Category Archives: Future watch

Color is culture (disruption watch)

Watching for the future feels optional.

Watching for disruption, that’s more urgent.

One way to look for disruption is to watch our color palette.

Cause color is culture. And that means it can tell us that culture is changing.

I was reminded of this when I went to an artisanal fair in Hudson, New York. Everyone around me was dressed in autumnal hues. I had turned out in a bright yellow that can only be called nautical. (I wear this coat not because I sail, but because I am very much hoping I will not get run over when walking at night.)

Autumnal colors, good. Nautical yellow, bad. Color matters because color is culture. (Thank you, Peter Spear, for your patience with a tone-deaf visitor.)

So last night, watching TV, I couldn’t help notice this new ad for Cadillac.  Notice the riotous use of color.

This struck me especially because Cadillac recently used a very different palette, showing new models drifting through the moody, monochromatic, streets of Soho. Very quiet, very hip, very dialed down.

So what gives with all the colors? No, I’m asking. What gives?  Is this an indication of a change in culture? Is this the future whispering in our ear?

But of course, this could well be an eccentric choice on the part of the brand or the agency. That’s always possible. But let’s assume that the people at the brand and the agency is listening to culture as hard as we are…and possibly, just possibly, they think they’ve heard something, they’ve spotted a future, they have seen a disruption in the works.

As I was suggesting in the last post (How to read a t-shirt) we cannot follow everything happening “out there” in culture. We have to rely on other listeners. We have to divide the labor of our disruption watch.

The question now: Are big, extravagant colors coming? And does this suggest something in culture that might be big and extravagant too? Is the new prosperity going to change our palette, our messaging, and the messages that matter in brand building? Is the economy going to drive culture in new directions?

No, I’m asking. Is it?

Postscript.

You know who might have an answer to these questions is Ingrid Fetell Lee who, as it happens, has just published a book called The Aesthetics of Joy. For more details, see  Ingrid’s website here.

Peter Spear has a great newsletter called That Business of Meaning. I think you can subscribe here. Otherwise visit Peter’s website here.

 

How to read a t-shirt (and the future)

Screen Shot 2018-11-06 at 3.15.59 421PMListening for the future is a tricky thing.

If we listen far enough out into the future, we are dealing with very weak signals. Or, better, we are dealing with noise that may or may not be signal.

One way to solve this problem is to enlist the aid of others. To let them listen for us. We need listening stations. Where ever they present themselves. (And they are likely to present themselves in the most unlikely places.)

One example caught my attention recently.

The first came from an essay by Lauren Sherman. Sherman is an impressive journalist. She examines the fashion world broadly defined and has a gift for seeing the pattern in the whirlwind of data that comes spinning up out of this world almost daily. (She writes for Fashion of Business.)

Recently, Sherman wrote about t-shirts.

Traditionally, the t-shirt is a perfect example of a commodity market. It may begin with robust margins but it’s not very long before people are slugging it out for tiny increments barely above cost.

But Sherman noticed a company called Everybody.World was doing very nicely indeed. Everybody.World had discovered that it can sell wholesale in the very teeth of the commodity market.

There was margin here. And lots of customers. The Trash Tee was a hit with streetwear brands including Noah NYC and No Vacancy Inn. It sold to to Shake Shack, Standard Hotel, Google, Airbnb and Dropbox. It was a feature of music festivals like Coachella.

This is a god send for someone who cares about the future. The t-shirt is a message from the future, a glimpse of the world in the works.

Case study learnings (from the ground up)

1. We can’t monitor everything.

2. We enlist the help of others, listening to the listeners, so to speak.

3. In this case, the journalist Lauren Sherman surveys the fashion business and spots something.

4. Everybody.world is making a success of t-shirts (of all things).

5. This is a big and unlikely change: The lowly t-shirt, once the unloved and unlovely child of the clothing biz, and almost the classic case of a commodity market, is undergoing its own little apotheosis. It has escaped the status of an undergarment, night shirt, softball team uniform and college wear. It is now punching above it’s weight and is now the medium for some very interesting messages. There is something to learn here.

This is where the culture watching really begins.

For starters we are looking at the expression of a couple of new sensitivities. These are, or should be, familiar territory, specifically:

6. People prefer things that are recycled.

7. And they prefer things that are manufactured in America.

Let’s treat these as “so noted.”

But the rest is new to me. How about you?

8. These t-shirts reveal something astounding about music festivals. They work there because they help festival organizers speak to 20 different segments. 20! (And the t-shirts work here because these groups are not going to signify their difference with a cheap and flimsy piece of polyester.) We are put on notice that festivals, once monolithic and a little repetitive, are now various. Very various. Certainly we have absorbed the “diversity” lesson from other sources…but this kind of cultural diversity tells us something about consumer taste and preference that our economic models were never designed to content with. Are we ready?

9. These t-shirts sell as street ware. The world of fashion is changing. Design and branding comes not just from on high from the great fashion houses and god-like designers. It comes also from the fearless, endlessly provocative efforts of people who routinely break the rules of the fashion moment. (In the current world of fashion, the insurgent designer, as Scott Miller would call him, is powerful and rising.) Let’s contemplate what this means for branding and PR. If we think we can speak to the world in the big booming voice of corporate self assurance…well maybe it’s time to think again. Everyone in the marketing and innovation biz is taking a risk on new voices. (Consider Nike as a recent case in point.)

10. These t-shirts work for companies like AirBnb and Google precisely because these companies are working hard to get away from that big booming voice of corporate assurance. Nothing says playful and propositional like a t-shirt. Especially when compared to the official bumpf issued by PR at HQ.

11. The t-shirt are also a calculated effort, as expert Sophie Wade tells us, to send a message to the Millennial employee for whom all companies must now compete. A t-shirt says, “look how much fun it must be to work here! We’re, like, super casual! And also totally awesome.”

12. Perhaps the biggest take-away is the evidence these observations give us of a world in which the basic rules and regs are changing. Three worlds, to be specific. That of the Music Festival. That of the street. And that of the organization. All of them have embraced the t-shirt for their own, revealing, reasons. All of them are primed for change. Are we monitoring these changes? Have we read the t-shirt? Have we grasped its message?

The Bill Belichick disruption (and what we can learn from it)

screenshot 2(This post was originally published on Medium two days ago. It is reproduced here with light editing only.)

How do they do it? How do the New England Patriots win so much?

Yes, Belichick is a genius. Yes, this system is the beneficiary of continuities at owner, coach, quarterback and players other teams can only dream of.

There are lots of answers. Every football fan has pondered them.

But here’s one I hadn’t heard of.

On Get Up (ESPN), Dan Orlovsky said this about the Pats offense.

“I don’t really believe that they have wide receivers or running backs.
They just take a bunch of guys [who are] football players and they move them all over the place to get match ups. Their running backs, sometimes they look like wide receivers. Their wide receivers, sometimes they look like running backs. Edelman, Wes Welker, James White, they all kind of look the same, playing different positions.”

This Belichick innovation is something more than a clever adaptation. It’s exactly the kind of thinking we prize these days. It rises above the architecture of thought and solves a problem in a new way. This is a classic disruption, a veritable black swan. The opposition can’t see it coming until there it is on the field.

Other coaches are prisoners of convention. They start with the positions specified by the age-old architecture of football. They find the players that fit these slots. And only then do they begin the work of strategy and execution.

Belichick’s innovation says, in effect,

“We don’t have positions to fill. We have problems to solve. We have plays to run. We will ask our players to conform to the play…instead of asking the play to conform to conventional thinking. Luckily, we have players so talented they can change their stripes from play to play.”

Has Belichick been reading Complexity theory? It’s possible.

What does the Belichick disruption mean to the rest of us?

Most organizations are slaves to convention. There’s the hierarchy that distributes power. There’s the division of labor that tells people what to do. We ask our personnel to conform to these conventions. Instead of turning them loose to solve the problem at hand.

Why can’t we be more like the Pats?

Attributions

The photo is public domain.