Unseen Unknown is a brand and business strategy podcast about the hidden threads that connect even the most distant of cultural concepts. We look at the emerging trends and behaviors that may be pointing to a deeper truth and ask the bigger question, “Why is society moving in this direction, and how can we apply it to business?”
We believe if we can’t see it in our culture, then we can’t know it in the market. From retail and consumerism to politics, gender, identity and values, there are patterns everywhere that illuminate a path forward for brands.
Your hosts, Jasmine Bina and Jean-Louis Rawlence, are brand strategists and futurists that explore these questions every day in their work for companies around the world. We’ll be interviewing thought leaders and domain experts both within brand strategy and outside of it.
Expect to hear from people from all walks of life: artists, scientists, CEOs, journalists, professors, technologists and everyone in between.
If you’re a founder, leader, storyteller or creator, this podcast will compel you to think at a macro level you haven’t considered before.
We also write and publish videos on everything brand strategy. You can see all of that here: https://www.theconceptbureau.com/
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Unseen Unknown is a brand and business strategy podcast about the hidden threads that connect even the most distant of cultural concepts. We look at the emerging trends and behaviors that may be pointing to a deeper truth and ask the bigger question, “Why is society moving in this direction, and how can we apply it to business?”
We believe if we can’t see it in our culture, then we can’t know it in the market. From retail and consumerism to politics, gender, identity and values, there are patterns everywhere that illuminate a path forward for brands.
Your hosts, Jasmine Bina and Jean-Louis Rawlence, are brand strategists and futurists that explore these questions every day in their work for companies around the world. We’ll be interviewing thought leaders and domain experts both within brand strategy and outside of it.
Expect to hear from people from all walks of life: artists, scientists, CEOs, journalists, professors, technologists and everyone in between.
If you’re a founder, leader, storyteller or creator, this podcast will compel you to think at a macro level you haven’t considered before.
We also write and publish videos on everything brand strategy. You can see all of that here: https://www.theconceptbureau.com/
From the way we create our identities and manage our health, to the way we employ therapy-speak at work and vote in elections, it’s apparent that people are increasingly being guided by feelings and intuition in places where they may have once relied on reasoning or ideology. This new form of intuitive, noetic knowing is changing how people move through the world, and how brands can speak to them.
Weirdness reveals something profound about human nature, and lately more and more brands have been tapping into the delight of the unconventional. When done right, weirdness is highly relatable and offers brands a unique opportunity to create deep connections, foster loyalty, and shape the future in exciting ways.
What does it mean to be good at thinking? Or more importantly, thinking strategically? It’s the culmination of mental processes that enable us to analyze, reason, solve problems, make decisions, and generate creative ideas in an efficient manner.
In other words, it’s a buildable skill. In this house episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis take a deep dive into how to cultivate that skill effectively.
Culture is moving from the self-indulgence of conspicuous consumption to the self-denial of “conspicuous commitment”: a new status code that will affect every premium and luxury brand. In this episode we speak with Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb about how and why conspicuous commitment is taking over, as well as an interview with author W. David Marx who sees status as still operating by the old rules of wealth, perhaps now more than ever.
The world is starting to reconfigure itself around a very different kind of relationship. Weak ties, the underpinning of social innovation for the last two decades, are declining while strong social ties are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of our social fabric. In this house episode, we’re talking to Concept Bureau’s Chief Strategist Jean-Louis Rawlence, about the huge implications for tech innovation, community building and business. When strong ties become the future of community, community becomes the new brand.
Cults make effective brands, and today, they’re all around us. Perhaps the most insidious way cults have influenced our reality is in everyday language that’s meant to control behaviors and change perspectives. It’s language we use with friends and colleagues, language in our media and content, and language we hear coming from today’s most powerful CEOs, on branded websites and in keynote addresses.
In this episode we’re talking with Amanda Montell, a language scholar and author of the critically acclaimed book, ‘Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism’ to understand why cults have had a resurgence in branding and in real life. Cults and businesses have always been intertwined, and understanding how they use the power of language to move people is the first step to decoding how they work.
Today and throughout history, a mere six competing stories of ownership have dictated how everything in the world is distributed. As resources have become scarcer, everyone from American homesteaders and ranchers, to tech leaders and consumer brands, have created ways to impose their own preferred ownership story in a world where what it means to “own” something is constantly evolving.
We speak with Michael Heller and James Salzman, two of the world’s leading scholars and authorities on ownership, and co-authors of the book Mine!: How The Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives. They explain to us how the rules of ownership change in every generation, and how those changes reveal the true brand landscape, the role of business, and most importantly, a society’s shifting values.
For the fourth and final episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about seemingly new emerging forms of spirituality, and how new spiritual brands are positioning themselves to take advantage of our collective movement towards wanting to be both categorized but at the same time free from conventional binary definitions.
Allegra Hobbs is a journalist who’s explored the phenomenon of the Enneagram. She found that the Enneagram and other categorizing devices like it have also seemingly crossed over into the mainstream because we find ourselves in a perpetual state of isolation and alienation—something Rachel Lo discovered as she developed the dating app Struck, which helps match people based on their astrological signs.
Every single culture and subculture - from states and governments to user segments and brand tribes - falls along the tight-loose continuum. A culture’s tightness or looseness affects people’s perceptions of threat, how they relate to each other, how they consume, and of course the narratives that shape the businesses and brands that form within that culture. In this third episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we speak with Michele Gelfand, cultural psychologist and author of ‘Rule Makers, Rule Breakers’ about the invisible systems that make a culture relaxed or rigid, and the surprising tradeoffs involved.
For the second episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking with brand strategist and sociologist Ana Andjelic about systems of class and taste. In the past 10 years, new brands have emerged, specifically in luxury and premium categories, that point to a divergence in our social systems around what class and taste are, and how they are achieved. Ana talks about the rise of the Modern Aspiration Economy and how the brands of this new economy have done something remarkable: they’ve successfully decoupled class from money, and taste from wealth.
Whether it’s brand, behavior, or culture, the more you dig into the systems that affect our lives the closer you’ll come to a conversation about capitalism. While capitalism as a model may seem unchanging at a glance, look a little closer and you’ll start to see patterns of change. In this house episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis dig into divergent systems, the unstable behavior of markets, and how the rules we’ve trusted for a century are now ushering in a new generation of brands, consumers, and capital. This is the first of a series of episodes exploring how divergent systems are shaping the business landscape.
From the gig economy to the passion economy, and now the emerging participatory economy - changing consumer values are inspiring new business models for creators. In this episode we speak with early stage VC and Level Ventures partner Sari Azout about how these nascent economies are centering the new frontier of disruption on customer happiness, and what that means for how value and profitability are connected. We also speak with Ty Givens, customer experience strategist and founder of the WorkforcePro about engineering the human connection that turns customers and users into fans.
Wellness and self-care have taken over nearly every industry with a whole crop of new brands. But there is a much deeper story about the connected history of politics, race, gender and identity that underpins the self-care space today, and how it’s many interpretations reflect our American culture. We speak with New York Times journalist and editor Aisha Harris, as well as Jerome Nichols, founder of cult favorite self-care brand The Butters, to understand the very radical roots of this now-mainstream movement.
Author and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom joins us for an intimate discussion on how the mechanics of the internet, social media, digital marketing and real-life institutions amass power along racial and gender lines. We discuss how certain cultural narratives create our understanding of ourselves and others, how consumption is becoming increasingly political, and the role that brands play in the larger discussion.
The nature of celebrity culture has changed in recent years, most notably with the rise of the influencer brand. But why is this happening now, and how have our digital tribes changed because of it? We speak with Cameo co-founder Steven Galanis about how he built a platform that has taken celebrity-fan culture to new levels of access, and sociologist and author Chris Rojek about the parasocial relationships and ‘presumed intimacy’ that is outpacing other forms of relationship in our lives.
Brands are facing the fact that loneliness has become a part of our identities, crisis or not. But you can’t talk about loneliness without talking about the meaning of rituals. We speak with Sasha Sagan, author of the social history book “For Small Creatures Such As We”, Harvard social scientist Kasley Killam, and Danielle Baskin, founder of the social connection app Dialup, about models of ritual, connection, and how loneliness can actually pivot our lives in surprising directions.
Rory Sutherland, author of ‘Alchemy’ and Vice Chairman of Ogilvy talks to us about psychological and branding techniques for managing behavior during and after transformative cultural moments like COVID-19 and beyond. We explore models of human behavior, social norms, belief systems and the nuance of what he calls America’s “gloriously optimistic consumer base”.
The big question: how is a brand supposed to act during a pandemic? How can CEOs and brand owners serve their users in a meaningful way while still struggling to survive themselves? It’s not as simple as “We’re here for you” founder letters and reduced prices. To really serve your users, you have to read the room and know one thing - business may be slowing, but culture is accelerating.
Times of uncertainty have a way of revealing the mindset of a society, and today’s imminent threats - from COVID-19 to political instability and global warming - are revealing a mental shift that emotion-led brands are responding to. We speak with BBC and Vox journalist Colleen Hagerty, eschatologist and end-of-world expert Phil Torres, and founders Ryan Kuhlman and Lauren Tafuri of the popular disaster kit brand Preppi to ask one big question: How do you brand in a time of crisis?
Brands like Ring and Billie leverage the uncertainty of our changing value systems to create new interest in old paradigms. In other words, they play with cultural constructs: arbitrary systems determined by our culture or our community, rather than a truth that stems from an immovable aspect of human nature. They prove that when constructs start to change, real brand opportunities start to emerge.
Unseen Unknown is a brand and business strategy podcast about the hidden threads that connect even the most distant of cultural concepts. We look at the emerging trends and behaviors that may be pointing to a deeper truth and ask the bigger question, “Why is society moving in this direction, and how can we apply it to business?”
We believe if we can’t see it in our culture, then we can’t know it in the market. From retail and consumerism to politics, gender, identity and values, there are patterns everywhere that illuminate a path forward for brands.
Your hosts, Jasmine Bina and Jean-Louis Rawlence, are brand strategists and futurists that explore these questions every day in their work for companies around the world. We’ll be interviewing thought leaders and domain experts both within brand strategy and outside of it.
Expect to hear from people from all walks of life: artists, scientists, CEOs, journalists, professors, technologists and everyone in between.
If you’re a founder, leader, storyteller or creator, this podcast will compel you to think at a macro level you haven’t considered before.
We also write and publish videos on everything brand strategy. You can see all of that here: https://www.theconceptbureau.com/
