Eugene Healey on Chaos & Meaning

Eugene Healey is a brand strategy consultant and educator in Melbourne, Australia. Previously, he worked as an Associate Strategy Director at The Contenders and Head of Growth at Lively. He kind of exploded into my line of sight with super smart TikToks, so I was excited to talk to him.

Check out “The End of the Hollywood Celebrity,” “Identity Marketing is (sometimes) Overrated,” “The Power of Framing,” and “Why Millennials Are So…Uncool?” Sign up for his newsletter, Considered Chaos.

All right, Eugene, thank you so much for accepting my invitation.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

So I start all the conversations that I do with the same question which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She is a neighbor. She helps people tell their story. She has this beautiful question which I love but it's a big question so I kind of over explain it before I ask it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

Where do I come from? I come from New Zealand, although I live in Australia. I don't really consider myself Kiwi or Australian, although I don't also really consider myself half Malaysian Chinese either.

I consider myself, where do I come from? I would consider myself a person who lives in Melbourne. I would say I'm a Melbourneian. I guess now we're talking about place but also identity. I guess I would consider myself as someone who has come from in between places.

That's kind of how I felt my whole life about things.

I think it's reflected in my work as well. I've always felt like I've lived in between things, in between identities. Never quite being fully enveloped in any one place, one identity, one perspective, which I'm really grateful for, I think is a privilege. Yeah, that's almost how I would answer that question, I think. Yeah, I'm from the in-between.

Yeah, you say you're grateful to have come from that place and it's still something that sort of shows up in your work. What do you appreciate about it?

I think it was something I struggled a lot more with when I was younger. That feeling of always, never quite, the feeling of every room I enter felt slightly outside of which I, yeah, I struggled with that a lot when I was younger because it felt like I was never able to quite blend in in any environment. But I think now having that slight outsider's view is something that I really enjoy.

I think it allows me to see things about culture in particular that other people might gloss over. I think it's kind of like I'm always in a state of a little bit of culture shock wherever I go. And so it makes it easier for me to sort of, makes it easier to sort of see or comment on that, but those particular parts of culture.

But I'm also actually quite, I'm also quite extroverted. So I find that that's sort of where my perspective comes through is like, while I find myself on the outside of things, like I'm still really interested in engaging with them. So that has developed into, I think, this interesting mix of observer participant.

So, you know, in my work, while I'm providing a lot of commentary on culture, I'm also participating in it at the same time. And I think that that feeling of being slightly outside, I think that you're also moving alongside with is something that that that really does show, particularly I would say in the content that I create, which is about which is cultural commentary. I think being able to sort of someone, someone said to me that it's not that what I'm creating is anything new. It's just that there's particles in the air that feel more disparate. And I'm making connections between all of those things.

I love the idea of a perpetual culture shock that you sort of you presented that that's somewhat familiar. Do you have a recollection of when you were young, what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Yes, I do. And it's not going to be the answer that I think anyone suspects. I wanted to be an investment banker.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, I wanted to be. And when I'm talking young, I'm talking like seven years old.

Like I had, I just had to be different. We had a neighbor who I was obsessed with money with when I was younger and we had a neighbor that told me about an investment banker and what investment bankers did. And I was there with my mom. I was like, Mom, I want to be an investment banker. And that was what I wanted to be like until I was like 15 or 16.

And then and then I had the like, you know, regular teenage crisis of confidence where you're just like, what on earth? I'm 15 years old. How am I supposed to pick a career path now? You know, because you're not picking a career path, but you are picking subjects. And the subjects determine what you're going to be able to study at university. So at that point, it was looking like I was going to be an engineer because I was picking one of the all approved Asian pathways. And then I ended up picking a business subject, which I nearly failed physics, but I got my end of year for business. I got 100 percent. So I was like, maybe I should try something else. And that sort of is in one way or another. What what put me on the path to where I am today?

What what do you recall? What was an investment banker to your six year old seven year old self? What was an investment banker?

I think he would have just said something along the lines of they do. If you like money, they deal with a lot of money. They move around very large sums of money. And I think probably he would have had something to say about them. They also control the way that the world works. Those are two very compelling, compelling. Yeah, exactly. Everything your precocious megalomaniacal child needs to aspire to.

Tell me a little bit about where you are right now and the work that you're doing these days.

Yeah, so I've actually just started my own consulting outfit a couple of months ago, but now I'm doing that full time, which is providing brand strategy, consult consultation services. And I'm still working out exactly what to call it, but I'm thinking I'm calling it brand training. Basically, I think I've worked in brand strategy for about eight years. I've also worked in teaching for around 2024 for around nine years as well as a lecturer.

So I started as a tutor at the University of Melbourne. I also lectured at the University of Melbourne. I'm often lecturing come semester one next year as well because the subject that I teach branding only runs in semester one. And I've kind of been in what I'm doing now. I'm starting to bring those two things together because what I love is not just giving people things, but I love helping them to learn. So in terms of the brand strategy that I run, I don't actually write brand strategies anymore, so I wouldn't consider myself a traditional brand strategist.

I work with founders and exec teams to understand the role of brand strategy, what it is actually supposed to help you do. And I help them to create, you know, I almost treat myself more as a facilitator. That helps them to understand and create the brand strategy itself.

I mean, that's driven from an insight that basically a strategy is not an output. You know, you may call it a roadmap, you may call it a framework for action, but there's no actual deliverable in the same way. So the success of a strategy is defined by the people who have resources in your organisation, their belief in it and their willingness to commit resources to it.

So I've kind of separated all the copywriting element of brand strategy out there now. And I say, OK, in these sessions that we run together, we're just going to get you to commit to a position that you are willing to put resources behind. And I found that's been really effective for the clients that I've worked with so far. And so I always have a sponsor in the exec team, preferably the CEO for those projects. And then the other part of the business that I run is this brand training, which are basically workshops and seminars with brand and marketing teams, traditionally of enterprise level organisations, which is basically like in many ways is a distillation of my content. But they are sessions that run anywhere between 60 minutes and three hours of

What do the modern methods of brand building look like? How are they different to the methods of brand building that you may be traditionally familiar with? And then how do you need to operationalise your organisation to deliver on this new way of brand building? And again, you can kind of see that that's pulling through a lot more of my lecture, a lot more of my lecturing practice in that it's really designing an education session and helping people to learn and learn something that I hope is delivered in an

interesting way.

Yeah. I am excited to get into all of that because I discovered you through your I guess I don't I think it must have been on LinkedIn because I'm an old man. Oh, and then Instagram, too.

And the content you create around the brand is so beautiful and I hadn't really encountered anybody doing it. But before we get into that, I was curious. When did you first discover, you know, the concept of brand or the idea that you could make a living kind of talking about these kinds of concepts?

I discovered the concept of brand as an interest about a year and a half, two years before I discovered that I could make a living working in a brand. So when I was doing my master's, I met a group of people who are to date a cohort of people who are still my really, really close friends. And we were doing our master's in what we were sprinkled across some management and marketing subjects.

But we were brought together, I would say, among other things. But we discovered that we really loved brands. I wasn't quite. I'm just trying to cast my mind back to what specifically the brand that we actually love, the brand that we loved more than anything else was KFC.

We loved KFC. And it was not just that we thought the product was excellent. In Australia, the quality of fried chicken options is not as high as it is in the US. So KFC is actually one of the best here. And we would spend a lot of time at KFC. And we would think about it wasn't just the product that we loved, although we dearly loved the product.

We loved everything about it. I think it was like not just the brand narrative, but it was also the brand codes, the way that the brand identity was executed. We looked at it like the red, the white, the bucket, the kernel and then the brand universe they created. So that was a like peak widen era KFC.

So that was when they were doing really, really crazy and strange things with the kernel, when they were playing around with the brand codes, where they were building this brand universe like they did the KFC gaming console that was shaped like a bucket. They did the KFC prom corsage. They tried to get a KFC ice skating musical off the ground.

They did like five different iterations of the kernel. They did like KFC ASMR. They created some KFC video games as well. They created a KFC meditation app and what we thought was really interesting was watching how you can see this entity that sells this thing and then you have the universe that that thing inhabits and they're not actually the same thing.

So the brand is about so much more than the product. The brand is about if you like, it was almost this culture that surrounds the product. And I think all of us, we just found that concept.

So it's so interesting and it tied in, you know, it tied into some of the work that we were doing in our masters as well about this idea of like, you know, we were learning about brand tribes and we were learning about semiotics. We were learning about all of these things that that we were finding. We were starting to find references in reality.

And that was really exciting for us. It wasn't until a year and a half later after I had just thought about what like after I'd finished my master's, I was like, what am I actually going to do with my life that I discovered that brand strategy was a career. And I was very lucky that, you know, people get into brand strategy in all different directions.

I was lucky that I didn't have to go in through the planning function, you know, at an ad agency where depending on where you work, the strategist and not the most appreciated people in their business, I went to a brand strategy agency and I started as a brand strategy intern. So I didn't I also didn't start in account management. So I really just got to go straight into the strategy function.

And it was, you know, I've I've left strategy and I came back because I thought surely my first career, the first thing that I pick is not going to be the thing that I actually want to do. Actually, it was. So, yeah, like I've ever ever since then I've worked. I've worked in the strategy function here or there. And now I'm here. Now I'm actually starting my own business in it.

Yeah. What do you love about it? Like, what's the joy?

You said you left it and came back. Where is the joy in it for you?

Yeah, so I mean, the things that I left were the kind of inverse of the things that I love it for. My, you know, the owner of the most recent agency that I worked at articulated it in a really interesting way, where he said it's one of the only jobs in the world where your role is to create intangible value. So we know that brands have value, but they are not tangible.

They're not something that you can touch or feel. You know, it's a job that's very, very difficult to explain to your parents. You're transacting on ideas. So what you create is value in the form of an idea, and it's purely conceptual. And I think that's the thing with brand strategy that I find interesting. And it's the perspective on strategy that I will hold for the rest of my life because I never worked at an ad agency, per se, where things are geared towards the execution or the expression brand strategy.

I like brand strategy. It is very pure in a way, because it's just what is the idea? What's the thing that we want to communicate? No, no, no, no, not the ad. You know, there's a lot of no, not the design, not the brand mark. Those are expressions of the idea. What's the idea itself? And I think working with people to understand what that is and to commit to that thing and to commit resources to it and to build belief behind it. And then and then to start on the expression of the idea. But then also not just the expression from a comes perspective, but the operationalization of that idea.

I think that's very gratifying. You know, it's the inverse is that some days you feel very alienated from your labor because the thing, the work that you do is so unmoored. Sometimes it feels from reality.

And, you know, I imagine it's actually like I have the conversation with friends of mine that work at McKinsey or consulting firms is you're so far up the value chain that you are very alienated from the outcomes of your actions. So that's why I like to, you know, in my in my own business now, that's why I like to get much more hands on with training because I've I found a way to reconcile that through education. You know, which if you educate someone, if you help them to learn something, that is its own reward. And that that was certainly what I learned from from being a lecturer. So now I've started to try and bridge the gap between those two things into something that I really enjoy doing.

You talked about, you know, that things have changed in some ways. Some things have changed and some things have not changed. But I think one of your recent pieces of content was around brand building today, you know, in the age of influencers. And I'm just curious, how would you describe the state of brand building today and maybe also the state of comprehension around brand building among marketers? What do people in this figure not understand about how it works?

I think in London, they do. I think in London, I think in London, that's where it's very clear. Like I took a trip to to the the UK and Europe last year and just observing the the like the ads, the the out of home that when I was walking around in London, I was like, wow, like you can see strategy in this copy. I've actually also never seen that much copy on bus shelters before. Like they really expect a lot of their viewer to say, you're actually going to read this like a paragraph. It's almost it almost feels like the old the old style of advertising, you know, when they had a lot of copy and errant.

I still do think that there is I think there is a struggle for comprehension about brand strategy more broadly. But that's what there's a minute because there's a million different people who say what brand strategy is. It's not that there's one clearly defined perspective on what it is. I still believe there's that challenge of the idea is not the expression of the idea. You need to understand the idea. You need to understand the idea first.

When we talk about comprehension, you know, I I mentioned it in that in that podcast that I spoke to Eric about when I was on the DTC podcast that I think brands themselves brand, I think agencies, maybe, you know, some of them do understand the concept of brand strategy as separate from the expression of that brand strategy. I think that a lot of businesses don't and they lean on their agencies to be able to create those brand strategies. But then they only look at those brand strategies within the comms realm.

So I think particularly there is a pipeline of we're going to get our add our big full service ad agency to create the brand strategy using a brief that we've given them. And then the ad agency is going to create an ad from that. And that's going to be that's the brand campaign.

That's the brand ad. And then a lot of people focus on that particular comms element and go, OK, that's the brand strategy there because those two things are too close together. And then that ad and then that ad gets fragmented through all the different channels, exactly.

So it goes from the top of the pyramid and then it sprinkles all the way down. That's kind of that's that's what I would say. A lot of brands seem to understand brands as and I would say to that, I would say. That that era of brand building through that style of farming out those competencies to your agencies is coming to a close because the media landscape is too fragmented now. So relying on your ad and it's too and it takes too long from inception all the way to completion as well. You know, we're talking about depending on the size of your organization, like six to eight months to getting that ad campaign out.

I think what you know, when I think about the kind of things that I teach now is flipping that from the top down to actually looking at it from the bottom up. So, you know, and I've talked about this before. Brands are now built boots on ground through armies of influencers, curators, gatekeepers.

It's basically your brand that is mediated through this force of all of these different people. And so, again, you actually have to go back to that point of what is the idea as separate from the expression of the idea? Because if you've got 50 different content creators, curators, gatekeepers, et cetera, that are creating all of these little fragments of your brand, you can't give them the expression of the idea.

They're going to express the idea. And in fact, they're going to express the idea quite differently because I think this is particularly what what's going to change is that tone of voice is going to become more and more inconsistent because every single one of these messages is going to be delivered in the tone of voice of the creator. But the strategy has to be even more consistent because how inconsistent the tone of voices.

So that's what I try to explain to them is, OK, you use your strategy needs to be simple, clear and actionable, and then understand that all of this stuff is going to flex. But you're still trying to get them to ladder back to consistent, favorable associations in one way or the other. So and then, yeah, and then there is almost there's an inductive thing of you can also use these people to test messages and the messages that flow through.

You can start to actually build inductively into a brand platform.

Yeah. How do you manage that tension? I mean, I feel like one of the first interviews I did here conversations I did was with Grant McCracken. And he talked about how, you know, when I was coming up, you know, the goal was this old idea that you just got one idea and you have to keep saying it consistency, you know what I mean? And you need to really keep it clear and consistent. He articulated something very similar to what you're saying, that he said what he says in the old days that you couldn't be too complicated because you didn't want to scare the horses. Like you just had to be one thing all the time. There was this really silly idea about the consumer. But then he said now it's like multiplicity is what he was talking about. So there's some tension between the permission to be a bunch of different things and a bunch of different contexts, right? But there is also a need to be something to be, like you said, a man of the kind of associations. How do you manage that tension or how do you communicate that that tension with the people that you work with?

I think, yeah, look, I think that consistency is still underrated in the marketing function. So when I when I answered this question, I'm I'm trying to be a little bit careful because I think there is a role for flex. But I think that there's already too much flex in most brands through inconsistency. So I think like then there's a you know, there's this guy Andrew Tyndall in the UK that you may be familiar with who runs system one, which is it tests ad effectiveness. And, you know, they've released a bunch of reports about how how much inconsistency is costing brands. Let's just wait a way, right?

Yeah, exactly. Inconsistent, like spurious campaigns and creative created that like that don't have consistency, I would say like consistency, particularly an application of not just brand message, but also application of brand codes. But it's basically, you know, like I do really subscribe to the principle that like just as you are starting to as the brand team are starting to get so absolutely sick of this particular brand or campaign or whatever, that you can't stand the side of it.

The customers are just starting to form an understanding of what it is and what it means. So, you know, I still think that the premise is the strategy is what should remain consistent in that. OK, yes, again, what is the idea? What's that piece of mental real estate that we want consumers to understand when they hear our name?

And I think probably like and I'm going to draw on stuff that Mark Ritson talks about here when he talks about KitKat. He's like, that's a great brand strategy with a great set of brand codes that is very consistently understood within the minds of its consumers. It's about, you know, having a break, basically. It's generally about snacking as well. That association needs to be consistent, but the way that those messages can be communicated through all of the different channels can be very different.

So you can brief, lets say you're doing this kind of influencer campaign. You've got 50 different people. You need to be able to explain to them that this brand is about taking a break, that this brand is about taking a moment out. That stays consistent. The way that that message flows through all of these different 50 different people is very different. It's accomplished in 50 different tones of voice.

It's like it's fragmented across all of these different channels and all of these different forms of messaging. But it ladders back to something consistent in the aggregate. That's kind of like I basically the metaphor that I've been using here is this is brand as mosaic. So the idea is that the the media landscape has gotten so fragmented. There's no single point of origin for a place that a brand is experienced anymore.

So I think that's that. That's the shift is you can't rely on your audience to see the TV campaign first. So that old model of ad agency driven brand building is not effective.

There it's experienced in this sort of cultural milieu among a sea of other things. Images, art, news, entertainment, memes, scientific breakthroughs, whatever. And all of these there are all these different disparate fragments in which the brand is experienced.

So there has to be some sort of consistent line, but they all have to function independently. So they have to function as independent little moments that ladder up to something in the in the aggregate, which is which is the mosaic, which is is basically what what your brand is and what it stands for.

Yeah, it's and you make this point that it puts an extraordinary amount of pressure on the positioning itself that you can hand it off to so many different people and trust in some way that they're going to be it's going to be accumulative, right?

Yeah, because and that's almost that's the almost the insight from what I saw working in brand agencies. I would create or we would create these. I would consider them what I liked about brand strategy originally. I think that had a beauty and purity to it. This I this idea like succinctly articulated of this concept. But what I would find is that there would be let's call it a hum.

There will be meaning loss between each stage of handover. So there's meaning loss between yourself and the design function, although they're they're probably the best at interpreting it. There's meaning loss between you and the client. When you hand it over to them, they don't grasp the full nuance of the idea. There's more meaning loss when that goes over to the ad agency to create the campaign. And then there's a significant degree of meaning loss between every other stakeholder that has to interact with the brand strategy that wasn't involved with the project.

So you're basically you create this idea that is very beautiful, very nuanced. But then people are not able to grasp the complexity of that nuance. And so the brand ends up being really highly watered down. And that just kind of made me realize like it's almost it's almost impossible to create a really complex brand strategy. And in many ways, it's probably not and not not only is it complex, like a strategy should be simple, a strategy should be clear. You should be able to read it and understand how to drive action from it.

And other people who haven't been involved in the creation of that should also be able to understand and interpret what this thing is about and how they're going to deliver to it. So that's, again, has kind of been the step change for me in creating brand strategies is rather than write something that's very beautiful, but leaves room for interpretation or miscommunication. It's just get the people who have resources in this organization to understand what they're committing to and commit resources to it.

And then however that thing is written in many ways, it doesn't actually matter because you've basically achieved consensus. If once you've achieved consensus for the exec, I think on a position like you have got yourself 80 to 90 percent of the way there. And then the and then the marketing team or the function know that they have license to basically pursue stuff in line with that. And then they can they can ladder back to that conversation. So actually, you know, what it allows them to do is it allows them to become more consistent in the way that they work.

Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about process. I mean, I'm a I'm a researcher and consultant and, you know, I believe deeply and qualitative and face to face. And I realize everybody has their own way of learning and discovering what they need to discover in order to develop a strategy or a position.

I'm just curious, what did what did you learn coming up about the role of research? How do you discover what you feel like you need to know to help people develop a strong, clear position? Hmm.

So I've come from my background is quite heavy. Again, it's heavy duty strategy. So, you know, I've worked in places where strategy is the only output. No design, no ad, anything. It's almost, you know, it almost goes across almost into commercial strategy or customer strategy in that way. I've worked with lots of different processes in the past.

So I've worked on brands that have got, you know, three to six month lead times from inception through to strategy. I don't want to really do that anymore. I think that what I learned through that is.

Brand is politics. Brand is a brand is a political process. So is it like I've got a couple of really key, key memories from early to mid in my career? If you, the marketing team, walked into the CFO's office and you said, I'd like to have input on the financial planning for the year forward, I would like to provide my perspective, the CFO would say,”Get the f**k out of my office.”

But if the CFO walks in on a brand planning meeting and says, I want to provide my input on where I believe this brand should go, they get to have input, As does everyone else in the organization. So for some for some reason, not for some reason, brand is a permeable function that everyone in the organization believes that they have a role in because everyone believes that they're represented by a brand.

So I work at I work at so and so company. That means that I get to have an input on how that thing is communicated and expressed in the market. So when I see a big when I see a big strategy project, what I'm seeing is it's a it's a very highly it's a politically complex project and you need to arm yourself accordingly with the with the creation of that strategy because

everyone gets to have gets to have an input on it.

So, I mean, I think that that really shaped my perspective on things where. When when it comes to process for me, there is a very strongly political element to that process. But I look at it from the lens of how am I going to get people to understand what a brand strategy is?

So for that, that may include that, you know, you know, it's almost like I'm thinking about how am I going to get the strategy approved and committed to rather than and I actually think in many ways that secondary thing is as important, even more important than OK, but what is the idea? Because the because, you know, if we consider what is the main challenge with brand strategy? It's consistent application and execution of it.

So then all of a sudden, actually, what you're saying is not as important as your ability to get people to commit to saying the thing. And that's what that's basically what my whole process is built around when it comes to brand strategy. So, yes, there is definitely like a I'll work like I'll work with researchers.

My methodology is short, sharp, high value. It you know, there are interviews with the exec that I run beforehand that are basically, you know, asking them questions that get them to understand brand is not just comms. So I asked them basically about how does this business make money? What are the things that you are focusing on strategically? And then I kind of and then I'll work through all of that stuff. That kind of primes them to understand that we're not just having a comms conversation.

I'll bring in where relevant, like a market researcher, if they want to do something like customer research or stakeholder research. And then the process itself coalesces around one three hour workshop with the exec generally where I say, OK, here's what I've found now. Now, with that primed, we're going to work out what is this actual strategy going to be?

What's it going to be about? And that's that's the process. So it is really about getting buy in and commitment to whatever the thing is.

It's not about what I do, because it's written out in bullet points, because it's not fully formed, I find when people look at a strategy that's fully formed, they start to read it as if it's a piece of communications and then they start to pick apart. Is it this word or is that word correct? And they end up being a semantic conversation.

Whereas if I deliver it to them in a more raw form, that's more like bullet points, then they then that mindset breaks and they start to think of it as, OK, no. What is what is the strategy? What's the thing that we're committing to? And I found that has been a really, really effective process for getting people who have absolutely zero understanding of brand strategy to say, OK, this is actually a tool for action. This is a tool for decision making and tradeoffs. And that's yeah, that's basically my process.

And then then we have another three hour workshop the day afterwards to actually say, OK, if we create this strategy, then what are the implications for the strategy in terms of what we're actually going to do? Yeah.

And what do you find? I'm curious about the people that are coming to you. You've been on your own. How long have you been out on your own? It's relatively recent, right?

It's been it's been about it's been about three months, but it's been full time. It's been full time just under two months.

What's that been like? I mean, what's your experience been of what was what drove the choice and then how's it been?

What drove the choice was sort of a recognition about the way. You know, it was more internal than external. There's a recognition of the way that I wanted my own career to proceed. I wanted to incorporate more education into the offer. And yeah, my previous agency has been fully supportive of this. We don't like we don't get the same types of clients and we don't do the same type of work.

So, you know, they sort of helped. They sort of gently helped me out the door as well. And that was kind of the main thing. And I was also having a lot of through creating the content. I was having a lot of people approach me and say, hey, I'd like to work with you, but I don't quite know how we can work together. And so in many ways, I also inductively developed that offer as well through those conversations with people.

And it's been like the things are starting to settle into a rhythm that I would consider a little bit more sustainable. Now, I've got I've got a workflow that I actually can replicate in a way that allows me to run things. competently and efficiently.

But yes, the transition to business owner has been a very challenging one. And I've learned a lot of things very quickly. You know, that's everything from, you know, your finance and invoicing to how to manage your time more effectively to knowing basically what kind of conversations and meetings are going to lead to things versus things that are going to be a little bit of a waste of your time.

Like that's that's been like I had. Yeah, one of my tech talks, which is the channel that really is how all of this got started. One of my tech talks is sitting at one point three million views. And another one is sitting at one point two million views. And from those tech talks, I reckon each of them would have led to 20 people reaching out and wanting to do something together. And so learning to triage all of that into OK, but what operationally what is actually going to work, what is an opportunity that is worth dedicating resources to because it is it's just me and they want to work with me. So it's not it's not a thing that is set up to scale in the same way. That that has been a really steep learning curve for one that I'm starting to really get ahold of on now.

How did the content creation, the TikTok stuff, how did that begin? It seems I mean, my experience and I don't I honestly don't know how long you've been doing it. But I mean, you sort of just showed up out of nowhere in my experience and maybe it was just like, holy s**t, there's a guy on TikTok who's like super smart about brand and culture. And I'm not a TikTok person, you know what I mean? But you in the so I'm just curious, how did you how did that begin?

I got to a point in my career earlier in the year where it was a kind of it was a real question of where to next. What's the next thing that I want to accomplish? And I've always been a person that's had a destination in mind. And ironically, when I started creating this content, it was the first time that I proceeded with a direction, but not a destination. So I knew what I wanted to do was find more people in my field that I would be able to connect and collaborate with. I knew that I wanted to hone my own perspective further on strategy.

I felt like I was forming something, but it was still tied into the, if you like, the ontology of the agency. And I wanted to be able to create my own perspective. And so I think I was like, I need to do something that is separate to the work that that the work that I'm doing.

And I need to I want to understand what it is that I want to talk about as well. So if you go back to my early videos, there's kind of many different things that I'm talking about here and there. You know, I'm talking about what does good brand strategy look like? How do you write a good brand strategy? I'm making commentary on rebrands here and there. Like I'm doing all of this stuff.

And then at one point, it sort of clicked what I wanted to talk about and what the audience wanted to hear most was culture analyzed through the lens of brand. So providing cultural commentary about, I would say, why do people feel the way that they feel and why do they feel the way that they feel now? And what is the effect, I would say, of let's call it social media, but even more broadly, the Internet.

I'd say the Internet interests me not as a platform, but as a mediating force something that shapes how we actually understand ourselves and understand one another. And and through creating content, I realized that that was actually what I wanted to talk about. And that that's how things have have gone since then.

So I will I learn most of what I want to talk about through intuition, through conversations that I have with people at bars or, you know, just like at a gallery or whatever. Like when I'm when I'm talking to someone, what I find is ideas naturally pop up and then I think, oh, I can make a video of that. And then I just need to be able to connect the connect the brand lens into it. But it's really more. Yeah, I like it. It's what am I seeing out in the world defines what I actually want to talk about.

I feel like that was my first encounter with you. That resonates with what you just described. Are you working on anything now?

Are you in the middle of a particular observation or communicating a particular point of view?

There's a few that there's a few things that I've got going, like content is also it's a runway to the conversation we were having beforehand where it's a it's a never ending runway that you're always having to find new ideas for. Fortunately, I've got two dozen ideas in a in a notion doc. But the thing that I've probably do, I was going to release it now, but I'm going to release it at the start of next year is I'm going to do a six part series on host luxury status symbols.

So what, you know, and I did a video about the the death of luxury as a status symbol a couple of weeks ago where I talked about how the luxury industry abandoned craft over the past 15 years and they sort of eroded their own status as a status symbol and other things have started to take their place. So I'm just going to go through, you know, I'm going to lay out a thesis for why, again, like why luxury and even the beauty industry have also started to lose their position as the as the core status symbol and what some areas like almost some cultures, some some behaviors or activities, why they're the new source of status. That's that's like a six part series that I'm going to be doing in the start of next year.

That's like the most significant one, I would say.

Well, can we talk about that? Can we slow can we sort of break that down? What's the what is the how would you describe the state of luxury and status today?

Yeah, so, I mean, that that video that I made was basically saying that luxury industries were originally defined by human craft and detailing and scarcity. And that was where the, you know, the intersection of those things was where luxury brands or all the major luxury brands and fashion houses built their brand equity. But in the late 20th century, in the early, early 21st century with the advent of things like licensing, but also just the access to a greater and greater portion of the market, they sort of realized we've got all this brand equity.

We can exploit that brand equity to serve greater and greater proportions of the market. So what we've done, let's say this is not just fashion. I use BMW as an example. BMW used to have three series of cards. Now it has what, seven or eight? And how many of them are truly luxury? How many of them are truly scarce? So, you know, the one series, the two series, a bunch of the three series as well.

They're not about human craft anymore. They are effectively all the middle class. Or the slightly aspirational middle class. And, you know, you may say the same with LV or brands like Gucci, where they tried to where they basically created all of these new products that had absolutely nothing to do with craft. Craft wasn't in the narrative as well. The brand world was far beyond that story.

In addition to that, what has what social media done effectively? Like what the effect of social media has been to feel a cultural oversaturation of brands and products. So even if something, let's say Hermes, even if something is scarce, it is defined by craft. When you can type in Hermes Birkin on Instagram and you can see thousands of Birkin bags and people posting their Birkin bags, it loses its it loses its supposed mythical status. It becomes just another common object in a way.

There's a difference between physical scarcity. It doesn't guarantee digital scarcity in a way.

Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, and then you see the true volume of these bags. You see the true volume of of people that have the bags as well. And the way that the bags are

shot in that user generated content is obviously a lot less aspirational, too. So the brand loses the halo or the mystique as part of that.

And so, you know, so I'm kind of in this video that's not come out yet. And I'm talking about how what's actually happened was that the beauty industry has actually taken over as the real luxury industry of the last 10 years. It's all been about your skin, your hair, your teeth, et cetera.

But I'm going to lay forward a thesis that with the rise of Osempic, with the mainstreaming of cosmetic procedures and with cosmetic surgeries getting better and better, even that is becoming really accessible as well. Like that's not going to be as scarce. And so it will it too will lose its status as a status symbol or as the status symbol.

And so in this video, I'm going to lay out a thesis for why I believe the next the next era of status symbols are things that can't be exclusively compressed into the physical realm. They're going to be status symbols that are behavioral status symbols. So things that can't exactly be captured on camera, things that are more demonstration of the way that you live.

And I've got kind of like sex. I've got one like, for instance, like privacy is the first one that I'm going to do. So I'm going to talk about the idea of not having a digital footprint, the idea of not being online, the idea of still knowing where to go and what's cool and what's in while not having your own digital footprint.

Like that ability to retain that ability to retain a position within a cultural hierarchy without having the mechanisms that allow most people to actually understand what that hierarchy is. That's a new status symbol. Yeah.

This sounds so fascinating. I've got two things that are bouncing around in my head. The one is I started out of the brand Consultancy in San Francisco and the guy was kind of a guru, super sort of smart. And and he had this way of speaking in koans. And one of the things that he would say is that we consume what we're afraid we're losing. Hmm. Complicated way of expressing maybe scarcity and status. And then I guess so. Then my question is, are you aware of there's a paper by a woman, Sylvia Bellezza, you heard of the distance and alternative signals of status? She's got a hypothesis that I think is it shares your diagnosis that in the past status was about scarcity was sort of an up down. You know what I mean? And then there was this period of highbrow, lowbrow. So that that's not being negotiated on this vertical axis. But now, because of everything you've described, it's really the true signifier is just your distance from the mainstream. So in any direction are away from whatever is conventional. And she's got these six characteristics, but I can't do justice to the whole idea, but I'll share it with you.

Send it to me. That's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting, the highbrow, lowbrow, because that was obviously the last 10 years with like Balenciaga, for instance, like that was the remix of highbrow and lowbrow. Such that middle class consumers would not be able to participate because middle class people were too close to the lowbrow.

So they would not be willing to engage in those forms of remixing because it was too close to their everyday realities, whereas high status, high class people were able to because they were confidently highbrow. They were able to remix some of those lower, lower tier status symbols through high materiality and production, et cetera. That's really what it was. It was about not distancing you from poverty, but distancing you from middle class aspirational wealth and status.

Yes. Yes. I think she talks about this idea of signaling costs, too, that like you can you risk being in an environment where nobody where people don't really know what you're doing, you know what I mean? And you're wearing something ridiculous and nobody at least sees you for doing the status seeking thing that you're doing. But I want to talk about because through all your observations, because I was looking at watching your TikTok, you talk a lot about the collapse of meaning. It's sort of it's like a thread between the from the death of the woke rebrand, the chaos packaging, the aesthetics of rebellion for the last few that you've done.

I guess maybe there's an overarching question about just meaning management and in the state of now. And in any one of those TikToks that you want to talk about, the rebellion or the chaos packaging for the woke rebrand, because you're very yeah, I mean, I guess it's that the meaning we're just we're we're really it's all collapsing around us in a way.

Yeah, so I mean, I'm not going to do any of this justice. So I'm not I'm like I'm not even going to attempt to in some ways. But like a lot of my work is like I would say the through line through my work is probably the theories of people like Mark Fisher and Guy Dubois, like Society of the Spectacle and maybe like a little bit of Applied Baudrillard as well, although like I'm not going to profess to actually be able to that I actually understood any of the books of his that I've read. But that there is to me that I like feeling of.

What when I talk about the collapse of meaning, what I'm really thinking about is like, through all of my content, why are people feeling the way that they feel? And right now, particularly not just young people, but particularly young people, what is the effect of the society we live in and, you know, through the lens of like the cultural, psychological, technological pressures as well that like. And then I talk and then in a lot of the way, what I'm talking about is the Internet as a as a mediating force that sort of shapes the way that we understand ourselves and one another. And so all of these different things, like all of these different videos that I create often have that as a as a through line.

And then obviously the thing that wraps it all together is what's the role of brand in it? So, you know, what I'm talking about, what I'm using is brand is the lens through which I analyze culture, because that's what I mean, I understand brand and it's kind of like it's two ways. Sometimes it's how is culture influencing the way that we brand?

And sometimes it's how is the way that we brand reflects our influence in culture? So when I was talking about that, the death of the work rebrand thing, that was really that video was really about how we get here? How did a word that was originally, you know, originally termed, obviously, by a different community, but co-opted by a right wing reactionary extremist section of the Internet? How did that get mainstreamed? How did those ideas start to filter into not only the political discourse, but I would say mainstream conversations? And what was the role of brands in actually helping to mainstream that conversation?

And so that that video was very much about that brand purpose era where we took the aesthetics of progress and the communications of progress, but not the but we didn't do the work. How has that actually done damage? And how is that how is that actually opened the door for a lot of people to become really disenfranchised with the idea of progress?

That was what that video was about. Chaos packaging, which was was a video which was about the chaos packaging movement. Now, someone like at Labor Labor to say, I didn't invent the term chaos packaging. That was a person called Michael J Miraflor.

OK, how is culture influencing brand? So we're experiencing a sort of semiotic breakdown now where images and information are delivered to us at such a volume and density that they exceed our ability to consciously process it. And, you know, that and that blends into the worlds of semiotics, where it's the ideas that are communicated through those images. So the, you know, the sign and it's referred to the thing that it refers to, the signifier and the signified like there's a semiotic breakdown there. These things don't necessarily need to correlate to one another anymore.

What we actually what we need is the prior of the priority is to get attention. Maybe what we want to do is actually create dissonance rather than create harmony. So rather than creating some sort of harmonic semiotic code, you know, it's green, it's wholesome, it's healthy.

It's, you know, it looks like gin. No, why don't we actually make something that doesn't look like a gin? Why don't we make something that actually looks like motor oil and then sell sell it as gin? And that is dissonance. That requires a high level of engagement from the consumer and that pulls them in. So it's yeah. So that was a conversation more around the idea of what it take to get attention now.

Yeah, I love the cam and I really enjoy all of them. And I want to linger maybe on the chaos packaging one there, because I mean, I feel like one of the principles of brand is that in some level, you're sort of responsible for the structure of the category, right? That the brands are kind of shorthand for a category. So what do you do as a brand manager or a strategist? How do you manage that tension between just violating all the I mean, this is an Ehrenberg bass that talks about category entry points and all that stuff, all this distinctive assets. We maybe we talked about this last time, too. There's always this tension between conforming and and what's the opposite of conformity and rebelling?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, you know, the insight that I had from that was basically it's game theory. So not everyone in there's a few people in the category can benefit from.

Let's call it semiotic confusion. But if everyone participates in semiotic confusion, then the sign itself starts to break down and the category becomes impossible to shop. One thing that I also spoke about is for a brand manager, if you want to pursue this strategy, recognizing that it is, I think that's what's interesting is it is a it's a rebel strategy.

So it's a it's a challenge, a brand archetype in many ways. But the packaging is only one overall part is one touchpoint of the overall brand experience. So what is the brand world, the DNA and the codes that you're building around that packaging to actually make it makes if it doesn't make sense in one context, it actually makes sense in another one.

So the online context, like the example was Vacation SPF. So they've made it look you know, the product looks like Cool Whip, basically, or it looks like shaving cream. But the brand world is this kind of like Miami 80s, you know, sun drenched days by the pool, like, and it's like it really makes sense within that context. And that brand world is really beautiful and evocative. And that's what they're selling. Like they're selling.

It's like it's a nostalgia brand, effectively. It's a well, you may say it's like a it's a post-algebra brand because most of the people that consume this product never lived through the 80s. But they're living through an idea of the 80s through Vacation SPF. But that like, that's what the that's the real project. Like the real project is where in what context do the semiotics that you're building actually make sense?

Yes. And I mean, are you making the case that that does make sense? That's an example of a brand operating on sort of a multidimensional challenger strategy.

[Speaker 1]

Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think that the packaging is probably the most important touchpoint in terms of grabbing immediate attention. But then the brand world is what reconciles that dissonance and makes it, you know, an evocative and interesting narrative for you to want to be a part of. Like Vacation, like that's really to me, that's a really interesting brand where they're like, OK, they took something that could have been just a gimmick and then they made something really interesting around it.

Like a lot of people talk about Liquid Death as well. Like in many ways, Liquid Death was the first chaos packaging brand where they took the semiotic codes some people say they took the semiotic codes of alcohol. I think they actually took the semiotic codes of like rock and they put it into water, which is, you know, the least edgy thing that you can consume. Right. So that that to me, that sort of that semiotic dissonance there, that tension of something that's really hardcore with something that's really straight edge.

That's where the brand of liquid death is formed. And then that's where you see all of their comms, like all of their comms are playing on this idea of being ironically hard. We're not we're not actually a heart. It's just water. But Ira, but ironically, it's a really hardcore. It's really gothic. Would you know, we do brand activations with Yeti where we make Yeti coffins? Like the humor really comes through really strongly in that brand. Yeah.

Yeah, it's amazing. The more recent one you did was the the death of the woke rebrand, which touches on brand purpose. I'm wondering if that's what I want to ask you about.

I'm so so I have spent a little bit of time in the sort of the drinks space, like sort of the spin drift, like this idea of a collapse of meaning that where category lines really get blurred seems to be something that I'm running into as an old person looking for category boundaries. Right. And they don't seem to play the same role as they played in the past.

Well, you've just described vacation seems it almost feels like there's like an extra dimension to sort of the brand management or something. And I'm curious if number one is what I'm saying makes sense to you. You know, I mean, I feel like I'm asking that it does seem like there's sort of a multidimensionality to the way a lot of these propositions are racing the boundaries around Dota and seltzer and juice. You know what I mean? This is a very banal example. But is it this the tick-tokification of brand where you just have to kind of resist in multiple dimensions at once? Or you you're not as beholden to sort of the category from which you come because the media appetite is so intense that it sort of eliminates the need to really be a category player. You need to be a media player first.

Yeah, I mean, that I think is true in that, you know, if we go back to the conversation that I had, if you're a brand now, you're a content creator like a well, so it's not not all brands. You know, if you're a bottle recycling business where you make like, you know, you make waste into tarmac or whatever, then you're not. But if you're a consumer brand, then you are a content creator effectively.

Why is so like just what's the what's the first principle of that?

Well, I mean, it's how are you, how are you? It's marketing, right? How are you getting in front of people and how are you drawing attention to your brand? And, you know, like there are of this, of course, there's there's all the four the four pays and whatever. And like, that's not to say, you know, you are as a marketer, you are thinking about pricing. You're thinking about how you're going to distribute.

You think about all of these things. But the the content pace, like the volume of content that you can produce and the ease of which you can get in front of an audience from that, like at the cost that you can produce it as well. Like, this is something that I talk about with a lot of brands is on social creativity is more important than budget.

So if you go on to TikTok or Instagram reels, but particularly TikTok, the videos that get the most significant distribution are not the ones that took the most time and effort and resources to produce, they're just the ones that have the most novel ideas and they can be produced incredibly cheaply. And so I think, you know, we can talk about the effect of TikTok and brain rotting our children, whatever. But I think effectively, like what we have is a media platform that has completely flattened the cost of entry.

So you can be anyone and you can sell anything. And as long as you can make a culture of entertainment around your product or a culture of education around your product, you can build an audience for that. Like, I mean, that's like that's me. You know, I'm just talking about some niche. I'm talking about culture through the lens of brand. And I managed to build an audience for that as well.

You know, so it doesn't matter if you're like what particular good or product, whatever you're selling like that, the category matters less. And by the way, we're talking specifically through the lens of online social media and entertainment. The categories matter less than your ability to build the like the brand world.

Like, that's almost what your anchor point ends up being. Like, what is it? What's the thing that we're actually going to the thing that we're actually going to create in terms of a brand universe? And then we'll work out what we're selling as well as part like as a way of executing on that brand universe.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's beautiful. Awesome. Is there anything else you want to talk about?

I feel like this is perfect. This has been a great conversation and I can build to this and what we did before.

It's been an interesting conversation. I don't sometimes I don't get the opportunity to actually stop and think about this through line with all of my content.I'm kind of what I'm trying to express. I'm kind of caught up in the micro thing. It's rather than the macro. So it's been good to have this conversation.

But good. I'm glad I'm glad that's the case because your stuff is really provocative and I feel like there are dimensions at work that are. Yeah, like I said, there's just a different way of being. That makes sense, right? I mean, if you're going to build it, you know, if you're living in a different media environment or experiencing things in a different media environment, the brands that you build in there are going to be wildly different.

Yeah, like I'm about to do an interview in a little bit as well. Someone's asking me more specifically about how have we shifted in the errors of branding and they say, yeah, you know, with the new Gen Z customer coming in and all I'm like, OK, yes, the demographics are a part of it. But it's actually the cultural and media environment that Gen Z just so happened to be the faces of.

But TikTok exists regardless of whether it's Gen Z or not, like the cultural and political situation is what it is. They're just the ones that are the most, you know, they're the figureheads of the movement like they they represent that particular movement because they're the young people in youth culture as well as something that a lot of brands really went to appropriate. So but, you know, I'm saying basically like I've been I'm going to talk to them about the end of the millennial brand era, which was the seat like that, like 2012 to 2018, generally like venture capital backed brands like Harry's and Hymns and Casper, etc.

That were all that disrupting existing categories with something that was much more, quote unquote, authentic. That was a little bit more about the story. The like the the purity of the product as well. The no BS, the cutting out the middleman. I'm talking about Everlane as well. And it's not that those brands are brand narratives are ineffective because they're not effective for Gen Z.

It's because those brand narratives are no longer effective for the media environment that we find ourselves in that the way that those packaging stories are told isn't effective for the ferocity of the competition of getting attention. And so if you're, you know, running off seasonal brand campaigns and this particular type of brand shoot and a really static content and focused on aesthetics over all else, nobody has time for you anymore to ingest that message. You need to be much more aggressive and dynamic.

I would say in your entire content and and brand approach.

I was listening to an interview in a totally different context with people both of whom were really smart both of whom have written books about social like society and they were making the observation that when they were writing the book, they couldn't get it sold because it was so provocative. But then somebody, you know, took a risk on it, published it. But by the time it got into print, the idea was sort of it would already been normalized and was sort of eddy. And the the hypothesis was I think about it like a metabolism right that culture is moving so fast. It's sort of digesting things so quickly that you need to be producing something that's what's the what's to push the metaphor your your brand needs to be something that's hard to metabolize or something.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting because it's like we have cultural acceleration on some dimensions and then we have cultural stagnation on others. So this goes into Mark Fisher's thinking of like we've got technology advancing at a really rapid rate, even with the advent of AI like technology is advancing at a faster rate than it has been over the past couple of decades, but that technology doesn't seem to bring with it the hope for new possibilities. In fact, that technology seems subordinated to the refurbishment of established cultural forms.

So while our technological environment is changing and while there may be changes in packaging or whatever, etc., the media that we consume in terms of like the ideas underneath like almost the ontological stuff feels like the same things that we've been consuming for the last 20 or 30 years. So some stuff is stuck in place while others like some that you know, the important things are stagnating while all this other stuff is accelerating and that I think that's one of the things that makes it really difficult to live these days. It's this feeling of like how is it that there's all this new stuff and yet none of it feels new?

Yeah. Yeah. How can there be so much change and so little change at the same time?

Exactly.

And yeah, I wish you just a ton of luck and I appreciate you sharing your time with me.

Yeah, I really appreciate you reaching out. I think, you know, of all the things that we talked about today, you know, the reason that I am forming clarity on what I am, what I do and what this whole platform is about comes through conversation. I'm not the type of person that can think on things on my own. My thinking all happens out loud. Just ask my housemate. Basically, they find me talking to myself all day because if I don't have someone in front of me, I have to talk to myself.

Good. Well, I'm glad that I was in front of you for this past hour. And likewise. Yeah. Nice. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Peter. Have a good day.

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