A Time to Build Tight Brands in the Chaos of Loose Cultures

Tight brands like Greenpeace, Trumpism or the modern Académie Française may appear like anomalies, but they are in fact deeply human—and highly predictable—reactions to loose cultures. The people in these groups felt destabilized by evaporating social codes, and in that mental state, welcomed in the strong voice of certainty. Where there is chaos,

In a survey of 1,000 adults, it was found that 30% of people were eating dinner on the couch, and 17% of people were eating it in their bedrooms—two places where there is likely a screen and likely no conversation or interpersonal gathering. Remember that rooms have rules, and when we change the room, we create a vacuum of norms.

No matter the magnitude, sudden freedom brings a normlessness (and in some cases, disorder) so uncomfortable that we would rather subscribe to clear rules than to wade into the unknown without any at all.

In France, food norms are powerful and cohesive forces, while in the US food is simply a whirlwind of chaos.

hen there is a decrease in government stability, there is an increase in religiosity in both Eastern and Western cultures.

According to him, the word “natural” has become a “sort of a secular stand-in for a generalized understanding of goodness, which in religion you’d call holiness, or purity, or something like that. “Nature,” with a capital N, [has taken] the place of God. In a secular society, we don’t look to religions to tell us what to eat or how to heal ourselve

people who leave organized religion quickly become eager to replace the void with another system of meaning—a dimension most atheist groups have failed to consider.

in branding, relief beats guilt, and reward beats fear.

sometimes the most destabilizing chaos isn’t on the world stage. Nor is it a public outrage or even a shared experience.

It’s found instead in the quiet chaos of our everyday lives: making a home, raising a family, putting a meal on the table. These mundane corners of the human experience are also where we find the loosest pockets of culture today: