- Revenge of analog↗ 1 Oct 2026
Newsletter housekeeping and event promotion for Tasteful Summit, a conference on food, media, and hospitality culture.
- Market to the Middle↗ 29 Sept 2026
Connor Archbold of Tracksuit discusses how brand sentiment works across human audiences and LLMs, arguing that effective brand marketing targets the silent majority—not the vocal extremes—and builds future demand through emotional connection and consistency rather than chasing clicks.
- Post-Friction↗ 21 Sept 2026
As AI agents handle customer requests at scale, brands must actively choose how to allocate scarce access—through auctions, membership, loyalty scoring, or social reputation—rather than relying on friction to manage demand.
- Agenda for Tasteful is here↗ 16 Sept 2026
A Substack newsletter invitation to 'Tasteful,' an event exploring how luxury brands recreate cultural capital through scarcity, effort, and identity now that access restrictions have dissolved in a frictionless digital world.
- Celine x Reebok: all business is IP business↗ 14 Sept 2026
All companies sit on intellectual property—founding stories, aesthetics, community practices, archived materials—but most activate far less than they own. Brands that treat IP as dynamic cultural assets, not static legal ones, create durable competitive advantage by programming and extending it across categories and channels.
- Simulation marketing↗ 10 Sept 2026
As AI-generated content erodes baseline trust in all media, marketing is bifurcating into two paths: Stealth Acceleration (viral manipulation, astroturfing, cheap reach) and Intentional Slowdown (analog formats, IRL events, long-form content, localized trust). Anthropic's cultured brand positioning via intimate dinners and print outperforms OpenAI's incoherent influencer trips, signaling a shift away from social media scale toward offline credibility.
- Six faces of luxury↗ 8 Sept 2026
A framework mapping six types of luxury—traditional, modern, quiet, mindful, aspirational, and low-key—showing how luxury is shifting from outward status symbols to inward personal meaning, experience, and well-being.
- How brands make culture↗ 3 Sept 2026
Brands are not logos but complete systems—rituals, products, behaviors, and infrastructure—that manufacture and sustain culture through repetition, mobility, immutability, aggregation, and organizational control of supply and demand.
- RIP Dolly, the tiny rollneck, and the first round of Tasteful speakers is here↗ 27 Aug 2026
Reflections on Dolly Parton's legacy as a narrative-owner and American archetype, followed by speaker announcements for the Tasteful event in New York.
- The Stone Island Test↗ 25 Aug 2026
Stone Island has built a luxury brand by mastering three distinct loops—recognition, community, and resale—that accumulate cultural capital through art partnerships, exclusive experiences, and subcultural authenticity dating back to its 1982 founding.
- Cultural liquidity↗ 19 Aug 2026
Burberry's return to profitability reflects a strategic approach to activating cultural market actors—examining how brands orchestrate cultural narratives through speculators, arbitrageurs, and regulators to drive business outcomes.
- 4 types of brand worlds↗ 11 Aug 2026
Brand worlds are coherent fictional-but-real spaces where companies convert cultural capital into commercial value through iconic products, experiences, and community. The piece defines four types of brand worlds centered on product, place, person, or practice—a framework for understanding how fashion and food brands build lasting relevance.
- Fandom is not a marketing channel 31 Jul 2026
- 3 types of brand gravity 25 Jul 2026
- In Defense of Brand Myth 23 Jul 2026
- New new rules of brand marketing 20 Jul 2026
- Tasteful 16 Jul 2026
- Attack of the gimmick 13 Jul 2026
- The reign of the mighty creator 9 Jul 2026
- Assembling a cultural portfolio 29 Jun 2026
- Tasting menu 22 Jun 2026
- The Sellout 15 Jun 2026
- The "Backrooms" Shocker 8 Jun 2026
- The power of subcultures in brand 4 Jun 2026
- What can the World Cup tell us about the future of cultural IP? 1 Jun 2026
- Artmaxxing 26 May 2026
- Cultural derivatives 18 May 2026
- Culture is the new balance sheet 11 May 2026
- Paying the price 4 May 2026
- What Rick Rubin and Duomo have in common 27 Apr 2026