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A personal brand is a service. Here is the simplest way we can describe what that service needs to be today:People need ...
07/22/2025

A personal brand is a service. Here is the simplest way we can describe what that service needs to be today:

People need a release, and your job is to give your audience the kind of release they need.

It might be intellectual release or emotional release or relational release, but no matter what kind it is, it requires a deep acknowledgement, for people to say, “I didn’t even realize I was thinking that!” You need to give their unspoken insights and feelings a name, which is the ultimate release in a world where people feel increasingly estranged from each other and themselves.

Naming something invisible is what allows us to see it.

And when it comes to personal branding, if you name it, you own it.

We've helped build many personal brands over the years. We've worked with people who had smarts and people who had vibes, but neither of those things are really going to make a breakout brand that spreads across audiences and niches. The biggest personal brands of today and tomorrow will be those that surface new truths. You don’t need to be a genius or a painfully cool person to do that, you simply need to be chasing a bigger idea.

We say “simply” jokingly because it’s a lot harder than it seems. It means openly wrestling with ideas before you have the meta-answer. Even we find that so many of our articles are circling a bigger idea that we haven’t articulated yet. They’re like celestial bodies orbiting a black hole. It’s there, we can feel it, we just haven’t reached the event horizon yet. And part of us is scared of when we’ll get close enough to be sucked in because we don’t know what we will find at the center of it all.

Your personal brand needs to be chasing something just as big and unknowable. You should feel its gravitational pull and its mystery should terrify you a little bit.

When our CEO first interviewed Tressie Cottom in 2020, she was talking about Thick and gender, but it was only the beginning of an inquiry into class, taste and capitalism. Today she is unearthing ...

[Read the full article in the link in bio.]

Welcome to a new era of tension branding.Brands that feel most magnetic right now don’t stand for something so much as t...
07/15/2025

Welcome to a new era of tension branding.

Brands that feel most magnetic right now don’t stand for something so much as they hold something: tension and contradiction.

Tension captures the ambient contradictions we live inside, and we rely on culture, brands, media, and communities to reflect them back to us.

When a brand externalizes the tension we’ve been silently carrying, we feel relief and recognition, and we assign them disproportionate value for it.

In today's article, we provide a map of where we’ve been and where things are about to get more interesting:

*Moral Tension (peaked around 2015)*

The age of Abercrombie & Fitch and the Iraq War. Of the TOMS buy-one-give-one alongside the meteoric rise of disposable H&M and Forever 21 clothes. Millennials came of age in a moment defined by rising ethical awareness colliding with their first real taste of material power. We were making money and faced with a new kind of mental math: 'Can I live a life of comfort and still be good? Can I participate in capitalism and still critique it?'

Brands like Patagonia, American Apparel, Everlane, and TOMS sold moral resolution. They offered a way to feel spiritually aligned without opting out of the system. “Voting with your dollars” was the perfect refrain.

*Aesthetic Tension (peaked around 2024)*

After years of pursuing a moral singularity, we hit a point where we realized it wasn’t easily feasible. Life collapsed into an algo where you might see a Met Gala look next to slime videos, a Harvard commencement clip next to a mukbang stream, a Sotheby’s drop next to genocide.

The only way to resolve the tension of a world that says it values substance, and yet rewards shallowness, is to mix style and taste codes so that you’re in on the gag. Balenciaga, Heaven, Praying, these are all inside jokes dressed up as fashion.

We voluntarily flattened ourselves to fit into 2D boxes to attain aesthetic tension, but s**t got 3D really fast when we realized the algorithm isn’t how people vote, find community, or build their value systems irl.

A new tension has emerged.

*Existential Tension... [Read more at the link in bio.]

Our industry thinks the best way to understand where culture is headed is to study what’s dying. That's a failure of ima...
07/10/2025

Our industry thinks the best way to understand where culture is headed is to study what’s dying. That's a failure of imagination.

To know culture you have to track what’s coming to life.

Adult play is increasing everywhere. Real play. Play that gets you in a flow state, with special rules and special energy. Play that no one thinks of monetizing or turning into a side hustle. We're re-learning what it means to play simply because it fulfills a deep, human need.

In our newsletter, we write about the cultural signals that suggest something important is coming back to life.

Play is one of them.

Adults have now overtaken 3–5 year olds as the toy industry’s most important segment. Out of the top 10 toys adults bought for themselves this year, #1, #3, #6, and #9 were all some version of Squishmallow. It’s hard to believe that just a couple of years ago, a Washington Post article profiled a man so ashamed of his Squishmallow collection that he used a fake name to avoid getting fired.

But my oh my, so much has changed in the last 2.5 years.

Major categories of adult gameplay have shot up. Suddenly it’s cool that actor Joe Manganiello is playing D&D in his homemade lair and the Critical Role guys have cultural cache.

Everyone is playing games *for real* now. Playing the way children would, getting lost in fantasy worlds without shame or apology.

There’s been a wholesale rejection of cynicism around play that was so apparent just a few years ago. Some stigmas may remain, but they remain the way avocado toast memes linger. Everyone knows the joke is based on a lie.

Play is how new cultures are born. Play is how we test out the new futures we may choose to pursue.

Ottawa has named its first-ever Nightlife Commissioner and Santa Monica is converting its Third Street Promenade into an entertainment zone, to bring play back into public life.

Multigenerational playgrounds, adult camps, empty lots converted into creative zones - when we play, we break and remake things.

And the play that’s emerging now will turn into new laws, new norms, and new systems, because play always breaks into the physical world around it.

Read more in the link in bio.

Rage rituals are just one of the many experiential portals available to us in today’s body culture. Muscle mania, food-i...
07/08/2025

Rage rituals are just one of the many experiential portals available to us in today’s body culture. Muscle mania, food-ified beauty products, immersive fragrances, calf-first colostrum and glazed skin are all so pleasing to the senses you could eat them. The promise of the mind-gut connection is a new frontier that feels like manifest destiny. The exploration of female sexuality and power through Venus rituals and goddess play is borderline intoxicating.

We are gripping and swallowing and banging ourselves into a new experience of the body.

But just like Venus and her cohort - and most other beautiful things for that matter - body culture has a breathtakingly violent side. And until you understand that violence, you cannot really understand what form of the body we are trying to (re)claim… or what it will take to get there.

In our newsletter today, our CEO explores how people are coming into their bodies at the exact same time as two other phenomena: moral lag and technological acceleration.

We lack the new moral frameworks to discern ‘good’ bodies from ‘bad’, and yet the onslaught of body-enhancing/ monitoring/ hacking technologies does not stop. The body is changing so fast and we cannot even say how.

Yes we all want to go back to inhabiting our physical selves, but we are probably only halfway through the long arc of cultural progress that will get us there.

The first half was about waking up.

The second half will be about locking down.

Link in bio.

"When people in our field immerse themselves deeply in culture and markets, they often arrive at one of two instincts.So...
06/24/2025

"When people in our field immerse themselves deeply in culture and markets, they often arrive at one of two instincts.

Some come to understand people so intimately that they feel called to shape the world more intentionally, to build frameworks, movements, and futures. These are the gods.

Others come to understand people so intimately that they hesitate to impose anything at all, choosing instead to unmake, to hold space for ambiguity, and to welcome contradiction without collapse. These are the ghosts.

Both begin from the same place of deep respect, but they diverge in what they believe that respect demands.

You either construct the world or deconstruct yourself."

Read the full article in the link in bio.

We are a culture surrounded by losses we haven’t yet processed. Things that are kind of dead but we won’t let them die c...
06/10/2025

We are a culture surrounded by losses we haven’t yet processed. Things that are kind of dead but we won’t let them die completely. So much so that we’ve had to create a whole new raft of words - like ghosting, breadcrumbing, blanding, airspaces, liminal spaces, requels and nostalgia bait - to hold what we refuse to bury.

As a culture we are unequipped to properly, decidedly mark the time something ends or dies.

But it is so critical to mark that moment. The rhythm of life demands it.

In today's article, our CEO talks about how we cannot make new things when our spaces are cluttered with infinite half-dead brands, platforms, trends, jokes, technologies, ideas and memories that steal endless little fragments of our attention.

We’re weighed down by purgatorial ghosts both in the digital world and the physical one. And now with AI, the ghosts are multiplying.

Synthetic content floods Pinterest and Twitter, trained on old material and endlessly recombined with what came before. Our deceased loved ones are reanimated via AI texting agents and holograms.

The dead don’t die. They just loop and echo, or even worse, become a template for something else.

That’s making it harder to imagine and create. When nothing is allowed to end, nothing is allowed to transform.

There are a lot of reasons floating out there as to why so much of culture is effectively undead. Some say it’s the algorithm. Others say its mass accessibility and the death of subcultures. Historians like Will Durant might have said, at least for the US, it’s a clear sign of an empire in decline.

All of them are probably right.

But we also know that if all of our physical and digital ghosts were properly laid to rest and we were left with only the living artifacts of our world, we would almost certainly be reborn.

This is a time of zombie-like memories and generative content, and the most radical act right now might be learning how to let things die.

And when we say die, what we really mean is letting them permanently end. Intentionally and deliberately.

Any ideas we had about work and career, ideas of community and family and...

Read in the link in bio.

Control is becoming the organizing principle of modern life, and the next engine of economic and cultural value. But not...
05/28/2025

Control is becoming the organizing principle of modern life, and the next engine of economic and cultural value. But not all control is created equal.

We see two forms emerging right now:

1. Reactive Control
2. Generative Control

We name economies by what’s being monetized. The Knowledge Economy, Sharing Economy, Experience Economy, and Attention Economy were all new engines of value creation. They revealed what we were really hungry for.

But the nature of our hunger has shifted so dramatically in the past few years that it feels pretty inadequate to call it by any of those names.

Our CEO Jasmine Bina wrote about how a new economic logic tells us what we want now is control.

It’s not dominance, but rather a sense of power over the extreme complexity that pervades our everyday lives.

We don’t always see the complexity, but we feel it in the disconnect between the everyday and the existential, like the way a cracked eggshell is somehow entangled with American religiosity and Turkish geopolitics (see her article on Third Order Strategy also in the link in bio). Just last week, a New York Times headline asked “Why is everything so coded now?” while another headline in the same paper posed the question “Can I wear a sheath dress without looking MAGA?”

We feel complexity in the constant churn of events we can’t quite explain, but somehow know we’re supposed to manage on levels both profound and inane.

The laugh-out-loud existential ennui of TikTok is now creeping into the broetry posts of LinkedIn, stripped of any charming humor (some of it written by yours truly, sans broetry), and you don’t have to scroll for long to see that time itself feels broken under the weight of acceleration. We’ve all got one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. Without a shared truth, one person’s “I’m thrilled to announce…” becomes another person’s “Late-stage capitalism is a vibe.” You know the drill.

This is the kind of complexity that doesn’t announce itself but still governs everything we do.

And in response, people are willing to pay a premium for anything that promises even the *illusion* of control...

[Continue reading by clicking the link in bio.]

It might feel like the world is falling apart because everything is so fragmented and contradictory, but the truth is th...
05/06/2025

It might feel like the world is falling apart because everything is so fragmented and contradictory, but the truth is that things are not falling apart.

They are fusing together.

The reason you keep cracking little bits of eggshell into your omelet is because eggshells are more fragile now, because younger hens are laying eggs, because millions of older hens had to be killed after a bird flu outbreak borne of environmental changes, which caused prices to soar, memes to be made, Trump to get elected, and opened the door for a renewed embrace of religious identity and moral politics. We had to start importing eggs from places like Turkey, whose incumbent government got Elon Musk’s X to suspend opposition accounts amid civil unrest, in a move that likely happened because the price of eggs is a big part of why Musk got into the government in the first place.

Your omelet has very real political, economic and spiritual implications now.

Your omelet is why everything about your user - their beliefs, behaviors, stories, preferences, aspirations - has changed.

So how can any of us expect cursory trend decks and industry conferences to be enough for a brand strategist to do their job anymore?

If we could give you one piece of advice, it would be this:

Start diversifying your information inputs.

Everything has become deeply interconnected, but we’re still using first-order mindsets to understand third-order markets. You have to start getting outside of your comfort zone and learning more broadly in order to anticipate what is coming.

[Read more about this by clicking the link in bio.]

Meanwhile, another HBR study of job descriptions for CEOs shows that less and less job descriptions are asking for skill...
04/30/2025

Meanwhile, another HBR study of job descriptions for CEOs shows that less and less job descriptions are asking for skills around managing financial and materials resources, while more and more are mentioning social skills.

Correlation is not causation, but you have to admit the lines on these charts do look like near-perfect inverse relationships.

We're swapping reason for feeling.

We’re structurally embedding it into leadership, decision-making, and culture... and intuition is becoming our default operating system.

And if you're a brand trying to change beliefs and behaviors in your market, you have to start asking yourself how intuition plays into your UX and customer journey.

Intuition is felt. It's alchemic, but its not impossible to understand. You just have to learn its language.

It isn’t irrational, but it *is* processed differently. It moves through symbols, signals, and subconscious cues. If you’re a brand trying to shift beliefs and behaviors, you can’t just logic people into change.

You have to design for instinct. Shape the unspoken.

Build experiences that *feel* right before they make sense.

As intuition becomes our default operating system, brands have to learn to resonate in deeper ways.

Work is no longer tied to reward.And in a country built on the Protestant myth that hard work earns you moral and materi...
04/08/2025

Work is no longer tied to reward.

And in a country built on the Protestant myth that hard work earns you moral and material value, that changes the rulebook for branding.

You can see the decoupling everywhere:

- AI means anyone can be a “master,” so hard-earned skill doesn’t guarantee success.
- GLP-1s make thinness widely accessible, unraveling the idea of the “deserving” body.
- Crypto promises sudden windfalls, irrespective of experience or smarts
- TikTok turns virality into a slot machine, where years of effort don’t necessarily win you more reach.

When you see work untether from reward in foundational systems like labor, finance, and media, you have to reorient your understanding of the market and the consumer. The future of business and culture is not merely about the value these systems unlock—it’s about the behaviors and beliefs they *lock in*.

We're locking into a very different system that dissolves the old moorings of effort and reward, leaving us in a restless current of chance.

Chance and randomness are the dominant energies of our time.

So where do we find meaning when the myth of “work = worth” no longer holds?

Right now, culture is oscillating between two paths:

1) Worshipping Chance

We glamorize the glitch, the viral hit, the lucky trade, the perfect algorithmic storm. In a disenchanted world, chance becomes sacred. Worshipping chance is a natural extension of a system that has burned through its illusions of fairness. When hard work no longer guarantees reward, our default response is to elevate randomness itself, investing it with a near-spiritual authority.

2) Playing With Meaning

This is where it gets more interesting. Some are starting to see the void not as something to fear, but instead as permission. If effort is no longer the gold standard, maybe we’re free to create new kinds of value. To build strange, beautiful communities. To craft new rituals, new definitions of success, and new brands that don’t just sell effort or exclusivity, but offer belonging, creativity, and joy.

When anyone can go viral, rebuild their body, or gain sudden wealth, it becomes harder to sell the myth that...

[Full article in the link in bio.]

The content we consume is increasingly divorcing from objectivity.What is real or authentic is no longer defined by fact...
04/02/2025

The content we consume is increasingly divorcing from objectivity.

What is real or authentic is no longer defined by fact, credibility, or source.

What matters in the information we consume is what it *expresses*.

We can’t agree on what’s real anymore because in the age of post-reality, real is a feeling.

Post-reality is, at its core, the loss of a shared sense of what is real.

Culture, markets, and government are all built on information systems, so when our information ecology changes, it changes the nature of how society operates in a foundational way.

Every layer of society is experiencing the same tectonic forces. Our physical, social, informational environments, all of the spaces that define our lives, are fragmenting.

And its very new and shaky territory for brands. But there is a smart and meaningful way for brands to thrive in the post-reality market...

This is just a taste of what's to come in our newest report dropping soon:

"The Market For Reality: Branding in a post-reality world"

Sign up for our newsletter to make sure you get it.

Link in bio.

Morality today isn’t being shaped in our places of worship, our courthouses, our newsrooms or even our homes.It’s being ...
03/17/2025

Morality today isn’t being shaped in our places of worship, our courthouses, our newsrooms or even our homes.

It’s being shaped in our media.

Moral questions have gone viral. A single post, video, or meme can spark a global moral debate in minutes. It doesn’t matter if you like that or not, it’s just a fact.

And who should care more than anybody else? Brands.

Brands should care because the media is their domain now. As Ana Andjelic tells us, true brands have become media powerhouses and the brilliant Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel tells us brands have had a strong hand in cultural morality since the beginning.

Your religious leaders know this, too.

It’s why every major religion has a very significant organization and budget directly involved in working with the media industry. Take a look and you will find them. They are quietly trying to shape narratives around masculinity and femininity, money, family, spirituality, patriotism and cultural warfare in their favor.

So that begs the question: if you took a broad survey of all the media out there today, what are the moral questions that are be top-of-mind for our culture?

We explored this in our December research drop “Amusement of Everything” for our strategist’s community Exposure Therapy, and we found 3 major moral questions driving the vast majority of content.

Question #1:
“What’s the balance between individual and collective responsibility?"

→ We see this abundantly in survival shows (Survivor seasons into infinity), homesteading content (Ballerina Farm), tradwives (Nara Smith and co.) and communal TV (X Kids and Counting, Secret Lives of Mormon Wives)

Question #2:
“What does justice look like in a complex world?”

→ Overwhelmingly apparent in the rise of true crime podcasts (take your pick), moral nostalgia shows (Yellowstone), criminal justice docs (Menendez Brothers), and morally gray video games (LA Noir)

Question #3: “How do we define humanity in the face of powerful...

Join us at exposuretherapy.com

Link in bio.

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