Hi everybody,

I partnered with Sue Chan of Care of Chan and Max Meighen of Serviette Magazine on a new event this Fall. It’s called Tasteful, because we focused on the food and fashion industries, and also because taste is one of the main forms of cultural capital.

Culture industries, like food and fashion, convert taste, knowledge, belonging, or status into numbers on the balance sheet. Cultural capital protects margins, commands price premiums, and builds brand equity that is immune to trends.

Cultural capital is one of the most valuable and sought-after assets in modern business … but very few understand how this capital is created or translated into long-term relevance or commercial results.

Through fireside chats and panel discussions, Tasteful focuses on scarcity, opacity, aesthetic innovation, connoisseurship, and identity — on all the ways that cultural capital is made, accumulated, and traded.

Tasteful brings together the top New York City restaurateurs with the top US fashion executives. It aims to connect, inspire, and cultivate conversations through curated content and hand-picked guests.

Get your Early Bird Ticket

The event is structured like a tasting menu. There are dive courses: cultural fluency, brand strategy, entertainment, business, and new media and creativity.

Each of the “courses” has a distinct flavor, but all of them are provocative, exploratory, intelligent, fun and discerning, made both for connoisseurs and novices alike.

Right now, we are selling Early Bird tickets. Seating is limited, so make sure to get yours!

We look forward to seeing you there.

Ana

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I am kicking off Classroom series, monthly talks free for annual paid subscribers of the Sociology of Business. This upcoming Thursday, July 23rd at 11am ET, the topic is “Culture is the New Balance Sheet” and I will talk about how to make and measure cultural capital.

Paid annual subscribers can register here. Not a paid annual subscriber? Become one and join us on July 23rd!

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Behind the paywall is the rest of this analysis, along with what to replace gimmicks with, plus examples <3

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I am kicking off Classroom series, monthly talks free for annual paid subscribers of the Sociology of Business. This upcoming Thursday, July 23rd at 11am ET, the topic is “Culture is the New Balance Sheet” and I will talk about how to make and measure cultural capital.

Paid annual subscribers can register here. Not a paid annual subscriber? Become one and join us on July 23rd!

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The Reign of the Creator

Behind the paywall are the visuals capturing the new creator ecosystem.

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Mention a cultural program to a CFO and they will immediately think of it as a cost center. To change their mind (and get their attention), reframe it as a portfolio of accumulating assets.

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Within these portfolios, there are three layers, each with the different time horizon and risk profile.

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The core position is long-range, low-turnover holding. Ralph Lauren’s preppy style or Hermès equestrian aesthetics belong here, as well as Burberry’s trench or check pattern. These are positions held for 60 years and 200 years, respectively. The association with

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Everyone has their favorite food. It’s just one of those things that can’t be explained to someone who doesn’t already get it.

This fact alone makes food a cultural industry. Add to it the rest: aest…

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“To ensure that transformative AI has a positive impact on humanity.”

This is Anthropic’s mission statement.

Anthropic’s imminent IPO is a brand story. Along with OpenAI and SpaceX, Anthropic IPO is one of the largest IPOs in history, with a public valuation of $1 trillion. It’s a brand story of cultural capital accumulated through Anthropic’s promise of protecting humanity from AI by building AI first. Businesses, governments and society trusted that promise.

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What happens next is when a brand promise fails and when a brand devalues its cultural capital (Hint: it’s already happened to luxury).

After 53 years, Knicks won. New York City on Saturday night was the place to be in. (It always is, but especially this weekend). I lived 25 years in the city and this was one of the moments, like the blackout in the early 2000s, or the rare special nights where everything is just as it is supposed to be, where you remember the magic of New York, the hold it has on the global imagination, and all the wonderful characters that live in it, like this bus driver with exceptional dancing skills. Give this man a stage.

Founded by former members of OpenAI in early 2021, Anthropic is privately held, public benefit corporation created to serve “humanity’s long-term well-being.” Traditional role of brands is to act as markers of trust (we buy, say, Colgate over Crest because we trust it more). Anthropic brand promised social benefits, not perils, from artificial intelligence, and asked us to trust it with it.

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As with every brand, this trust carries a premium. The best AI researchers join Anthropic because it isn’t a commercial enterprise. Governments and corporate clients license its models because Anthropic is antithesis of OpenAI. Anthropic asks for high regulatory scrutiny because it wants to protect us from AI. The rest of us, faced with something genuinely frightening like artificial intelligence, give Anthropic our trust that this intelligence wouldn’t destroy us.

Brand Anthropic never competed on product or on features, but on trust. Trust is one of the ways that cultural capital converts into commercial value. Trust is not only good PR—it also lowers the cost of distribution, recruitment, and regulation. It builds brand equity and creates a competitive advantage that has nothing to do with the product.

Anthropic benefits handsomely from its cultural capital, but AI is expensive business. In 2026, its estimated spend is approximately $19 billion on compute, model training, and operations. For the first time this year, the company is going to reach operating profit.

Anthropic is going public because it needs money.

Capital needs liquidity. Liquidity will unlock trillions in funding for Anthropic’s growth in computing power, infrastructure and deployment.

This is very similar to a luxury brands public listings. A luxury brand lists because it needs money. It tells itself that it lists because it wants to accelerate its mission. The shareholder pressure instead forces category extensions, licensing, discounts and partnerships that erode equity. (Burberry’s overexposure in mid-2000s and its slow rebuild following it is a case study of what happens when brand equity melts.)

When a public benefit corporation like Anthropic goes public, the same thing happens. Its promise doesn’t get wind in its sails. It breaks under the weight of quarterly expectations.

Pay to read the rest, it’s good!

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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 — bec…

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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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