Membership appeals to human irrationality. A lot of sneakerheads waiting in line all night to score a coveted item don’t do it for resale; they do it for the badge value and the bragging rights.

Thanks to the Internet, products across categories are now more susceptible to trends than to individual preferences. It’s easy to blame algorithms for the sameness of our taste choices, but the real culprit is us. Humans use social signals to quickly orient themselves in the world. On a daily basis, we actively classify one another by lifestyle, v

Direct-to-consumer model can only work if companies know who their customers are. Granular customer segmentation allows precision targeting, leads to better retention, and higher-value customer acquisition. Best approach here is to go beyond demographic and psychographic, and build taste profiles, like Netflix and TikTok do. Then, we will know whic

An imagined community is bound together by a deep horizontal comradeship between people who haven’t met and don’t know each other, but have similar affinities, beliefs, interests, and attitudes.

Curation gives even mundane objects value by connecting them with a point of view, heritage, a subculture, or purpose that makes them stand out in the vortex of speed, superficiality, and newness.

Every brand should start thinking like a B Corp.

Any aspiration is a narrative: it’s the stories we buy into and the products and experiences we buy to be part of these stories.

A deep subculture entrenchment ensures that a company can maintain and enhance its difference as it scales. Patagonia’s long-term brand defensibility has more to do with it being able to believably connect with its community through the shared passion than if it had a proprietary product or acquisition channels.

social shopping means that platforms will bestow the same fate on retailers as they did on publishers. The platforms successfully monetized our attention. They are about to commercialize our social attachments.