Jasmine Bina is the CEO of Concept Bureau, a brand consultancy in Santa Monica, California. I first met Jasmine and her partner, Jean-Louis Rawlence, through LinkedIn, as you do. We had a great conversation and stayed in touch. (We hit it off so well, they invited me to kick of their Talks at Concept Bureau.)
In the few years since that first meeting, it seems to me, they have really hit their stride, as a unique kind of consultancy that’s not afraid to be intellectual in public. And they to do it with style.
Not only are they doing smart work for brands like Upwork, Skillshare and Feeld, they have launched their own community : Exposure Therapy - a “haven for the intellectually isolated” and “highly programmed educational community for strategic thinkers.”
I was super excited to get into a conversation with Jasmine, to get to know her, and hear her talk about how they work with clients, and think about brand.
I thank you so much for spending some time with me. This is a real experiment for me to invite people into a conversation and I'm excited to talk to you. When I do these things I always start my interviews with a question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who's an oral historian. She has people tell their story. I'm going to start with that question, but before I do, I want you to know that you are in absolute control. You can answer the question, or not answer the question, any way that you want to.
That question has layers. I've been asking myself that question recently, actually, because when you have kids, it makes you question who your community is, what your tribe is, and what you're going to pass on to them. I've had to choose what holidays we celebrate from which of my cultures, going back and relearning what they meant, who is in our lives and the things that we value.
Where I come from, the best thing I can say is that I was raised with a real love and appreciation for this country because my parents came from Iran. They basically fled, so I feel definitely American, but there's something about American history that I've always felt very deeply connected to.
The things you learned about in high school, in the little yellow margins of your history books, about manifest destiny, the way West, and the mentality of this country - all the mythology, good or bad, right or wrong. I feel that I come from this country in that sense, that I love the ideals of the country.
I am just as much of a cultural mashup as anybody else who's here. I would say that I come from it in the sense that I am always trying to get into the past of it. I love American history and I love finding out the truth about American history. It's great that in this country you can wrestle with the truth and confront it.
That's the best way I can answer that question.
It's beautiful. Where has that wrestling led you? What do you go when you try to, with your historical curiosity?
I think it's led me to where you arrive at in your 40s anyways, which is acceptance.
You just have to accept things the way that they are and be optimistic about the way things can change in the future. At this age, I feel like I've had to learn that about politics, demographics. I've had to learn that even as strategists, you're always in culture.
I was just having a conversation about this at dinner recently with people, that you consume a lot of the achiness of culture in our work. I feel like we need a formal place to digest the trauma of it all. Learning to accept things as they are and not constantly be judging them or being hurt by them or traumatized by them or angry about them.
It's a more fruitful place to be anyways.
I love that. Did you have an idea when you were young of what you wanted to be when you grew up?
I used to draw pictures of dresses all the time. I think I wanted to be a fashion designer. I wanted to create beautiful things with my hands.
I used to paint a lot. I think I need to get back to it. Maybe I'm a lapsed painter, but I used to write a lot too, which is what I do now. I think I've always been a creative in some ways. What I love about this work is that it gives you bounds to your creativity. It still has to work within a market.
It has to work within a culture. It makes it more interesting. I will say, I'm one of those people who doesn't remember their childhood too well, which I'm told is a sign of trauma.
I'm right there with you. I can never answer the questions I ask.
That's funny. I was going to say we got psychographic super fast here.
I should have given you a heads up. How did you come into this work? When did you first encounter Brand and the idea that you could shape them or that they were meaningful?
It's not the sexiest story, but I started doing PR in grad school.
I had a friend who had a startup and could use some extra cash. So I offered to do his PR and learned how to do it. Then my agency started while I was in grad school. Most of our work was in tech and that was when it was the app economy. Apps could get super big before they even knew why they were big or how it happened.
It was a really viral time. We would get these huge overnight successes that wanted to go to press, but they didn't even have stories. They had no identities, nothing. I started creating brands quick and dirty before I would even call them brands myself.
Just to have something to - it felt like the pre-work before we could do the PR. Then that became a bigger part of our work. I met my partner, Jean Louis. We got more into the strategy side of things and we've just hacked it together as we've gone, but I never worked in an agency.
I think that hindered me in the beginning, but I think it's really freed me in recent years. People always ask how did you create Concept Bureau to be what it is. It's different than other agencies. I think it's because I just never worked at an agency, so I didn't quite know the rules.
Even when I hire people from agencies, I get nervous because I feel like they're going to come and be like, this isn't how it's supposed to be done.
That's funny. I don't know. Start with that completely. When you say it hindered you in the beginning, in what way did you feel it hindered?
Just a lot of self doubt, maybe mistakes I didn't need to make, figuring things out. It was all on the fly in the beginning. It was definitely a shaping experience those first few years.
What do you love about it? Where's the joy in the work for you?
I do love that now, Concept Bureau is focused a lot more on cultural futurism. It's a lot like future casting and trying to understand - it was always very behavioral. We've always done a lot of studies and trying to figure out where culture's going, behavior, belief systems, values, identities, things like that.
I love it for the same reason I know every strategist loves their job - it's because you learn how the world works, but also you learn about who you are in the process. It's always changing you as a person. It's always evolving you. You're becoming more mature and objective and insightful and making connections between things. It makes the world feel like your playground.
I feel it when I have conversations with friends. That's when my biggest aha moments come through, is when I'm talking to people and if you have a good partner in conversation, you start to just see the matrix a little bit while you're talking about this stuff. I think that's why it's like solving an eternal mystery.
It's so beautiful. When did Concept Bureau start? It's been a long time.
I don't really know the dates. I'm really bad with chronology. I think the PR agency started, I can't remember, when I was in grad school in 2010. Then maybe five or six years later, we pivoted to Concept Bureau.
So I feel like 2016, 2017 is when we became this. When I say we became a brand strategy agency, I just mean in name. I didn't know what we were doing. That's when I started writing, because I had to figure out what am I even selling? So writing was my way of figuring out what's my philosophy about brand strategy, how do I approach it, what does it mean?
How is it changing? That came through my writing, which was interesting. In the beginning, a lot of the way I developed my skill was through writing and not so much the work.
What do you find people coming to you for? Why do people come to Concept Bureau? What do you find clients coming to you and asking?
Traditionally, our engagements can be on the higher end. People who come to us have been reading our work for a while, usually a number of years. When you come to us after reading all of my writing or watching our content, you're really coming to us to be with like-minded curious people and do a massive thought experiment on what you can build in this world.
Where can you take this brand? What new territory can you claim? How can you change your market? How can you change people's perceptions or beliefs? A lot of our work is very heavily research based. I tell people we're for brands that are looking to change a belief or a behavior in the market.
They need to change a belief or a behavior in order to succeed, because that's where we start. That's what it's evolved to be, whatever that agency is called.
That's beautiful. Can you unpack that a little bit? What does that mean? I love that, that's a very advanced place for most people to start a conversation. But what do you mean when you say change a belief, change a behavior, what are you actually talking about?
Usually companies that are operating in a new category, they're trying to create a new category, or if the market is moving ahead of them. Sometimes it's as simple as having a new product or the culture around them is changing.
The context where they used to own the market, but now they're not the ones dictating the rules anymore. If there's a bias or a fear or a habituated behavior that's keeping people from converting, or something deeper than just selling them on the benefits of your product.
If there's something culturally encoded that is keeping people from helping your company grow, that's keeping you from your customers, that's where we try to play. That's where we try to help you untangle that so that you can access that market. It sounds abstract the way I'm saying it, but certain brands need to - let's say if you're creating a premium brand in a historically non-premium or non-luxury category, there's a belief that you just don't pay extra for that, or there's a belief that this is not something that can be luxury. You change that belief by creating stories around it, or finding a belief underneath that belief that you can tap into, or creating a different kind of demand. It's just, how do you change context, create context that makes people behave in a way that makes your products make sense to them?
How do you talk about brand when you, when a client comes to you? What's the role? When I read your work and spent some time getting ready for our conversation asking myself, what is it about Concept Bureau - there's something I encounter there that's really special. I was trying to figure out what it is. One thing I felt is true about it is that you point, you make the stakes very high. You connect brand to belief and identity.
You make it a real thing in a way that feels meaningful. I think that's what I resonate with. It's elevating all of it to a very - it's funny to think about elevating it to a human level, but the stakes feel real. I'm curious when you do sit down with a client, how do you talk, how do you define the role of brand and how do you make it clear to them? You've prepped them, like you said, they've come to you.
They've been in our funnel. They've been in our orbit. I find oftentimes what we do explain to people to help level set in the beginning is that we very much believe brand first. Oftentimes brand is the product with the clients that we work with.
People are paying the premium for the brand, but the brand informs everything else, including products, including user experience and journey, including your org chart, sales, everything, as well as the obvious stuff like marketing and the actual branding function. The brand is an organizing principle.
I'm not the first person to say this, an organizing belief where if you saw the world through that lens then it spells out everything else about your company. That's what a brand does. It gives you this lens, this perspective through which to channel whatever the light of your company is, a specific point and it organizes all of your activities. People are usually relieved to hear that because brand usually feels separate or they feel like they're constantly making big decisions. But when you have a strong brand, you've made the only decision that counts, and everything gets filtered through that decision.
Who are we? Or what are we meant to do in this world? When you filter everything through that decision, and it's already been made, and it's specific enough, and it's tied to culture, and it's tied to the future, everything you do is going to be on brand. It creates a real harmony in the company, a real simplicity.
It doesn't mean you're not still going to have to make hard decisions and do hard things, but you're going to know - the indecisiveness, which plagues so many companies, or the uncertainty, or the unwillingness to take risk - it's still always going to be a risk. However, you've measured it so that now the risk is worth it, that you understand what the potential upside is.
That's how I describe brands to people. Sometimes even our most well-read new clients, they need to hear that. They need to know that that's the way we approach brands. It means we are working with the C-suite and we have access to the whole company. We talk about product development and roadmap and stuff like that.
Usually people are quite open to it.
You mentioned the indecision and uncertainty and fear of taking risks maybe or something, risk aversion. I'm wondering, what's your diagnosis of the C-suite marketer? What is it like to be in that seat and try to make very big decisions about brand?
I feel like we get such a small subset of people. They're already converted. They get it. But there are times where the risk aversion is a bit more endemic and I will say this, it's always top down.
It's really always top down. If there is a problem within a company culturally, or just not so much culture, but their habit towards risk aversion or whatever, that's a C-suite problem that comes from leadership. It doesn't come from middle management or from the employees.
So that's where if you need to fix it, that's where you start. I think if we're talking about CMOs, we're probably at a point in the business world for the most part, although I still see people who are not like this, but they don't usually become our clients, where I think people have a pretty sophisticated understanding of brands already and brand isn't underestimated.
It's just that you really have to stress test - do people really say they want to have a revolutionary brand or they want to have a brand that changes everything or that they're very committed to renovating or redoing or updating the brand. If you don't address that question first, then you're going to have problems down the line.
That's obvious. So we do our best to try to get that stuff out of the way upfront. We have a lot of questions that we ask initially, even when we do our initial calls with prospects. It's mostly us just asking questions. It works two ways. It helps us really understand if we can add value.
But two, it helps them understand how we work. When they see the kinds of questions we ask and the kinds of uncomfortable discussions we force, and the places that we're snooping or trying to look into, the dark corners or whatever. Oftentimes people get excited by those questions because they've been wanting to talk about them forever and they haven't been able to.
That's usually a good sign too.
That's amazing. I want to talk about exposure therapy, this community that you've built, which is really pretty amazing. And so much fun, so much more fun than I thought I was going to be having. I was such a curmudgeon about it.
There was a conversation today with Sylvia Baletsa, right? How do you say her name?
Sylvia Baletsa. She's a professor from Columbia, marketing professor. I introduced her, what she was talking about, her work and her idea about status, because I want to hear it from you.
She wrote an incredible paper. I can't remember the exact title, but I think it's like the distance theory of status or something like that. I mentioned this even on our call with her in exposure therapy. I've read a few different luxury books in my life, luxury branding books, and they don't really have much to say.
Nothing new. You would think luxury hasn't changed in the last 50 years and really it's just a game for big players. She created a new model that kind of makes sense because things have been cropping up lately in culture that disprove a lot of our models for luxury. Quiet luxury, conspicuous non-consumption, athleisure, ugly luxury, a big one.
These things don't make sense because in the typical luxury model, the idea is that luxury consumers want to create distinction, right? They create that distinction by buying expensive products or luxury products and when those things become more common or mainstream, they just go, they upgrade, right?
They go upmarket or they buy something more expensive or something that's a higher luxury brand. So why is ugly luxury or ugly fashion a thing? Why are billionaires wearing athleisure? Why any of this stuff? She presents a new model and it's this, it's the distance theory. She says along six different dimensions, I'm trying to remember what the dimensions are now, but the idea is that luxury is not about moving up anymore.
It's about moving away. It doesn't matter what direction, it's just moving away from the masses. Because luxury has become so diffused, because anybody can buy a Chanel bag now, because luxury brands have been so messy with their pricing and discounting and the internet has made information about all those secret rules about high society and culture and status democratized.
How do you differentiate yourself in a world like that? She talks about these ideas of distance. In fact, I should actually pull up... Give me one second. I just want to pull up because I don't want to butcher what she was talking about. So there are different dimensions. There's time, pace of life, culture, aesthetics, conspicuousness, and quantity.
So if the aesthetic of luxury has historically always been beautiful, and luxury consumers need to find new ways of distancing themselves and going up isn't an option anymore, of course ugly luxury, or ugly fashion is going to become a thing. Of course Balenciaga is going to make those like super expensive, the most expensive shoes of all time but they look like they're completely tattered.
Or I think they're the ones that also made the duct tape bracelet recently. Or a lot of this peasant life cosplaying and stuff like that you see with celebrities. It's just about finding distance, same thing with time. Luxury has historically, only until very recently, been very much defined by newness, right?
You have to buy the newest thing. This was very much true when we were younger. Whatever came out in the last three to six months, that was usually the timeline. This idea of vintage is actually quite new and vintage wasn't a known status signal. Vintage doesn't cost more money necessarily, but it costs in other ways.
That's another thing about her model that was unique. It really addresses different kinds of costs that are also status signals that we didn't see in the past. Before it really was just about maybe time and money, but now there's all kinds of costs to pay to be in the know. I think one of the most interesting costs she talks about is misidentification costs.
I could wear those tattered luxury sneakers, but the cost is that most people will think that I'm just being unfashionable. Very few people who are my peers will understand the signal that I'm giving. And that's a high cost. That's a cost a lot of people typically aren't willing to pay. But if you're in the upper realms of status and luxury and you're looking for ways to differentiate yourself, it's probably where you're going to go.
Anyways, it's a fascinating model. What I love about it is that it really elegantly explains everything. I feel like now that I've seen it, I can't unsee it. It's everywhere. So yeah, that's what she talked to us about today.
It's amazing, and I think I came in the middle, and that misidentification cost is fascinating to me.
It's really a beautiful idea. Tell me a little bit about how has exposure therapy been going, and where did that come from? What was the inspiration?
We're only two months in, but it's already exceeded all of my expectations. I talked about this recently. You can only ever really build half of anything.
That's what I learned in this process. I could only build half of exposure therapy and it wasn't until people showed up that I knew what it was going to be. And I could see the entirety of this brand for the first time. Really, it was born from the fact that I knew we do strategy differently in our company.
I knew we had a fan base that really wanted to spend time with us or somehow consume what we offer and the way that we do things. And I knew that strategists usually, I meet incredible strategists all the time and their curiosities are not being satisfied in their work and they're just not given access to the kinds of cultural intelligence and exposure and therapy that they need to be good strategists.
And so we developed this community and it's basically - this is something I learned after my community showed up and people were telling me what exposure therapy is. The thing I heard it described as most is that it's like a haven for the intellectually isolated. So we have a different topic every month that we focus on.
It's a highly programmed educational community for strategic thinkers. That's the log line for it. And every month we have a theme and sometimes they're quite strategic and brass tacks like positioning and storytelling we recently did, or this upcoming month is about how to build your strategic mind.
We have a month coming up on personal branding. But other months are quite cultural and future focused. So this month we explored what we called modern riches, how we relate to wealth and status, hence why we had Professor Baletsa come and speak to us. Next month, our topic is on like I mentioned, how to build a strategic mind.
And our goal is exposure and therapy. So on the exposure side, we drop original research into the group. That becomes the basis of our conversation for the month in Slack, but I'm trying to expose us to this topic from as many angles as possible. We haven't announced it yet, but next month's drop we're going to have the world's second, the number two female poker player in the world will come and talk to us about poker and strategy.
We have one of the most well known mentalists who has given a TED Talk. He's going to come talk to us about mentalism, misdirection, holding people's focus, reversing their biases, stuff like that. We have one of the best conflict negotiators or conflict resolution experts coming to talk to us about conflict.
It's just different ways of looking at strategy. And then we have some fun stuff planned too, and we have dinners. We just had one of our most recent dinners in LA, it was a remarkable night, and it was called Night of Abundance because we were still exploring the Modern Riches theme. We really played with that theme, it was a very playful, fun night, in a way that can only happen when you get strategists together, or strategists, we have founders and CMOs and leaders, and it's just anybody who has to think strategically for their work. It's really fun, but it's work.
People have to stay, you have to work to stay up on the conversations because they're always going in different directions. I have had so many aha moments already in these last couple of months in this community, but it's a place where you can actually get your hands dirty and play in the clay of strategy.
And I feel alive in it. I hope and think other people do as well.
Absolutely. That's been my experience. The conversations are amazing. And I feel drawn to it even though I don't have time for it.
You know what? I keep reminding myself, people make time for the things that are valuable to them.
My job is to make it valuable enough that people make the time.
That's right. I keep going. Something in what you were just talking about reminded me of, you talked about how you're about cultural futurism now. Is that a recent shift or how did you find that place? And what does that mean in how you work?
It is and it isn't. We've always been doing our work like this, where it's always predictive. The whole idea of a brand strategy, the way we do it at least, is most people can create a good brand for today. Most people that come to work with us already have a good brand for today.
But it's the whole Red Queen effect, right? Like things are always changing around you. You have to always be changing, even if it looks like there's nothing. And you can't build a strategy without having a prediction. We make a prediction about what the future is going to look like, and then we build a brand that sits in that future.
And then your job as a brand is to make that future happen. When people look at your brand, they'll understand either they want to follow you into that future or they don't, but they can't stay apathetic. Because the biggest problem a lot of brands have is that they're nice, but they don't force a reaction, they don't force conversion.
I say that you can work with love and hate, but indifference is what kills a brand. So the idea is to get away from that point of indifference. We've always been doing this. The reason I've started calling myself a cultural futurist is because I wrote a Fast Company article and they were asking for a brief bio and I was like, "You know what, I'm a cultural futurist."
So I put it in there. But I think I've been circling and trying to figure out what it is that we do. What's something that people would understand and I think right now that's the best way of describing it.
It's really powerful. I'm not, I've never heard of the Red Queen effect. What is that?
Oh, it's actually going to be in our drop for next month for Exposure Therapy. That's why it's top of mind for me right now. But it's basically from Alice in Wonderland and I think the queen says something like you have to move very fast to stay in the same place.
And it's the same thing. If you want to stay in your station in the market, you have to be innovating all the time. And that's the Red Queen effect. Things are constantly changing and you have to work very hard just to stay where you are.
What the predictive, how do you, I guess I'm curious about research. I know that it's central to what you do, but tell me a little bit about the role that research plays in your work.
It's a very big role. It's the first half of our engagements. I will say when we're not doing client stuff, we are always doing exercises and games and presentations internally just to keep us constantly predicting the future and comfortable with predicting the future.
I read a book that kind of really opened my eyes to what research was about and how it's basically the precursor to creativity, at least for us. Jane McGonigal wrote a book called Imaginable that I reference all the time. I've probably bought like 50 copies for people over the years.
I read that book and I would get so frustrated because it was just exercises about imagining a future. I was like, "Where does that, when am I going to, when is she going to start talking about how to do it?" It occurred to me that is how to do it. You must get comfortable with the discomfort of predicting it because we all think we can - if I told you, and this is an example she has in the book - describe, you wake up 10 years from now, describe where you are.
That's hard. Unless you've been practicing, you can't name if you're in bed or not, what the lighting is like, who's with you, what's the building, you can't. That's hard and it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable because it takes a tremendous amount of imagination. Predicting the future takes huge amounts of imagination because usually the future is not what we think it's going to, or it's not what the obvious answer is.
There are always disrupting things from out of left fields. People behave, you might think of the people, the way people are behaving, that's not the way they're going to behave in the future. Although the base nuances of who we are and what drives us probably remain the same, but we fail to interpret how they might change in the future.
Jean Louis, my partner, loves to always give the example of we had, people used to be very creative about the future. Postcards about what the future would look like from the 1800s, but they never imagined that people would stop wearing hats. There are things that stay with us.
There's so many things that you have to kind of popple in your mind to really be free to create an imagined future. It's an interplay, right? It's only the people who imagine the future that actually create it. So it's not like you're just guessing and hoping it's true. You're guessing so that you know what you need to do to make that guess a reality.
And brands have the resources to do that. Brands are probably the only - I don't know that even our governments can do that anymore, but I can see brands doing it. So back to the role of research, which was your original question - it's very instrumental for us and we do three kinds of research: cultural research, psychographic research, and market research.
Cultural is truly just trying to understand the narratives and culture that we think will be emerging that will affect people's perspectives and contexts in the next three to five years. Psychographic is - I hate to bring it back down to its very basic pieces, but it is quantum qual.
Although we try really hard to make it informed quantum qual that I'm not asking about the product, the brand, I'm asking, I'm trying to understand how people are building their world views and the triggers that will get them to change. And then the market research, again, really isn't about the market.
Of course, we need to know what's happening in the market, but I want to know how different players in the market are conditioning your users to expect different things in three to five years. Like in wellness, for example or medicine, yeah, science is going in a certain direction. Yes.
Brands are doing certain things. But there are other factors including brands that are conditioning people to expect hyper personalization or conditioning people to expect emotional medical experiences. These conditioning experiences matter even if, especially if they don't come from your direct competitors.
But that means they're coming to your doorstep with certain expectations and you have to predict what they're going to be. So that's the main research we do.
I love that the question about research led you down a rabbit hole of imagination. I've heard you mention that book before. I'm pretty sure I have it because I remember her saying something amazing in the nineties about reality is broken and game design is going to fix it. She had this amazing quote.
Oh yeah, she's great.
But I want to tell me a little bit more about the role of imagination in the work. I'm, I think everybody's landing on this idea that we all need, nobody was talking about imagination a while ago, but now I feel like we all... we want to know. I know that I'm thinking about imagination a lot. So what does it mean?
I feel like it's the hardest part of our job. And I think imagination for me, I can say personally, we're always trying different ways to engender more imagination in the company. I think imagination will be one of our topics next year for exposure therapy, for sure.
But for me, I feel that there is probably unbounded imagination in everybody. It's not about cultivating it so much as it is about excavating and getting rid of everything that sits on top of it. All of your beliefs, all of your limiting narratives - I don't mean identity stuff like "I don't believe I can be that imaginative".
I mean that we have so many conditions on what can happen and what's real and what people will accept that really make it hard to imagine something that's really outside of the box that we're living in now. It's like that whole paradigm shift. It's that famous quote, I don't even know if Einstein said it, but "the solution to a problem is never found in the same paradigm that the problem is in".
So imagination is really - it sounds so tacky, but you can't like color outside of the lines easily. You really, it's hard to know the confines that you put yourself in mentally when you try to imagine a different future. I know I have a lot of them, but I know, you know when you meet somebody truly imaginative because they say stuff that you realize you could have thought of if you didn't have these weird rules in your head.
And I think the innovative, like groundbreaking pieces when they break those rules. So I, it feels like an excavation to me.
For some reason I was thinking about improv. Do you do improv?
Oh my God. I'll die before I do that. And I probably should. I think somebody on my team does improv.
I think Rebecca does it, which to me, she'll be a hero forever for doing that. I've heard improv is valuable for this kind of stuff. I don't know, maybe if I could drink before I got on stage, maybe. No, I'm like you. I'll drink everything before that.
I'm like you, it's been suggested to me as something that people in this work do for all the reasons that we're talking about. And I have never done it because I'm terrified of all of that, but I guess I mean that's connected to everything you're talking about - my attachment to the boxes I'm in is strong.
Improv is maybe fated on my journey as a strategist, but safer ways that I've been exploring have been reading history, because history really helps you see the patterns that we're doomed to repeat, so it helps you get outside of the box and look at it from the outside.
Sci fi too and any kind of art, but sci fi is super interesting because those are like actual thought experiments that you see happening. I wrote about this recently, but for a long time, I wouldn't even let myself read fiction because I thought life is too short. I'm a business owner and I need to learn business and markets and how things work. I remember mentioning that to my team and I think it was Zach who said "you can't be a good strategist if you don't read fiction". And so I started reading fiction and it was just another one of those rules where I felt like fiction isn't the real work, imagination isn't the real work. And so it's just like I said, that's what strategy is - you're just always changing as a person.
Do you feel like the idea of brand as a lens, that seems consistent and evergreen as a way of thinking about brand, but what changes for brands now to connect AI? I don't know if it was specifically AI, but just generally speaking.
Can I go back to your first question? No, I'm kidding.
I'll throw you under the AI bus.
I don't think I have anything new to add to that conversation. I think my views are pretty vanilla. They're pretty loosely held. It probably will cut out the lower end of the brand strategy market, which would suck. I'm not concerned - we're not in that lower end. But I feel that another argument could be made, which is what I keep coming back to, that if AI and automation will completely democratize and remove any of the barriers around product tech development, entering a market, having channels - all that's really left is brand. That's basically all that's left. And brand can always be innovated upon. There is no right brand. And I think that's what makes it unique. You can have multiple brands that just grow a market. You can have one brand that stands for one thing, and another brand that stands for the opposite, and they will both work.
And they will both grow the pie. That's what's interesting about it. It's not a zero sum game when it comes to brand. So I think in that case, in that regard, and I don't know, I don't know if I'm just being naively optimistic, but that's the natural conclusion I come to.
Another conclusion too is that technology is fast, people are slow. My partner always loves to say that and I'm sure it's been said a million times. And I know somebody who's pretty deeply embedded in the AI world and things I'm hearing from people who are working at Fortune 500s - they're just so far behind. It's here and it's exciting, but most companies are extremely far behind in adopting it. We'll see, but I think we'll survive, it'll work out. I'm not having an existential crisis about it.
Beautiful. I don't really have any more questions. I just really enjoyed talking to you. I really appreciate you sharing the time and I'm ever grateful for the invitation you extended to me to air my thinking. It was a really rewarding and satisfying experience and I appreciate it.
Oh, people loved it. People loved it. It was a fantastic talk and I still use it as a model for all of our new speakers.
So it was really, it was a gift to us.
That's so kind. I mean it. Nice. So much. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Of course.
