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Desire is always linked to a story, and to a gap that needs to be filled: a yearning that intrudes, agitates and motivates human behavior both consciously and unconsciously.
We desire whatever it is—the place, the person, the thing, the period in our lives—we’re convinced we’re lacking.
Our Kulturbrille allow us to make sense of the culture we inhabit, but these same glasses can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately.
Nor can we say we are any more “ourselves” when we surf the Web anonymously. Without a name, or a face, or an identity, we become primitive versions of ourselves, a phenomenon some experts attribute to a lack of empathy that comes from communicating laptop to laptop, and that is also familiar to anyone who has ever flipped off a pedestrian, or worse, while driving a car.
This is the paradox of online behavior. We’re never truly ourselves on social media, and when we communicate anonymously, the result lacks any context that our offline lives might provide and enrich. Online, what we leave behind is largely considered and strategic, whereas the insides of our refrigerators and dresser drawers are not, as they were never intended for public exhibition.
Considering that 90 percent of what people give off in conversation are nonverbal signals, our truest identities can be found by studying who we are in our real lives, cultures and countries. This amalgamation of gestures, habits, likes, dislikes, hesitations, speech patterns, decors, passwords, tweets, status updates and more is what I call small data.
Joseph Campbell once described as the greatest human transgression: namely, the sin of inadvertence—of not being alert, or altogether awake, to the world around us.
new business concept generally has its origins in a cultural imbalance or exaggeration—too much of something, or too little of something—which indicates that something is either missing or blocked in the society.
Alcoholism, or any kind of addiction, is at its heart a search for transformation and transcendence. It’s an escape from both identity and place. Transcendence isn’t possible for humans, but we keep at it until we die, go crazy or give up searching.
As I mentioned earlier, in sharp contrast to Americans’ reputation for friendliness is the absence of physicality. In the United States, no one ever touches anyone else and if they do so by accident, most apologize immediately.
It’s instructive to compare how dolls in toy stores are sold in America versus how they’re displayed in European toy stores. In Europe, dolls stand side by side on shelves. They’re touching, holding hands with, even embracing each other. In America, a doll is displayed and sold as a single unit, inside a sealed plastic container, as if to communicate that she is alone or, if not, would be smart to keep a distance from her peers. It
America is a military superpower whose prevailing design aesthetic does everything it can to muffle, discourage and eradicate any trace of conflict.
At social events and parties, the topics of sex, politics and religion are all off-limits. (In fact, a lot of what goes on in America is off-limits—or at least too risky to raise in polite company.) Few Americans are willing to discuss things everyone knows but won’t admit—from how tedious it is to stay home all day with a baby, to their true feelings about hip-hop, to how they feel about sex. Most Americans won’t even talk
What’s most striking about mainstream American humor is that it focuses on much of the material they won’t talk about over dinner. Visit any comedy club, or watch Bridesmaids, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy or Louis CK’s routines on YouTube, and you’ll realize that Americans pay comedians millions of dollars to talk about things most of them have felt, or thought, but never said in public.
Political correctness ultimately derives from two things: fear and tribe.
I kept coming back to one word: fear. The circularity of American design and architecture. The bolted hotel windows. The political correctness. The sameness of the retail and hospitality landscape. It puzzled me. What were people scared of? Being sued? Being injured? Firearms? Fear, of course, contradicts everything most people want to believe about everyday life in America. The United States, after all, is synonymous with freedom and social and profession mobility. Which is why the padlocked hotel windows, climate-controlled buildings, paranoia about offending others and emphasis on rules and
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To me, this was the core of life in the United States: Rules and restrictions, most of which are reframed so that Americans believe they are, in fact, safeguards.
With increased transparency comes higher levels of envy and unhappiness, as well as the death of any hiding spaces. How do you reinvent yourself when the original version lives online forever?
From my perspective, smartphones are squeezing creativity out of society, especially among younger generations.
I saw sign after sign telling me I had to do this, or that, but that it was “for my own safety.” Please remove your shoes, belt and laptop for your own safety. The sidewalk is under construction for your own safety. Bottles of Purell hand-sanitizing lotions are situated every few feet at the airport for your own safety. Americans kept being told that they were free, but were they really?
In general, their lives as nonworking wives and mothers revolved around routines and rituals, with their cars becoming almost like small houses on wheels.
One of the first things I noticed as I made my way around the American South was the lack of community. There were no town squares. The downtowns were empty. What’s more, church attendance was down across the United States, a fact confirmed by numerous recent studies. In 2015, a Pew Survey of 35,000 adults revealed that the number of Americans who identified themselves as “Christian” was at its lowest point in history at 70.6 percent, 7 points lower than its 2007 figure of 78.4 percent, a decline happening all over the United States, including the Bible Belt.
After visiting nearly a dozen homes, it was clear that many of the women I’d interviewed had never quite outgrown their childhoods.
an era of pervasive solipsism, where we hear the continuous refrain that technology has unified the world as never before, community in America was vanishing, eroded by big-box stores, a homogenous landscape and the Internet.
When was the last time most Americans felt genuinely free? The answer: when they were children.
Why, for example, do we remember the Geico lizard? The answer? Because a lizard and life insurance have nothing in common. The same is true for a cymbal-playing bunny and an Energizer battery.
I wanted to reintroduce the concept of craving, as studies show that the more anticipation a brand, or an event, can create, the more people enjoy it when it finally shows up.
Lowes Pick and Prep staffers also took special courses where they not only learned how to cut fruit efficiently, but also how to create fruit sculptures, which attracted the attention of children. (If fruit is “fun,” children will eat it.)
New mothers are preoccupied with freshness, but few have any interest in buying a squash or a sweet potato, grinding it into single-serve portions, and throwing away what’s left.
Amazon, and even Walmart, can’t begin to compete against freshness delivered literally a minute or two after a shopper has placed an order.
the freedom that comes from lack of worry, responsibility and self-consciousness, the luxurious liberty, that is to say, that comes from being a kid again.
our perception of the world is almost always local, focusing almost exclusively around ourselves and our neighborhoods and our traditions and our beliefs.
Across the globe, aspiration exists at every level of society, from the lowest to the highest.
As I mingled with the crowds, I couldn’t help but notice a second dimension linked to aspiration: superstition.
strolled through Hong Kong’s malls, you came face-to-face with the same three words: Made in Italy.
More even than France, why is Italy the repository of so much global aspiration? One short answer is the car industry, whose brands include Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bugatti and Maserati, but the Italian fashion industry provides another answer.
fantasies growing up centered around flying.) Fashion, I was reminded again, gives consumers a shortcut to becoming a perceived member of an aspirational tribe.
all send out clues that convey our membership in a tribe. It could be the brand of watch we wear, or a pair of shoes. It could be layered clothing, or an absence of socks, or the presence or absence of a logo.
For years, I’ve been intrigued by the similarities between the world’s most influential brands and the world’s best-known religions. I once went so far as to interview 14 leaders from religions including Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism and Islam in an attempt to figure out the ten characteristics their faiths had in common. In order of importance, I found that they were: A sense of belonging; storytelling; rituals; symbols; a clear vision; sensory appeal; power from enemies; evangelism; mystery; and grandeur.
Rituals serve as an entry ticket to an exclusive universe consumers want to join, and the more often they repeat a ritual, the more of a hardcore fan they become.
Two decades earlier, when I first visited Brazil, every room would have had at least one of its corners devoted to the Virgin Mary, or at the very least a religious urn holding a spray of flowers, but in contemporary Brazil, most people’s “collections” consisted of branded beer cans or bottles holding flowers or pens.
I would give Devassa three attributes borrowed from the world’s best-known religions: evangelism, sensory appeal and rituals.
In addition to how waiters and consumers held their bottles, and women colored their hair, there were other parallels between Italy and Brazil, including climate, high levels of governmental corruption and the influence of the Catholic Church. Italy and Brazil were even geographically divided in a similar fashion, with the south symbolizing “pleasure” and “easy living” and the north representing business, and efficiency, and order.
South America is known as a “high contact” culture, meaning that residents stand closer to one another, touch one another more and are accustomed to more sensory stimulation than residents in, say, northern Europe, with Australians and North Americans believed to be more moderate in their cultural contact level.
Enclothed cognition is a variant of a field of scientific study known as embodied cognition, that believes that “humans think not only with their brains but with their bodies,3” and that in turn, our bodies themselves can suggest various abstract concepts in our brains that affect our behavior.”
selfie can sometimes tell me more about a person than anything inside a meticulously staged bedroom. When a girl shows another girl a photo on a smartphone, the first few things she seeks out are, in order of importance: Am I in this picture? How do I look? Who is standing beside me? Does the person standing beside me in this photo lend me a halo effect of popularity, or is standing beside this person a social liability? Selfies, it seemed, were even more important than the event or moment they were supposed to memorialize.
As I found out earlier, their goal wasn’t to stand out so much that they might become phosphorescent; their goal was to stand out only slightly.
Combining the offline and online world is known across the retail industry as retail convergence. In response, some retailers today have digitally “live” shelves—similar to those electronic speed limit signs that tell you how fast you are driving as you go past them—that customers can swipe with loyalty cards that offer real-time online or in-store discounts, and Waze, the community-based traffic and navigation app, has teamed up with a number of corporations, including Target, to offer geo-location-enabled deals and discounts at nearby stores.
We agreed that offline and on, the biggest advantage of shopping is its social benefits. Shopping gets us out of the house, and stores and malls provide a community, even a small city, of fellow fashion believers. Another thing online retailers cannot do is replace tactility, the human desire to touch and “feel” a shirt or pair of pants before buying it—which is perhaps why Amazon opened its first bricks and mortar bookstore in Seattle in late 2015.
Every successful brand stands for something more than itself, and that thing is emotional.
