The Sociology of Business is a global weekly newsletter about how brands connect business with culture.
This “how” is a cultural program. A cultural program connects cultural products so they best amplify each other. Cultural products are merch, collaborations, entertainment, content … that a lot of people pay attention to, share, and talk about. When a brand gets lucky, a cultural product becomes a hit. A cultural hit brings a company money, significant market share, and a strong stock price. A cultural hit becomes a market hit.
In fact, hitmaking is not a matter of luck. It’s a matter of cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence is very similar to financial intelligence: managing portfolios, making multiple bets, monitoring the market mood, reacting in real-time, and amplifying the early winners.
In 20 years of experience as the Chief Brand Officer of global brands (Banana Republic, Esprit) and a senior executive at global agencies (Havas Media, Spring Studios, Droga5, HUGE, Razorfish), I learned that best organizations are set up for always-on creative production, that CFO is the CMOs best friend, and that product, brand and business functions always need to work in sync. For this insight (and business and brand results), I have been recognized three times by the Forbes as one of the world’s most entrepreneurial CMOs.
The Sociology of Business is among the top 15 business publications on Substack. I published opinion pieces in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, The Guardian, Adweek, and Ad Age, among other. My two books, Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture and The Business of Aspiration can be found on Amazon, and you can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.
Membership
Paid Sociology of Business Members receive exclusive access to 4 monthly newsletters that include original writing about growth, culture, strategy and best business and brand building practices. Paid members learn how to build brand-first businesses, how to pitch angel investors and VCs, how to shift their brand narrative and competitive strategy, how to merchandise and sell, how to creatively differentiate, how to create brand systems, and how to ensure that your products and services create both monetary, cultural and social value. The issues mix sociology and business and are rooted in my experience as a C-level executive at the global brands. My writing regularly informs and inspires the wider aspirational economy coverage, so be first to access the source code.
What to expect
This newsletter will give you a framework to connect brand with business through culture:
Prioritize the cultural narrative as the only factor for the durable brand growth
Understand a portfolio approach to building the cultural narrative world, where the story is told through cultural products and amplified through media
Create a lot of cultural products in order for some of them to become hits, depending on a cultural mood and moment
Transform media buying and planning into cultural amplification strategy, which allows brands to be quick to react to cultural moments
Approach media creatively, and use it to identify all the different cultural contexts for a brand to participate
Segment your audience based on their relationship to culture; some of them are going to be critical for turning cultural products into hits
Develop creative production capabilities to develop and test ideas in the real world
Think of cultural influence strategy as a self-enforcing loop of different cultural products, each seeded in a different cultural context and targeting a specific customer segment most likely to respond to it
A sneak-peak into past posts:
Cultural influence strategy
Turning culture into business superpower
Cultural influence is not about hiring influencers
The creative economy
Building narrative worlds
Cultural programming in action
Media amplification
How to choose the right merch strategy
The creative class
What’s the creative director for, anyway?
How to sell to the creative class
Why cultural obsessives matter
Tools & frameworks
