worked at a brand consultancy called Interbrand. And I asked them about the type of work that they did. And it sounded semi interesting. And so I applied for a job and got it. And that was pretty much the extent to which I understood what I was doing, what on earth it involved. I learned it all when I started doing it. Yeah. And what do you enjoy about it? What do you love about it, actually? Or where’s the joy in the work for you? I love — well, personally, what I love about it is and the reason that I applied was I started working in brand valuation. So I studied philosophy and economics at university. So that’s a really nice mix of numbers and thoughts. And so what I initially liked about branding was that very often you’re looking at large data sets and you’re looking for some story or idea that you can extract from those data sets. And then there’s the bit on top of that, which you don’t get from an economics and philosophy degree, which is then you can start working with people who actually do things like designers, writers, creatives of all sorts of shape and size to actually make this idea manifest in all sorts of delightful ways that you probably couldn’t have imagined when you started thinking about that idea. And that for me is just a really lovely process that you go through from you can literally look at an Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of ones and zeros as input. And then output is just this really beautiful, compelling experience that’s been really thoughtfully designed that is going to make the right people really happy and get something and want to engage in it in a way that creates value for them and creates value for the people who are serving it up to them. And that’s still 26 years later, just a really fulfilling thing to do with my time. Yeah, I feel like maybe we started around the same time. And I always say that I feel like when I came into the work world, brand was the new technology. Do you remember on one level? I’m curious, does that resonate with you? Do you feel like that’s valid? And then secondarily, what do you look at 26 years later? It’s a long time has passed. What’s changed and what hasn’t changed when it comes to brand? I feel like I have to apologize before I respond to that. I think the funny thing for me is just how little that resonates. And I think probably the interesting thing about doing something for so long is you get into it and you forget. You forget some of the fundamentals after a while because you’re just used to the process of doing things. And so once in a while, I just find myself thinking, actually, why do these things exist? We’re so surrounded by brands in particular. Right. You can get up probably on a daily basis. You interact without really knowing it with thousands of brands. It’s in the tens within about five minutes of waking up. If you’ve brushed your teeth, picked up your phone, looked at the shower, stared out of the window. And so I think it was about 15 years ago. I just started thinking, well, hang on. Yeah, why? Why do brands exist in the first place? When did they start existing? And maybe I can just learn a little bit about how it all started. And there was a really interesting academic research paper that I stumbled across that basically said, you go back to the earliest civilization in the Indus Valley, something like 4000 BC. There is evidence of what they call proto branding. But effectively, it’s the same thing as what we’re dealing with today. And you’ve got merchants who are putting bulls and fertility gods like images of things onto their wares to signify where they come from. But also there’s symbolic value to those things. And that’s what we’re still doing today. So I would have — I used to go along with the story when I was at Interbrand. We always said the same thing. Brand comes from this Norse term to brand something. So that’s how old it is. It stretches back to Viking times and it’s all about asserting ownership. It’s complete nonsense. Brands go back about as far back as civilization goes, as far as we know. Yeah. And consequently, there’s just something innate about people when they get together and they produce all sorts of things like these artifacts of culture and brands happen to be one of those things. Yeah, that’s beautiful. I’m happy to be corrected on that front. That’s beautiful. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Anthony Shore. He’s a namer. But he pointed out there’s some science and research that talks about how names — they change the brain. We interact with names differently. And in a way that affirms what you’re saying, that the things that we’ve called things that we make and share or sell are fundamentally different than other things in our life. So tell me, what kinds of projects do people come to you for? What are the kind of problems that you like to solve? Well, part of the thing I love is how varied they tend to be. So I think a lot of the time when people talk about branding, lots of the books and literature about branding focus on positioning. So how do we construct a belief system or create meaning around an organization and then use that meaning to help provide a sense of direction for people? And that’s some of the work. But then there’s a lot of stuff which is closer to what I call portfolio strategy, which is — so I’ve got a dog that I need to keep letting in. And some of it’s portfolio strategy. So that’s just a question of, we’ve got all of these different moving parts. Most organizations don’t sell or create one thing for one audience in one place and sell it through one channel. So how do we take all of these different moving parts of teams, divisions, products, services, solutions, families of products? How do we take all of that and make sense of it and help people navigate their way around it and make sure that it ladders up into that overarching meaning that we have set for ourselves? And then there are architecture projects which are about how you create a system of visual and verbal signposts that make it easy for people to find their way around it. And then there’s brand experience stuff, which is basically how do you take that idea in your — whatever you want to call it, positioning, proposition, promise, purpose, whatever word begins with P, vision, mission. How do you take that idea and how do you turn it into something people can experience, a service ethos that they can feel? Of course, there’s a manner of speaking, but really just how do you create something that you can envelop someone in where they will get it and benefit from it and want to continue that relationship? And that’s the interesting bit because that’s where you’re working with designers and creators of all sorts of shape and size to just create, make something happen in a better way than it would have happened otherwise. So most recently, your book on brand architecture popped up on my feed is what inspired me to reach out. But you’ve written a couple other books before them, all of which I recognized even not knowing, which is pretty cool. So Wild Thinking was the first one, right? Is that right? Wild Thinking was the second book I wrote. Yeah, sorry, I have to remind myself because first book I wrote was called Business is Beautiful. Oh, yeah. Nice. And what was the inspiration for that? Or how did you become a writer on top of being a brand consultant? Well, when I worked at Interbrand, which is where I started working, it wasn’t really an option. I worked in brand valuation. It was one of the more prominent parts of the business in terms of how Interbrand markets itself. Every year they produce this annual study of world’s most valuable brands or best global brands, as they call it. I used to manage that. And so I was very used to writing about brands and talking about brands and going on news programs and discussing brands that were in the public spotlight. And when I moved job, I think there was an idea that I was just the numbers guy. And every — at that point, we’re talking probably about early noughties. Everybody wanted a league table because they felt that was a way to get attention and market your consultancy. And I was really bored of them by that point. So I just said, well, why don’t we not do a league table? Because everyone’s doing a league table. Why don’t we write a book instead? And why don’t we write a book about the importance of intangibles in organizations and intangibles like creativity, for example? Why don’t we write a book about that? And why don’t we give it a really nice counter cultural title like Business is Beautiful, because certainly at the time businesses were getting bashed left, right and center. And fortunately, because it was a French organization I was working for. And if you want to get French person interested in something, then just make it counter cultural. And then much more likely if you’re a bit contrarian, then that’s going to work a little bit better with them. And so they said, yeah, great. Let’s not do a league table. Let’s do a book and let’s make it about all of these wonderful intangibles that organizations run on and thrive off and grow through. But no one really ever talks about that. So it’s good fun. Yeah. And I want to return to — you’ve connected us to the ancient roots of brand, I guess. So what do you feel has changed or has not changed when it comes to building a brand in twenty twenty five versus when you started? I think surprisingly little has changed. I think the fundamentals of it are pretty similar just because whatever technology exists, whatever systems exist, you’ve still got a person in the middle of it or a group of people and all the messy ways that we interrelate with systems, we’re always the weak link there, the limiting factor. And so you can only really design a great system to the extent that you can really understand the messiness of humankind and our imperfections. And so whatever technology has sprung up, I’ve only been working 26 years in that time, we’ve had the dotcom boom and bust, we’ve had one and a half, maybe two financial crises. We’ve had a pandemic. We’ve had, of course, social media come up. We’ve had AI. And they’ve all had a cosmetic impact for brands. But the fundamentals — it’s a different channel. That channel works a little bit differently. But at their core, there are a few basic things you need to get right. If you’re a brand and you need to get them right, no matter what time you’re in. I just don’t see any technology particularly changing that unless that technology changes humans to the point where humans no longer interact with their world in the way that they’ve interacted with the world for millennia. What are the things that you have to get right? What’s your working definition? I have a perverse attraction to foundational ideas, to the basics. When you talk about brand, what does it mean? So I think when I talk about brand, probably like you, right, when you talk about brands, depending on who you’re talking to and what their level of interest is, then you’re going to talk about a different facet of it. Because you can talk about brands from a legal point of view. I don’t know much about trademark law, but I know enough to at least know what I need to speak to a trademark lawyer about a piece of work. There are all of these really lovely facets. And I’ve only started, 26 years in, I’ve only really started wrapping my head around some of them. But I think one of the things that really piqued my curiosity about brands, and fundamentals of branding, extended from that idea of when did brand start? Oh, I can’t really tell when they started. So then why do brands exist? Why are they this almost, they’re not innate, but they just seem to be some chronic aspect of the human condition, or at least in the context of civilization. And again, I found in another academic paper, this really interesting idea of anthropomorphism, and how, initially, it was identified as how interesting it is that when you travel around the world, people in different cultures recreate gods in their own image. And that’s a wider phenomenon. And we do it in all sorts of places, all sorts of times, we do it with our pets, and we do it with toys, when we’re younger, we do it with our cars, we do it with all sorts of inanimate objects. And I think, fundamentally, brands exist, because humans have this tendency to anthropomorphize or humanize things that aren’t human. And there are specific situations in which we tend to do it. And those are the specific situations in which brands tend to flourish. And so I have a theory that if you understand why people tend to humanize non-human things, then you probably also have some insight into branding, and what good looks like, and what not so good looks like as well. Yeah. What role, I came up as a researcher in a brand consultancy, so I identify very much as a researcher. And I’ve always been curious how people think about the role of qualitative, but just research, how do you learn for a client? Or how do you advise clients in terms of understanding the relationship you’re talking about between people and the objects that they’re trying to have a relationship with? Yeah, and I love it, absolutely. I always feel like it’s an unfair thing that people pin on research. Certainly, there was a while when people used to roll their eyes a little bit at organizations that spend a lot of money on research, because particularly from a creative point of view, there was an idea that it’s some limitation factor, or it’s just indicative of just a lack of imagination on the part of an organization that they want to look into research all the time. Actually, I think another way to look at it is that the firmer your evidence base, then the more confident you can feel in doing more creative things, just because you’ve got a solid platform on which to build. So if I possibly can, I like to build off a solid platform for the people that I work with, particularly if you’re going to ask someone to do something quite extreme for them. The more you want to take someone out of their comfort zone, I think the harder you have to work in terms of justifying why they should, and very often research is a way to do it. Qual, sometimes, quant, often, more often than not, some combination of the two, and ideally with Qual, I think, I’m really interested in where you come out with this stuff is the weirder, the better sometimes, as far as Qual is concerned. I tend to be less interested in six or eight people sat in a room for two and a half hours being asked questions about a subject, but I’m always super interested in ways people get prodded without them necessarily knowing about something in other ways to reveal something that they would not otherwise have revealed, that they may not even be aware of themselves. That’s the stuff I really love about Qual. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have any examples, or can you tell a story? Anything, weird is a beautiful invitation. Weird, yeah, I used, I really, for quite a lot of positioning work, I’ve really enjoyed stuff that builds on metaphor elicitation, and Jerry Zaltman and all his thinking, and you get people to collect images and tell stories about those images and use metaphors, and I do find you just go to some really, people take you to weird places, and will very often say they’re discussing things that they hadn’t necessarily thought about before, which I really like, and I really like the idea of if you want to test for one thing, you ask about another. So if you’re working on packaging, rather than show a couple of examples of packaging and ask people what they think of them, you put that thing in the packaging, and you ask them to taste it and tell you what they’re tasting, knowing yourself that that is the same thing in both packs, and so any difference they reveal is likely to be a difference that they perceive from the packaging, and I think it’s that sneaky, we’re going to tell you that we’re asking you one thing, but actually we’re testing for another thing that I think really attracts me to that aspect of Qual. Yeah, absolutely, and I feel like that’s where I had a weird upbringing in that I was, I learned Qual at a brand consultancy, and so everything I learned was weird, it was all deep, projective, free association stuff, which I think is, well, of course, it’s unbelievably powerful, and I often say that what you learn, you can’t learn a ton, but what you learn has massive leverage because it’s so deeply true or connected to the emotional experience. Yeah, that’s beautiful, and I’ve got a sense of that, your work Wild Thinking was also, you’re advocating for just getting out, you seem to have a contrarian streak, is that fair when it comes to the discipline? Well, I couldn’t have said all that stuff about the French, and admitted to having been born in Paris, and got quite a big French family, and not have a little bit of that rub off on me, I think, yeah, yeah, but weird’s another word I keep coming back to, as well, for a lot of the right type of client will respond well to a sentiment like, good positioning is sometimes just about finding out what makes you weird, and really embracing it, some organizations hate that sentiment, and just aren’t comfortable with it at all, but the right organization will take that as a prompt, and then go to an interesting place. I want to talk about the brand architecture, what, why write a book about brand architecture? What’s the state of that? That’s not something that feels like an inside baseball, that’s a bad Americanism, perhaps, but an inside baseball topic. Why write a book on brand architecture? The simple reason that it didn’t really exist yet, and I’d just, the book that I’d written before was called You Are a Fish, and that has all the stuff about anthropomorphization, and it’s really and anyone can pick it up and read it and understand a bit more about brands, even if they don’t feel particularly interested in them, that’s why that book was written, and I thought, after that, I should probably write a super technical book about this important but not particularly well covered subject about brand architecture and brand portfolio strategy, and it’s super geeky, I think you have to be really, really, really committed and interested in branding and brand strategy to really want to pick that book up and go through it. I know I’m not particularly selling it, but I also wouldn’t want to misrepresent it, and it always surprises me that there are people out there who do want to pick up a book like that and are interested in how you construct a portfolio strategy and once you get out of the trap of the house of brands or branded house, how you have a more nuanced way of talking about something like brand architecture that’s just a little bit more helpful for organizations. Yeah, yeah, well, I guess I’m that guy. I don’t know that I’ll be spending the time to read all of it, but certainly the getting into the weeds about what brand architecture is and why it’s important is something I feel is thrilling in a way to me, which is strange. But it’s funny, I guess I hadn’t really acknowledged the degree to which there wasn’t a lot of literature about it, right? You’re saying it’s sort of there was house of brands. What’s the state? What’s the general idea about? It seems like your book is what I’ve read about it. You’re reframing it from this hierarchy to a systems view, but what’s the state of thinking on brand architecture and what does the book bring? Well, I think maybe it’s one of those things where David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler, 26 years ago now, I think it basically coincided with when I started working in branding. They wrote a book about brand leadership, and then that was followed up by David Aaker with a book about brand portfolio strategy. And that’s where they introduced the idea of the brand relationship spectrum. And at one end, you’ve got a house of brands and the other got branded house. And there are seven steps in between them. And they wrote that, they introduced the brand relationship structure and they created it. And they wrote the book that they wrote together with the idea that this is quite a nuanced area and it’s quite complex. And they wanted to create a helpful way for people to deal with that nuance. Unfortunately, unwittingly, what they did was they invited people to collapse that spectrum into two opposites of branded house and house of brands. And I do still find whenever a client organization or marketer wants to talk about brand architecture, then they collapse it into that dichotomy. And so over the intervening years, not a lot, if anything, has been written about brand architecture that doesn’t just regurgitate that brand relationship spectrum. And some people have house of brands, branded house, and in the middle, they’ve got an endorsed or something like that. But it’s not helpful if you’re a practicing brand consultant, because all of these things are really unique. And so but that’s not a helpful thing just to say to people, forget that model, just focus on something unique, because then you’re not really giving them anything helpful that they can use. And so I thought I’d just write a book about the steps that I tend to go through when I think my way through a portfolio and architecture projects. And out of the end of it came this ludicrously large, but quite geeky book that is the brand architecture book. And so what I would love, to the degree that you’re interested, I’d love to hear your approach to brand architecture. What’s the role that it plays for you? And what are the steps? What makes it valuable? Well, I think at the heart of it is a distinction that I didn’t come up with. Someone I used to work with described this to me. I’m pretty sure it was someone called Ruth Ingram, who I think is now practicing in the United States. So some of your listeners may be aware of her, but she described to me this difference between roles and relationships. So in any branded system, one job is just to work out, well, for each part of that system, what role does it play? What’s it there for? And that’s one challenge. And that’s what I now call the portfolio strategy bit is just what roles will be assigned to all of the different bits of your portfolio? And then the second thing is, well, once you know the roles of these things, then you can start having a coherent conversation about what the relationships between them should be. If things play a similar role, maybe you group them and maybe they become a family. If different parts have contradictory roles, then maybe you actually want to create distance between them, and you can get into questions of, well, if you want to cross sell a lot between, or if there should be lots of cross talk between the different parts of your system based on their roles, then you actually want to make sure that visually and verbally everything feels similarly tight and coherent. On the other hand, if you’ve got lots of contradiction in there, or you want to speak to a really heterogeneous group of people and cover a really broad set of needs and requirements and markets and channels, well, actually, maybe you need to pull things apart a little bit more and have a system. And so at the heart of the approach is really that distinction. First, let’s work through the roles, three things that I think of when I think about how you define roles, starting with the commercial side of things, working back from the positioning, because the role should refer in some way to your positioning, and then just making sure that in the context of what you want to achieve as an organization, and what your customers or audiences want to achieve, that you can then define a clear role in terms of how they win and how you win in each of those areas. And then once you’ve done that, and you’ve got a clear enough role defined for each part of the organization, that you could explain it to a five year old, then you start thinking about the relationships and how many levels or what the hierarchy is, how you create fixed assets, or what some people would call distinctive brand assets, but also what’s flexible, and then how you design an entire system around that, that you can future proof. So it goes from the very, very commercial through to the very, very creative. Yeah, and who does it really well, would you say, or who’s doing it badly? I think the answer on badly is super easy, because most organizations get away without having a particularly great system. And what’s the impetus to get one’s house in order? Very often, it’s just people get a sense that everything is out of control. And they waste a lot of time doing things that don’t make sense. So when I think about the briefs that I got, I’m working with an automotive company right now. And they’ve innovated really quickly. Generally, as a rule, I would say, the more innovative the company, the faster their pace of innovation, the more screwed up their architecture is likely to be because they get excited about something, they give it a name, it launches, it may succeed or fail, but they’ve already moved on to the next thing. They’re now excited about that. They want that to have a name, but they want that name to stand out. So it’s going to be different from every other name they’ve got. Then you just see it happen over and over again. And before you know it, they’ve got 500 things all with completely random names. Some of them seem to be working, some of them don’t, but everything looks different. It doesn’t look like it comes from the same place. Every time they launch something, they have to reinvent the wheel. And at some point someone says, this is super inefficient. It’s crazy. We’re so confused. Our salespeople can’t explain what we do. I can’t explain what we do. I run the company. Someone has to stop the madness. How do we stop the madness? And that’s when you arrive. But what that means is that generally the problem’s got to get really bad. Most organizations have pretty poor brand architecture systems. They muddle on. Okay. So it’s a fair challenge. Once in a while, people say, well, if it’s so bad for most organizations and they can be valued in the billions or trillions, then how bad an issue is it? And I think there’s probably a threshold at which it just becomes unignorable. And until you’re at that threshold, then I completely understand why organizations do ignore it because it’s really difficult to get a good architecture system. You need so many different bits of your organization to work together. Your product innovation people and your salespeople and your marketing people and your brand people, if you have them, and then your HR people, all of those teams need to agree on a single thing and then agree that they will sacrifice their autonomy for the greater good. And there’s loads of organizations in which that level of discipline doesn’t really exist. I’m curious. The other context you mentioned before was there’s brand architecture, but then brand experience and developing brand experiences. How do you work with teams to do that? And how has that changed? Generally, I would say that happens by increment. Once in a while, you get a really lovely brief or an opportunity to map out someone’s entire brand experience, and then work with them to identify the pain points, the pleasure points, which aspects of the experience are going to be most impactful from a user point of view, and then to work with them to design more thoughtfully around it. Sometimes you’ll already have a guideline in place before you do that. But that’s not in most cases. In most cases, you’ve worked on a brand project, you’ve created a guideline, and then it’s a little bit like when you move into a house, right? And I remember the first house I moved into, and I remember thinking the walls are a disgrace, wallpapers peeling off the walls. And so we fixed the walls, but then I noticed how terrible the floor looked, because now that wasn’t up to scratch. And I think that’s how it happens in a lot of jobs is you develop a positioning, you work through some portfolio strategy, some architecture, you develop a set of guidelines, and then someone notices actually, our environments all look rubbish. And so you get into a, okay, fine, we’ve designed a nice business card, but if our offices look terrible, then we need to fix our office experience. And then, okay, our offices look great, but actually the rest of our colleague experience sucks, because none of the rest of it is up to scratch at the office. And so you find in increments, you fix the thing next that needed to be fixed most after the last thing you fixed. And then over time, everything becomes more coherent, it makes more sense for people, their impression of it improves, and only a few people know why, because it happens slowly, and without much fanfare. So that’s wonderful. So I love the fact, the story of your name of your company, would you tell that story? And then I’m just curious how you work with clients to embrace the same spirit? Yeah, well, I suppose, yeah, I’ve got to be really careful that this doesn’t sound like desperately amateurish. But I was just in a position where I needed to set a company up really quickly. Yeah. I’d worked on enough projects that involve company naming to know that if you go for an intelligent, if you go for an intelligent name that anyone in their right mind would want, then probably that name is already taken. By someone, because there are lots of intelligent people who make good decisions. So if you need a name in a hurry, you need to come up with a name that’s dumb that nobody would want, or maybe is brilliant, and no one thought about, but that’s 0.01% of names you’re likely to come up with. So I just came up with a name that nobody would want. Baron Sauvage is the name of my business. And it was the name of, or the title of one of my ancestors, again, French ancestry. So there was a Napoleonic general in there called Pierre Sauvage. He was a Baron. And I just thought, I’m going to call it Baron Sauvage because no one has it. No one has it. The domain name costs 69p. And also if this thing fails spectacularly, no one’s really going to notice that. And it turns out five and a half years later, it’s still going. And it’s caused lots of client mirth in the meantime, as well. This is another great thing about the difference between Northern and Southern, all my London based clients are extremely polite about it. My early clients was from the North, Accrington. And they revealed after a little bit of working with me that behind my back, they call it Baron Sausage. And I just thought that was brilliant. And so if I need to set up another business, it might be Baron Sausage. Yeah, well, I was just curious, after all the time working with brands, what the experience was like, you caveated by saying you were worried it would appear amateurish in some way, but what was it like to try to brand yourself or to go through that process for your own identity and your own company? I think it, well, I can’t say it revealed much to me. But what it did confirm is something that I’ve felt for a super long time, particularly all the time that I’ve worked, I’ve been so lucky that I’ve worked with some really great creative directors. And one thing I would observe is creativity is enormously undervalued in most organizations that I work with. But the real missed opportunity there is that creativity, if exercised in the right way, can save you an incredible amount of money. If I had had more resources, I could have thought about a sensible name to call my company. And someone would already have had the domain name, I would have had to have bribed them to give me the domain name, I would have had to have probably challenged a bunch of people in terms of securing trademark rights, it would have cost me a lot of money. I think if you don’t have money to spend on something, then you’re just going to have to get more creative with it. And I think we tend to do it out of necessity. It’s like the last resort. But actually, more organizations, I think, would benefit from using creativity as a first resort for saving money, just doing things a little bit smarter. And working their way around problems in more imaginative ways that actually create solutions. A lot of the work really is ultimately about that. Right? I’d be surprised if you didn’t have similar experiences. Yeah. We’re coming near the end of time. And I was curious about, I wanted to shift into just your sense of the state of things now. There was something you said earlier about, you’re talking about how constant it all has been, that there’s a lot that hasn’t changed. And I think you said, unless some technology comes along, and it changes the way people relate with the world around them, I couldn’t help but think about AI and its most extreme manifestation, it’s pretty transformational. So I wonder, have you given it any thought as to what the implications are? And what do you say to somebody, a client who might ask about what’s coming, and what it might do to brand? So I am always really honest with people that I am the least qualified person to ask about AI. If I had to, someone put a gun to my head and said, what’s AI gonna do to transform branding? My response would probably be less than you think. Partly because most of the stuff I read about it, and I’m interested in AI, I read about AI, I read about how marketers and branding people and creative people use it. It’s not for lack of curiosity. It’s just that I genuinely don’t know. And I’m really comfortable talking about brands and branding. I’m super uncomfortable pretending like I know about something that I don’t really know. But unless AI, so we go back to conditions in which we tend to humanize things, also being conditions in which brands tend to do really, really well. And one of those is conditions of high uncertainty. So typically, if you can’t judge whether something’s good or not, or right or wrong, then you’re going to rely more on something like a brand to help you decide. Do I know much about life insurance providers? No. But it’s a really important thing for me to get right, because then if I die, my family’s entirely reliant on that provider. So am I going to go for someone that I’ve never heard of, who started up yesterday? Or am I going to go for a company that’s 200 years old? Answerable to regulators? Well, I’m probably going to go for the 200 year old company that I’ve heard of, right. And so AI, if I have gleaned anything from what I’ve read about it, is heightening our degree of uncertainty. Certain individuals feel very certain about AI and what it does, but most of us I think don’t. I think it probably makes us even less trusting of what’s going on. And throughout time, the more we have needed to trust stuff, and the less we’ve been able to objectively, the more we tend to rely on brands to fill the gaps. Now, I’m totally hedging my bets, because those brands might be AI brands. I might be talking about Claude or Anthropic. I might not be talking about Apple, or pretty much anyone GE. But some brand at some point, if we continue to feel uncertain about all of this, it will be brands that probably help bridge that trust divide that we will hold responsible for things that go wrong as well as right. And I don’t see that piece of technology fundamentally changing that dynamic. Awesome. I want to thank you so much for accepting my invitation out of the blue and just being generous with your time and all your experience. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Matt Klein on Ambivalence & Mythology

Matt Klein is Head of Global Foresight & Research Methods at Reddit and the creator of ZINE [https://kleinkleinklein.com/], a Webby Award-winning cultural intelligence newsletter with 26K+ subscribers across 150+ countries. He calls himself a “digital anthropologist, cultural theorist, strategist, and writer.” Douglas Rushkoff called him “a brilliant cultural analyst.” Someone else called him “the closest thing to Gen Z’s Marshall McLuhan.” So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, which is significant, and she helps people tell their stories. And I haven’t really found a better question to start a conversation, but it’s a big question, so I over-explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? I knew this one was coming. Still don’t have an answer. Where do I come from? I come from two loving parents in New Jersey. I grew up in the quintessential suburbs and went to high school in the very stereotypical movie high school with Friday Night Light football games and people shoving people into lockers type of deal. And didn’t love that experience. I was not shoved into any locker, for the record. But I did find a lot of relief. We had a mass media department. We had a full-on film set, TV studio in our high school. And I found a lot of both relief and just a respite catharsis in that space. And it was also quite convenient to edit movies there rather than sit at the lunchroom table or alone. And very quickly I learned this is it. This is what I love doing. I ended up going to a very small liberal arts school, Franklin and Marshall, where I did a double major in psychology and film and media studies. And I was either going to be a film director or a child therapist. It was a coin flip, one or the other. But it wasn’t until I was taking these courses in strategic communications and the theory of technology that I realized that there was this overlap here, which was the psychology of media or the ways in which new technologies are changing the ways in which we communicate, express, create senses of self. I’m like, oh, that’s it. This idea that we can study media and culture and people through our devices or through media. And that’s what I was so interested in with film as well. And that landed me in Adland. I had my first gig at RGA. It was perfect timing because all these brands were trying to figure out, what do we do with this thing called social media? How do we behave? What do we say? What is the purpose of these tools? And here I was explaining all of these platforms and the psychology of it and what that meant for culture and purchase decisions and creation of identity. And to be paid to do that was profound. That was wild. And jumped from shop to shop, to market research, to creative, cutting my teeth on any and everything. And here we are. The passion is still the same, which is trying to make sense of culture. And what does our technology say about us and what do we say about our technology? Yeah, that’s really wonderful. I’m so excited for this conversation. I wanna go back to the beginning. I was really struck by the suburban upbringing and your discovery of that studio. How did that begin? What’s the origin story of you finding that space to play in and explore? I had already loved backyard movies. I was using our old massive camcorder. I don’t think it was even DV tapes. I think it was VHS tapes. We were recording on just nonsense in the backyard. And then for a birthday one year, I got a handheld. Lego also had their own movie studio product line. So I was loving that. How did I discover it? I don’t even remember. It’s not like I chose the high school, but there was these intro to mass media courses where they taught you, here’s how to shoot. This is a pan. This is a zoom. And we were just editing. And the next year you take a course on deeper into editing styles or narrative fiction. And I mean, it was quite advanced for a high school and absolutely loved it. Was absolutely hooked because it was just filling an existing interest in the first place. And our school took it very, very seriously. We had a full blown film festival at the end of the year where all the students submitted their films. There were screenings where students and teachers and parents came to watch them all in award ceremony. And I think it was so rare to have that experience where at a very early age in high school, you are given the opportunity to find something or for something to find you that stimulated you. And you can find something that was challenging. I mean, that wasn’t happening in US history for me. So to have all of those options of electives, essentially what they were, to find that in film was quite special. Yeah. And do you have a recollection and maybe the answers in everything you’ve already said as a young, as a boy, what did you wanna be when you grew up? What did I wanna be? I don’t know what the title was, but I knew that it was something creative in nature. I mean, I was always doodling. I was making those backyard movies. It was something creative in nature. And I mean, I went into college thinking maybe this is a film thing, but it was deeper than just the art itself. There was something beneath it. And I think I found that in, here we are, business. I’m not as much interested in the business part as much as everything else. Business is just the vehicle to explore that. I still don’t know. I still don’t know. Yeah. And so catch us up. Where are you now? And what do you spend your time doing? Doing a lot. I am currently at Reddit. That’s my nine to five on the Research and Insights team. The last four and a half, five years has been focused on helping brands understand what’s happening in culture through our data so they could show up in a more strategic way. In a more strategic, creative, resonant manner. Last year or so, I’ve shifted a bit to focusing on applying those insights to Reddit itself and thinking about consumer growth, both in the US and internationally as well. That’s the nine to five. And then outside of that is a lot of writing. I’ve been writing for quite some time, trying to make sense of the messiness of our current moment. I was writing for two people on the internet and was quite fine with that. I was doing that on Medium and then Forbes and then a little thing called Substack came along before Substack was even Substack. And I thought, well, this is great. If two people subscribe, then at least I’m not fighting for attention. Those are two people who are raising their hand to say, oh, I’ll read that. And that allowed me to focus more so on what I wanted to explore and think about rather than chase a view or cut through on attention. And that has grown into Zine. And that has then brought in other speaking opportunities and advising opportunities. And that’s how I’m filling my time currently. And when would you say you first discovered you could make a living doing this? It’s an interesting question because we can interpret living in a few ways. There’s the financial aspect of it. And there’s the, oh, wow, I could fulfill myself and find that meaning in that. That was very quickly. That was very, very, very quickly. Still today, I don’t view writing as something for other people. I don’t say that selfishly. There’s of course value and people wanna pledge and fantastic, I’m so about that. But when I say it’s really for myself, it’s I have something that I’m trying to wrestle with. I can’t make any sense of it. I’m trying to find my words to explain this to myself. The page is the canvas to do that. It’s really for me. Truly, it is for me. And sure, if less people read it, would I feel differently? Yeah, probably. That said, anything that I’m writing is truly for myself. Truly, first and foremost, I’m trying to make sense of this thing. And if other people enjoy it, fantastic, I love that. So when did I learn that you could make a living from that? I think very quickly because when I was writing these things even in college and soon thereafter, I was finding the words for things that I was trying to make sense of. And publishing that, whether that was read or not, was this practice of, oh, wow, I now better understand myself and I have a better understanding of the world around me. How would you, to the degree that you have one, how would you describe your process? I’m always curious how people learn. I mean, you’re sitting in a position, I mean, you’re unbelievably well positioned to have access to so many different sources of data and different perspectives. But for you, how do you learn? And what’s your process for trying to understand what’s going on? I try to wrap my arms around as much as possible, just collect, collect, collect, collect, and then try to find the patterns amongst all of that. And the collection could be an observation on the street, a documentary, a dataset, whatever. The more diverse, the better. And oftentimes feels like the snake unhinging its jaw, trying to consume all of it. And there’s total discomfort, like it’s not natural by any means. I have a running note in my notes app. And just thoughts, like true shower thoughts. And when things start feeling connected, that then becomes a larger idea that graduates into maybe a piece or maybe a slide. But how I learn is just consume, consume, consume, consume, consume, like endless consumption. What’s an example of a shower thought? This idea of, what kinds of things are worthy of you noting down? Let’s open it up. We’ll do this in real time. It could be from a podcast. I’d be listening to a podcast and oh, let me open the notes app and jot that down. I could be on the treadmill and oh, wait a second. Let me pause this, whether that be my own thought or someone else’s. 74% of food cooked in a restaurant is not eaten in a restaurant and it’s brought home. That’s something like, oh, haven’t thought of that before. That’s interesting. What else does that connect to? Here’s another one. This is funny, it’s like a diary. Do we need another made up phrase? Maybe not, but if language is the limits of a reality, creating a new language expands what that reality can be. Shower thought, just writing that down. And I mean, those are pretty solid ones. What about trust cannot exist without fear? Perhaps fear, sometimes I read this and what does that even mean? I think that makes sense. Fear of perhaps the risk of a relationship or risk of identity or maybe ego. Well, the value of trust is that without it, you can be hurt, right? There’s that too, totally, totally. So they’re like unfinished lyrics. If you want to think of it like, an artist and you just piece these little things together, and maybe there’s a story and maybe it’s nonsense. I mean, I’ll read through some of these. I’m like, what the f**k was I saying there? Okay, not an idea. Or I didn’t even know what I meant. Didn’t hold, didn’t hold. What would you say, you mentioned, I love the way you articulated the psychology of media. And I’m always curious about, what do you feel like you pay attention to that other people don’t? Based on your training, based on your own interests and inclinations, where do you find yourself fixating in ways that other people don’t? I find it very reactive, where I’m reacting to the signal. And what I mean by that is, what I’m interested or what I’m calibrated to pay attention to is the overlooked. So if everyone’s looking over there, I want to look in the other direction. What’s happening over there that we’re not giving as much attention to. And the threshold or the barometer, the rubric, whatever you want to call it, is what’s having an influence on us with unproportional, or that is disproportionate to conversation volume. So in other words, okay, we could be talking about hype for hype’s sake, loud conversation, lots of volume of it, yet low impact. I want the opposite. I want high impact, low conversation. And where do you find that? I don’t know. I’m still trying to look, that’s the job. But I’m constantly reacting. That’s what I meant, which is all right, let me consume, consume, consume. This is what everyone’s thinking about, talking about. That then sets me off in a different direction. The criteria I have in regards to what I write about is very much if it’s covered, then fantastic. I don’t feel compelled to have to add another voice to this given topic. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, but I try not to. Because for me, I’m trying to go in the other direction to make sense of and to explain and articulate and selflessly try to provide the words for these other things that we don’t have the words for yet. When you say react, what do you mean when you say react? React in regards to just a response. So react, maybe that’s not the right word. You go through the scroll or you’re going through the newsletter curations. Everyone’s talking about X, lots of headlines about X, more X, more X. Here’s someone else’s hot take about X, fantastic. The reaction to me, what I mean by that is okay, X has been covered. We don’t need more noise about X. Some of it’s good, some of it’s not. I don’t feel compelled to have to say more about X. It’s not, judgelessly, not interested in more X. I’m interested in the Y. Interesting, I meant letter Y, but I also, W-H-Y as well. Both, why is everyone talking about X, but also the letter Y over in this other direction. So I’m almost reacting to the, this sounds so clinical, the metadata of all the news itself. So rather than even reading some articles, it’s okay, this publication is talking about X. There’s a whole debate in the comments about X. That’s something to react to. That’s okay, that’s some signal. Let me go over here. And I’m reacting to that existing noise or signal and heading in the opposite. I don’t think it’s the right word, but maybe it is. There’s something really ambivalent in a few things that you’ve expressed. I know in the past, you’ve said trends have no meaning. You mean you’re critical of things that you’re participating in. And you hold both these positions at once, which is the definition of ambivalence, but you also said it in your, maybe it was your shower thought of do we need new language for this stuff? Oh, we actually, we do need this language for this stuff. Do you identify with that ambivalence? 100%. What we’re talking about is this nuance that it’s not all one way or all the other way. That what we’re talking about is incredibly complex because we are complex. So therefore you can need complex answers and approaches to all this material. Sorry about ambivalence. We’re working within this, let’s call it corpo machine, which is oftentimes such nonsense and just so toxic, so anti-human. And it’s very easy to say, let me go unplug and write poetry in the Alps or whatever. But I’m also of the camp that if you want to change something, you can’t always change it from the outside. Perhaps you’re more well positioned to change from the inside. So as critical as I am to the nonsense of advertising and trends and corpo capitalistic, not whatever, perhaps rather than throwing stones from the outside, you can find more momentum or traction in changing discourse and decision-making from the inside as well. So I think all of these things can hold true. Is one more effective than the other? I don’t know. I’m not going to pretend anyone has the answer there, but I don’t think that’s a contradiction or insincere or disingenuous. I think they can be true, that I find this work fascinating. I find it incredibly problematic, yet I also care so much about it and do find value in it in some instances. So all of this is just, it’s messy and we’re messy and it’s problematic if we don’t allow room for that messiness. What do you love about the work? Thinking about all the different things that you do as part of it, where’s the joy in it for you? It is not news that we are in a fucked up moment. Trust in government leaders, institutions across the board, all time lows. Yet when it comes to this idea of a brand or even marketing messages, there is no exaggeration, profound influence on the ways in which we see ourselves, others, the world. It’s the party, it’s meaning. And you can’t have a sense, this sounds wild in a vacuum, but you can’t have a sense of self without some purchase. And to help organizations help other people, I find fascinating. There’s something about that. And if you allow many of these organizations, which is just people to progress in group think or autopilot or hype, it’s a disservice to culture and individuals writ large. So I do find an opportunity and a valuable opportunity is how can you become a translator for these massive, massive, massive organizations that have an impact on the world anything else, arguably larger than government in some instances, because that bends towards the institution more often than not. How can you become the translator, the decoder and the representative of people? And I don’t take that responsibility lightly. And that sounds more, it sounds bigger than it is, but I mean, that’s the work, that’s what we’re doing here. And I find that fascinating. That is wild. And if not me, then who? So there’s this, I’ll go back to this word responsibility and no one granted this to me. I just found it myself and I find it interesting. How can you help these organizations show up in a more human-centered manner? And I do think it’s possible. I do think it’s possible. Is it easy? No. Is it frequent? No, but it is possible. Yeah. Two questions trying to get out of me at the same time. I think the first, because you really centered on it, it sounded to me and maybe I’m over-interpreting, but you really, you’re holding up a brand as a responsibility, as an obligation and the significance of the role it plays in all of our lives in this culture. Can you just say more about what makes it so meaningful and what the role and responsibility is? Because sometimes I feel we skate all over the top of it without sitting with the significance of it. This is a conversation in itself or five podcasts in itself. Brian Lang puts it from Future Commerce, transaction is identity exchange, which is to say a maker of a candle or a car is exchanging a part of their identity for this output. And you are exchanging your commerce, this transaction to help inform your identity. I’m a proud owner of this candle. I’m a proud owner of this car. This transaction is more than money. This is labor. It is identity. It is affiliation. It is meaning. It’s really easy to hate on that. I’m well, do we need more luxury items? Or live a life without trying to buy something. You can’t, you cannot. And whether the identity comes first or after, I think is moot. It’s all wrapped up. It’s one in the same. So if transaction is integral to who we are and who we associate with and how we create status for both better or worse, more often worse, I mean, you can’t separate these things. So there’s ambivalence in that as well. I think oftentimes that’s not good. That’s not healthy. We see the destructive path of that. But I think that’s for me a bit of reality. I mean, we’re not gonna all wear burlap sacks and call it even. It’s not happening. We’re not doing that. We’re not all gonna agree to buy the same car. And we’re not all going to agree to live in the same place. That’s not realistic. It’s impossible. So what you’re left with is this forced decision of, well, what do I buy? Who do I associate with? What logos do I or not? And what’s wild about all of this is that the logo is not real. This thing is not real. It’s not real in that Tony the Tiger doesn’t exist because it’s just a team of other humans. But Tony the Tiger, right? Brand is mythology. This is a spirit. There’s nothing physical about this. So the fact that someone could look at one logo and feel a certain way and someone else can look at the same logo, the same colors and shapes and feel something else, that means it’s not real. This is perspective and interpretation. With all that said, selfishly, that’s wild to me. That’s fascinating. And that you can make a living from trying to study that and play with that, insane, absolutely insane. Now, to balance that or to counter that, if you’re gonna do that for a living, why not then root for Team Human and try to make these transactions and make these meanings as pro-human, as humanly possible? We’re in service of other people more so than that of the business. And it doesn’t have to be in favor of the... I mean, why should it be? This is all meant to serve us. Yeah. You mentioned playing the role of translator and decoder for clients, helping them help people. What are the kinds of questions or where would you say clients or organizations generally, where do they struggle the most in trying to understand culture, understand what’s happening outside? I think the biggest struggle is that, we’ve been hinting at it, that this is more complex and nuanced and subjective and ever evolving and dynamic than we realize. So we create these frameworks and trends and labels to try to code, quite literally code both in categories and names and zero and one binaries of what this is. And we need to, to a certain extent because we can’t just throw up our hands. This is really messy stuff. And can we embrace that messiness and that gray area thinking? What I try to do is in that realm, which is can we deconstruct some of the presumptions that we come to the table with and think about this differently? The one that’s killing me right now is, we need to operate at the speed of culture. Ridiculous. In what way? Ridiculous. What’s ridiculous about that? That we’re conflating culture with fast. No, that’s one part of it. You’re talking about the boo-boo nonsense, machete garbage. That’s not culture. Culture is also language, civil rights, religion, climate collapse. That stuff happens slowly. Is that not culture? Of course it’s culture. So you’re talking about one super thin sliver of culture and it’s the least important part of it. So you don’t have to operate at that. Or another example, we need to predict the next thing before anyone else can. So we have to create our trend forks, forecasting algorithmic newsroom to catch blank before anyone else. And the provocation there is, okay, and then what? What are you gonna do with it when you catch it? It’s the dog chasing the bus or car. What are you gonna do when you catch it? Not only do you not have the answer, you don’t even have the organizational capability to do something with it. If you catch pickle girl summer, whatever it is before anyone else. Now what? So we’re just distracted by a lot of these things, which is fair because we’re living in a crazy moment where it’s very easy to be distracted by these things. And we have more data than ever. We have more exposure to events around the world than ever. We have more access to people to research than ever. We have more opinions than ever. Everyone and their mom has their substack. Fantastic, but can we develop a sense of taste or discernment around what do we pay attention to? What do we care about? And what’s going to help us? And then that part of what’s going to help us, let’s start there. What are we actually trying to stand for? Why are we in people’s lives? Back to identity exchange. What do we want to be known for? How do we wanna help people? How do we provide value? How do we make this world better? Let’s start there and then worry about Pickle Girl Summer later on. So many good things. So what do you call that top layer of culture that is being confused for culture? Entertainment. Yeah. It’s fun, okay? There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fun to talk about it and to pontificate and write these articles about it and to strategize around it and make tools to analyze it. It’s fun. And there’s not gonna totally denounce it. There’s some value to it. It’s what people care about and are interested in. There’s value to that. But to mistake that as your business opportunity or business thread is completely myopic thinking. How does one tell the difference between the two? And then I’m gonna little asterisk here because you reminded me. I’m just, I imagine you know Grant McCracken. I’m always quoting Grant because I love him so much. But he talks about culture as dark matter for corporations. And I’m just recognizing that he’s very explicit about how mystifying culture is for the organization in the same way that you’re being very explicit about that it’s just, let’s just name this as something that the organizations just don’t know how to manage. What’s the right question? How do we tell the difference between the messy culture that matters and the superficial entertainment bit? And how do you help clients see it for what it is or operate on it? I’m not gonna pretend there’s a right answer or a hard-coded answer. I don’t think there is. Back to this messiness. And that’s not to punt the question by any means. Because for me, I think it’s a good question. For me, the threshold or the criteria is does this scratch a human itch? If you wanna go back to hierarchy of needs, do humans fundamentally care about this thing? And does this have a more evergreen shelf life? If it’s, I don’t know, stonks or NFTs, back to the metaverse, what is this itching? Is this answering something for people? Maybe in a moment, sure. But if you really, really go deep, what is this doing for people? I don’t know much. I don’t know what this is answering. Now, if you go back to La Boo Boo Entertainment, Dubai Chalk, sure, that’s fulfilling something that is scratching an itch, so that contradicts it. But this is where it gets so fricking tricky. You almost need a cool-off period where, it’s funny, rec soccer, there’s this rule when we were kids. And the rec soccer rule was, if you’re a parent and you have an issue with one of the games, and the games are on Saturdays, you can’t call until Tuesday morning. You can’t complain until Tuesday morning. We’ll hear you Tuesday morning. We’ll take your call, take your email, but you can’t send it until Tuesday morning. So I think there’s something applicable here, which is if you just wait half a beat and see if this still persists, and it’s still scratching an itch, and it’s still saying something about our moment, fantastic, all aboard. Let’s talk more about La Boo Boo’s, or I don’t know, Mu Deng, the pygmy hippo, which everyone’s forgotten about at this point, poor Mu Deng. But if you just wait just half a second, you’ll realize, whoa, maybe this is not as important as we actually think it is in our current moment. That’s not to say it wasn’t important in that moment, or there’s other signals that we could create constellations around. We just maybe need a cool off period for some reflection. Because we get caught up in the cycle of machine and the platform and the algorithm. It wants us to work that fast, but it’s not natural. That’s not, we don’t operate at that level. So to think that we operate at that level because the news headlines operate that, that’s not it. That’s not how it works. So to go back to the original question, what are brands asking, or how do we help these organizations? What are those provocations? It’s can we attune ourselves back to the human frequency, and realize that we are only human, and we’re trying to resonate with humans? So getting caught up in all this spin cycle, all this so-called nonsense isn’t helping anyone. Yeah, that’s beautiful. And it’s, I mean, so resonate is a word I just keep, it feels everybody just wants to be resonating now. It’s the best expression of how we feel aligned with things, I think. I wanted to ask, I’m always selfishly interested in the role that qualitative research and ethnographic research plays in things. If it doesn’t play a role, that’s fine too. But how do you think about research and the different modes and the methods and approaches in terms of helping organizations resonate? I have no favorite, and oftentimes no preference, right? Pros and cons to all of it. I have a soft spot for the deeper, slower ethnographic research. I, years ago, was on a crazy project trying to help understand why chronically ill insurance members were rejecting care. They were offered in-home care and it was a benefit to everyone if they accepted this care because they lived longer, insurance doesn’t have to pay out. Yet they couldn’t figure out, here was this free care for people to help, not just organize your life, but pick up prescriptions and clean and wash. And why were people rejecting this? No survey, no dashboard, no semiotic, whatever. Nothing is helping you unless you go into those homes and spend three hours with these people. So I have a soft spot for that. That being said, I don’t mean to punt again, it’s so dependent upon what’s our context. And maybe that’s the insight in itself, which is, I think we have a hammer, call it a dashboard for social listening, and we just view everything as the nail to hit that with. So I’m a bit more contextual of what are we doing or why are we doing it? I also look at a whole lot of data all day long, the largest human generated text corpus that’s ever existed. So there’s a bias towards that as well. Incredible, incredible insight. The downside is you can’t ask a question to any of it. No follow-up, can’t ask, what do you mean by that? Or why’d you use that word? Or what about in this context? It’s static. Not only is it static, but it’s five years old. And five years old is insight if you want to compare it to this year or next year. Yeah, pros and cons to all of this. Yeah. You talked about, I think in a recent study, you had a bunch of people choose the word of the moment. Is that right? Yeah. Here, I want to talk, I want to get your sense of the state of things right now. And I guess the words of the moments were anxiety and overwhelm. Is that right? That’s right. And then in my newsletter today, and I don’t ever plug this, but somebody wrote, do you know what whelm? I have a link about the word whelm. Maybe, I don’t think so. But it’s whelm means overturn and it’s about boats. Whelm meant originally overturn or capsize. A thing that was whelmed was either a boat or other thing inverted with concavity down or someone or something covered by such a concavity. Anyway, so I thought that was a charming segue to talk about how we are all feeling now and what’s your, from where you sit, how are we all doing? What’s going on? Not well. Not well. I go back and forth. I think about this a lot. You read Futurists from the 60s. I think of a future shock. And there’s these lines like, the pace of information and technology is greater than it’s ever been. We’re in complete overwhelm. We cannot make sense of reality. This is so, so long ago. So either you’re incredibly prescient or this is just the human condition. And it’s a 50-50 coin flip on how I feel every morning of is this particularly unique and this is truly, truly unprecedented or it’s just always been a mess, sometimes less of a mess than others. I flip-flop on that all the time. But I think by and large, it’s not good right now. It’s not good. I’m optimistic, you have to be optimistic and not naively, but I’m optimistic because this goes back to the work that we do. These organizations, these institutions, these politicians, it’s all so malleable. It’s so flexible. It’s so, it’s made up. None of it’s real. It’s arbitrary at times. So if that arbitrariness can get us to this point, that arbitrariness can also get us to other points as well. So the optimism comes from this idea of agency. Now that’s easier said than done. I just think we’re missing a bit of, without diagnosing everyone or everything, that’s not the intent. I just think we’re a little, back to nautical themes, just a little lost at sea. We’re treading, we’re swimming in a direction and we’re quite uncertain if that’s even the right direction or is that towards shore or not? And we’re just overwhelmed and exhausted with I’m tired of just treading. Where are we going and why? And who’s leading us there? And how much longer? And what’s gonna be there when we get there? We have no vision of what can be next. And I think that’s maybe the most acute part, which is we have no alternatives. We have no tangible or visible alternatives. There’s a reason why a certain individual is in the position which he’s in, because he’s offered, this is what the future can look like. It looks autonomous cars and living on Mars. At least that’s a vision. And you could understand why people are attracted to that because it is a vision, it is an alternative. It’s something other than this moment. Now, there’s many, many, many other options, just harder to find them, to point to them, to hear them. And I think it’s scary for people to present them in our current moment, to deviate from or to stick their neck out. So chicken or egg, I don’t know, but a bit of a catch 22, the words I’ll use is lost or directionless, rudderless. I thought I wanted to share, there are some of my shower thoughts, but I think they’re just observations that feel really true about what’s happening now. And I wanted to just run them by you. We’ll let my dog out for a second. The first comes from, it was several years ago. I remember a couple of people in different contexts telling me the same story. One was this woman in wellness. And she was saying that, you can’t really trust healthcare or doctors really to know what’s wrong with you. I’m the only one that really knows what’s good for me. And then a couple of weeks later, a guy at a bike shop was saying the same thing about the news. He was, you can’t really trust any of the news. I’m the only one, I have to go out and do my own research. And I’ve come to call this, this is just the collapse of trust, right? Everywhere. But I’ve come to call this sovereignty that we’re in this sort of sovereign age where everybody’s sort of assuming absolute control and responsibility for their domain because there’s no higher authority. It’s another way I’ve heard people describe it as trust went from vertical to horizontal. We’re all, we have to figure it out on our own. And then I wanna throw into that. So that idea that things went from vertical to horizontal, the K-shaped economy, this idea that we’ve split in two and the well are doing really, really well and the poor are doing really poorly. And then third, and I think this is probably another hour’s worth of a conversation, but the notion of orality, this idea that media, we’ve just shifted out of, we’re in sort of post-literate, I’ve heard people talk about. So we’re not reading anymore. And the implications of all three of these feels the maelstrom that we’re in. I think that’s a nautical term. Yeah, what do you make of that? I feel if I were to draw a map, that would be the map. I would be trying to help people. That’s what I would describe as the environment we’re in. I it. I co-sign. Yes. Yes, across the board. For the trust and sovereignty bit, what comes to mind is, it’s almost larger than trust. It’s no one’s going to come help you. So therefore you’re on your own. And that’s where I think you see something a sports betting mania, which is, f**k it, I’m on my own. Let’s gamble it. Because my resources are much more limited or more precisely, my prospects or futures are more limited. So you have this maybe larger desperation, more willingness to bet because I’ve got less to lose. That then speaks to your K-shaped economy. I think that’s always, maybe more so now, but people have always done very well and people have always done poorly. That’s more exacerbated and more extreme in our current moment, which then goes back because no one’s helping. In the same survey that I’d run about what’s the top word to define the moment, hold on, this is going to be, yeah. In that same survey asking people what’s the top word, I’d also asked a question of what do you think is the most overlooked aspect of culture today? So my meta trend analysis was here’s what everyone’s talking about. But for those who study culture, what’s the one element you believe is having that outsized impact relative to discussion? Back to the question I think about a lot. And there’s a lot of answers around this idea of the successful, i.e. elites, celebrities, influencers, those are perhaps one aspect of the K-line are ignoring those on the bottom K-line. That there’s not just a deviation, but a lack of acknowledgement of that. And I think that goes back to, oh, wow, I’m really on my own. There’s no, let’s go back to nautical themes, no dingy is gonna come and save me. There’s no Coast Guard looking for me right now. And to maybe try to tie this all together, back to the post-literate bit, what comes to mind there is that, yes, we’re in a very visual culture. I think what’s driving that is that it’s a fast, just speedy, overwhelmed culture. And we’re able to encode visual data faster than auditory or written. That a symbol or a sign is quicker. The video is quicker than hearing something. So maybe we can tie these all together, if you stretch that in that overwhelmed, there’s this just fast breakneck desperation of I gotta go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, that utter panic, this frenetic energy of truly feeling alone and having to figure it out yourself because no one’s coming for you. Yeah, that sounds about right. Have you encountered that orality argument before? I have. I thought of it a lot when there was all those home devices, the Amazon Alexas and the Apple had one. And there was all this talk that, our future is gonna be screenless. Well, there’s some term, spatial computing. We’re gonna live without screens. Never bought that, never bought that because no one wants to wait for the message to be finished read. Right. I remember I had done a little, we’re near the end of time and I did a podcast project for a greeting card company. And I remember talking to young people about communications and greeting cards and greeting cards had become the equivalent of a marriage proposal. You know what I mean? The formality of a greeting card had become so, it’d become so weighted when you’re living in a world of text. But Matt, I wanna thank you so much for accepting the invitation and for showing up. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. I appreciate the questions. This was a lot of fun. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Katarina Graffman on People & Meaning

Katarina Graffman [https://www.linkedin.com/in/katarina-graffman-8679458/] is a cultural anthropologist and founder of Inculture [https://inculture.com/], a cultural analysis consultancy. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and is a researcher at Uppsala University. Her clients include IKEA, Volvo, Bloomberg, Björn Borg, Skanska, Swedish Radio, and the BBC. She co-authored *We Are What We Buy* (2018) and *In Search of the Time to Come* (2020). Her TED Talk “The focus on the rational mind will lead to climate collapse [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYlq0dMoBGw].” All right, so I start all the conversations I do with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their stories. I don’t know, it’s just a beautiful question, so I stole it from her. But it’s really big, so I over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you are in absolute control. That’s an interesting question. I come from my mother’s womb. I was actually listening to a podcast this morning when I was out walking — a professor in nanotechnology here in Sweden, Maria Strömme. She’s from Norway, but she’s at Uppsala University. She has been in hard science her whole life, but now she’s started to dig deep into philosophy and the humanities, because she thinks she can build a mathematical formula to understand where people go after death. Where they go. And I’ve never been someone who is afraid of death, even though I’m not religious. I think that in some way, we are around. So it was really interesting to hear this hard science woman arrive at the same conclusion through mathematics and physics. She will probably be a name in the future, I think. So to answer your question — I come from my mother’s womb, but I think I come from all over the place, from many, many people from the past. That was a little bit maybe strange. How does that feel? What’s that? It feels good. Nice. You used this phrase, I think, we are around. What did you mean when you said that? I said that the spirit of us — or the something, whatever it is — something in us as humans is always around. The only way to explain it. Do you have a recollection of growing up, as a girl, what did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to be someone working with elephants, but I ended up working with humans. I don’t know what it says about me. What was the attraction to the elephants? I think I have always been fascinated by elephants because they are very wise. They have a really interesting way of living in groups, how they socialize with each other. So I think maybe that’s also why I studied humans, because what’s interesting about anthropology is how people live in their groups, how we become herd members. We always talk about how humans are so individualistic and unique, especially in Western cultures. But the thing is that we are more dependent on the group than ever before in those individualistic cultures. So that’s my area I’m studying today. Yeah. Did you have an experience with elephants as a child that inspired you, or where did that come from, do you think? I don’t know. Not more than going to the zoo. And then later on, I went to Tanzania, but that was when I was 20-something, when I was starting my PhD. I went for half a year to Tanzania. Of course, I saw elephants in the wild, but by then I had already started my anthropological career. Yeah. Tell us, where are you now and what do you do for work? Yeah, I’m an anthropologist and I took my PhD in Sweden, Uppsala University, in 2002. And then I rather quickly decided to leave the university and academic life because I wanted to work outside. I think that as an anthropologist you can do a lot in society, in organizations, in different aspects of how to understand humans. I wrote my thesis about TV producers. So that was a little bit different from many other anthropologists. My thesis was about how people in content creation produce content for people they don’t know. Especially in Sweden, we have public service and you are supposed to reach certain groups of people in our nation. How can you do that if you don’t know them? So I wrote about that — how producers create fantasy viewers based on maybe one person they know in the countryside. And there was also an American anthropologist studying public service TV who talked about the same idea — that you create a viewer and then you start to make content with that fantasy in your head. And I think that’s very interesting if you look at the marketing industries, because they often have very shallow knowledge of the people they are supposed to create products or advertisements for. So that’s where my interest started. Yeah. I want to hear more about the field work on your thesis. That’s so fascinating. As somebody who’s worked within organizations and big corporations in the US, there’s all this talk about personas and empathy — all these shortcuts to help people develop products for people they don’t know. It’s a whole infrastructure, really. So what did you do and what did you really learn? I started my field work with the idea that I was going to study how you make formats more locally adapted. For example, Who Wants to Become a Millionaire or Survivor or something — the format has a Bible, from the person who came up with the idea, and they say this is the way you should produce this format. But then you have to locally do something to make it popular in Sweden or popular in the UK or popular in Poland or wherever you are. So I was interested in how you make this cultural adaptation of a format. But as an anthropologist, you can never know if what you’re interested in is going to happen during the time you’re there. So they didn’t do any formats. And when I was there — I was at a production company in Sweden, maybe they did 12 to 15 different productions — I started to become very interested in, OK, how do you know how to make this program? Because you don’t know your viewers, whether they’ll connect with it or not. And then I talked to a guy who was in charge of the insights at this production company and he said, well, nobody in this industry comes and asks me anything about how to get to know people. It has happened twice. And I have put a sheet together with some statistics — that’s the only thing they want. But I was so interested because I thought, wow, this is really something. So then I tried to understand how you as a creator actually make things when you don’t know for whom. That was my focus — to understand this process. And different producers use different strategies. One guy, he said that when he’s out of creativity, he goes to a small town in Sweden and has some drinks at the bar. Then he goes home and writes new stuff. He’s met the ordinary Swedes. So it was a lot of easy ways to get to know people without real knowledge. And maybe that’s why I talk a lot about insight washing in my work today. Because I think that what most companies do is insight washing. They have very, very shallow insights. You mentioned personas, generation descriptions, et cetera. And that’s quite shallow because it’s mainly based on quantitative studies or broad categories. They don’t have this deep, qualitative knowledge of how people live their lives, what is meaningful for them, how people act in different groups — because you can never get that if you only ask people things. So insight washing is, I would say, the summary of everything I do. Trying to make organizations understand what it is. Yeah. What’s the definition of insight washing? Well, I think it’s when you try to make very shallow insights look like real knowledge. And I think that when you talk about it in that sense, people get two reactions. One is, wow, that’s true. But they also get a little bit offended — oh, so you don’t like quantitative studies? Well, it’s not about that, because you need both. You need different tools if you really want to understand. So what I say is that you should have qualitative studies as part of it. It can be ethnography, it can be different conversations with people, it can be observation. You need to have the other view, not only what people say. Yeah. You need to be able to see, okay, is this true? Are people really doing what they’re saying? No, they’re not. So that’s what I always say — you can’t trust what people say. You have to understand how they live. So tell us about the work you do now. When do clients come to you, what kinds of problems do they bring, and how would you describe your approach? I can take one project. One of my latest projects was for a big official organization that oversees building — different building projects. They set all the rules for construction. How do you explain that in English? A developer? Yeah, but they also decide all the rules for building. It’s more like a regulatory body. So they have been working a lot with waste in the building industry. And in Sweden, they’ve estimated that around 25 percent is waste — materials, time, everything. It’s the most wasteful industry of all of them. And they said, everybody in the business knows this, but why is nothing happening? Why isn’t the waste getting less year by year? So me and another anthropologist, we had the question: how can we work with this without sending another information folder? Everybody already knows. And that’s very typical when I work with companies — they want to change something. I work a lot with sustainability today. People know, but they don’t change behavior. And the easiest response is to treat the human as a rational person. So let’s send some more information. This time they will probably change — but of course, they will not. So I worked with them, me and Lotta Björklund Larsson, the other anthropologist. We thought, what can we do? Because building is very, very complex. It’s a very complex process from when they start to buy land to the end, and also everything that happens after the building project is over. So we said, let’s look at the knowledge culture in this business. Why is it that everyone knows, but nothing is happening? Is there something wrong with how knowledge is transferred between different parts of the project, between different companies? So we focused on understanding the knowledge culture in the building industry. And what we found was that many, many people have an enormous amount of knowledge, but they don’t have any system to transfer it the way they should. And they don’t systematically look at good and bad projects and use that knowledge going forward. So that’s one way to work — finding ways to make change without using information as the lever. Especially when it comes to consumer culture. People know the world is on fire, but — I still want my fast fashion little dress. So I’ve been working a lot on that. How do you make people change without telling them to change? That’s maybe my main area today. Yeah. Because it’s also a world that really needs change in many, many ways. So when did you first realize you could make a living doing this stuff? I think that I have had my own company now for 20 years, actually. And I know I wrote something about that on LinkedIn, because when I told my former professor at Uppsala University that I wanted to start my own business and have my own company, she said to me, oh, that will be tough for you. Don’t say that you’re an anthropologist. So then I decided — yes, of course I will say that I’m an anthropologist. Why make that choice? I think because she said that people in Sweden think anthropology is something weird. As I told you before we started to record, in Sweden, applied anthropology is not common. You can’t study it as a subject. So an anthropologist in Sweden and Finland has been quite rare, compared to Denmark, for example. In some countries, anthropology has been much more established as a career path. Your advisor told you to avoid the language, but you chose it for yourself. Why? Because I thought that anthropology was the best subject in the world. I was supposed to study law first, then economics, and then I decided no. Economics, because I thought that was quite a broad education and you can do almost anything. But it was really boring — I started with statistics, so I had to take a term off. And then I actually saw anthropology. I didn’t know what it was when I was looking in the catalogue for the courses. And I started to read anthropology, and by my third course, the first term, I was just amazed. It was like a salvation for me. It was really like, wow, this is fantastic. It made me see the world in totally new ways. So then I continued to read anthropology in different subjects and took my PhD. So anthropology for me — it’s not a job. It’s a way of living and seeing the world, I would say. So that’s why when she said, you shouldn’t say that you’re an anthropologist — I said, of course I have to do that. I love that so much. How do you talk about what anthropology is, or what culture is, to people? I know you teach, and these ideas can feel slippery. How do you talk about what culture is? And as an anthropologist, what do you do that somebody who’s not an anthropologist can’t? I would say — I know that it’s difficult. And also in Sweden, we have a particular difficulty with the word culture, because in Swedish, culture is called kultur, and that means both fine arts and culture. One word for both. And that makes it even harder to explain what you do — it makes the whole thing blurry. So you have to find other ways to explain it. When I talk to companies, I mostly talk about behavior — understanding people’s behavior, not only trusting what they say, and looking at group effects. If you’re more practical when you explain, it helps. Because in anthropology, there are around 200 definitions of what culture is. So of course, it’s really difficult. And I think Grant McCracken has a good way, because he talks about it as a language. You learn the grammar when you are a baby and you start to talk, but you don’t know that. You just learn the language and start to speak it. If you start to learn a language when you’re older, you need to learn the grammar. And that can be quite difficult, instead of just being in a culture and you just start to talk. And he says that culture is like that. Culture is the blueprint of the society. It’s the grammar of the society. And it’s the system that decides how people interact and how they behave in different contexts. So for many, it can feel like it’s quite blurry. But ethnography is the method of anthropology. It’s about putting a lot of time in different contexts, studying how people behave, and also talking to them without leading questions. I can study a family and I can always ask them, why did you do that? Or can you explain that for me? But I never ask leading questions, because then you are pulling them towards different answers. And you’re not interested in that as an anthropologist. You want to understand, how do these people live in everyday life? And who is affected by whom? Because that’s the essence of understanding culture. How do you think about the questions you ask? You’ve said you don’t want to ask leading questions — so what kind of question do you find yourself asking? Oh, it really depends on the project. I have one example. I was working with a fashion brand in Sweden and the marketing manager sent me three sheets with questions. Very tiny text. And I was really — oh my God, she has really been thinking about this. She was a new marketing manager at this fashion brand and she wanted to do ethnography. She knew what anthropology is all about. And she said, I have too many questions. So then I said to her, okay, interesting to read your questions, but let’s just leave them. The only thing I would go out and do is actually understand: what does this brand mean for people? And then we studied how people use the brand. They had different stores. We did field work in the stores to understand the customers. We worked in different subgroups to understand how they used the brand — or how they didn’t use the brand. And then we started to say, okay, this is what the brand is all about. And it answered almost all her questions, but we had this really broad approach. And the most interesting part was that this company thought they were so much hotter, in the trendier customer groups. And it actually showed that no, they were very late majority. And that made a total difference for them — how they looked at the brand, what kind of marketing they were supposed to do. Everything changed because they realized they had been thinking totally wrong about who used the brand and why. So I would say that most projects I do, I look at it very holistically, with a very broad question. And then you start to get knowledge and you get closer and closer to what is really interesting. And I call that the white spaces — and the white spaces are almost always something the company haven’t thought of at all, because you find it when you go in with this broad perspective. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I would say two things. I meet a lot of people that I never would meet, because we live in our bubbles. And sometimes when you go out and do your field work — you have to go out in the evenings, and you feel, oh, I’m so tired, it’s tough going out tonight — but then it’s so fun to meet people you never meet otherwise. It can be in parts of Sweden I never go to. It can be different kinds of people that I normally don’t hang around with. We always live in our bubbles — at work, doing our exercise, the family, the area we live in. So I love that part, that I meet so many different kinds of people. And then also — it’s fantastic to do this often long study. It doesn’t have to be that long. When you write your PhD, you’re supposed to be one or two years in the field. And that’s not possible if you work with company clients. But you put a lot of time in anyway. And then when you have all this data and you start to look at it and work with it and you realize, wow, look here — here is a real finding, here is a white space. I think that’s the most gratifying part of being an anthropologist. I’ve got two questions trying to come out at the same time. You’ve been at it a long time. How do you feel like it’s changed, or its role has changed, over that period? I think that’s changed just in the last few years. When you do anthropology and ethnography in companies, you’re often looking eight to ten years out. What can we see today? What kind of trends, what kind of behavior can we see that will actually have an impact five, eight, ten years from now? Because you’re looking for those small signals when you do ethnography. And my feeling is that companies are not interested in this long-term perspective anymore. It’s more like two years now. And that’s a little bit scary, especially because the world is changing so fast. Instead of having this long perspective, they’re just looking at the fires right now. And I’ve been talking to other consultants from other fields and they say the same — the long-term perspective is gone. And that’s scary, because you need it if you want to have a sustainable society. But what I’ve experienced in the last one or two years is something interesting, because I’ve met several highly educated engineers who say to me, we need the knowledge you have about understanding human beings. Engineers can be very focused on what they are doing right here, right now. And maybe they don’t see how the impact will be felt in other parts of society. I’ve heard several engineers say that knowledge about how human beings behave will be even more important, because if we are going to scale up these technical solutions, it can be catastrophic if you don’t understand the impact and how people behave. And several really well-educated people, both in tech and other fields, say that understanding how human beings use technology will be so much more important when we have this technology all around us all the time. So it’s hopeful, I think. Though it will take time before companies understand that, because right now they think they can do everything themselves. And the whole discussion about how everything will become very average, because they do all the creative work with AI — so of course, it will all be the same. I think it will take time before companies realize that they really need to do something different. That they really need this understanding of how people live and what’s important for them. Two things you said earlier — the insight washing, and the way anthropology is almost exclusively focused on very durable, enduring learnings. There’s a huge gap between what organizations like to digest and what anthropology actually creates. Do you feel that mismatch? And then — this is a big question — for somebody in a leadership position who wants real knowledge, not insight washing, what guidance do you give them about balancing different ways of learning about who they serve? That was a very long, dense, tricky question, because I think that most organizations live in a system — they already have ways of doing stuff. And the way they’ve been doing it, it’s difficult to bend the system, because everything is connected to the same way of working, including how you look at insights. So the main thing I would say is this: when I started — I’ve been working now for over 20 years — I had a lot of meetings in the beginning. And I would say that maybe two to three percent of people in CEO positions understood what I was talking about. And I quickly realized I couldn’t sit with people who didn’t even understand what I was talking about, because it would just drain my energy. And today, I would say maybe 15 to 20 percent understand, after 20 years. Of course, I also have much more experience now, many more examples. So I can explain better. Because you can’t sit and talk in anthropological terms — you have to find better ways to explain. But there is a difference. And the first thing I say is, look at what you’re measuring. Because we live in a measurement society — everything should be measured, all the time. How effective people are at work, how successful our product is, how much people love sustainability, blah, blah. You measure everything. So the first thing I say is, can you look into everything you’re measuring? What are you measuring, and why? And what kind of answers do you think you’re getting? Because if they start there, they soon realize that maybe they don’t understand the right things. And one typical example — if you measure how loyal your customers are, or how satisfied your co-workers are, you have these measurement systems that you do every year. And I’ve worked with companies where I say, okay, you’ve done this with your co-workers for — what, 30 years? Have you changed the questions? We have a totally different world. Oh no, we can’t change the questions, because then we can’t compare to what they said 10 years ago. And for me, that was really like — okay, society has totally changed. But you still ask the same questions. It’s amazing. So very often I start by saying, what are you measuring? What kind of quantitative studies are you doing? Look into those things. And maybe let someone with a qualitative eye look at what you’re doing. You might save some money, because some of these things aren’t telling you anything. So I think that’s the first thing to keep in mind. And also to question this idea of information as a way to change people’s behavior and values. Most people in companies know it doesn’t work, but they don’t have any other tools. People aren’t changing, they still eat bad things — okay, let’s do another information campaign. They know this isn’t working, but they don’t have alternatives. So you give them some ideas. How could you do this differently? Maybe it could be nudging, or other approaches. Try to make small changes, and then they understand, wow, this is really good for us. And then they can start to make bigger changes. I want to go back to that example — the client who wouldn’t change the questions because it would ruin their ability to track change over time. Can you be explicit about what makes that insane? What’s the assumption underneath that’s so problematic? I would say — you have this saying that how you ask things, that’s the kind of answers you get. And for example, it can be such easy things as using the wrong words. Maybe you’re using words that people in the 90s understood one way, but people in 2025 experience differently. I can give you an example. I was working with a big TV company in Sweden, and they were doing a lot of quantitative studies on how young people experienced different media and technology. And they were using the phrase “new media” when they were talking about digital media. Because if you remember, 20 years ago, we talked about new media — that was the word. They didn’t know what to call YouTube, so it was new media. And they were still using that phrase in their quantitative studies. And the young people we were studying, they said, what? What is new media? I know what old media is — that’s public service, that’s radio, that’s newspapers. I don’t know what new media is. So they couldn’t even answer the questions because they didn’t know what was being asked. That’s a very simple example. And you also need to understand that media technology has so fundamentally changed the way we live and understand the world. If you don’t have that included in your quantitative studies — if you want to understand customer loyalty or behavior — it’s really strange. Have you ever heard of appreciative inquiry? We don’t need to get into it. But David Cooperrider — it’s an approach to transformation that’s not problem-solution. It’s about identifying where things are working, peak experiences, and trying to replicate the good as opposed to solving the bad. He had a quote: we live in the world that our questions create. And I feel like that’s the idea you were expressing. Yes, yes, that’s very, very true. And I think that’s also connected to what I’ve been saying about white spaces — broadening the area of what you’re interested in. Because otherwise, managers have some ideas about what’s going wrong, or what they want to check. And if your research doesn’t give them the answer they want, well, then they don’t use it. They’ve already decided what they want to confirm. The problem is that very rarely is that correct, because it’s often something else that’s wrong — something else in people’s everyday life that is affecting your brand or your product. And managers sit, maybe they sit for quite a long time in the same company. And of course, they develop this framed view of things. That’s the way of being human. If you are in a certain context, you start to see only what’s inside the frame. So it’s really hard to go outside your own frame of safety and start to understand what’s going on. And sometimes it’s even better to study people who don’t use your brand or don’t use your product. Because then you understand why they’re not using it. You can get more insights from that than from studying the people who are already using it. So there are a lot of ways to get a much better understanding than the traditional way of doing research. We’ve just got a little bit of time left. I’m always curious to hear people advocate for qualitative. You’ve talked about measurement, and I think we probably agree that there’s a kind of qualitative illiteracy in organizations — people don’t really understand what qualitative is, or that it’s actually data. How do you talk about what makes qualitative so important, and the role it should play in how people make decisions? Well, I think I have mentioned it now. I use this quote: people don’t say what they think, they don’t know what they feel, and they for sure don’t do as they say. And that’s my idea of being human. And that’s what I bring into the field when I start to do my study. We live with this idea of the rational person who understands information and can interpret the knowledge and then make a wise decision. And we can’t. And humans are not living in a social and cultural vacuum. We are social beings. I would say that most things we do in life is because of other people. I think, for example, Mark Earls has written Herd. It’s about the idea that you are part of a group — whether it’s the family, or your company, or your friends, or different groupings in social media. You want to do as other people do, because that’s the way of being human — being part of a group. So in that sense, it’s so important to study how groups live and how they act and what’s important for the group. Beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. It’s been a blast talking to you. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Alexi Gunner on Signals & Culture

Alexi Gunner [https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexigunner/] is an independent cultural researcher and strategist based in Melbourne. He is the founder of idle gaze [https://idlegaze.substack.com/about], a consulting practice and newsletter [https://idlegaze.substack.com/] exploring the hidden undercurrents of culture. He previously held strategy roles at We Are Social, AKQA, and Zalando, and served as cultural futurist and Berlin chapter lead for RADAR. In our conversation, we talked about his recent essay, “Research as a form of pattern disruption [https://idlegaze.substack.com/p/research-as-a-form-of-pattern-disruption].” Later, in a discussion of analog v digital planning, we discussed Yancey Strickler's “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet [https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet/]” (2019), which frames the retreat from public online spaces not as apathy but as survival — people going quiet because the predators came out. So you may know this, you may not know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which is, I borrowed it from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. She’s an oral historian. And when I heard it, I was really struck by how beautiful the question was, but it’s pretty big. So I over-explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? So I think I was born in Sweden. My mother is originally Finnish, but she grew up in Sweden. My father is British. And from quite an early age, we were moving around a lot. So before my teenage years, we’d lived in Brazil, in the US, in the UK. So constantly moving around. And I think because of that, I don’t feel particularly Swedish. I also don’t feel particularly British. And so I think from a geographical or a national identity point of view, I think it’s always quite hard for me to answer that question. I think for me, because I was moving around so much as a child, it programmed me to continue moving around constantly. So now even in my adult life, I’m not often rooted in one place. So after high school, I went to the UK. I was in London for six, seven years. And I moved to Berlin, where I was seven years. I’m now living in Melbourne. And so I think that every time I move, every place I think shapes me in a different way. So I think rather than feeling like I come from one specific place or one specific identity, I think all these different places I’ve lived in have had an influence on me. So it’s almost like this bricolage of different influences. So I think that’s how I like to see myself respond to that question. And what was it like growing up moving around? What was it like as a kid moving around that much? I mean, I think in some ways, it was quite challenging. Because every few years, it would be this process of unrooting the family and then going to a new place and starting in a new school. And I think it’s challenging because I think you start to build this identity as being a little bit of an outsider. You’re constantly having to adapt to a new place, a new situation, a new social circle. So often I always say that I envy a lot of my friends who’ve been based in the same place their whole lives. They’re still really close friends and they’ve spent time with their childhood friends, people they know from primary school, they’re still friends with now as adults. But I think in a lot of ways, I think it builds a lot of useful tools. I think being this outsider that has that ability to adapt to new situations, I think does help a lot in life. I also think it helps a lot, I think, when you are a researcher and a strategist as well. I think something I’ve been reflecting on recently is being always in this mode of being ready to adapt to a new situation, moving to a new place, and then trying to fit into the new culture or a new social circle or a new context. I think what happens is we start to become very observant around a lot of the nuances and the rules and all this seemingly invisible layer of things that happen in a culture and in the rituals of communities. And I think that’s how you learn to fit in to new contexts and situations. But I also think it helps in being a strategist in terms like you are always trying to learn about a new type of consumer or target audience or a new subculture. And you start to notice these nuances and these almost like these invisible unwritten rules and rituals that I think a lot of people might miss. So I think moving around, it’s been challenging, but it has, I think, been useful in a lot of ways as well. Do you have a recollection of what young Alexi wanted to be when he grew up? So I had a phase where I really wanted to be a war reporter. I think I always felt like it seemed very exciting, looking at the news and seeing these reporters on the front lines. And I think gradually that shifted to wanting to become a culture journalist. So it was always like, oh, I want to work in media. As a young child, that was this dream of becoming a traditional journalist. And I think for a long time, I got really into this idea of wanting to be some culture journalist, analyzing things that are happening in culture and society, doing the long form scoops and features in newspapers. So I think that was the thing I wanted to be when I grew up. And was there, who was the role model? Was there something, was there a model out there that was like, oh, that’s what I want to be? No, I think growing up. So one thing I always remember is that my parents used to subscribe to a lot of print publications, print newspapers. And I think that had a really big impact on me. It’s like every morning before I went to school, I would go through the, read the morning papers. They had a subscription to, I remember, for example, being really influential when I was in my teens. I thought the doing that deeper digging, the really reflective long form pieces. I remember thinking like, that’s super cool. Like, how do I get into that? So catch us up. You mentioned you’re living in Sydney, is that right? And so I’m currently based in Melbourne. Melbourne. I don’t know why I did that. All right. So catch us up. Tell us where you are and what you’re working on. What do you do for work? Yeah. So at the moment I recently relocated here, but I’m still spending a lot of time in Europe. I moved here from Berlin and I’m continuing what I did in Berlin. So at some point I went from being a full-time strategist to breaking free and starting as a freelancer. It started through my Substack newsletter. So that’s something I started when I was a full-timer. But I eventually started to get client interest in the things that I was writing about. And that’s when I had the epiphany that, okay, this is interesting. I could maybe start a little bit more of a consultancy and a little bit more of a business model around the things that I research, that I document and I write about in the newsletter. So that was the major driver that made me want to start working independently. So yeah, at the moment, what I call myself is a cultural strategist. I work both a lot on the research side of things, but also on the creative strategy side of things. And I still continue with the Substack. I think whether it’s writing for the Substack or doing the client work, I think the approach to research and the principles I think are similar, where it’s really about trying to dig a little bit deeper into all these trends that we’re seeing, trying to understand what are these deeper undercurrents that are shaping these things we’re seeing that are happening? Trying to connect dots between lots of different domains to try to build up a more nuanced bigger picture of what’s happening in culture, what’s happening in society, trying to break free from I think some of the common narratives and assumptions that we have around where culture is heading. And trying to maybe provide a little bit of a reframe for people of maybe this is an angle that you haven’t thought about. Here are some of the more interesting nuances and tensions that are behind all this stuff that is happening. And writing about that in the Substack, but also then clients helping them to navigate that and to help shape their role in the world and how they want to position themselves in this perspective of what’s happening in culture. Yeah. I’m curious about this. That’s how I encountered you in that, it’s impossible to ever discover the moment of interaction, but your newsletter came into my world and I love it. I've always appreciated it, so I'm curious about the origin story. Where did the inspiration come from? Why do it at all? And how has it evolved over time? So I think I started the Substack during COVID at some point, everyone had their pivot project, right? So that was mine. That’s where it started. And it started off, I didn’t have a specific model or something specific that I was trying to do. It was basically trying to have an outlet for things that I was researching and things that I was trying to make sense of. There wasn’t a bigger plan, but I’ve always enjoyed writing. And I think taking the research and patching into something, engaging something for people to read, I think I immediately felt like it was something that I enjoyed. And yeah, the more I did it, the more I felt like even though I was writing about stuff that I was personally interested in, I wasn’t doing it for trying to write about things that I thought an audience would be interested in. So it’s really nice to then see subscribers come in and also have this joint interest in the things that I was writing about. And I think that’s what motivated me to continue with the newsletter. I think one thing that was always a big part of what I wanted to do with the newsletter was trying to, I think, connect dots in more interesting ways. And yeah, trying to challenge these generic ideas about where a culture is heading. I think that’s where the name comes from as well. So Idle Gaze, it’s this idea that if you focus your gaze too much on one specific domain or one specific area of culture, you start to build a bit of tunnel vision. If you can have a little bit of an unfocused view, you can start to see the bigger picture a little bit, and you might be able to connect dots between seemingly unrelated things. So that’s really what I was trying to do was tickle my brain and tickle other people’s brain of, oh, well, you see this thing happening over here and you see this thing happening here. They are connected in some way. There are these deep undercurrents happening in culture that are connecting all these different emerging behaviors, emerging signals that we’re seeing. It’s also someone, a friend once told me when she was talking to me, she said that I had an idle gaze. I think I was daydreaming and losing focus on the conversation. But that phrase stuck with me. And I thought that was a good name for the substack. And it’s also the name of the consultancy. So yeah, it’s stuck. Yeah, it’s really great. I love hearing that story. I’m curious, how would you describe, because a couple of times you’ve pointed at the fact that there’s a common narrative or there’s a tunnel vision in the way that we or the way that culture maybe is talked about. Can you talk more about how you see culture or do you consider yourself to be in the space of trends? I don’t think that’s a word I see you use, but where do you see yourself operating and how do you think, what’s your, how would you describe the state of it today and how you’re, twice you were, listen, there’s this common, there’s a big conversation going on about how the direction we’re going. And I don’t think that that’s the right conversation. I think we need to look at things differently. Can you say more about that? Yeah. So I think in terms of the client work that I do, I call myself a cultural strategist, which I think is one of these interesting terms where I feel more and more people, it’s become the buzzword, I think, among strategists to call oneself a cultural strategist. The way I see it is that I have my foot in two different domains. On one side, there’s the research and trying to do a little bit of the deeper digging and really trying to understand whether it’s emerging trends across certain consumer groups, but also trying to understand subcultures, different movements, doing that proper research work, but then also having a foot in the creative strategy. So I think for me, it’s working at an intersection of proper cultural research, but then also creative strategy. How can you apply those insights to a creative opportunity, a business problem? So I think for me, calling myself a cultural strategist is trying to convey that it’s the intersection of these two things, the research and the strategic application of that research. In terms of the research, so I recently published, for the first time on my Substack, I was trying to tangibly define my approach to research, which I’d never really done before, but it’s something that I inherently had in my mind, I couldn’t really describe it, but I had an attempt of trying to set out some tangible principles of the way that I approach research, because yeah, I do see myself as a little bit of a trend forecaster, a cultural researcher, but I think there are unique or specific principles that I follow in terms of our research. So one of the things that I always think about is looking for weird signals. So when you talk traditionally about trend forecasting or research, right, you typically talk about, you’re looking for weak signals, right? A weak signal can be any signal happening today, any anything interesting or behaviour, an emerging trend that provides evidence of a future shift in culture or society, right? I think the danger often that a lot of research and a lot of strategists, I think a trap that they fall into is falling into a lot of the commonly accepted narratives about where culture is heading. So there’s a danger of confirmation bias. So if you think, this is what’s happening in culture, you’re only going to start spotting the signals that corroborate, that support that worldview that you have. So for example, if you are bullish on AI, you think it’s going to transform all these industries, you’re only going to find evidence that that’s the case, and you’re going to dismiss and miss, totally miss, be blind to things that might challenge that view of maybe what the future looks like. So what I think about is weird signals instead. So a weird signal is anything that you come across that might make you feel uncomfortable, or might feel strange, because there’s a little bit of cognitive dissonance, right? Because you see that and it might challenge a commonly held assumption that you have about a certain thing that’s happening. And the interesting thing about spotting these weird signals is that it’s a glitch in the matrix, right? Where you get this weird feeling, oh, it shouldn’t be that. That’s strange. But I think the interesting thing about weird signals is that it helps to show you it’s a portal to a vastly different future. It’s a future that’s vastly different to our current reality. And I think that’s one way of trying to challenge this, the commonly held assumptions about where certain trends are heading in culture. So that is something I think that is a key cornerstone of the way that I approach research. Secondly, it’s around trying to find non-obvious connections. So a little bit what I was mentioning earlier is often when you see trend reports, or documents that are prepared for clients, it’s often the way the trends are framed is you’ll have evidence, signals that are very closely connected, that are from the same domain. So if you see three startups with the same business proposition, that are getting funding, you’re, okay, cool, here’s an emerging industry, or you might see something that’s happening in hospitality, and then you see something that’s happening, oh, here’s a new trending alcohol product, and here’s a new food trend. These are very interconnected industries, right? And so, not that these trends are wrong, but I think what I’m always trying to do is trying to spot these more, these less obvious connections of, okay, let’s try to look at lots of different domains. Look at both highbrow culture, lowbrow culture, if you can start to connect the dots between these things, that’s when you start to, I think, unlock more interesting perspectives around what’s happening in culture, but not limited to one specific domain. I think that’s a useful tool to starting to, yeah, I think, build a more nuanced and a more, yeah, I think, more unexpected, more imaginative view of what’s happening in culture. I think a third key thing for me, which is, I think, quite challenging, is this idea of trying to resist immediacy. I think when people often think about trend forecasters and cultural researchers, there’s this idea that you’re always on the lookout for these trends that are emerging, but we live in a time where there’s this rapid hype cycle of these trends that blow up overnight, but they’re not really trends. They’re more fads, right? Things, you see something that’s happening on TikTok, it’s huge, viral for one day, and then it disappears. But there’s always this pressure, I think, as a researcher, as a trend forecaster to jump on that, try to define it, give it a catchy title, and then write a subset about it the next day. Or when you’re working with clients, there is this pressure of you need to be on top of what’s happening in culture. But I think often when you are too, when you try to define something too quickly, I think you miss out on the bigger picture. Because you’re looking at this one isolated thing, it only tells I think part of the picture, if you can observe these things that are happening, and you can sit back, give it a few weeks, give it a few months, there’s some stuff that I’ve been tracking that I haven’t written or tried to define in years, but I’m still keeping a close eye on it. That’s when you start to then figure out what is the bigger picture here, all these things are connected, they might not all be happening at the same time, but it starts to tell the story about a broader macro theme. So yeah, I think having this process in place where I’m tracking all these different trends, I don’t talk about them, I don’t publish about them, but I’m always collecting signals about them. And the more I collect signals that either support this trend, or maybe challenge them, the more nuanced and more rich the analysis of a trend becomes. So yeah, so I have these principles on the research side of things that, I mean, certainly not something I’ve invented, but I think it’s helps me to, yeah, I think disrupt a little bit and make the research and the analysis, yeah, a little bit more interesting, a little bit more nuanced. Yeah. And that’s certainly what attracted me to Idle Gaze and keeps me returning. And I’m now looking, I’ll share a link to this post that you were talking about research as a form of pattern disruption. And in the beginning, you said this year alone, 135 or more trend reports were published by tech companies, agencies and consultants. So I appreciate everything you share in there. And I’m wondering, to what degree can you, how, what’s your process for collecting signals and how do you organize that stuff? What’s that? Is there a way of talking about the messy process of collecting them and accumulating them and waiting for them to become something or not? Yeah, I think I see myself as a little bit of a tool junkie. I’m always trying to find the perfect, particularly with the internet research. And the reality is that a lot of the research that I do is predominantly online research. For me, also doing the IRL, talking to real people, going out in the real world is super important. I have my own processes for that. But trying to manage the sheer volume and speed of things that are happening online, I think is a big challenge. So I’m always carefully trying to tweak and try to find the right tools and the right processes. So for me at the moment, it’s a combination. It’s this messy stack of different tools that I use. So something that I mentioned in the research as a form of pattern disruption essay is because I try to give a little bit of tangible examples what this looks like in terms of the research process. So I mentioned that I use this app called Sublime, which for me is a really great tool for collecting and making sense of signals, different ideas that I come across online. The easiest way to describe Sublime is that it’s like a Pinterest for researchers. So essentially, you’re saving and you’re capturing things that you come across online and you put it into different collections. And you set up a process of intentionally going through those collections, you treat them a little bit like digital gardens, where you’re slowly nurturing them, you go through them and you start to figure out how these different things related. What an app like Sublime does as well is that it helps to unearth other ideas that other people have saved on the platform that are connected to your ideas. So back to the way that I do research of trying to connect the dots between all these different things. I think it’s a really useful tool. And for me, being able to spatially map those different ideas is super important as well. So predominantly, I use Miro for that. So I think going from having all this noise and trying to do the clustering, the analysis, connecting the dots, I think for me, being able to lay it out spatially and use a mind mapping tool like Miro is super useful. I do that when I prepare my essays for Substack, but also in terms of doing the client, the commercial client work as well. But I also have a huge database on Notion, where I just collect and tag things as well. And my desktop is just full of screenshots. And that’s not a very useful, it’s not a useful system. But that’s where a lot of things live as well. So it’s a little bit of different, lots of different ways. I’m still trying to figure out the perfect or the ultimate process of that. But that’s a long term challenge. When did you first discover that you could make a living doing this? So I think just to maybe rewind in terms of my career trajectory. So when I went to uni, I even wanted to be a journalist, I didn’t study journalism, I ended up studying language and communication. It was just broader, this broader course, there were some journalism modules to it as well. And it was quite a theoretical course, but I got, I really enjoyed, I think some of the more academic theoretical stuff that I was learning at uni, just all the fundamentals, Stuart Hall, encoding, decoding, Roland Barthes, mythologies, semiotics, Marshall McLuhan. I thought all this stuff was super interesting. Although when I was a uni, I never thought that I would actually apply any of this to my real work. I just thought, people don’t, this is just something people use in academia. And I started off my career. So at some point, I realized that being a strategist was a thing, which was totally random. I had a brief stint working in public relations when I graduated. And it was just by chance that we were sharing office with a creative agency. And I just remember, I remember instantly gravitating towards this group of people in the office, bare corner of the office, there was always post-its up on the walls, and a whiteboard where they were drawing these frameworks. And I was, I just remember trying to figure out what they were doing, because there was just something about them. I was, that seems really interesting. And that’s when I started to inquire a little bit more. And that’s when I realized there was this thing called being a strategist at a creative agency. And I mean, I encounter a lot of strategists who they just, there’s not a lot of, maybe it’s better nowadays, but I think 10 years ago, there just wasn’t a lot of education of when you work at an ad agency or creative agency, it’s not just about being a creative or an accounts person, there is this planning function as well. So I just found that randomly. And I realized, okay, that’s what I want to do. So I eventually found myself on a graduate scheme at an agency in London, called We Are Social. And it was a really good training ground for being a strategist there. And I had a great boss that Harvey Cosell, who he came from a very old school planning background. He’d worked at these old school London agencies that had defined planning, JWT, and so forth. And so there was this immense respect for planning fundamentals. But at the same time, We Are Social was one of these first agencies back in the day to really invest a lot in cultural research. So they had a proper research team. And it was quite novel at the time of they were selling in cultural research and insights as a function to clients when a lot of agencies weren’t really doing that as part of a creative agency context. And I think being able to combine these things of learning proper planning strategy, how to work really closely and collaboratively with creatives, transforming insights into really tight, clear creative briefs, but also really trying to create culturally resonant work through doing that proper research. That’s where I already started, I think, to figure out as a strategist, this is what I really want to do is have a foot in the research, but also having a foot in the creative strategy. And I worked at a few different agencies, I moved to Berlin, I worked in house a little bit as well as a strategist. And, but it wasn’t until I started my newsletter, but I realised, okay, it’s this funny thing where when I started writing about things, I thought I was just interested in this. And it was really interesting to see that people client side were coming to me being, okay, this is a topic that we are really interested in, we’re trying to figure out internally, do you want to do a research sprint for us? Do you want to come in and explore this topic further within the context of these projects that we’re working on. And that’s where I realised, okay, not only am I interested in this stuff, but there is a business case for it as well. And so that’s where I realised, okay, because I always really enjoyed working as a strategist in creative agencies. But I think what I this, I’m quite passionate about working at this intersection of being a very enthusiastic researcher that really understands trends and not just researching consumer groups, but really doing for example, the forecasting, the foresight, not just understanding where things are now, but where is culture emerging in the next few years? Doing this proper research work, but also finding a way to translate it into creative work into creative opportunities. I felt like it’s, there’s not a lot of agencies that do this particularly well at the moment. So I think that was another driver of okay, as a consultancy, these are the kind of projects that I want to get. I look at, I think there are smaller agencies out there that are really great at the trend forecasting. And the proper research, I follow agencies, nonfiction and places like that. But then I think for me, what’s really interesting is you have these smaller agencies and these consultancies that are proper trend forecasters do the trend work, but also creating really interesting creative work out of that. So I think for me, places like there’s an agency in London called Morning, also Sibling Studio, DigiFairy. These small indie agencies are emerging that are working in this intersection. And this is where I’m trying to place myself as well in terms of my consultancy. I have some really great creative directors that I work with that I pull in for particular projects. But I think it’s been a slow realization that this is something that there is a demand for with client work. It can live beyond just a substack, because it’s quite hard to make a living off substack. It’s a passion project, first and foremost, but it’s also opened doors to getting commercial work as well. So I think it’s just been a bit of a trial and error and testing and building confidence that this is something that I can do independently. You mentioned you had a mentor at the agency, and you talked about traditional planning and maybe it’s analog planning versus digital planning, and maybe that’s a little brutish and reductive. But I’m curious, what’s the role of qualitative in your work? What’s the role of what have you kept from traditional planning and how have you evolved it into the practice that you have now? Or does it have a role? I feel like these things get pitted against each other, but I’m curious, what’s the balance between analog research and planning and digital and social research and planning? So, even though I say I’m a cultural strategist, a big part of that is being a researcher. I don’t have any particular formal education or formal training in a proper research environment doing really structured qualitative or quantitative research. But I think working at agencies that, starting off at agencies, even though the agency that I mentioned before where I started off at We Are Social, it’s a digital agency. But I mentioned, I think the planning team had this respect for this more analog type of planning and research. And so, I think that’s something that has really stuck with me. So, even though today, I, a big part of what I do is online research. And like you said, I think I’m more of a digital approach to research and strategy. I think for me, the analog stuff is still super important. I think I’ve never been a huge fan of really structured focus groups, for example, and traditional surveys. I think it does have a place. I think when it comes to trying to understand the more IRL approach to research, I think what’s always been more useful for me is, I don’t know if you can call it a more gonzo type of research of, instead of inviting, if you’re trying to understand, let’s say, teenagers in London. When I started off in London, I was working on Nike and Adidas, these sports accounts where a big focus was trying to understand youth culture in the UK. I think what I was taught and what I also realized is that instead of bringing all these teenagers into a corporate office and organizing a focus group, where at the end of the day, it’s just going to be a performance, they’re not going to feel at home themselves. You’re not going to get a lot of super rich insights in my point of view from that. Instead, get closer to their lives. I remember working on Nike projects where we would just go hang out at the inner city football pitches and just observe everything that’s happening around them playing football. Or even just, okay, let’s just organize a WhatsApp group with some people who are part of the target we’re trying to understand. Ask them to just journal or capture, a digital journal, just capture these everyday mundane moments of their lives. Go to study their bedrooms, go in and see what they put up on their walls, the things that they put on their bedside tables. I think stuff like that, I think, unlocks far more interest. For me, it’s a way to unlock really interesting and interesting nuance understanding of a certain target audience or a certain subculture or community. So I think in terms of the analog research, I think that’s something that has played a really critical role. But I think not having that really formal background research, I think, and working often in a creative environment where it’s not so much about provide creating a very detailed research report, but it’s, okay, what are the key interesting tensions inside so we can bring into the creative work? I think that has been, that more Gonzo type of research has been, I think, really useful. And that’s something that, I learned during, for example, my We Are Social days. So I think that’s how I try to combine, more analog research with the online research as well. What do you feel like the Gonzo approach does for you that the digital doesn’t? When you feel like you need Gonzo? I think doing online research is, in some ways getting more and more difficult. I think even if you look five, 10 years ago, people were posting so much on social media, for example, social listening was a really key element of how you would do online research. I think the digital landscape is changing in such fundamental ways at the moment. So people are posting far less on public channels. There’s this move, people talk about the move to a more dark forest ecosystem, where a lot of conversations are happening in DMs, in private WhatsApp groups away from the public eye of public feeds and social networks. So there’s less signals, there’s less data input, let’s say, in that respect. You have to find these and get access to these, I think, these private conversations, private communities to understand how people are talking when it comes to digital. And there are, of course, I think, interesting places to look for. If you want to get that authentic view into what people are really thinking, there are places still online. I think it’s more about, I think Reddit, I still really depend on Reddit. I think Reddit is super interesting for a lot of research because people are very authentic on Reddit versus, let’s say, Instagram or Twitter. It feels much more intimate. I think people trust those spaces a lot more. So I think that is a really key place for me. But also just going on Discord, people are talking more on these private communities and servers on Discord. So I’m spending a lot more time on trying to find those spaces. But I think this is why I think there is more, it’s more and more important to balance online research with offline research as well. Because you can do, it’s more difficult to find those conversations, those insights online. So I think it’s always going to be super important of just getting escaping your desk and exploring, exploring your city, exploring the real world, trying to find what are these, what are the, particularly as a trend, working in the trend space, it’s trying to figure out what are these spaces and places and communities that are sort of there’s a gravitational pull, there’s always these places that culture sort of radiates from, the early adopters, the innovators. You just have to figure out where they are. And often they are offline as well. It could be a gig venue, if you’re trying to understand certain music subcultures. If you’re, I work at quite a few fashion clients, there are certain schools where the students, they are the ones that are experimenting the most, where that’s where you can get a little bit of a hint of certain fashion trends that are emerging. So yeah, I think the analog research I think, is in the next few years, I think it’s become more and more important because you can’t rely on online research in the same way that you could 10 years ago. Yeah. You mentioned the dark forest. That’s a, is that the, I’m vaguely remembering the essay or something. Can you talk a little bit more about what that was? Or that theory? Yeah. So the dark forest theory, I can’t remember who exactly, who originally defined it. I think the person who made it more legible and more widespread was Venkatesh Rao. He’s an online researcher and writer. There’s this collective, it’s called the Dark Forest Collective. They’ve published a few books as well, but the dark forest theory is this, I think it’s a term that originated in sci-fi, where there was a story of these aliens that came to earth and they came to earth and they realised there were no humans left, but the humans were just, they were hiding in the forest. And this is a theory, you can go into a forest and it might seem quiet, but it’s filled with animals, but they are hiding underground. And it’s this idea that same thing is happening online right now, where because of all these different factors, hostility, cancel culture, breakdown of nuanced conversation, people are much more afraid to post things in public feeds. So gone are the days of having a public Instagram channel and posting your most private intimate moments on there. You’re voicing your opinions on Twitter. Instead, all this is moving underground. So, whether it’s WhatsApp groups, DMs on Instagram, forums. Yeah. So it’s this idea of all these conversations and all this, let’s say, cultural production is still happening, but it’s not happening in the public eye anymore. It’s amazing. I should have known this before I went in. It was Yancey Strickler. Yancey Strickler, that’s right. Metalabel. I just found it was 2019 he wrote this piece. I didn’t know until you told the story that it had its origin in a sci-fi novel. And he was borrowing that metaphor to describe the shift in the, I guess, in the availability of public data, because people were, we really came out of a very extroverted social age. I always feel, I always would always, excuse me for a little rant as an old man trained and qualitative and face-to-face stuff. It always struck me as Orwellian that the corporate world chose to describe social listening. It was the first time a corporation ever said that it was listening to anybody. And I was well, it’s not listening. It’s reading. You’re reading public posts. It’s not, you’re not listening to another human being when you’re doing social listening. You’re reading public data, but it’s that being a little resentful. And I think you’re absolutely right. I think there’s always, there’s always been limitations to social listening because you’re not truly listening. Even when people were posting publicly, social media has always been an external performance for people. It’s very rare that people are very honest on social media. I think that’s what’s interesting with seeing people talk in more private confines. I think that’s more listening, but I think again, it’s never a conversation, right? You’re just observing what’s happening. And I think that’s, you’re always going to get richer insights from having proper conversations with people through gaining their trust and digging a little bit deeper. Yeah. How do we think about, I mean, I didn’t, how do we, Derek Thompson, he’s a popular culture author. I don’t know if he’s in the States and in the Atlantic. And I remember he had a quote, because we’ve learned so much, this Facebook era, I feel we’re in a little bit of a hangover with the consequences of this ability to broadcast our thoughts and feelings all the time. And we’re always doing it in isolation. We’re alone with our device, not engaging with another person. So I guess my question is, he says, he’s I don’t think, I think there was one quote, he’s I don’t think we, as a species, we were really meant to be broadcasting this, because we have, we’re so disinhibited, we say things that we would never say if we were in the presence of other people. So I guess my question is just a follow-up really, is how do you think about digital research now, and then how does AI and all that, this feels a conspiracy theorist question, change how we think about what’s going on out there and how people are communicating or expressing themselves online? Yeah, so I think one thing with the AI is, people talk about it’s a dead internet theory as well, but any form of social research is invalid now because, 80-90% of conversations that are happening online is AI bots. Yeah, I don’t know, it’s a theory, but I think it’s becoming more and more true. Even Instagram, his name escapes me, the head of Instagram, but he came out with a statement recently that, in a prediction from Instagram themselves, that in the coming years there’s going to be a high percentage of content created by AI and by humans, and creators and influencers should prepare for this. They see it as an opportunity, but I think the second that Instagram users or social media users feel there’s more AI content than human content, there’s going to be a desire to move to a platform where there is some sort of proof, because it’s harder to distinguish gen-AI content and human content. There’s going to be a desire for a platform where there is some ability to prove that a piece of content is coming from a human. So anyways, yeah, I think on the AI thing, I think that’s going to be a big shift in the next few years. I think to your point around when humans aren’t designed to be constantly broadcasting, most people have quite a dystopian, quite a negative view of where culture, in terms of how cultural production is heading. There’s lots of arguments to say that innovation, invention is at an all-time low in terms of cultural production, whether it’s film, whether it’s music, whether it’s art. But I think that a lot of that lack of invention and creativity and imagination comes from the fact that we right now live in a time where there’s a pressure to always be broadcasting, always be creating, and getting, showing it to the world to get engagement. And I think that there is still a lot of creativity in the world, but it’s that it’s not being broadcast publicly as widely as it has before. So I think if we’re moving into this era where there’s more a culture of working on things in private, where you can follow your own creativity without feeling pressure to shape things to fit what’s going to work well in the algorithm, I think there might be, there’s probably going to be a renaissance, I think, in interesting ideas where we are creating stuff not for immediate broadcast, but for our own pleasure and for our, based on our own interests and tastes. And yeah, I think that’s going to be a positive thing for culture in general. We have just a few minutes left, and I thought I would just open it up. And what are you thinking about now? Is there an idea that you’re fixated or excited about or observing out there that you would to talk about? Yeah, I think I posted last week. So one thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot, which I think is a little bit connected to some of the things we’ve spoken about now previously, I had this piece called Archive Futurism, which I think is based on quite an interesting shift, I think, that’s happening in culture at the moment. So the idea of Archive Futurism stems from this observation that I’ve had recently, that when you look at some of the most forward-thinking and inventive brands, but also creatives at the moment, there’s this newfound enthusiasm with retrospection. And when I talk about retrospection, I’m not necessarily talking about this old recycled nostalgia that we’ve been seeing in culture, but it’s about having a genuine appreciation and respect for the cultural canon. It’s something that I’ve noticed a lot in fashion. So some of the examples that I talk about, one of my favourite fashion brands at the moment is, or one of my designers is Grace Wales Bonner. She runs her own namesake label, Wales Bonner, but she’s also the creative director of Hermes menswear. She talks about, she specifically talks about archival research being a fundamental cornerstone of her creative process, where she is really deeply and diligently researching history, whether it’s Afro-Caribbean diasporas in the UK, or Renaissance painting in the Netherlands, and finding ways to recontextualise this in her work. And I think this not just repeating the past, but really understanding the classics and all this interesting stuff that has happened in the past, whether it’s archives or old masterpieces, not just replicating or repeating it, but finding ways to recontextualise or to challenge this stuff, I think is something that’s happening across lots of different domains and cultures. So another example that I talk about is Charlie XCX, who, I mean, arguably is one of these artists that, on a mainstream scale, is pushing the pop culture zeitgeist forward. What’s really interesting is that, at the moment, she’s putting a lot of time and effort into showing the world that she has this immense respect for the cultural canon. So she recently went on this YouTube series called the Criterion Closet Picks, which is, you invite these famous people to go through the archive of the Criterion films, and they pick out their favourite classics. And she’s talking about being a Cronenberg stan, and she’s talking about all these indie film auteurs from the 60s and the 70s. And it’s an interesting shift for me, because for the past decade, there’s almost been this rejection of the past. There’s been this idea, and this is something that, I’m not sure, I don’t know if you’ve read W. David Mark’s recent book, Blank Space. He argues that we are in this creative rut at the moment, because people have started to reject the cultural canon, where this idea that you should embrace tradition has been tied to more conservative values. And he argues, and it’s something that I think is happening at the moment, is that in order to push culture forward, to be more inventive, to be more innovative, we once again have to really study the cultural canon, what has come before, so that we can find ways to get inspiration from this. And it helps inform creativity in far richer ways than if we start with a blank slate, because we’re always going to be recycling the same references, leaning into the same recycled mood boards. So this idea that the most forward-thinking creatives are looking into the past to come up with more interesting forward-thinking creativity, I think is an interesting shift at the moment that I’ve recently been writing about. Yeah, it’s beautiful. I’m glad you brought that up. Beautiful. Alexi, we’ve run out of time. I want to thank you so much for accepting my invitation and for Idle Gaze, which is a great newsletter. I recommend people subscribe, and I’ll share links to the pieces that we talked about. But thank you so much. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Carissa Justice on Voice & Craft

Carissa Justice [https://www.linkedin.com/in/carissa-justice-24928658/] is a copywriter, creative director in Atlanta. She is the founder of Nimble Creative [https://nimblebrand.co/], a brand studio focused on voice, naming, and storytelling. Her clients have included Google, Strava, Figma, and ThirdLove. She previously served as Verbal Lead at CharacterSF. In 2023 she founded The Subtext [https://thesubtextnewsletter.substack.com/], an online publication and community dedicated to elevating the craft of brand language. So I start all these conversations with the same question. You may or may not know this, but it’s a question I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And it’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I ask it, but because it’s big and beautiful, I kind of over-explain it like I am doing right now. And so before I ask it, I really want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? All right, I think I can start off with the more literal interpretation of that, which is born in Vermont, raised in Massachusetts, have lived all over South Carolina, Atlanta, California for 11 years, and then back to the South. But I think maybe the more emotional response or that might tell you a little bit more is I’m the youngest of three raised by divorced parents. My dad was like a conservative, Republican pharmaceutical salesman, and my mom’s like a super hippie, liberal animal lover, social worker. So I feel like I got raised by two different worlds, both people that I love dearly. And I think when I think about that question, it’s fun to think back on it, because I think when I grew up being the youngest, I had a brilliant older sister who was so smart, and then I had a really athletic older brother. So I feel like they had their things and I never really had my thing. So I did a lot of things and tried to blend in and be the peacemaker and be the kind of easy, and I don’t want to say easy kid, but always was like, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m good at. So I’ll have fun along the way. And I think that that’s been a bit of a backdrop of my whole life. It’s doing different things and seeing what sticks and seeing what I like about it and not ever really knowing where I’m going, but trying to enjoy the ride as I go. Yeah, so much I want to ask about, I guess the first is really Vermont. What does it mean to you to be from Vermont? And are there moments when you feel particularly like a Vermonter? Yes, I feel like I love being a Vermonter. I only lived there until I was about five, but then my mom moved back up when I went to college. And so that’s always been like home base now for many, many years. It’s the most beautiful state. It’s so peaceful. I feel like there’s, you could zip me down the middle and half of me belongs like off-grid in the country riding horses and wandering in tall grass. And the other half belongs deep in a city in the grit and the grime with that rougher kind of hustle edge. And I feel like both feel right at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, where in Vermont were you when you were there? I was born in Brattleboro, but my mom has a farm up in Northeast Kingdom outside St. Johnsbury. That’s a beautiful place. She’s a 72 years old and still a competitive horseback rider. She has horses and cows and chickens and sheep and whole menagerie. Yeah. What did young Carissa want to be when she grew up? I wanted to be an in living color fly girl for a little bit. I wanted to be on SNL. I wanted to be, I don’t know. I think I was very influenced by whatever I was watching on TV. I think the only thing I knew in school that I was decent at was writing. So I think I always followed that because I was so, so tragically bad at math. Dumb, dumb at math. And science was really hard. So I was like, I guess it’s English for this girl all the way. But I don’t think I knew what I wanted at all. Can you tell a story about that? About, I guess the way writing showed up early for you? Yeah. Well, I think my mom was doing, went back to school when I was young. And got her master’s in social work. And so I feel like she was always writing papers and clacking away at the computer. So I think I saw her, she was very, I think she was quite the writer. Even, I think she really enjoyed that part of her studies. And so I think that infiltrated me a little bit. And then I was not the best test taker. I was really bad at memorization. And so I would revel at a paper project because I’d be able to do it in my own time. And so I think that was my only source of feeling like I was okay at school. So I think that, I remember writing papers and being like, oh, okay, I’ll at least get a B because I know I can nail this. And then if I mess everything else up, that’ll be my saving grace. So I think I found comfort in being pretty good with words. Yeah. I really identify with that, how painful, impossible math and science, they didn’t seem to enter my consciousness in any meaningful way at all. But words were very easy. Yeah. And I think, I didn’t know it at the time, but my grandfather was a copywriter and I didn’t even for a good part of his career. And my grandmother was like an editor and also a writer. And I think, I didn’t know, when you’re a kid, you don’t really dig into your lineage as much. But as I got older, I was like, oh, that’s so interesting. Because I always thought they were artists. My whole mom’s side, they’re so creative, so artistic, and there’s art everywhere. And it’s all done by people in the family. And so I always like, oh, they were artists, but they were actually writers. And they also happened to be really good at art. Wow. And so I think I’m probably lucky for what I was maybe given a bit naturally on that front. How did you come to discover that they were copywriters? Given what you’re doing now, that’s pretty beautiful. I think when I was in college, I was trying to figure out my major. I think my mom, I went to see my grandmother and cause I did all my internships in New York and I went and visited her. She lived outside of Westport, Connecticut. So I would take the train out to go see her and my mom met up with us and then I got to, they just started talking to me a lot more about her life. And I remember just being like, oh, wow. That’s so cool. But yeah, even in college though, I don’t think I knew, I didn’t know that copywriting was a thing. So- What were they doing? What kind of copywriting were they doing? So my grandfather did, he was the copywriter to the art director in advertising. So we worked for a local advertising firm and just pitched ideas to local companies. It’s funny, I just completely randomly ended up watching just because of the queue happened that way, watching the premiere of Mad Men. And so that whatever you’re bringing into this conversation, you just got all this imagery from that show. Have you watched it, the whole thing yet? Yeah, I watched it when it was- Yeah. So I hadn’t revisited it in a while and it was amazed at how good it felt to watch. I was a long time ago. I don’t even know when that premiered, but it’s beautiful. That first episode is amazing. They’re all so young, of course, but it’s amazing. It’s amazing show. I’ve watched it twice and the second time was even better because I think you have such a, I don’t know, you’re not waiting to see what happens, but you just get to see how good they play it out and the different storylines and the references. I don’t know. It’s such a genius show and Jon Hamm is my forever number one. Yeah. Yeah, he’s something else. Yeah, and it’s funny, even in that first episode, not to get to derail a little bit, but they have a researcher, it’d be selfishly, there’s a researcher that comes in and they’re trying to pitch the tobacco client and they have this woman with a German accent come and represent Freudian insights into the behavior. And Don Draper is like, “What the f**k?” They’re all like, “What are you talking about? That’s insane.” They ridicule her for bringing this psychological insight into the conversation. That’s pretty funny. That is funny. Did you feel a little bit hurt in that moment? No, I think I’ve been around long enough to know that everything’s true all at once. You know what I mean? We all hold different things with a different level of need or attachment, I think. And so, he’s as right as she is in a way. And the solution he comes up with, toasted. You know what I mean? It’s the Lucky Strike thing where he sort of, he avoids, the creative solution is avoiding the psychological conversation entirely and coming up with something brilliant. Yeah. It’s cool. It’s really cool. Anyway, so now, where are you now? Catch us up. Where do you live? What are you doing? What are you up to? I live in Atlanta, Georgia. I moved here in 2021 and it’s wonderful. I run my own branding studio and I’ve had it for about nine years. I have a business partner who’s wonderful and a small team and we do strategic branding. So, the crux of the type of work we do is around articulation. And so, clients come to us when the biggest need is articulating value or particular technology or challenge. So, while we do full-scale branding design strategy and even executions around websites or packaging or whatever, I think what our sweet spot is is around finding the right words, finding the right language to articulate something that’s tough to explain. So, because of that, we work with a lot of emerging tech or work with bigger companies navigating, whether it’s a pivot or a change in their business or an expanded set of customers, it’s like, okay, how do we get from here to there and make it make sense and understandable to people? So, that work is very custom fit for the things I like to do and the challenges I like. And then on the other side, I started a publication called The Subtext, which is about elevating the craft of writing and strategy within the branding and marketing world. And that was started selfishly because I was sort of feeling down and disillusioned about the state of the industry and how many awards and publications were talking about logos and design and advertising and no one was showcasing and talking about the other brilliant people that are in the work. And so, our community is mostly made up of strategists, namers, writers, researchers, but also designers and marketers and business folks that believe in the power of language and its role. So, those are sort of my two avenues. And then personally, I have two boys, 10 and six, and that’s also a big part of my life. I wanna talk about, well, two things, the word, articulate. You seem like the right person to ask about that word. You’ve used it a bunch of times. And I remember when I was coming up, my mentor, our project objective was always to explore, understand and articulate the thing. And it was always very clear what that was. But the way you were using it made me curious about what that means to you. What does it mean to articulate something? So, to me, it means, I think you can’t articulate something until you understand it. And so, I think a big part of the work that we do is trying to get our arms wrapped around our clients’ challenge. And that’s through a lot of conversation, research, diving deep into their world. And then, I always think it’s like untying a tangled up knot of, because there’s so many things you can say, but articulation is about finding the things that hold the most value and understanding. So, to me, I think articulation is a process of crafting, you know? I love that you were talking about the subtext as coming out of maybe a little bit of frustration with how, and I think this is a fair assessment, how verbal creativity is maybe undervalued as opposed to visual creativity in the world of brand and marketing. Is that a fair description? Yes, yes. So, what is the role? How might we properly respect verbal creativity in the role of brand building? Pay us. No, I’m just kidding. Pay us, hire us. No, I think it’s not about, to me, it’s about getting a seat at the table with the other disciplines. So, it’s not about one being more important than the other, but I think to talk about a rebrand project, for example, and go into every detail of their identity around motion, logo, typography, color, and to then not discuss all the words and ideas that underpin that brand, it feels like a one-sided conversation that didn’t encompass so much of the work. And so, that’s where my frustration started, which is even as a studio owner, I’d be well, I wanna submit work, but I don’t wanna talk about the logo. And honestly, the hardest part of what we did was figuring out the positioning of this company. And so, I think there is a challenge that I do understand about elevating the other side of the work, which is strategy is often feeling quite proprietary or secret or something that a lot of companies don’t necessarily want to externally promote or show. But I think when you’re talking about the language that shows up within brands, whether that’s not in ads, but on your website or even internally, the types of the way that you articulate what you do, I think is as important within your brand presence as a logo or a color palette. So, I think it’s about finding parody and game recognizing game on both sides. And I feel like we started to, I don’t know, I feel like there’s been a bit of a change within the industry where I think people are realizing how important strategy and writing is, especially in the dawn of, or I guess the hyper cycle of AI that we’re in. So many disciplines, a lot of things that people have been precious about are sort of changing a bit. And I think what comes out of it is what is the idea? What is the real story that we wanna tell? And then how do we do that in the best possible way? I think has started to rise to the top, at least in my mind. I don’t think that the subtext is responsible for that, but I think that it’s a good way for us to ride. Yeah. Yeah, well, how has that changed the role of, or the need for more verbal clarity? I mean, I guess you’re taught there’s two things too. There’s this idea that strategy is words, right? It’s being very clear and disciplined about the language you use and positioning. It’s all pretty much a linguistic exercise. Totally. And then there’s also, then there’s the verbal, there’s the creative side of the language on the creative side. How has the role of that changed? And I’m totally naive on this, in the different media environments we’re in, is it more important to have a clear verbal identity and how do you help clients understand what it can do for them? I think what’s changed is that there was such a focus for so long on, I think what happened was brand became obvious, the way that your company looks can impact the success of it, right? The Nike, the Airbnbs, the big businesses that showed that high design, high craft, high intention can move the market in your favor. But then I think what happened was, everyone went through a design exercise and a brand exercise, and then it wasn’t there wasn’t all these brands that hadn’t been touched or they looked outdated. It was sort of everybody got to a similar aesthetic level, even in B2B now. I mean, the rules are so different. So I think when you think about branding, it’s not it needs to look cool or it’s an aesthetic exercise, but it’s the market is so noisy. There’s so much competition. AI makes it so much easier to start companies, to compete quicker, that understand, crafting a clear and compelling story that people wanna choose you over somebody else. I think is the thing that’s changed. That I think the value of that, I think has gone up. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I think it starts with people. I love working with clients and I love working with my team and collaborators. I think the start of a project, it has so much energy. I love that feeling of being terrified, being oh God, what did I say I would do? I don’t know if I could do it. Yeah, this is the high of winning a project and then the low of being okay, now I gotta do all this stuff that I said I would do. But I think the working with people is always my favorite part. And then I think that over the years it’s changed. I used to love writing, I would love a manifesto or I’d love to give people goosebumps in a meeting or try to crack the perfect sort of line that would rally everybody and get them excited. And now I feel like my joy comes from the wayfinding through it. I think the positioning part is, it used to make me too nervous to enjoy it. And now I think I’ve done it. I’ve gotten my reps in enough to where I think the strategy is more fun because it is, it feels like the most rewarding once you get to the other side. Yeah. How do you think or talk about, was sort of kept, caught by what you just described, the wayfinding until you get to the right place. How do you think or talk about what a good brand needs to be or a good positioning needs to be? I think it’s different depending on industries, but I think in my view, I think we are moving away. I don’t think it’s about finding white space or finding what somebody else isn’t doing. I think it’s about looking deeply at what you’re doing and what you have and what makes it special and trying to pull that out in the most compelling way. Because you can find white space or do all this research and say, this is what customers want. But if that’s not the business you have, that’s not that helpful. Because I don’t, there’s definitely been times where we, our strategy influences business significantly, but there’s only so much businesses can do, right? They have to build off their strengths. So I think that to me is the wayfinding is where are the strengths and how can we make sure that those are amplified and the business can then prop those up. And then how can we build the story around that, that makes it feel like the most desirable thing that people want. What’s the role, if any, that sort of qualitative plays or research plays? Let’s say research plays and then if it plays a role qualitative within it. I think it, ideally I wish it played a role always. I think the hard part about research is that it takes time and money and increasingly clients don’t wanna wait. I feel like branding is one of those things where after they’ve exhausted every other business conversation or sales solution or whatever, they’re finally okay, I guess we do need to think about this from a brand lens. And then they’re at that point behind the eight ball it often feels like. And they’re we needed this yesterday. And it frustrates me to no end because I think, well, you’ve already waited this long, you’ve already waited too long and now you wanna rush through it. But I think with that aside, I think research can do a lot. I think if you have an active customer base, if you have more of a mature product, I think research comes in from figuring out how people are using something or engaging with something, or what are they loving or what are their hate about it or why they didn’t want it to change. So I think research can be helpful on that end. And then on a newer business, I think research is important on the cultural side of things. What is this business, what gap is this business gonna fill or what need are we trying to serve or what moment are we building on in culture or in the country or the economy? How can we do our work in terms of research and sort of figuring out the context of the business? But it depends on whether it’s new or mature, I guess. Yeah, and how would you describe the way that you learn culturally or you’ve got a project or a client, you have a, maybe you don’t have a way, but I’m curious, how do you feel like you learn? That’s a great question. I don’t know if I’ve thought about this that much. I’m very your classic ADD brain where I have a million tabs open. Usually when I start a project, I read as much as I can haphazardly. I don’t stick to, I don’t have a well-oiled machine brain where it’s I do this and then I do this and then I do this. But I think I try to get, I try to read what I can about the business from what they’re saying. And we often get a lot of documents and then I try to zoom out and be okay, what is everybody else saying about this? And does it feel incongruent with what they’re saying? So I think so much of my days is reading and wandering around the internet for information. Now I do a good amount of research and wayfinding with certain AI tools like Notebook LLM or Clod, but I can only get you so far. Cause I don’t, I can’t, a synthesis is helpful, but you have to get it in your brain first. So it makes the tidy recaps easier, but I still need to look at all this stuff. Can we say more about that. You drew a distinction between getting a synthesis from Clod or Notebook LLM, I guess, versus getting it in your brain is what you said. What are you pointing at? Well, I think that there’s a misconception that if you can do research through AI and it just accelerates the process, I think it accelerates the synthesis of it in some ways, because you can do, I need to still read the things. I can’t just get a recap of all the things. Because then I, especially as somebody who’s taking more of maybe a heightened approach to language, I need to see what they’re saying in their docs. I can’t get a recap of it. I need to see the language they’re using. Why? So I, because that’s often a big part of our mandate is to be intentional with the language and see what’s working and what’s not and how we would shift it. So if I get a truncated output from an AI, I won’t actually, that’s not actually that helpful to me. Again, I think when I synthesize my findings, if I agree with what some of the things that I’m using, then I’m great. Yeah, I agree with that. But other things I feel like I have to work through on my own. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t, I was very curious about that. I mean, because I feel like this line between what we ask or allow AI to do for us and what we do for ourselves is, we’ve been thrown in this very weird situation where we can allow it to do quite a bit and it will do whatever we ask it to do very easily. So it’s not gonna defend those boundaries. So I’m gonna have to defend the boundaries between what I do. Have you found that to be the case or what broadly, how do you feel about, or I guess what’s your experience been incorporating these AI tools into your process? I think it’s been a mixed bag. I think from a research standpoint, I find it incredibly helpful because I don’t find that I have the most organized brain when it comes to, I feel like I’m often overwhelmed by the amount of documentation that we’re given. So because I can house it in something like a notebook LLM, which is essentially like a closed portal, you can add certain things to a project and then it only, you can query it. And it only takes from the documents within this portal, which is nice. Because then it’s not like it’s taking from all of the internet and you’re what, where did you get that? And I like to be able to search within the information I’ve been given for answers, especially when I want to find something specific or get a specific quote. In some ways, I think it’s definitely made parts of the process more efficient and gives you easier ways of accessing the material. In other ways, I feel like I really like it when you get more to the execution standpoint, you always have to feed it your idea. I think if you want it to give you an idea, I don’t think it’s good. I’m thinking more about ChatGPT or even Claude. It’s I feel like I have to have a point of view. And then once I have it, I think it’s helpful. Sometimes it’s helpful in the sense where I’ll be give it a rough draft and then it gives me something back and I have even deeper conviction over it not being right. And then I’m okay, why? Now I know what more of, I feel more convicted now that I see somebody else try to play this out. And then other times I’m sweet. I like some of that. I can build off that. And I don’t feel like it’s ever a linear thing. It either fight with it or it feels like it’s giving the work a boost. I dug around a little bit in stuff you’ve written before. And I wanted to maybe shift. Oh, I guess I’m curious about, before I get into that, when did you first discover that you could make a living doing this? Do you have a recollection of really encountering this as a jobby job? A jobby job. Yeah. I mean, I had a very circuitous path. I was an assistant sports editor, my college paper. So I made a little bit of money doing that. I only knew journalism was a thing. I didn’t really know you could be a copywriter. I knew you could do advertising, but I didn’t know there was another side of being a copywriter, which is more like a brand writer. So when I got out of college, I did wanted to be a sports writer. And then that was weird. And then I wanted to be a music writer. Anyways, I wrote about a lot of different things that I was interested in, made a little bit of money, but not much. I was actually convinced for a while that I wouldn’t make money at it. So I became a massage therapist. So I had a different, a day job. So I could take on all these really poorly paid writing jobs. And that’s how I got my first job. That’s how I ended up moving to San Francisco. I made money, more money doing that for a few years and took on really crappy writing jobs, but they got me a foot in the door. And eventually I got my first big gig at Shutterfly as a full-time in-house copywriter. And I made so much money at the time. I mean, it wasn’t so much money, but to me it was so much money. And that was my big aha moment that it was oh, this is made for me. Nice. And you talk about voice and some of your, how do you talk to clients about voice and what makes a good voice, what it means? I think my opinion has changed over the years on voice. I definitely think voice is important. I think it, but I think what it used to be was having it feel unique and ownable and consistent so that people could understand, see something and know it was you because you had created this vibe and a way of articulating what you do that felt recognizable. To me, that’s what voice used to be and still is in a large part. But I think to me, voice comes all back to strategy. And to me, I think more about what is your point of view? What do you believe that others don’t? And what is your unique take on your industry or the value you deliver? I think once you have that, which is to me the harder nut to crack, how you then express it should feel a little bit more obvious. And I used to really beat the drum of consistency around voice, but I think it’s such a different world. Brands have to constantly be evolving and moving. So I focus a little bit less on consistency as opposed to trying to really focus on what you do best and what your point of view is and making sure that’s coming through as opposed to cleverness or pithiness. Yeah. What are the examples of brands that have done this really, really well? And I’m thinking for whatever reason, maybe when we were talking about the visual branding versus verbal branding of the great blandification of visual identities. And maybe you were talking about a little bit of the consistency that there’s been a homogenization on some level of brand identity. I think we’ve come out of that quite strongly, but what examples are there of brands using voice really powerfully and strategically? Well, there’s so many. I think, I mean, I think people love to talk about the big ones because they were what started, I think, the drive towards having a really ownable voice. People still imitate Apple all the time for good reason. They really birth the crisp and clever headline. They use punctuation with such impact that I think that still reverberates today. And then you have the really chest beating, feel it in your heart, Nike anthematic kind of voice that can flex in so many different ways for all their different product lines, but you still feel it’s Nike. And then you have Volkswagen just always has this pulls at your heartstrings, reminds you why safety matters. It’s this really engaging, but emotional storytelling that I think has really been consistent and really well done over the years. So this is the big ones that come to mind, but then there’s really cool, even brands like Twitch, right? They speak in the language of gaming, right? And they get their user. And so they’re not polished lines or it doesn’t feel as much like marketing as it feels more like something you would read within a Discord channel or something. So I think, and WhatsApp does a pretty good job of that too, speaking within the vernacular of their product and within their customer base. Or there’s really beautiful, Alison, who’s in exposure therapy to this beautiful brand with her studio, Forner, where she works. It was called Uma and it was mushrooms or something, but it was so drippy and sexy and every sentence just felt seductive and you wanted to try it. And it just, I don’t know, there was something so beautiful about it. I always think when I see stuff, my first litmus test is if I feel a pang of jealousy that I didn’t write it. So stuff like that, I just think there’s so many, there’s so many great voices. And then people love Duolingo because mostly because their social voice, which is actually quite different than what you see in their product, which is quite functional actually. But they have this sort of caricature and this mascot that has permission to do things their own way. And I think it just adds a bit of a fun foil to that brand that builds on the storytelling and the voice in cool ways. Anyways, I could probably go way too long. I could do a whole hour on just talking about examples, but there’s so many. And I think it shows that I think people understand it. And it’s, I just talked to a writer named Nick Parker for the subtext, who’s a sage when it comes to voice. And we were both agreeing that it used to be that we’d have to try to convince clients that voice mattered. And we’re post that. I think clients get it because you see it out in the world. If you don’t have something, if you’re not saying something in an interesting way and you’re not getting attention, it’s such a waste of money. And it’s such a waste of money and airspace to be boring or bland. So it’s sort of, the problem isn’t trying to sell it now. It’s more, oh, there’s a lot of good stuff out there. So yeah. Well, that’s great. I was gonna ask that question about how, I guess selling it into clients. What do you think explains or how do you, yeah, how do you explain that shift? Is it just hyper-competition? Is it a very banal explanation like that? Or what changed? I think it’s, now it’s, I think it’s about reminding clients, you have to explain what you do. So you might as well do it well, right? You might as well have, really understand what you do. And it’s amazing how many projects I get where they really don’t know how to talk about what they do. And they’re not even really sure what’s most important. They have a list of features. They have a list of things that their service or product does, but they don’t actually know why or what it’s helping. And so I think to me, it’s really about reminding clients and doing a bit of that therapy around, nobody needs this feature. What do they need? What, why, or why would they need that feature? Or what does that help them do? And I think what you get is a lot of what you see today, which is to give you more time back in your day so you can get back to doing what you love. So you can, AI powered blank, so you can do more of this other thing. And it’s such a bizarre argument or more seamless, blah, blah, blah. And it’s really, it’s a lot of words to say nothing. And so getting clients to cut that s**t and be, we have a few words here. Can we say something that actually gets us somewhere without saying nothing? And I think it’s really around the inability to commit. They don’t wanna commit. They wanna be, they don’t wanna pick a lane cause they’re all in one. They do everything. Oh yes, yes. That’s the biggest issue. I have two quotes that I always, I’ve probably bored you with before and I’m sure you have counted them just that you’ve brought up that make me think of. One is that the biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred. Have you ever heard that? Yeah, I love that. That’s so great. That one and then what you’re talking about too is this woman, Fiona McNae, who ran, I think it was called Space Doctors, a semiotics outfit in the UK. And she has a TED Talk. And the title is taking responsibility for being understood. And I quote that line all the time because we never, we so rarely do it. Do you know what I mean? We so rarely actually do take responsibility for making sure that things that we say are actually understood by whoever’s on the other side of it. A hundred percent. I mean, I haven’t heard either of those and they’re amazing. I should pocket them and use them myself because I think it does, it’s shocking how little is communicated in all of these communications. It’s more about obfuscation and not taking responsibility or not promising too much, but also promising way too much. The willingness to promise that you’re bettering the world, but not promise that you’re gonna do something X times faster or it’s pretty interesting to see. And I think that that’s part of the legal landscape that we find ourselves in. It’s part of the marketing landscape we find ourselves in. I think also the hardest part is what gets somebody’s attention is often not what helps people understand something. And so I think we often have to think about those in different ways. So an advertising moment deserves a bit of a different brief, right? As it should, which is, there’s so much coming at people. What’s gonna make somebody be, what? What’s that? And then click on it. But then the responsibility really does need to be there around, this is what we do. And this is what you’re buying. That I feel is the part that, yeah, that I think it’s nuanced. And I think a lot of people wanna simplify it because they are just, no, just, this is what we say. And that’s what we do. But it needs to be a lot more layered than that. This last question, cause we’ve sort of coming into the end of time. And it reminds me of a conversation I had here with Grant McCracken, who’s a cultural anthropologist guy. And he makes this really, I mean, all of his arguments are very compelling but enthusiastic. But this idea that brands, he talks about multiplicity. That we came up, I came up in a time when brand was consistency was the thing, and it was a pattern and just all this stuff. And we’re just in a totally different landscape now. And brands can be a whole host of different things in different contexts. And there’s so much freedom in terms of how brands can show up in the world. And you talked about social voice versus product voice. And I’m just wondering, how do you think about the idea of multiplicity as it relates to brand and brand voice? Yeah, I mean, I think I agree with him in the sense that, yeah, I don’t think it’s about consistency. I don’t think it’s about following your brand guidelines. I don’t think it’s about saying the same thing over and over again until the market understands it. I think it’s about multiple things. So it’s what is true? What is unique to you? What is your very specific point of view? And then what’s contextual, right? So what is happening that you can speak to? And I think that’s the part that deserves that sort of ongoing negotiation around language. There are things that shouldn’t change a lot around that, what we do and why we do it and what we believe, they can be deepened over time, they can be expanded over time, but there should be some sort of core thing to hold on to, but everything else needs to be very much willing to react and excite in new ways. And I think it just depends on what you need it to be. Do you need it to be something that somebody can’t live without or do you need it to be something that somebody desires? Depending on the industry, those two things are different. And so they require different ways of showing up. And then I think if you’re not responding to the world and what’s happening and whether that’s in your market or within your industry or within culture, you’re just missing such an important layer of communications. Multiplicity. Layered, nuanced. More words. Any other buzzwords we can get in? Synthesis. Teresa, thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for having me. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]