The most fascinating thing about “Backrooms” is not how big its opening weekend was, but that it hasn’t been bigger.

Popularity was baked into “Backrooms” long before the movie hit the screens.

Unlike most movies, “Backrooms” has vast, well-established and keen subcultural fandom. Fandom here is not people only, but also stories, aesthetics, vibes, mythology, language, memes, places, and characters. Fandom, given the opportunity to experience object of its fascination in a new format and in a novel interpretation, rarely passes it.

In my second book, Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture, I describe a lot of what ultimately underlined the success of “Backrooms” — the existing fandom, the clear and recognizable aesthetics, the urban mythology, the portfolio of decentralized cultural products.

“Backrooms” fandom goes back to 2019, when someone posted a grainy photo of a yellow office space with caption “approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in” in the murky waters of 4Chan.

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From there, the photo multiplied, as memes tend to do, across message boards, forums, subReddits, podcasts, Substacks, TikTok and YouTube, where the grainy photo became known as The Backrooms: creepy, drab, “liminal” empty spaces. Kane Parsons, then a high school student, serialized The Backrooms as the “found footage” homemade videos. His YouTube channel became ultra-popular, leading to producers calling, and to him making “Backrooms,” the movie.

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The movie is doing exceptionally well: during the opening weekend, it amassed $81.5M at the domestic box office, and over $118M worldwide. The numbers are exceptional compared to other box office openings. Compared to the sum of The Backrooms internet fandom, they are fine.

This is an important distinction. By the time “Backrooms” reached movie theaters, the context for its success was already set.

When it comes to success of cultural products, context is the only thing that matters.

When the context is right, almost anyone can create a hit. When it isn’t, almost no one can (see: Mandalorian). In sociology, there’s analogy of forest fires to describe this. A fire happens when there are dry woods, strong winds, dense shrubbery between the trees. Any spark can light a fire then. In society, hits are a matter of susceptible, interested and receptive subcultures:

Fan as a Creator. “Backrooms” is the work of fan fiction. Parsons is a fan obsessed with The Backrooms, turned video creator, turned movie director. At 20, he is one of the

As always, the best stuff is behind the paywall.

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Back in 2022, there were rumors that LVMH was going to buy AC Milan. Antoine Arnault quickly denied them and went on to found 22 Montaigne, an entertainment arm for the conglomerate — because, really, what is the difference? Sport is entertainment. Entertainment is IP. And LVMH is, above all else, in the IP management business.

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Not buying AC …

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“Art is either plagiarism or revolution,” said Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp had never met Lauren Sanchez.

Artmaxxing, adopted by Sanchez as well as Bertrand Arnault, is a lucrative corporate strategy. It refers to strategic transformation of fashion into objects of art, in order to de-emphasize their commercial nature.

Louis Vuitton Cruise at the Frick Collection and Dior Cruise at LACMA, both part of Arnault’s conglomerate LVMH, were held in traditionally non-commercial setting. The hope was that rarified symbolic authority of these museums might rub off. (By setting Gucci Cruise in the grimy Times Square, Demna clearly hoped for the opposite effect, calling spade a spade).

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Nicholas Ghesquierre partnered with Kith Haring foundation for the LV Cruise and Jonathan Anderson with Ed Ruscha for Dior Cruise; Ruscha’s famous slogans could be seen on a number of shirts on the runway. They will sell for many thousands of dollars, a mere bargain compared to the original works.

This year’s Met Museum’s The Costume Institute Gala exhibition is titled “Costume Art” because art x fashion are the zeitgeist. The exhibition’s main sponsors, the Sanchez-Bezos duo, are after the self-fulfilling prophecy: if someone is celebrated as a patron of arts, they must have taste. Just as artmaxxing gives a product the status of the work of art and enriches it with meaning, it also gives a person status and cultural authority.

At least, that’s the hope.

Artmaxxing ensures that fashion remains a contemporary and active element of

Behind the paywall is the analysis of why artmaxxing is a genius corporate strategy and a dangerous cultural strategy.

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“Original imitation” is a preferred way of Marrakech luxury knock-off merchants to describe their wares. There, one can find anything from Tiffany x Wilson basketball to a Millionaire Speedy to the Chanel 25. Most of it looks original; it is also unmistakably an imitation. The souks’ luxury knockoffs are derivatives.

A derivative is a financial instrument whose value is derived from an underlying asset.

Cultural derivatives have the same structure: cultural products, signals, rituals, and community behaviors whose value is derived from underlying cultural asset — a brand world, a subculture, a founding mythology, recognizable brand codes, an aesthetic sensibility.

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Before derivatives, there needs to be underlying assets with stable value. In cultural economy, these are:

Behind the paywall, you will find the types of underlying assets, types of derivatives (collaborations as options, merch as futures, etc), and why the cultural derivatives framework is more useful than traditional brand strategy templates.

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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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