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The most interesting business story right now is not happening in finance.

It’s happening in culture.

In the Season 2 of Hitmakers (named ofter my book of the same name and diving deeper into the selected Sociology of Business posts), my co-host Lee Maschmeyer and I treat culture as the leading indicator of business strategy.

We believe that the old rules of business, like scale, price, mass advertising, distribution, etc. no longer determine who wins. The new competitive advantage is rooted in cultural fluency, defined as the ability to generate meaning, build worlds, earn fan obsession, and circulate value through communities rather than just transactions.

Cultural fluency is the main reason behind brand durability. To build it is to resist attention economy that runs on speed: shock, novelty, and chasing the next thing. The more one spends time with a brand, the more it means to them. I build on Emily Siegal’s concept of cultural umami to introduce neo-umami, the taste that has to be earned through intentional practice and activity.

In the course of 12 episodes, we place our analysis within the context of the consumer market without the center, where pop culture is a backdrop shaped by a million micro-references known only to niche taste communities. In this distracted landscape, the winning formula is not for brands to outcompete each other on advertising spend. It’s for brands to become a cultural product in their own right, like Rhode, Labubu, UGG, or A24.

People relate to these brands not in terms of price or category but as as if they’d relate to music or art: with passion, identity and loyalty no media buy can manufacture.

I wrote here about merch, collaborations, world-building, taste-making, neo-umami, luxury, product-led brands, holistic brand management, show business as a operating system. Brand, entertainment, and lifestyle used to be separate categories, with separate budgets and separate strategies. What’s replacing it is far more ambitious and interesting: it’s brands-as-creative-studios, building worlds with their own internal logic, aesthetic rules, recurring narratives, and communities of people who don’t just buy things but genuinely inhabit a world.

This world has it’s own logic — a center of gravity — that holds it together. Different worlds have different centers of gravity. A world built around a hero product grows by expanding the mythology of that object. A world built around a fandom grows by giving the community tools to participate and co-create. A world built around a pure aesthetic grows by defining a lifestyle so precisely and so consistently that every object within it feels inevitable rather than chosen.

See the lineup of episodes with short descriptions below. I hope that you will have as much fun listening to our conversations as we had recording them.

Episode 1: How Cultural Capital Becomes Financial Capital

The season opener. We look at moments where cultural capital turns into financial capital — breaking down why Labubu is still printing money long after its hype peaked, why Hailey Bieber’s Rhode became a $600M brand almost overnight, and why bootleg Gucci is hotter business than Gucci itself. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast.

Episode 2: The CMO as Showrunner

Why are AI brands opening cafés? Why does MiuMiu have a book club? Why does A24, a movie studio, have a membership club, a publishing arm, and its own theater and bar? This episode unpacks why every business is now show business, why the modern CMO isn’t a marketer but a showrunner, and what the hidden formulas behind these operations are. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast.

Episode 3: Why We Will Never Tire of Collaborations

Why do brands collaborate with each other? What differentiates a good collaboration from a bad one? Have we reached collaboration fatigue? The episode reveals how to elevate collaborations from tactics to strategies — putting them in context of IP, world-building, fandoms, and a brand’s cultural expansion and market growth. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast

Episode 4: Trend-makers vs Taste-makers

Explores why Nvidia hired its first community manager and how community — long treated as a soft marketing metric — is now a hard business asset that creates compounding advantages. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast

Episode 5: Everybody is Talking About World-Building, Nobody is Doing It

Everyone knows what the Magic Kingdom is, yet almost no brand in history has been able to replicate it. The episode maps distinct types of brand worlds — product worlds, merchandise worlds, aesthetic worlds, fan worlds — and explains how where you begin determines the physics of the world you can build: its growth logic, commercial engine, and the operating model needed to sustain it. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast

Episode 6: Weird on Purpose

How do you earn attention in a fragmented world? Cultural currency no longer comes from scale — it comes from attention, which is scarce, fleeting, and brutally competitive. The episode explores how brands capture attention through friction: inversions, oddities, contradictions, and coincidences already simmering in society. The brands that win don’t smooth edges — they sharpen them. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast

Episode 7: What Makes a Brand Iconic

Iconic brands are built on products people obsess over — Levi’s 501s, Ray-Ban sunglasses, Nike Air Force 1, the Big Mac. Each is a creative expression first: a shape, a taste, a texture, a ritual. Real brand creativity lives not in messaging but in the product itself. When products are designed with cultural intent, innovation becomes identity. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast

Episode 8: What is Next for Merch?

Merch has moved from the edges of culture to the center of the retail economy. The side show has become the main act. The episode explores what happens when consumers learn to buy everything as merch — and why the future of merch is niche, secret, and indecipherable to the mainstream. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast

Episode 9: Popular Culture is a Contradiction in Terms

When media was mass, culture was mass. When distribution was centralized, symbols were shared. Today influence, taste, and communities are all fragmented. The episode explores how algorithms reward both scale and specificity — and why pop culture is now just a backdrop, not the main event. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast

Episode 10: The Umami Experience

Borrowing cultural strategist Emily Segal’s “Umami Theory of Value,” the episode explores what it takes to make something linger in an age of speed, shock, and endless novelty. The hosts discuss “neo-umami” — cultural work that turns attention into legibility by unfolding, deepening, and resisting the algorithm. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast

Episode 11: What Happened to Luxury?

The luxury industry spent years raising prices — and for a while it worked. Then consumers stopped buying it, literally and figuratively. The whole model crumbled. What replaced it is more interesting: the most coveted things today aren’t the most expensive — they’re the most obscure. The episode asks where value lives in an industry that got addicted to growth at scale and high price. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast

Episode 12: Resale as the Stock Market for Brands

A product’s life doesn’t end at the point of sale — in fashion, it may be just getting started. Brands now aren’t just designing for this season; they’re designing for the afterlife of the product: how it will circulate, hold value, signal status, and show up again in the market months or years later. Growth is no longer just about volume — it’s about durability, recognizability, and unit economics over time. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, Substack Podcast

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At Watches & Wonders in Geneva a couple of weeks ago, there was a pervasive feeling that people knew what they were paying for. The same cannot be said of luxury fashion. When brands raised prices across every product tier, making even entry-level items inaccessible, they lost more than aspirational consumers. Faced with a $5K sweater or a $1000 bucket hat, the wealthy consumers started doing the math, too. Once that happened, the irrational, aspirational, prestige dimension of luxury — its soft power that powers its pricing— got lost.

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Price hikes are a great example of the simultaneous destruction of both economic and cultural value. Not only luxury fashion got more expensive, generating billions of unsold goods, it also lost meaning and clout, forcing the industry to revise its price pyramid from both ends: more accessible staples at the base, genuine exclusivity at the top.

Bigger lesson here is that pricing strategy is not only a financial decision, but a cultural one.

Price tells consumers what category a brand belongs to, what kind of people buy it, and what kind of knowledge they signal by doing so. A $19 bread loaf is not irrational

Behind the paywall, the analysis expands into the information that pricing strategy communicates, how it builds brand equity and commercial scale, and why and how it matters for brand positioning and strategy.

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Rick Rubin gets inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this November. People quote him constantly — on creativity, on process, on instinct. But Rubin’s most quoted line is the one he gave Anderson Cooper: that he trusts his taste completely.

Taste is also all over Substack. Everyone has a theory about it.

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Also all over Substack: The Devil Wears Prada 2. The celebrity cameos. Vanessa Friedman. The original cast. Kara Swisher. The method red carpet dressing. The world tour. Dior. The popcorn purse. The massive marketing push. The brand activations across the globe.

Most importantly, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a clash between attention and taste played out in real time. A movie about the foremost taste-making industry in the world almost certainly measured its promotional campaign in impressions, reach, and views.

Impressions, reach, and views are not cultural relevance. They are evidence that people scrolled past you. This did not stop brands from reorganizing themselves

As always, the best stuff is behind the paywall <3

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It also doesn’t work.

A better way is through cultural products—merch, collaborations, product drops, capsules, experiences and events—and the self-reinforcing loop those cultural products create.

Collaborations lead to merch, merch is dropped at events, capsules convey a brand message and an experience, and all of this creates content. Content is sequenced around each cultural product: merch, drop, collaboration, capsule, event, experience. There are teasers before, documentation during, community reaction after.

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But the content platform does more than just amplify cultural products. It provides architecture that gives the community a shared lexicon, history, and reason to keep engaging between product moments.

In my last post, The show business of brands, I explored the formula of cultural production and asked what great entertainment can teach every CMO. If you are on the Substack, join the chat. With one of the paid subscription options, join Paid Membership Chat, and with the free subscription, join The General Chat on The Sociology of Business WhatsApp group.

Holding it all together—merch, collaborations, events and experiences, product drops, capsules, and content—is a cultural program (no, a cultural program is not a

Behind the paywall are a cultural program sequencing principles and a deep dive into how each type of cultural products creates community.

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On March 25th, a California jury delivered the most consequential verdict in the history of Big Tech to date, when it found Meta and Google liable for deliberately engineering their platforms to addict children. By targeting platform design rather than content, plaintiffs’ attorneys found a way around the federal shield that has protected Silicon Valley for decades, setting a precedent that could end social media as we know it.

A generation raised entirely on smartphones may gotten there first. If a recent NYT article is to believe, they are rejecting social media, switching to dumbphones, deleting apps, and reclaiming their attention, out of sheer clear-eyed understanding how these platforms are designed to exploit them. But going analog is both a trend and a privilege — not unlike Emma Grede’s limited time with her kids — and for every person who can afford to opt out, there are more who remain trapped by their smartphone.

The shift is not just social and cultural, but also commercial.

Brands, who had years to perfect the ways to reach of the most coveted demographic via organic and paid social media are now targeting algorithm, not humans. To believe that social media is still a place where people proactively share things with each other is naive at best and uninformed at worst.

The most culturally influential, financially valuable, taste-making, high-value consumers are drifting away from social media, and they do not seem to be coming back. They went somewhere harder to reach: private communities, live events, physical retail, word of mouth, books, zines, entertainment, newsletters. Spaces that require intention to enter rather than an algorithm to stumble into and where attention is given rather than harvested.

So, who exactly are brands creating their social media content for?

There is a large audience of scrollers rather than buyers, algorithmically captured rather than genuinely engaged, slow to convert. Optimizing for their attention is expensive, ineffective and counterproductive.

More importantly, if being offline is the ultimate status symbol and the flip phone is a coveted cultural product, a brand’s aggressive social presence can read as both desperate and obsolete. Being everywhere on social media actively undermines its desirability.

Social media role’s in the cultural economy is progressively demoted from the center of gravity to just another commodity channel: noisy, crowded, and devoid of the actual community tastemakers who actively — and intimately — shape what everyone else eventually wants.

In the “where we think social influence happens” and “where social influence actually happens” dichotomy, there are two types of content: algorithmic and community-building.

Behind the paywall is the in-depth analysis of two types of content: zeitgeist-driven, responsive, algorithmic content and brand equity- and community-building content, and their strategic implications.

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I have always believed that best brands produce culture. Nike’s iconic ads and “Just do it” slogan that became part of cultural vernacular. Coca-Cola ads, recognizable even without a logo. Apple’s design that still makes us think of the company as innovative, even if it didn’t create a single new thing in close to twenty years. Esprit’s graphic design is still recognizable, and still considered iconic, long after its clothes moved to eBay. Even smaller things, like Rhode’s iPhone case or A24’s Wild Cherry restaurant and short-lived movie promo stunts.

Are you going to Possible 2026?

Bad brand strategy interrupts culture. Good brand strategy produces it. The mental model of the CMO in this production context is one of a cultural showrunner. They are running a studio, making decisions about what the world they are creating contains, who lives in it, what the aesthetic rules are, how the story develops season by season.

Television (of all examples) is the model. A great showrunner builds a universe with enough internal consistency and richness (e.g. Ryan Murphy, Mike White) that audiences want to live inside it between seasons, talk about it, dress like it, quote it, and feel genuine loss when it ends.

The real question is, what’s our show? Who’s our ensemble? Who is our audience? What season are we in?

As an operating model for brands, this reframing means three things:

Narrative architecture: what is the overarching, coherent story that a brand is telling this year and that all its cultural output ladders up to? What’s the season arc? The goal is to build a narrative universe.

A production system: cultural products—content, collaborations, events, drops, capsules, experiences—mapped to that arc. Consistent, connected, and mutually amplifying.Every drop, collab, content is a scene in a larger story.

Cultural gravity: done right, the show is not chasing attention, attention comes to the show, because a brand partners with culture to build something people want to participate in and be part of.

The CMO is running a studio that’s producing this show. Their business is cultural production: THE SHOW BUSINESS. To sustain it, they need a system for cultural production (not a content calendar).

This system for cultural production includes writing the episodes (annual and seasonal creative concepts), setting the tone, choosing the characters (merch, content,

Behind the paywall, you will find a production system and cultural gravity that complete the show biz operating model for brands, along with the elements of the system of cultural production and examples how this works in practice.

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There is a strawberry you can buy right now for $15 for a pack six. It is grown without pesticides in a vertical farm using Japanese cultivation techniques, available year-round regardless of season, and by most accounts it tastes like the strawberry you remember from childhood — the one you can never quite find again at a grocery store. The company is called Oishii. The berry costs like a small coffee.

There is also a sweatshirt you can buy for $50 that looks, to most eyes, indistinguishable from the $1500 one. The $50 version is from Quince, which just raised $500 million and is now valued at over $10 billion. The company’s genius is that it closed the perception gap, and then made you feel good about knowing it.

These are two different relationships to the same word: quality.

For the better part of a decade, quality has been a performance. Venkatesh Rao called it premium mediocre — the mass-market luxury illusion built not from the thing itself but from everything surrounding it. The illusion is constructed through branding, packaging, retail experience, service, and the right condiments — not through the underlying product. Aesop’s amber bottles. Flamingo Estate’s William Morris-coded jam jars. Carbone’s experience. The particular lighting in a Glossier store. Lucia Pizza’s $26 margherita on a plate that costs more than the pizza.

The branding is the signal, the product is an afterthought.

It worked so well that actual luxury followed. Dior made sneakers. Gucci made tracksuits. Louis Vuitton made a bucket hat and charged $800 for it. The

Behind the paywall, I introduce the idea of luxury commodities, created by the 10 percent of spenders being responsible for 50 percent of consumption, and why an economic oxymoron is the future of the brand and business strategy.

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In fashion, it may be just getting started.

There’s a strong connection between people who buy a lot on resale… and people who buy a lot of new clothing, too. They shop more. They turn over items faster. They return more. They discard perfectly good pieces. Which means resale isn’t replacing the primary market. It’s amplifying it.

That’s a new game.

Brands now aren’t just designing for this season. They’re designing for the afterlife of the product — for how it will circulate, hold value, signal status, and show up again in the market months or years later.

That has consequences for everything: design, merchandising, distribution, supply chain, even financial planning. Growth is no longer just about volume. It’s about durability, recognizability, inventory quality, and unit economics over time.

In this episode, we explore resale as the stock market for brands — and how the secondary market shapes value in the primary one.

Listen to our conversation here or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.

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A lot of brands still treat culture as a communications task.

A campaign launches. A collaboration gets attention. A product goes viral. A founder says something quotable. Everyone calls it cultural relevance.

But culture is not an outcome. It’s a cross-functional production model that coordinates execution across the entire organization.

For this execution to be ongoing, repeatable, scalable, and commercially impactful, it cannot sit in marketing. Story, product, merchandising, media, retail, partnerships, timing and finance all work together on one cultural program.

Cultural program is the way a brand organizes itself to produce cultural influence on purpose.

It is a series of decision on what story a brand is telling, what cultural products it will

Behind the paywall, I outline how specifically to operationalize the cultural program (the steps, like defining the business goal or cultural narrative or KPIs) and what it means for the role of each of the departments. Choose one of the paid options to access.

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I explored previously how restaurants resist the enshittification produced by platform logic. By prioritizing craft, limiting scale, and preserving friction, they protect forms of value that platforms reliably erode.

Platforms are built to smooth everything out, accelerate everything, and market themselves without end. The result is now familiar: a slow collapse in quality, distinctiveness, and user satisfaction.

Restaurants, at their best, still answer to a different logic, news of Noma’s abuse allegations notwithstanding. They are governed not by frictionless optimization but by hospitality, and hospitality remains one of the few commercial forms capable of producing a sensorially rich, socially textured, and genuinely satisfying experience.

Most ambitious restaurants are no longer happy merely to be places that serve food. They are moving into publishing, product development, design, music, education, events, and media. They are building systems around themselves. In the process, they

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He might as well have been talking about luxury today.

Because something is off. The industry spent years raising prices — and for a while, it worked. The higher price was the draw. But then consumers stopped buying it–literally and figuratively. The whole model crumbled like the house of cards.

What replaced it is more interesting. The most coveted things today aren’t the most expensive — they’re the most obscure. A run so limited that no one knows about it. An AI ad that pissed off almost everybody. Or, in the words of Matthew Blazy, “Craft as technology.”

When the currency changes, so does the trade.

In this episode, we’re asking: where is the value in an industry known for taste, craft, and story once it got addicted to growth at scale and high price?

Listen here or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.

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A culture-driven organization is built on a different assumption than the classic company: culture is not a layer on top of the business, it is the business environment.

In mature markets product advantages are quickly replicated and consumers are hyper-literate in marketing tactics. The real moat becomes the ability of companies to both create an ongoing cultural relevance and to turn this relevance into pricing power, improved unit economics, higher demand, sustained growth, stronger customer retention, and reduced reliance on promotions and discounting.

Most organizations are still designed for a world that no longer exists. They separate teams who “make” (creative), teams who “sell” (commercial), teams who “measure” (finance) and teams who “execute” (operations). This structure creates slow handoffs, conflicting incentives, and predictable failures (prioritization of short-term metrics and actions, like constant “newness” in creative output that in turn leads to unremarkable work (sequels, reissues, self-referencing) that then leads to diminishing returns).

In culture-driven organizations, culture is embedded in product design and merchandising, retail channels, media planning, creative and marketing and PR, with the goal of synchronizing all functions as part of the same production process so their cultural leadership becomes repeatable and financial accountability shared.

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Operationally, a culture-driven organization is cross-functional by design. Brand, product, merchandising, retail, media and channel planning operate as one production process with shared brand and business goals, calendars, and financial accountability. Brand and products are in narrative sync; marketing and merchandising tell the same story; media and retail channels cross-amplify.

Culture doesn’t live only in marketing campaigns, social content or, brand activations. It lives in the product and its assortment strategy, drop models, visual merchandising and store experience, partnerships and collaborations and IP management. This makes the brand culturally resilient. It can respond to cultural shifts without repeatedly reinventing itself (“rebranding”), because it has a coherent governance system and a portfolio engine that can constantly test, learn, and iterate.

Cultural influence is the vehicle of value creation for the brand.

Value is created when cultural influence becomes an investment and a growth engine, not discretionary spend. This happens when cultural output (products, content, merch, collaborations, retail channels, capsules, events, experiences, fandom) links with commercial outcomes.

Instead of “marketing supports sales” or “media supports retail channels,” the system is set up so that cultural output and commercial results are in sync: multiple bets are

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Hermès “Quelle Idole” is a mini-handbag created by Jean-Louis Dumas, then CEO of the company, in 2000. It anthropomorphizes the Kelly bag with arms, legs, and a smiling face, and has become a highly sought-after collector’s item. Discontinued in 2005 and occasionally resurrected in limited reissues and special orders, it has become an object that lives somewhere between product and urban myth.

Owning one signals something specific about your relationship to Hermès, to fashion, and to culture. Recognizing it signals something else: literacy in Hermès’ bigger aesthetic project: creative freedom held inside extreme craft.

To most people, it’s just a small bag with hands.

That gap—between insider recognition and outsider incomprehension—is where the value lives.

Taylor Swift operates on the opposite logic. Her cultural power is near-universal: everyone knows who she is and the music she authored. Friendship bracelets, the number thirteen, “Swifties” as identity—these are symbols designed to be shared. The barrier to entry is low because the goal is maximum participation.

Both systems create value. They just do it by opposite economic rules.

In the legibility economy, value is produced through recognition by a few. In the access economy, value is produced through recognition by many. And crucially: recognition by a few is often inversely correlated with recognition by many. The more people know a signal, the less it signals.

Ben Gorham understood this early at Byredo. He wanted exposure, but not the wrong kind. More than once, he turned down major editorial features that aimed to “explain” the inspiration behind fragrances like Mojave Ghost, Slow Dance, or Bibliothèque. For most founders, that’s a dream placement—awareness, legitimacy, conversion. Gorham refused because explanation collapses the distance that makes the product meaningful.

Byredo’s value isn’t just in what the scent is; it’s in what the name lets you imagine. Retail staff can describe notes and guide you to what you’ll love, but they won’t unpack an official narrative. Even the copy holds the line—suggestive, not definitive: “the salty skin memory of summer.” The result is a kind of members’ club. If you meet

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There’s actually a fifth one. It’s called umami. It’s the flavor that lingers. The one chefs chase because it stays with you after everything else fades.

A few years ago, cultural strategist Emily Segal borrowed that idea for her “Umami Theory of Value,” describing a certain kind of savory cultural work — the kind that feels familiar and surprising at the same time. Not just catchy… but sticky.

And right now, that kind of work is getting harder to find.

Our feeds are full of speed. Shock. Endless novelty. Everything hits fast and disappears faster.

So what does it take to make something linger?

In this episode, we’re talking about what we’re calling neo-umami — cultural work that turns attention into legibility. By unfolding. By deepening. By resisting the algorithm.

Listen to the Episode 10 of Hitmakers, Season 2, the show that tracks how culture moves margins, multiples, and market cap.

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In the pre-algorithmic culture, a viral moment could dominate conversations for weeks. A Super Bowl commercial like Apple’s “1984” could define a brand for years.

Viral moments of the past had staying power because the cultural metabolism was slow enough to digest them. There was enough time and context for viral moments to preserve their newness, nurture their original references, accumulate meaning, and become material for future remixes. There was only so much content, so many chronological feeds, and so many creators. Cultural moments were far and few in between. For example, when it was widely shared, Gingam Style was a new format; it was rich in local cultural hooks, it accumulated meaning as it spread from South Korea to the West, and it became an often remixed meme that assumed a social life of its own.

When something “broke through,” it was not because it was served through algorithmic personalization to a number of taste profiles and optimized for maximum engagement. It was because it developed cultural legibility.

In contrast, Bad Bunny and Super Bowl ads were all over my social feeds for a day.

They were short-lived not because they weren’t good; it’s because my (and everyone’s) algorithmic feeds refreshed the next day with new content. Even so, brands spend large sums of money trying to create moments that will “break through” and spread rapidly. Pay a celebrity partner to post once and move on. Or influencer campaign where hundreds of creators make nearly identical content. Or shock-value creative designed to generate conversation, but not tied to any durable brand meaning. What brands do not realize is that they are competing in an environment where breaking through means nothing because everything, by design, breaks through now.

Platforms are literally made for virality. Virality is so common that it is no longer a competitive advantage, but table stakes.

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Algorithmic optimization treats every piece of content as an experiment in engagement maximization. All of the corresponding generates metrics—impressions, views, shares, comments are a trap, because they encourage optimization for short-term metrics that the algorithm already knows how to game.

It turns brands into content factories producing variations on what worked yesterday, which is just repetition of the past dressed up as innovation. And brands are seeing diminishing returns on every dollar spent chasing attention this way.

None of it builds the kind of cultural value that translates into desirability, pricing power, customer loyalty, market share growth or sustained competitive advantage — and anything that doesn’t drive long-term value is just expensive distraction.

Brands face a choice: compete in the attention economy where virality is common but meaningless, or compete in the legibility economy where recognition is scarce but valuable.

Legibility is something that brands can actually build and defend over time because it requires cultural program that can’t be instantly copied or algorithmically optimized. This program is about creating friction; designing for slow build; creating limited access; and building meaning over time rather than fighting for immediate engagement. It’s not about making things harder; it’s about making things matter more to consumers

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Legibility means launching cultural products that accumulate meaning over time, rewarding cultural literacy required to understand what makes something culturally (and subculturally) significant, and what creates and nurtures enduring fandoms, not short-term algorithmic engagement.

Cultural value indicates whether a brand built something durable or rented attention temporarily from an algorithmic system designed to move on to the next thing as quickly as possible. Cultural value is in things that algorithm cannot compress, and it’s made of three aspects:

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In the 1980s, we had Air Jordans and Back to the Future.

In the 1990s, it was grunge, Pretty Woman, Britney Spears.

Iconic things have always been products of their moment.

When the media was mass, culture was mass. When distribution was centralized, symbols were shared.

That’s no longer true.

Today, influence is fragmented. Taste is fragmented. Communities are fragmented.

The geography of culture has collapsed—from mass movements to millions of micro-scenes.

So how does culture move now?

In this episode, we explore how algorithms reward both scale and specificity—and why pop culture is just a backdrop now.

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I can’s remember what went viral last December. I can, however, easily remember things that were viral in 2016 (hygge, Pokémon GO, the Snapchat Dog filter, carpool karaoke), 2014 (Pharrell’s big hat, ice bucket challenge), 2012 (Gangam Style), 2010 (planking), 2008 (Obama), 2006 (OK Go treadmill video).

There are two reasons for this.

First, the culture moved much slower, and social media were still relatively new. It wasn’t until 2016 that Instagram introduced algorithmic feed, which prioritized content based on affinity and engagement, rather than time and one’s immediate social graph. TikTok, based on similar algorithmic personalization, gained traction only in late 2018.

Things went viral not only because a lot of people shared them, but also because they stood out against a known, stable, relatively slow-moving pop-culture narrative. These things were cultural signals.

This signaling power is another reason for past viral moments’ memorability. Memes, content, fashion, lexicon, etc. all had cultural legibility, even when, as was the case with the Gangam Style video, they were sang entirely in Korean and contained intensely local cultural references. People shared them because they were new and different.

Comparatively, in early 2025, middle schoolers across the country began shouting “6-7” in classrooms—when a teacher turned to page 67, when lunch was six minutes away, or for no apparent reason at all. It was a joke without a punchline or setup. The phrase meant nothing, but using it made students feel like members of a bigger, cooler peer group.

For a few weeks, it spread rapidly. A kid in Ohio posted a video. The TikTok algorithm picked it up, tested it with similar users, measured engagement, and began feeding it to broader clusters of middle school accounts. Within days, it jumped from Ohio to California to Texas. Teachers started hearing it in hallways. Parents noticed their kids saying it at dinner. And that’s when it died.

The kids didn’t stop saying “6-7” because they got bored with it. They stopped because adults could now decode it. Teachers were using it. Parents were asking what it meant. The phrase wasn’t new anymore, and it couldn’t differentiate insiders from outsiders. It couldn’t signal that you were part of something special that not everyone understood. Within a week of adults catching on, the meme was buried in the graveyard alongside every other reference that had become too visible to the wrong audience.

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This wasn’t fickleness. It was economics. And it reveals why virality—once the holy grail of marketing strategy—has become economically worthless.

Death of virality can be traced to social media’s algorithmic personalization, exponential growth of content (and content creators), and corresponding fragmentation of culture.

More people, more content, smaller audiences.

Small audiences are created through algorithmic personalization of the high volume of content. We see content, based on our taste profiles, regardless of who created it.

Algorithms’ role here is not to amplify culture the way mass media did—it is to sort it.

“6-7” spread by a kid posting a video. The algorithm shows it to a small test group of users with similar engagement patterns. Some laugh and share it. Some scroll past. Based on those reactions, the algorithm tags the video with metadata about what kind of content it is and which microsegments of users respond to it. Then it shows the video to more people in those microsegments. React positively, and you get tagged as someone who likes this type of humor. Scroll past, and you get tagged differently. Over time, you’re sorted into tighter and tighter clusters of users with similar preferences so that every piece of content can be optimized for conversion.

The economic incentive isn’t to create big, heterogeneous audiences anymore. It’s to create homogeneous micro-audiences where messages can be personalized and response rates maximized. Even when something like “6-7” appears to go viral—when it jumps from thousands to millions of impressions overnight—what’s actually happening is simultaneous micro-adoptions across fragmented taste communities. The algorithm isn’t broadcasting to everyone. It’s targeting hundreds of small clusters that happen to respond similarly to the same content.

Virality is mistakenly equated with popularity and cultural and economic value.

Pay to read the rest of this analysis, including why brands are still optimizing for the 1990s on the platforms designed for virality, and what kind of cultural output avoids virality trap.

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In the feed, everything is a thumbnail seen for a second. Brand is often just an ambient style layer, so products have to become the their own best marketing. Products’ job is to pull customers off the feed and to the store through their own legibility: an instantly identifiable silhouette, cues of quality or performance or a cut that has a predictable logic.

Products that drive online and offline traffic function like media.

Product discoverability is a design feature, which turns a product into the acquisition channel. When a product is carried or worn by people, when it shows up in feeds,

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The term “merch” originally referred to items made for music fans, where items like t-shirts were sold on a band’s and musician’s tour. From music, merch spread to sports, film, gaming, art, fashion, design, travel, and entertainment. Merch’s original value has never been in the physical item itself–after all, a band shirt is just a tshirt, but in the social and cultural capital associated with it. Partly this stemmed from the fact that originally one could buy merch at concerts, thus signaling true allegiance to a cultural artifact. Thus, unintentionally, merch also operated on the concept of scarcity.

This social and cultural capital made merch the opposite of a commodity. Commodities are interchangeable (who can tell the difference between a Polo and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt if it wasn’t for the logo?); merch was a unique expression of a specific time, place, community, and context. First streetwear brands, often run by music enthusiasts in the pre-e-ecommerce age, also operated on the same principle.

The nature of merch changed as merch became commoditized in the early 1990s by Hot Topic, a chain store that gave access to band t-shirts to teenage mall rats. At the same time as streetwear became more important, it also turned merch into a commodity, which became even more ubiquitous with the rise of e-commerce. These developments removed the necessary friction that made merch a valuable cultural symbol. In the past, a person wearing a Nirvana t-shirt was probably a fan of the band’s music, today no such guarantee exists (and many more shirts are sold). This often precludes one of the original purposes of merch, a signaling of belonging to a certain subculture.

Still, the meaning of merch has not disappeared, but merely shifted. A person wearing a logoed Balenciaga tee is also signaling some kind of meaning, as is the person wearing one with the logo of A24, the trendy film production company or H&M’s infamous “Dimes Square” tshirt. The need for signaling through one’s possessions has not gone away, but, in the world of social media, increased.

Recently, we’ve heard:

Merch is a status symbol.

Merch is a subgenre.

Merch is a style statement.

Merch is an identity marker.

Merch is past its peak.

But all those takes miss the reality that merch has become big business.

What used to live on the edges of culture has moved to the center of the retail economy. The side show has become the main act.

In this episode, we explore what happens when consumers learn to buy everything as merch — and why the future of merch is niche, secret and indecipherable to the mainstream.

Listen to our conversation above, or on iTunes, Spotify or YouTube.

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