I think about brands the way anthropologists think about tribes: with too much curiosity and just enough judgment.

Brands and culture

Eco's 1964 dichotomy between apocalyptics and integrators maps onto the AI debate with uncomfortable precision. But there is a third position he did not name, and it is the one that actually matters.

Strategy and meaning

The future of the market isn't about who offers more. It's about who helps consumers filter the world. But building that filter genuinely, structurally, not just rhetorically, is exactly what most brands are not set up to do.

Critical marketing

Brand activism did not fail. What failed is the version of it that was never really activism: the seasonal commitment, the logo change, the statement with no operational correlate. The data from 2020–2026 is now precise about the cost of that difference.

Critical marketing

The line between cultural appropriation and exchange is not aesthetic — it is structural. It is drawn by who benefits, who is credited, and whether the relationship was built or merely assumed.

Brands and culture

The paradox of authenticity in branding is not that brands cannot be real — it is that the harder they try to appear authentic, the more clearly they reveal they are not. What survives scrutiny is not authenticity. It is consistency.

Strategy and meaning

A meme works not because it is funny, but because it signals cultural membership. Brands that understand this stop trying to go viral and start trying to be genuinely fluent in the language of the spaces they want to inhabit.