CULTURE SNACKs
Quick takes on cultural research and strategic foresight.
How Food and Beverage Companies Must Innovate in a Shifting Landscape
The food and beverage industry stands at a crossroads, facing the dual challenges of evolving consumer demands and potential deregulation under a second Trump administration.
Culture Mapping focuses AI Marketing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the marketing landscape, driving digital growth, and reshaping business practices. Despite increasing interest, there's a noticeable gap in comprehensive reviews within the marketing domain.
ESG and Sustainable Fashion struggle to align with broader societal values
ESG and sustainable fashion are grappling to align with broader societal values. Culture mapping can play a crucial role here starting with an analysis of the language within the storytelling.
The tension between individualism and collectivism
The ongoing clash between individualism and collectivism shows that we need to find a middle ground where both can work together to create better, more balanced solutions for society.
Demure versus “brat” is not a zero-sum game
It’s not about one behavior dominating the other but about understanding the context in which each behavior arises and how they coexist as responses to social pressures.
Beyond the Clock: Unraveling Microtrends, Urgency, and the Essence of Trend Work in 2024
As of January 23, 2024, the Doomsday Clock was set to the closest to midnight as it has ever been. The closer the clock is to midnight, the more urgent and serious the perceived threats to the world. Yet, for the most part, forecasts are babbling about ballet core, corpcore, cowboy aesthetic and mob-wife style on equal footing with climate change, race and economic issues. Show Studio recently pointed out that Louis Vuitton’s cowboy-aesthetic show drew from Hollywood cowboy costumes, not reality.
Culture Mapping the Emergent Signals of Global Youth
The UNDP report is based on the synthesis and analysis of 'signals' collected by a global network of over 300 UNDP staff, who monitor development-related issues and signs of change. scenarioDNA contributed to this network this year.
Innovation needs a writers’ room approach
Culture Mapping is a semiotics-based social science tool that explores cultural archetypes and their inherent tensions to drive innovative storytelling as a writers’ room process.
As we stand on the threshold of 2024, the conclusion of Art Basel Miami marked a departure from the sensational, viral spectacles that defined past events—no bananas taped to walls or MSCHF ATM machines detailing Diplo's wealth. The absence of such attention-grabbing moments extends to the majority of recent trend reporting as trendspotters approach the current landscape cautiously, navigating the delicate balance between predicting cultural shifts and avoiding the embarrassment of being proven wrong. Yet, amid this uncertainty, a discernible pattern emerges: a recurrence and evolution of familiar trends.
Subculture: Its Definition is an Obstacle to Problem-Solving
Subcultures are simply social groupings within a larger societal system. They form as a response to tensions within society. Their divergence results in an organic social cohesion of subsets where people share similar codes of behavior and ideologies. It is the place where people begin to evolve a common language.
Cultural Research Requires a Lab
Subcultures are engines of social cohesion. Alliances and affinities are reforming. What looks like chaos is a reset, a systemic change on the horizon. The tensions are present. We need to be taking a social science approach to futures, reading and analyzing signals as they develop.
No one will think about Italy’s "Barbie Venus" campaign 6 months from now, but many will continue to make the same mistakes as the world flies beyond 20th-century marketing techniques.
Mapping A Framework for Masculinity
The tradition of “men” had been off-kilter for quite some time now. Society has been dealing with more inclusive and equitable understandings of gender, intersectionality acknowledging that masculinity is not a monolithic concept and that it interacts with other aspects of identity, such as race, class, sexual orientation, and more.
Aren’t we always moving through time and space? A liminal state of existence is more our norm, rather than the places we aspire “to land.” Once, we land we already have the next idea in our sights. This places research and planning in a predicament. Projects must end somewhere so they can be acted upon, campaigns can be created and products can be built. Shouldn’t they?
“Disruption” Should be a Point of Evolution
Disruption is a slow steady process of understanding the human behavior involved. It does not launch like a tsunami. Nor is it presented by the hottest influencer of the moment.