Beth Bentley on Risk & Culture

Beth Bentley is a brand strategist with 20 years' experience advising major brands. She founded Tomorrowism consultancy after serving as Chief Strategy Officer at Portas, SVP Strategy at VICE Media's VIRTUE, and Executive Head of Strategy at Wieden + Kennedy, where she led work for Nike and Honda. Her Substack Pattern Recognition is amazing.

So I have a question. I start all of my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. And it's a big question, which is why I use it. But it's because it's big. I tend to over explain it like I'm doing now. And the question is, and you can answer any way, answer or not answer in any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

It's just a good question. Well, I on a very simple level, I come from Wales. I'm from a tiny town near the Welsh coast that no one's ever heard of. And I'm from a family of obviously Welsh descent, but also Irish descent. Many people from my part of Wales originated in Ireland.

So, yeah, very Celtic, I suppose, is my background. Certainly not a metropolitan city, living sort of childhood in any way. In terms of the family that I come from, it's a very book-loving family culture.

It's not really the best way of thinking, in that there were books everywhere for me growing up. I remember being little and looking up, you know, and you look up at bookshelves, like in a bookstore in someone's house or in a library and thinking how massive the bookshelves were and how huge the books and how would I ever be good enough at reading to read them all and what were they all about? And I've always just, you know, found myself surrounded by words. My parents' walls were always lined with books.

They still are, actually. They stayed with me last week because it was half-term holidays in the UK. And I have two little girls, so they came to look after them for me while I was busy working. And they still, it's so cute, they start every day with a few rounds of Scrabble. Every single day, they can't not. They are so into it, into like linguistics and words and everything.

My mum was a journalist, so it obviously comes from there. And so am I, actually, by trade, as it were, back in the very beginning of my career. And actually, the first time I ever went anywhere unaccompanied by my parents was to the library. I remember my mum, my brother, who's a year old, and my mum gave us the library tickets, the old school pieces of paper. And we walked hand in hand to the library, which was one street away from our house, thinking about it. Maybe that's why they bought the house there in the first place.

But that was my first sense of freedom, you know, that was the thing that was worthy of my mum, like, you know, white knuckling of being scared that her two babies were being left, but she let us go to the library. So, yeah, that's my family background in my world.

But I suppose where I'm from in my life now, like in the industry, I'll tell you where I'm not from. You know, I'm not from, as I say, this kind of London creative industries culture. I had no connections at all to any of it. I didn't literally didn't speak the language of ad agencies, creative agencies, creative industries, brands at all.

And growing up as a young planner, I was a strategist forever in agencies. I was always quite conscious that I didn't look or sound like a lot of the other planners. In my day, it was very male.

It's quite a boys club, maybe a lot of the guys were older than me. I didn't speak or look in any way like they did. You know, I probably ruffled a few feathers, I'm sure. But I had amazing mentors, great bosses, and I learned from the best. So I suppose if you ask me where I come from professionally, I would probably say I grew up at Weiden & Kennedy. Like I am very much of the diaspora of the people who've passed through the doors of that place, you know.

But I spent time at Adam & Eve DDB, VICE, Portas. I spent a couple of days in Whitehall as a strategist. So I've had a bit of an unconventional journey. But yeah, my, I was very lucky to have formative years on and off for 11 years actually at Weiden & Kennedy London as a baby grad and then growing all the way up into an agency leadership team member. So that's where I'm from professionally, I would say, as a practitioner. Yeah.

What does it mean to be from Wales?

To not be centered, literally. I mean, our country is so little, but we don't have really any major commercial centers. We don't have any great commercial, sorry, cultural hubs, really, in terms of creative industries or film or music and that kind of thing.

Of course, there are umpteen creative individuals from Wales and the rest have been. But we don't have a focal point commercially or culturally, I would say. It's very dispersed. It's rural. It's beautiful. Some parts are very old fashioned and disconnected from the fast moving consumer culture that I live in now. But yeah, you're not from the center. You are literally from elsewhere. You're not from the margins, I would say, culturally in the UK.

Are there moments where you feel particularly Welsh? What your Welshness appears to you? Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. Well, my accent will go more Welsh when I'm hanging out with my dad or other people. I will do that in the family. But my husband and I, we have a camper van that he renovated. It was a film production van that he turned into a sleeping thing, an old sort of black VW thing. And I feel very Welsh when we go out in that. And we go all around the coast. We take the surfboards on the roof. We pop the top. Our kids go out in the waves, in the wetsuits. We cook on campfire. We like going mostly to South Wales, actually, and Cornwall and Devon and all those places that maybe some people might have heard about in the UK.

And do you remember as a girl what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Yeah, I think I wanted, I was so intrigued by the books and the writing. And I so, my mum and dad were very young when they had us. They met when they were 17 and 19 and then got married when my mum was 21, my dad was 23.

And then we came along very quickly, my brother and I. And so my mum was still quite young in her career when she was, when I was conscious and cognisant of what she was doing. So I would be being shushed in the other room while she was interviewing somebody on the old school phone and like taking notes in shorthand and transcribing quickly. And then filing her copy over the phone.

I would see that stuff happening. So I mean, she was still is. They both are my heroes. And I wanted to write like her and I wanted to write a book and I wanted to deal with words and be paid for my opinion and my ability to write and stuff. And so that was what I double down on. I've got double English lit English language degree.

I'm obsessed with this stuff. You know, you can tell from, you know, my living environments, my office, you know, I very much kind of got that gene. So I think when I was a little girl, I didn't know what it meant, but I wanted to write somehow for a living, I think.

Yeah. What when you say that you're obsessed with words, what do you what do you find? What do you find there? Like what I mean, I share this obsession with words. I remember there was a moment in a dark moment in my life, I found some weird comfort in a dictionary. Do you know what I mean? Like I enjoy words in a way that seems a little abnormal. When you're when you say that you're obsessed with words, what are you pointing at?

I don't know. I think it's my way of understanding the world. I think being from somewhere that's so rural and so perhaps in some ways disconnected culturally from kind of the center of things and the center of the action.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s in the UK, at least, I think that reading there's that phrase is now I'll probably butcher it, but that you can experience a thousand lifetimes through reading and actually understanding other people's experiences. Helps you to understand the world. And so I think I was just reading the world from the kitchen table in Wales in the middle of nowhere, I suppose.

As I grow older and I did which university did my English language and so on, everything that we learned was about that piece of writing, whether it was the poem or the book or the play or whatever it might be. It's a cultural artifact.

It could not have been written by that writer in any other way than it could have been in the cultural context that they're writing in. And this, for example, in post-colonial literature, this thought about writing back to the center and being in the margin, you know, like there was there was a way of thinking that informs a way of writing. And so now obviously that's in on a whole life of its own and into my sociological rabbit holes that I go down, of course. But yeah, I think it was about trying to make sense of the world through how other people made sense of their worlds, I think.

And sort of catch us up. Where are you now right now? Where are you and what are you doing? What keeps you busy?

Well, now I have stepped away from the agency, well, the kind of corporate, like I think we would say in the States, and I'm now an independent.

So I think it was maybe three, three and a half years ago, I stepped out of a chief strategy officer role and set up my own practice, my own strategic consultancy, which is called Tomorrowism. It's now evolved into a brand strategy and brand design consultancy. And we, there's three of us, partners and sort of an atomized network of others, as many people do these days.

It's sort of Web3, deconstructed agency. But we serve a big mix of established bigger brands and younger disruptors in and around the global fashion system. And of course, its many related worlds, you know, beauty, home, luxury, anything, aspiration-fueled spaces, I would say, based in London, work everywhere.

And also I write, I have a Substack newsletter, and I reach maybe 30,000 or so interesting, very intelligent people, the most interesting people actually, by the way, on that platform, you know all about it, I know. And I write about the kind of sociological side of consumer culture. So lots of references, lots of quoting from, you know, big thinkers or looking back in time in order to help us look forwards or deconstructing not just what's going on right now, but why perhaps and therefore what might happen next.

When did you first discover that you could make a living doing this kind of thing?

I think there was a sense of blind faith to begin with, because really what I did at the time was it was kind of about unplugging the strategy department, the planning department, as we would say in London, from the full service agency model and plugging it directly into the client side organization, a little bit maybe further upstream or before the actual creative brief was formed, frankly before any of the diagnosis of the problem often is formed. You know, we are brief makers, not brief takers, for sure, in the work that we do now. But I suppose it was, there was a bit of consternation actually, I took lots of advice at the time, you know, I spoke to 50 CMOs about what they actually value and what they actually need and how they use and how they speak about brand strategy.

It's such a fat word that means so many things. And I spoke to loads of other agency founders and industry body people and journals and just like, I feel like there's a thing to be done here, but what do you think? Like, how would you frame it? What would you call it? Like, how would you describe it? How would you productize it? How do you get paid for this stuff, you know? Because I was a planner, I wasn't running the agency. Of course, I had a conception of how it worked, but I was not that brave, you know, that wasn't me, I was the sort of vertical practitioner.

So there was a lot of confusion and a bit of like, God, I don't know if this is a thing and surely you need a delivery arm and you can't just sell your thinking and don't, agencies lost lead on strategy and all of the things that actually aren't true. But yeah, I don't know, we ended up in a very interesting place, taking a big strategic decision to focus on a sector in an industry that's wildly underserved for proper big brand building thinking, which is the fashion system, fashion industry. You know, enormous $2 trillion rev industry, huge, complicated interconnected system of industries actually, providing millions of people with livelihoods.

So interesting, so fast moving, so indicative to so many other sectors in industries, but facing complex challenges right now, of course, like many industries are, but very underserved. You know, lots of the world class agencies don't lean into fashion, retailers, fashion houses, luxury, they just don't. I never quite understood what the disconnect was. Other sorts of agencies would serve the fashion industry, but very little really, actually, in my world of kind of the full service agencies.

So there's a bit of strategic jiggery pokery, lots of come to Jesus conversations, lots of client advice, actually, like off the record chats, but ended up positioning it in a really interesting way. And we are kind of punching above our weight in terms of the kind of clients that will trust us, because we're sort of described by many of them as a category of one, there's no one really doing what we do, you're not in London anyway.

How are you, how do you talk about the category that you're, you're either creating or what did you learn in those conversations that are really driving you forward.

I think there's a real sense of pragmatism of, yes, strategic people, strategic thinking, strategic products, whatever we call them, you know, the things that we actually produce are of great value and are worth investing in, particularly in these times of great volatility and challenge and headwinds, you know, and there is a, there was an agreement from all of the clients pretty much I spoke to that yeah there actually is a gap here we could do with some more of this right whatever we call it and wherever we put it and how much of a budget maybe it comes from, but also great strong advice about don't stop with the thinking, you know, you have to find ways to apply it, so embed it with the people don't just launch and leave us with a deck because it will just live on the server, right as interesting as it is it has to be embedded within our people it has to be embedded into the body language of the organization, and also visualize it to make it make sense which is where the brand design arm of the consultancy came in, in terms of developing physical, you know, building the brand world rebuilding the tone of voice like thinking about the big picture behaviors, the marketing mix modeling like the strategic sort of ingredients really you know the audience mapping and sizing econometrics like the actual kind of jigsaw puzzle that you would then click together in terms of changing and switching up and leveling up how you invest your marketing pounds or dollars. So we kind of stop there most of the time we don't get into practicing but because all of us have had 20 years of deep practitioner experience at the probably largely the highest level you know Olympics activation briefs, John Lewis Christmas ads, you know fashion week activations like the big picture stuff and for me also the measurement of that stuff.

I think it allows us to empathize with the people who are going to pick that stuff up and then activate it, perhaps an in-house agency or a full service creative agency or whoever it might be in the future. So we can understand it and we can go. We can know what our work will be used for in a way that perhaps other consultancies or strategic brains, maybe haven't had their hands dirty within, you know, but we have the joy of that in our earlier careers.

You, you use the phrase body language to describe sort of maybe the brand or getting into the bottom of the body language of the brand can you tell me more about what you're, you're talking about when you're talking about the body language of a brand.

Yeah, for sure. So I think, you know, people talk about internal culture and employer brand or internal brand and those kinds of things and they're all great expressions. But I do think when we're thinking about brand strategy and the development of greater cultural heat weight capital in order to drive commercial capital, I think we have to look inside as well as from, you know, from the inside out rather as well as the outside in. It's all very well positioning the brand very intelligently in the culture and thinking about how it shows up and where it shows up and what its role in the world is. It's all what it promises itself, whatever else, but also internally like iconic brands are built from within.

Like anyone who's been to a Nike HQ, anyone who's hung out with a Googler, you know, anyone who's walked past a Mac counter or stepped into a Gap store of the year, you know, in the 90s or 2000s. You know, it's clear. You need to understand that there's a canvas that you can paint your brand strategy on before you even reach for anything in terms of a marketing brief, you know, get it right internally, help people to become excited and unlock new hope and be aligned and develop, as they say, the shared body language way of thinking, speaking, interacting, attitude to risk, you know, holding hands, saying stupid things and it's okay and rewarding the right stuff inside the organization, progressing people for the right reasons, you know, hiring the right brains and propagating a culture of curiosity and risk taking and creativity more than risk aversion and short-termism.

What do you what do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?

I think it's untangling of knots, I suppose, you know, tidying bedrooms, making order out of chaos. Being, I don't know, that kind of the top down like thousand foot or 10,000 foot view, I think starting then and then like progressively getting closer and closer to the ground and turning the rocks over and finding the messy stuff and having the awkward conversations and I love that, you know, I probably say so I shouldn't. I just think it's such a rewarding and like psychologically revealing and interesting thing to do what we do, you know, sort of therapy sometimes when you're hanging out with your clients. Yeah, that's great. And I watch about myself, I'm sure maybe the brand does through every project. So yeah, it's a sort of process of deduction, I guess that's just interesting.

You one of my favorite words in the in the world is awkward and you mentioned sort of enjoying the awkward conversations. Can you tell me more like what role do awkward conversations play in the work that you do?

Well, I think, yeah, it's like other ways of expressing inconvenient truths, maybe is another way of, you know, grasping the nettle like having the awkward conversation like saying the thing that no one will say in the room. And yeah, I mean, I'm certainly in no way alone in that, like every great agency practitioner loves that thrives on that stuff, you know, and it does take a lot of emotional intelligence and, you know, being able to read the room so that you don't upset or setback or create some more problems than you're solving sometimes.

So I'm sure I've probably got it wrong, as I say many times in the past, but maybe that is a bit of that imprint of the Weiden & Kennedy culture or the early days of the Adam & Eve kind of scrappy start up or disruptor that actually identify the roadblocks like there's a there are reasons why this organization's brand isn't where it wants to be. Yes, it might be about budget. Yes, it might be about competitive threats. Yes, it might be that the product pipe's not where it needs to be or a million reasons.

But all these people kind of being their own worst enemy, not in a pejorative way, but when they come together, is there a cultural roadblock here that's actually stopping them from being and doing the things that they want to do. And as an outsider, you can maybe see it or say it in a way that feels safer than them saying it themselves.m, I don't know, I think it's untangling of knots, I suppose, you know, tidying bedrooms, making order and chaos. Being, I don't know, that kind of the top down like thousand foot or 10,000 foot view, I think starting then and then like progressively getting closer and closer closer to the ground and turning the rocks over and finding the messy stuff and having the awkward conversations and I love that, you know, I probably say so I shouldn't. I just think it's such a rewarding and like psychologically revealing an interesting thing to do what we do, you know, sort of therapy sometimes when you same again, I'm sure when you're hanging out with your clients. Yeah, that's great. And I watch about myself, I'm sure maybe the brand does through every project. So yeah, it's a sort of process of deduction, I guess that's just interesting.

You one of my favorite words in the in the world is awkward and you mentioned sort of enjoying the awkward conversations. Can you tell me more like what role to awkward conversations play in the work that you do?

Well, I think, yeah, it's like other ways of expressing inconvenient truths, maybe is another way of, you know, grasping the nettle like having the awkward conversation like saying the thing that no one will say in the room. And yeah, I mean, I'm certainly in no way alone in that, like every great agency practitioner loves that thrives on that stuff, you know, and it does take a lot of emotional intelligence and, you know, being able to read the room so that you don't upset or setback or create some more problems than you're solving sometimes.

So I'm sure I've probably got it wrong, as I say many times in the past, but maybe that is a bit of that imprint of the Weiden & Kennedy culture or the early days of the Adam & Eve kind of scrappy start up a disruptor that actually identify the roadblocks like there's a there are reasons why this organization's brand isn't where it wants to be. Yes, it might be about budget. Yes, it might be about competitive threats. Yes, it might be that the product pipes not where it needs to be or a million reasons.

But all these people kind of being their own worst enemy, not in a pejorative way, but when they come together, is there a cultural roadblock here that's actually stopping them to being and doing the things that they want to do. And as an outsider, you can maybe see it or say it in a way that feels safer than them saying themselves.

Are there are there any mentors that were particularly important to you, or also like touchstones other ideas or concepts that you kind of return to often.

Yeah, I mean, you probably won't be surprised to hear me say there are some books that I read a lot and like keep around the place, dog ears, you know, post it notes and stuff all over. And it would, I mean, probably for me, I guess, be the Holy Trinity, maybe the Marshall McLuhan world. Pretty much everything that blog has ever written. And Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, like, whatever that guy says, whatever he was on or drinking, you could be some of that. And then Mark Fisher, a Brit, like, certainly no longer with us, but an incredible, brave, provocative media analyst, university lecturer, writer, delver of digging into culture, speaking truth to power, like those three people are all men, they're all white, all middle class. One of them is, well, all three of them are no longer with us now, unfortunately.

So yeah, old and new, informing each other. But those three, in terms of, they're not mentors, but then in terms of guiding me and being touchstones, that is, they are people that I wish I could have a dinner party, a dream dinner party, that thing, like if I could put me in real life. But in real life, yeah, loads of people, so many, I've been so lucky to be exposed to such incredible, again, maybe this is the thing, but like brave thinkers, people who will say the thing, and, you know, grasp the nettle, as it were.

One particular person, a lady called Pamela, I spent a couple of years, as I say, in between all these agency roles as a strategy advisor inside Whitehall, which is the UK central government, you know, Westminster, working as a strategic advisor comms strategy, you know, activation of government communication budgets, that sort of advisor, to the Secretary of State for youth or children, schools and families. So it was youth issues. So for example, things like government intervening and spending public funds on interventions that stop truancy or gang knife crime or affect the teen pregnancy stats or those kinds of things, you know, that elongates your timeline, we talk about thinking longer term and not being trapped in short termism like that, wow, that really opened my eyes.

But Pamela, my boss, she, she, oh my god, she's just the most incredible person, she wasn't of the world that I was from in any way. But, you know, more from the policy side of things. But honestly, like, one of the most inspiring, intelligent, funny, she said to me, Yes, this is like, with this, we're in the corridors of power, like now this is like Whitehall, this is where we run the country.

Please don't ever ask me where the switch is, that won't be a funny joke, like I've heard it all before. And she said, then if you're ever in a meeting and you suddenly find yourself daydreaming, is this really how we run the country? Is this really where my tax money goes? She's like, don't ever ask me that either, because I will just roll my eyes at you and refer you to this conversation that we had. She gave me George Orwell, while we write my first day about the dangers of opacity and political language and saying what we mean.

Honestly, just an incredible woman who's still in central government right now. And then during that period of my time, actually, I met and was taken under the wing somewhat by Rory Sutherland. It was the year, the eras of the era of behavioral science, behavioral economics being adopted into central government and behavior change.

For example, one of the summers that I worked there during the summer recess, all of the ministers had to read Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, you know, like the nudge theory. It was on everyone's lips and Rory came in and did a huge kind of great big symposia and training sessions and encouraged everyone to understand it and grounded it, Kate Waters as well, like huge big planning brain. And so yeah, in terms of mentorship, those people, those brains helped me and made me, I've still got the notes from those sessions, you know, I keep them in my office drawer.

And then obviously through the agencies, I was with Dave Golding and James Murphy during their big years of growing Adam & Eve and at the Weiden years, Tony and Kim, the huge, bold, brave, creative people that just, you know, didn't think like other people. And it just inspires you to think, okay, well, maybe there's a way of being weird and saying things differently. Perhaps they're not toeing the line always.

I've forgotten loads of people, of course, obviously.

That's amazing. Unbelievable. Where would you say we are now? I mean, the history you just told about, well, I was curious about a couple things. Number one is sort of being a brand strategist in the sort of the public space and what transfers over and what doesn't transfer over? Are there different? Is it different when you're sort of in Whitehall and trying to apply the wisdom of brand strategy to those kind of problems? And then the idea that, I mean, behavioral sort of science and economics sort of blew up all over the place. There was, it felt like there was a moment when we were all nudging. And it feels like that's a little bit in the past. I guess I'm curious, where do you, where would you say we are now in terms of how we think about the proper role of communications or the way that we think about how organizations are meant to be in the world? Is that a clear question or is that obtuse?

Yeah, that's a great question and I don't know the answer, but I will try. I think, yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because that really was a moment in time where everybody was talking about behavior change and behavior change communications. And, you know, I remember all the awards shows, we'd be talking of like all of the papers that if you were sitting on judging panels, it would all have like the behavioral shift and here's the science bit. And it suddenly like really entered the lexicon of the creative industries at that time. And that was great because what it did, I suppose, was it opened up a level of rigor and a sort of a closer, tighter relationship between the world of academia and the world of communications or marketing.

And I think that can only really be a good thing. And that I think has left an imprint, even if perhaps the behavioral science side of things perhaps isn't quite so loud anymore. It's not quite so trendy maybe anymore. But I do think, you know, Malcolm Gladwell has been debunked and whatever, like no disrespect to any of them, of course. But there was that era of like the Steven Pinker era and this huge, like massive, you know, Dan Airely and all of these really interesting, quite thought provoking ways of thinking about not marketing as such, but decision making, like why we decide and why we do certain things. And how, you know, like choice architecture and decision fatigue.

And I think it left an imprint of rigor and to sit alongside the marketing science that we had, which was all about effectiveness and being very, very tight on the sort of return. And it was almost like a different layer or an additional plank of that, which was great. I think now maybe it's evolved into less the paper, the economics fields and more sociological understanding, perhaps more broadly, more generally.

Maybe, you know, the psychology, the sociology, the anthropology, the connection between everything is political and fashion is political and, you know, slightly more broad church maybe than just those particular thinkers. So people are dredging up incredible old philosophers or ways of thinking about consumer culture or from the industrial revolution and where did it all start and post capitalism and things like that, which is great. But yeah, I don't know.

I think maybe we've just evolved from like V1 to V2 maybe of that space. Maybe that's just my echo chamber, to be honest, Peter, I might just be, you know, conflating there.

Well, to that point, how do you research? What's the role? I mean, I'm a qualitative researcher. I'm sort of always interested in, of course, talking about myself and what I do. And I'm just wondering what the role of qualitative is in your practice, the role of research and how maybe that shift or how you use it to learn.

Lots, lots and lots. So I think that, yes, the culture and the ability, the budgets, the timing somewhat, and maybe have changed on projects, big meeting brand strategy projects from perhaps 10 or 15 years ago and before to where we are now. But I will always strongly believe in the power of not just, you know, going out and developing a research-led point of view, but the actual genesis of primary research. So obviously going up in the kind of agencies that I did, that was the edge, that was the selling point of those organizations and then spending time with Vice, sitting on their leadership team. And then you are basically, you're sitting, it's a creative organization sitting on such a wealth of data. So I think I've always been drawn to organizations that practice what they preach. And I don't like this surface skimming, assumption-led, big picture, sweeping statement stuff. No one does, obviously. Clients certainly don't, thankfully. But I do think that, yes, it's incredibly important to back up your assumptions and to prove it.

It's incredibly difficult, but at the same time, there are so many levers that we can pull. You know, from my era of growing up, we were encouraged to and allowed to develop our own methodologies, like different sorts of digital ethnography, overlapping this, you know, qual study with this digital diary of what was, I don't know, eaten and what was worn. And, you know, all these kind of really interesting stuff that led to things that we never would have got to, like this thing, small example, but this thing about we were working on women's and sports bras.

We developed this thought about Run Club to the Club Club, and it was about women wearing sports bras to the club and the connection between the womanhood and the togetherness of the run club and the womanhood and the togetherness of the dance floor. And you're like, we would never have got to that. That would have just been a hunch that someone crazy said in the corner. If we hadn't been able to overlay, for example, her responded to Instagram feed with the qual group that we did with the ethno study that we doubled down on with, I don't know, this social listening project that we did. If you layer things up, all of a sudden you have a different lens. So anyway, all of which is to say, in a world of fast moving, low budget, I need it yesterday, thinking and AI and machine learning. I just think it's just a different palette of tools that we have, but certainly in anything that I work on through Tomorrowism, I can't just talk about what's happening. I have to explain to the client why it's just part of what we do. I can't, I don't know any of the way really, I think.

You have a preferred way in this, where there's all these, all the things you just mentioned, I mean, the increased pressure, the short timelines, these easy tools with answers all over the place. What is the role that you have found for qual to get to the why?

Well, I think it can be, you don't need, sometimes you don't need very much of it, and sometimes you can go in with a strong hunch already, and sometimes you can corral a very interesting conversation with a small number of people very quickly if you think about it really carefully beforehand. Sometimes we use it to unpick or, not, this sounds negative, but debunk, push back on maybe a organizational POV or attitude to go actually no, or maybe not just that, maybe it's this thing as well.

So sometimes it's used not for blank piece of paper, what should we go and find, sometimes it's used very strategically to kind of go, look, these guys are hung up on something here and I think it's become a roadblock for them. How can we help them to see this from a different angle? How can we say this is true, but also this might be true as well. And then let's go and develop some thinking from there, you know.

So, yeah, I mean, always, always not, I mean, old school in some ways, but there's nothing better than talking to people and asking and listening, you know, the two ears, one mouth thing, you know, that we've all been taught since the beginning. But actually, there's a lot of wisdom and there's a lot of shortcuts, actually, because of a lot of time, I mean, if you just go and speak to people and ask smart questions and they shut up and listen, you know. Yeah. But you guys are the heroes in that, you know, it's what you do so well.

Well, tell me about the Substack. How did you choose to do it? Pattern recognition, it's really amazing what you've been writing. Yeah, how did you, what made it the thing you wanted to do?

It's funny, isn't it? I mean, I have to say I always wanted to write and write more, and it's very easy for that to fall by the wayside, I think you have to be very disciplined. I think when you do jobs that all of us do, where it's, you know, project based and lots of new things and new business pipe and those are distractions and stuff. I think for years I sort of made excuses, I think, a bit.

But I don't know, I think that I'm in a situation where I, my business model, it doesn't allow me to create, very often anyway, proper systematic entry level roles. I can't, all mentorship, really, very often. So I, as you asked before, all of us have got mentor stories of people who helped us and people we learned from in this atomized way of working, of which I'm a culprit.

My business is all over the show. Yes, there's an office, but it's not very big and we're not all there all the time. Like, how do you, how do you, not just help less experienced people to learn about, how do you learn from those people if they're not there? And how do you develop that sort of kind of idea exchange in a world where we're all just on Zoom the whole time? Yeah, of course we can do it.

But anyway, I suppose the Substack thing was about sort of a commitment to building in public and sharing thoughts before they're probably fully formed and lifting the curtain, NDAs not aside, on the kind of way of thinking that we have the sort of stuff we're bringing to our own clients' attention, the kind of phraseology, the thoughts, the concepts, this divergent s**t that we're putting in front of our own clients and unlocking their problems. Things like status sentience or cultural omnivores or meh-ification or those kinds of things. There's stuff that came out of boardrooms really, you know, it was like shoving it on slides full bleed.

And then we go ahead and write a bit more about it. So, and then people will come in and it gets better and you can write more about it and you dig in and whatever, you know. But also this thought of having a model where I don't have an opportunity to help people to develop and grow.

My only way of really doing that is to write stuff and share it. I don't know any other way. Yeah, I can mentor. That might be one person. You know, I want a two way conversation with people that are coming from a very different angle than I am on stuff. And that's why I find all the time on Substack is people who are so much more than me or in a different world or a different continent. And I love that challenge. I used to have that all the time every day at work and I don't anymore. So I think that's kind of why I did it.

Yeah. And how I do not use the Substack, the chat function. Are you chatting all that? Do you have the chat function? Do you have sort of community and interaction going on around the pieces that you're writing or no? This is like a question.

Yeah. So yes, I do. And there are two forms of that. One is that it's called notes, which is basically what Twitter used to be. So that is like, again, building in public where you are. You just, yeah, people like go, oh, I've just posted a new piece. And here it is. Or like someone will quote something from someone else's, oh, that's really interesting. But sometimes it's just like, here's an interesting flower.

Like, it's nice that it's spring, you know, it's my stuff as well. So there's a lot of that. And like just weak ties turning into stronger ties through just silly little interactions, I suppose aren't silly.

But then there's also, as you say, this sort of the chat functions and the DM functions where, yeah, you can start really interesting conversations with some or all of your subscribers, whether they're the paid ones behind the wall or whether they're just the more general people that follow. And then in the DMS, which is like the even smaller, like BAW last week, I had two new business inquiries, directly one from an investment group incubator and one from a CMO. I'm like, I didn't I've never met either of you. I'm not connected to your LinkedIn or any other platform. This is and that's not why I ever thought this would be not that it's not the pipe. There's other stuff that does that.

But it's a way now there's communication levels within that platform where inbound, you know, maybe you don't do this, but we kind of need a bit of help with this. Or would you do you know anything about what you know, someone else, you know, that sort of stuff is happening all the time now. So the world's colliding, I think, Peter, for me.

And those worlds are?

The agency world of practicing and filling your pipe and productizing your thing. And the sort of more fun downtime, obvious stuff of like, you know, let your brain do its thing and write some interesting, weird, provocative stuff and see what people think and get into a chat with them. And suddenly someone's watching that who's got a brand strategy problem and go, Oh, cool. Okay. Like, this is nothing like my problem, but I like the way that you guys are thinking on this stuff. So cool. And you're like, Oh, okay.

So yeah, small examples. But, you know, it's it's new early days for everybody on sub stack, isn't it? I mean, it's obviously enormous, but the ceiling's so high, I think that it's doing new things all the time.

Yeah. How does that feel that those walls are colliding? The worlds are colliding. I don't know why I shifted metaphors, walls crumbling between the worlds. How does that feel?

Well, it's good, I suppose. I mean, you I just, yeah, I just want to do interesting people, interesting work with interesting people and interesting brands that hopefully, you know, makes the world in any way a slightly better or less s**t place. So if I could turn a slightly sort of hobbyist, I like chatting, I like reading, I like writing, hey, read this, quote this, look what your postman said about this, look what happened over here. You know, if I can turn that into something that might become an interesting project to work on in a few weeks, months or years from now, then happy days, like that's that's the flywheel.

So for anybody that maybe didn't run into the stuff that you've been writing, how would you how do you explain your observation about the meh-ification? I hadn't tried to say that out loud before. The meh-ification culture of brands.

Yeah, um, yeah, I talked about the meh, meh, like meh, as in the British, it's a bit meh, it's a bit s**t, it's a bit mid, you know, like the sort of homogenization, the drift to the middle, the life under the algorithm, basically, everybody's very well aware of this, I'm sure right now. But this thought of, like, meh-ification and this being the meh-cage of the 2020s and the meh-ocene as opposed to anthropocene or, you know, just playing with words, have fun. But yeah, I mean, that came about from watching live practitioner issues occurring about clients' levels of attitudes to risk and what they think good looks like. And this short-termist, let's not rock the boat, this worked last time, or this works in our space, this works in our industry, let's do a version of this.

They're incredibly intelligent, brilliant, creative people, I'm certainly not criticising, but just an organizational air that's being breathed right now, that is contributing to this drift to sameness and averageness and everybody knows it. Matt Klein’s Zine, basically, he's like the text of this stuff, he's all over it, he's so intelligent, he's, you know, the one who's kind of brought this to everybody's attention. You talked about the creative paradox three years ago, I think now.

There's lots of stuff like Filterworld by Kyle Chayka, there's a ton of stuff that's been formalized in this space now. But really, from my point of view, it's more from a brand building side of things that actually are the leaders of our brands in aspiration-led categories, the need to understand this stuff because it's affecting their decision making and it's affecting the way that they are being managed even by their investors and their CEO. It's so big that it's become invisible, I think, in corporate culture, for me. But yeah, that's one thing I write about. Basically, it's about the stuff we should say, but often don't, about what's really going on in consumer culture, I suppose. It's my stick to support.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what do you, how do you, what's the question? Well, you've mentioned the word risk a bunch, you're very explicit that sort of the approach to risk is sort of part of the issue. So what do you mean when you, how do you work with your client's relationship with the risk? It sounds like that's what you do, or that's how you think about it.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, totally. Yeah, it's a big part of things, I think, being that to, we help our, try to help our client brands to develop greater cultural authority, you know, so this point of view that cultural heat or capital or weight meaning leads to, again, leads to commercial growth, commercial heat, commercial meaning, commercial capital, right? In aspiration led post-cap, stage capitalist, you know, culture, meaning more, can mean growing more. Like, look at the D2C's, look at the luxury fashion houses, you know, we're not paying for the cost of the fabric, we're paying for the value of the brand, right? Like, look at luxury cars, look at luxury makeup and the dupe culture of products that work almost as well, but are a quarter of the price, but we still want that one because it's that one.

So we know all about this stuff, but really, if you're trying to develop cultural authority, cultural meaning, cultural weight, then you have to be okay with taking risks and thinking differently and divergently and moving through culture and taking up space and not being of the mindset that, oh, we mustn't alienate the core, or that's the way we do things around here, or this worked in the past, or this is what our competitors and peers do, or this is what I like doing. It's cool, but like, we have to build on top of that, or at least have to consider different ways of coming at this and developing authenticity and trust. And this whole thing about this drift to algorithmic sameness, the meh-ification thing, it's just making it even, it's turning up to 11, it's making it even more important that a brand that wants to have any sort of cultural leadership, cultural authority, category leadership, category authority.

You cannot do that by playing within the bounds of the playbook anymore in my view. So why is the playbook like it is? Why do we think it's going to work that way? Let's just start there. And as we say, having the weird and awkward conversations about why we are institutionalized in this way, why do we think we're right? Because we might be, but we might not always be.

I have to ask the self-indulgent question, which is, you know, this is my newsletter, it's called that business of meaning. You talked about, you just mentioned cultural meaning. What do you mean when you say meaning?

I think probably when I say meaning, I'm probably talking about status, I think, in that obviously when I talk about, you know, brands growing in authority or growing in relevance or growing in stature or growing in cultural capital and meaning, as you say, it's basically becoming a higher status organization that people, that status is both given and received, that people think that they will derive status from wearing your X or using your Y or driving your Z, whatever, drinking your whatever. Like you are imprinting status, higher status onto the individual. That's what they're paying for. That's the differential. So I suppose when I say meaning, I probably mean status, to be honest, I think.

What's the relationship between risk and meaning, would you say? Maybe you just already answered this question.

I think you probably can't have the latter without the former anymore, if you ever could. I mean, I grew up working in around Nike, and that is the home of risk. It was a really interesting way of thinking, and obviously everything else that, you know, the Honda stuff, the client literally, he said, I'm only interested in ideas that frighten me, so scare the Jesus out of me. You know, it was, it was said in jest, but there was a real strong message to the agency there. And that's where Honda “The Cog” and "Hate Something, Change Something" - Those big pieces of work came out of a client's attitude to risk and willingness to think way beyond the confines of the category playbook.

You know, all of the stuff that happened at that time, three, the three pony. I mean, there were millions of examples that, you know, the Old Spice guy. Thank you, mom. Like, I was in that was my era where I was just like, oh, God, okay. There's a, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, maybe, you know, and I didn't work all of that stuff, of course, but that that's the world that I grew up in, as they say. So I just don't think that ever leaves you.

So what I'm trying to do now is not be cavalier and being very cognizant and empathetic that these leaders I work with are in a very specific space and a very specific mindset and under real, you know, constraints and pressure. But still just trying to sow that seed always. And this algorithmic sameness is really helping me with that, to be honest. It’s our job as brands, our job maybe as brand leaders, to help people to become more interesting, bigger, better, more inspired, more curious, more high-octane, more enlivened versions of themselves. So we have to challenge people. We cannot just give them the same of what, you know, more of what they're already into.We have to help people to understand not just what they currently like, but what they might like in the future. And that's why I like looking backwards so far into the history of marketing to go, that's what has always, that's the red thread, actually, if you look at old work or Apple 1984, you know, that was a strong, really strong point of view about a better way of thinking, a better way of living. And I feel like maybe that's got obscured in the last few years of short-termism and sort of risk tolerance, perhaps.

Yeah. What's your hope looking forward? I mean, if there, if we're coming out of this sort of sea of sameness and manifestation, and we want to break with that, do you have a feeling that things that so much of that feels like that was just we were frozen in sort of a cultural place. You're, you're calling it short-termism, but I feel like there's so much other sort of factors kind of maybe making people less risk open than they could be.

What do you see coming next? Are we entering a new sort of way of expressing, I guess, a new tolerance for it? I mean, I would love that to be the case, but I think with everything that's going on politically, socio-politically, economically right now. No, unfortunately, we're right. We're ready for it.

I think whether we call it post-capitalism or post-meification or I don't know, this explosion of innovative new dazzling creative production that we should be seeing because we've all got cameras and video and editing skills and AI in our pockets now. And we're not seeing, you know, and back to the Matt Klein cultural paradox stuff that actually we're seeing sequels. We're seeing cinematic world expansions.

We're seeing, you know, the top authors in the top tech bestseller lists again and again and again and again, and it's hard to break through with anything new, right? All of that. Yes, it feels like the dam should probably be bursting and that we can suddenly free ourselves and think in a different way. That would be the dream, of course, not just for me, but everybody, for my kids, frankly.

But I think that we've got a huge spectre, a big barrier, a big and very real set of problems coming at us now all over the world, frankly, and it's making people fearful in a whole different way. We were maybe scared for our jobs or we were scared about not hitting the numbers or I don't know, not getting the investment round and whatever it might have been. And, you know, I'm not a bit simplifying grossly.

Now we're worried about a whole different set of things for ourselves and our families and our kids and our communities. So I don't know. I mean, it's pretty, I don't want to be negative, but it's not, it's not a particularly optimistic era, is it really? No, not at all.

It's a naive question, honestly, and I appreciate you.

No, it was a good one.

Well, I want to thank you so much for your time. This has been a lot of fun and I really appreciate you sharing everything that you've shared in your time and everything else.

Well, that's so kind of you, Peter. I've loved it. I just love, you know, I'm, Peter is the best curator on the internet, in my opinion, everybody. And you all know this because you're listening, but you and your I, I'm such a huge fan and I love your podcast.

So it's a great honor to be involved. So thank you. Nice.

Thank you so much.

Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe