When I was first getting studio jac off the ground, I knew I needed to be creating content. I also hated the idea of it. I’d run social media accounts for other businesses before and genuinely enjoyed it, but being the face of the content for my own business felt very vulnerable and completely unappealing. So naturally, I ignored all of my own advice and took what felt like the path of least resistance at the time, which was short-form. I’m still not totally sure why it felt that way. I think part of me figured I could rip off the content bandaid quicker and get more eyeballs faster.

Spoiler alert, that approach was pretty ignorant. It didn’t take much brain power for me to spot the problem with my studio jac content strategy. If anything, the whole experience has shown me firsthand just how stubborn I can be (sorry to anyone who’s been on the receiving end of that in the past).

So here’s the bottom line. The short-form-first approach is the absolute wrong strategy for me and for studio jac. In this piece, I’m going to break down exactly why, and hopefully by the end I’ll have taught you something and also convinced myself to dive deeper into long-form content outside of just Substack. Hello, YouTube? Maybe...

First things first.

What actually counts as short-form content, what counts as long-form, and what’s the difference?

Short-form content is anything you can get through in just a few minutes. Think Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube Shorts (with an honorable mention to the best platform of all time, Vine, RIP). Written short-form usually comes in under 1,000 words, and whether it’s text, image, or video, it should take less than 3 minutes to consume. It’s the content that fills the cracks of our day. We scroll through it while waiting for a coffee, in between meetings, or lying in bed when we should be asleep. Nobody’s really sitting down for it, which is exactly the point. These quick bursts of content are mainly there to grab attention and build awareness and recognition.

Now, I’m about to blow your mind, but long-form content is... longer. It asks more of your audience’s time, and just like short-form, it can show up in any medium. The difference is in how people show up for it. Long-form gets a more intentional kind of attention. It’s the podcast that keeps you company on your commute, the YouTube interview you put on while cooking dinner, or the newsletter you save for your Sunday morning coffee. You’d never scroll Reels while driving or walking the dog, but you’ll happily give someone an hour of your ear. By the time someone presses play on long-form, they’ve already decided to focus, which makes them far more open to learning something. That’s why long-form is primarily used to establish credibility, educate, and drive deeper connection and, ultimately, conversion.

Now that that brain buster is out of the way, let’s get to the interesting stuff.

How do you actually decide which one is best for your brand?

It’s not really an industry thing. The decision goes deeper than that and comes down to what you sell and how you sell it.

The Case for Short-Form

If your product sells itself visually, that’s a great sign short-form is the way to go, since it can captivate an audience in seconds. But there’s a very important caveat, and that’s price and the length of your sales cycle. Brands with a relatively low price point are in a much better position to win with short-form. I’m sure plenty of you reading this have been swindled into a purchase that only took one click on an Instagram ad. Or maybe a celebrity or influencer raved about their new hand soap and how amazing it smells. Even if you didn’t look it up and order it right then and there, the brand probably stuck with you on some level. And the next time it pops up on your feed, it feels a little more familiar, which makes you that much more likely to buy. That’s why posting frequency matters so much with short-form. Every time someone sees you, you’re building a little more recognition, so you need to be on people’s feeds, and you need to be there often.

The reason all of this works for lower-priced products is that there’s very little standing between seeing something and buying it. There’s not much to think about and not much to lose if it doesn’t work out. You see a video → click on the product → realize it won’t break the bank → add to cart. A quick impression is really all it takes.

The Case for Long-Form

Now for the other end of the spectrum. Long-form optimizes for trust and conversion. It filters for people who are willing to invest their time, and those tend to be the same people willing to invest their money.

Higher-ticket products and services that take more convincing usually need some kind of long-form content strategy. These brands have much longer sales cycles with several touchpoints along the way, a far cry from the TikTok Shop purchase you made while doomscrolling last night. For example, I have followed a lot of luxury fashion brands on Instagram for a while, and I’ve never purchased any of the new items they have posted. To me, it was always more of a spectacle. Aspirational, sure, but I couldn’t justify the purchase of a brand-new designer bag. Then a few months back, I came across a YouTube interview with Tim Blanks, Editor-at-Large at Business of Fashion, and Jonathan Anderson, Creative Director at Dior. I sat down, ready to listen, and ended up learning so much. Jonathan was incredibly interesting, and suddenly I felt a real connection to Dior. I still haven’t bought a Dior bag, but I wouldn’t be shocked if one shows up in the not-too-distant future. That’s long-form content doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. It created a deeper connection, shared expertise, and brought me one step closer to conversion. That’s something that never happened after all my years following them on Instagram.

And this doesn’t mean long-form is only for luxury brands. It’s just as powerful for brands where expertise is the product. Consultancies, agencies, studio jacs..... yea.

By now you might have a clearer sense of which type of content suits your brand, but there’s a very, very important follow-up question.

Who will be creating the content?

This section is for you if you’re figuring out who to hire for your content needs, building a personal brand, or just want to know where you’ll have the easiest time getting started with content creation.

Short-form people are sparks. They think in moments, hooks, and reactions, and they get their energy from responding in real time. They love the crowd, and their brand IS their personality in the room.

Long-form people are world builders. They think in systems, stories, and slow build-ups, and they get their energy from depth, context, and teaching. Their brand isn’t just the moment, it’s the whole universe they create.

Neither is better. But if a world builder forces themselves to be a spark account every day, they burn out and look cringey. And if a spark tries to do a 40-minute YouTube video, it’s probably going to be a little chaotic, and also cringey?

So really, it just depends on what you’re selling. If you’re a $12 hand soap, short-form can probably carry the whole thing on its own, and nobody needs a 40-minute deep dive on lather. But if what you’re selling takes a little more trust, short-form alone usually won’t close the deal. That’s where the two start working together. Short-form catches someone’s attention, and long-form gives them a reason to stick around. The spark gets you noticed, but it’s the world you’ve built that makes people stay.

So where does that leave me? I’m a world builder who spent too much time pretending to be a spark. For studio jac, long-form needs to be where the real work happens, and short-form should just be the trailer for it. I guess it is time to take my own advice. See you on YouTube.

In 1993, researcher Daniel Kahneman introduced something called the peak-end theory. The idea is that our brains don’t save the whole of our past experiences. They save a couple of snapshots, notably the moment that hit us hardest emotionally (“the peak”; memory bias) and how it ended (recency bias). Everything in between gets compressed, simplified, or deleted. Those peaks and ends can be good or bad, but the bad ones tend to stick harder (thanks, negativity bias). So when people tell you to end on a good note, they’re onto something. It’s not just good manners, it’s how memory works.

Once I learned this, I started seeing it everywhere. The concept felt overwhelmingly relevant to me. From the start, one of the mottos for studio jac has always been “building memorable brands.” It sounds simple. Just 3 words. But to me, there’s a lot packed into them. A memorable brand doesn’t happen just because you picked the right color, have the coolest Instagram profile, or threw the dinner with the flashiest tablescape. Those things can help, but they are simply just the ingredients. None of them makes a brand memorable on its own. Which ones you use depends on the brand, but what matters even more is how you use them.

That’s where the psychology comes in. The more I dive into this world of brand strategy, the more I realize it is really just a big social experiment. I’ve written a few articles about psychological theories & ultimately what they mean for consumer behavior. This one, if it wasn’t obvious, is all about the connection between the peak-end theory & brand building.

To put this in perspective, here are a few times this theory was clearly at play and totally worked on me. For the sake of simplicity, I’m focusing on the “end” part of the theory.

• Physical retail. Zara’s RFID self-checkout bins. After a slightly overstimulating shopping spree, this is where I closed out my Zara experience, and I found it to be 1) very cool and 2) quick and easy.

• Digital. A congratulatory message about my new Delta status. People love their rewards, especially after a big purchase that might leave them feeling a little guilty about the spend. A notification about a new milestone or achievement can ease the pain. It does have to be worth it though, and actually offer something of value to the customer.

• Dining. A local Italian restaurant brought limoncello to the table at the end of the meal. It’s such a simple gesture, but it makes you feel special. Everyone loves a little treat, even if every other table is getting one too.

• Events. The last 10 minutes of my own wedding. I can’t tell you how many people have commented on our last song, “Dog Days Are Over.” Don’t ever let anyone tell you the music doesn’t matter! When the song wrapped up, the venue staff handed out water bottles to our guests before they boarded the shuttles back to the hotel, which several people mentioned was a thoughtful touch after hours of open bar. Both are small things on the surface that I didn’t think much of at the time, but the feeling behind them and where they fell in the night made a big difference.

As you can see, this theory can show up in many different forms, at any point of customer interaction, whether it be online or IRL. For any founders, marketers, or strategists reading this, take a moment to think about all of your customer touchpoints. Where can you create a real high point? And what does your last interaction with a customer actually feel like? I doubt it’s negative, but even a neutral ending is a miss in my book.

So first and foremost, make sure you end on a (strikingly) high note.

Next, take an honest look at the least pleasant part of your customer’s experience, and make sure something positive comes after it, just before they leave. Otherwise, you’ve seriously lowered the odds they come back. Disney World, for example, knows its lines are the worst part of the experience. They could just hope the rides are fun enough that guests forget the wait, but hope is not a strategy, especially for something that subjective. So they go a step further. A line that’s 30 minutes long will reportedly show a 40-minute wait on the sign. You might be a little cranky about waiting 40 minutes, but when you’re suddenly next up after barely 30, you’re relieved. That’s not luck, that’s peak-end theory at work.

Your customers won’t remember everything, but now you know which moments they’ll actually hold onto, and those are the moments you can design for. And if you were wondering why I gave you the bad news first, now you know. I wanted you to leave on a good note.

To my mom, who is probably reading this and wondering what drastic life change I’m about to make now, don’t worry. I’m not planning to change the course of my life. I’m talking about making a few small adjustments to my day-to-day routine, starting with how much time I spend on my phone.

So, let me be clear: I need a break from social media.

I can’t really just delete all the apps and cut it out cold turkey, considering social media has been a huge help with growing studio jac. That would just be silly.

The amount of time I spend on social media, though, is completely unsustainable for me right now. Once I decided to become more active on studio jac’s social media and really take it seriously, it became the hardest part of my days.

I hated it so much at first. I felt embarrassed, awkward, and like everyone was talking about me behind my back. I thought that would be the biggest battle to overcome but, shockingly, I feel like I blinked and suddenly didn’t give a f**k about any of that anymore. Exposure therapy, I guess?

I had stopped being so self conscious about what other people might think of me, but I just shifted that negativity elsewhere. Instead, I became my own biggest critic, which was an obvious byproduct of spending too much time scrolling and comparing myself to other creators. Comparison is the thief of joy, and I know that but I haven’t really changed my scrolling habits. It’s addicting, even though it makes me really, really, really cranky.

So all that is to say, my mental health could benefit from a little social media detox. A randomized controlled trial published in BMC Medicine by Springer Nature found that cutting smartphone use to 2 hours or less per day for three weeks was associated with significant improvements in well-being, depressive symptoms, insomnia symptoms, and perceived stress. The intervention group saw a 14% increase in well-being, a 27% reduction in depressive symptoms, an 18% reduction in insomnia symptoms, and a 16% reduction in stress.

Like I said, I can’t totally get rid of it, but I can make some rules for myself to follow that will keep me on my phone less and doing things that bring me joy more. So here’s my plan to reclaim all the hours I’ve donated to Mark Zuckerberg. No offense, Mark.

RULE 1: No phone until I move my body (Difficulty Level: Hard)

Lately when I go to turn off my alarm in the morning, I get a glimpse of my notifications, and immediately get absorbed by them. Oftentimes, I don’t even remember what led me there, but I end up with Instagram open before I’m even out of bed. I gave myself the ick admitting that.

So, no more! I am not allowed to use my phone until I have gotten myself out of bed and moved my body. Most days I expect to unlock my phone privileges after a yoga class or going to the gym. On rest days, that might just look like stretching or going for a walk, but I just have to do something.

RULE 2: No phone after 9:30pm (Difficulty Level: Medium)

I don’t think this one will be too difficult, but I do think it will be very impactful.

I usually start getting ready for bed around 10, but more often than not, I’m still scrolling during that supposed wind-down period. Then, the second I get into bed and close my eyes, approximately 1,000 thoughts rush into my head. Apparently, the moment I put my phone down is the moment my brain decides it’s finally time to think freely. Which would be great, if it didn’t happen right when I’m trying to sleep.

So, the goal is to put my phone away by 9:30 PM and give myself some actual time to unwind, let my mind wander, and write down whatever thoughts come up. Ideally, this means less mental stimulation before bed and fewer nights spent lying there, perseverating over every thought my brain has been saving up all day.

RULE 3: No Scrolling Without Intention (Difficulty Level: VERY HARD)

This one was hard to define. I want to just cut out social media, specifically Instagram and Tiktok, entirely for a few weeks but I can’t abandon my needy little studio jac accounts. So, instead, I will just need to hold myself accountable to avoiding mindless scrolling at all costs! I will only go on Instagram and Tiktok with specific intents, which will likely either be for posting my own content or for business development purposes. This one has the most gray area, so I need to be really strict with myself here.

RULE 4: Replace Screen Time with More Productive Tasks (Difficulty Level: Easy!)

I am most excited for all the time I will get back to myself if I stick to these rules. I want to make sure that I make the most of that time, so I am giving myself some goals to hit.

1. Journal for at least 20 minutes every day.

2. Read for at least 20 minutes every day.

3. Reach out to at least one friend or family member each week using a form of communication other than text, whether that’s a phone call, FaceTime, or mailing a letter.

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I always strive to do these things but I don’t hold myself accountable whatsoever. Now, I will be much more intentional with how my time is used.

Today is day one of following these four rules and I’m off to a good start. In a few weeks I will give an update on how this is going and hopefully have some overall wellbeing improvements to report.

I hope to have thoughts that aren’t influenced by what I’ve seen someone else doing, and I would love to spend less time worrying about what I should be posting and more time actually doing interesting things that are worth talking about. I want to get back to reading, writing, moving my body, and being present without feeling the constant urge to check my phone.

And, perhaps most importantly, I want to remember that building studio jac is supposed to be something I enjoy. I know social media is a tool that can help me grow my business, but I don’t want to get so caught up in using the tool that I lose sight of why I started in the first place.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some screen time to reclaim.

The amount I use it and the things I use it for look a lot different than they did on day one. I used AI at my previous job, but not nearly as much or as well as I could have. I was so busy being busy that I felt like I had no time to figure out where to implement AI the right way.

That changed VERY quickly once I became an entrepreneur.

At first, I used AI for the kinds of tasks that had a clear, correct answer. There were what felt like hundreds of administrative tasks to figure out when starting a business, and AI was great at helping me navigate them. What do I need to register? What steps do I need to take? What am I forgetting? I could ask a question, get a specific answer, and move on to the next thing.

But over time, I started using it for more and more. What began as a tool for getting things done slowly became a tool for thinking through everything. Basically, ChatGPT went from being my organized intern to becoming my full-time employee. And, spoiler alert, I started to realize that my new hire and I weren’t a great personality match.

To put this into context, I was used to being on calls all day in my previous role, discussing ideas with other people and brainstorming out loud. My brain is a very active, excited, and sometimes overwhelming place, with thoughts constantly flying around. Talking through those thoughts with other people helped me make sense of them, consider new perspectives, and figure out what was worth pursuing.

So, I figured it would be a good idea to use AI in much the same way. Maybe it would bring up a concept I hadn’t even considered, refine an idea, or help me see something from a different perspective, just like my old coworkers used to.

I think it took me a little too long to realize just how unproductive that approach could be. As someone who has always had a meticulous approach and process for strategizing, I found that AI was actually eroding it. And I let it, because my head was so stuck in those chats.

Here’s the problem: AI has made it easier than ever to improve an idea, but it has also made it easier than ever to avoid deciding that the idea is finished.

My perfectionism simply couldn’t put an idea to rest. I’d be lying if I said there haven’t been times when I went back and forth in an AI chat about a specific topic, getting increasingly frustrated with each reply, only to eventually realize that the starting point was the clearest, most cohesive idea all along.

None of that was necessary. Instead, AI had given me more material to work with, which only clouded my original ideas and made them more vague. I was spinning in circles and delaying progress, two things I hadn’t previously been familiar with.

Eventually, I realized that AI was amplifying my perfectionism by making it possible to endlessly revisit a decision that would otherwise have to be made.

At some point, I had to ask myself… Why am I getting so mad at a robot?

After all, I am a strategist. AI is not. Can it help? Yes, but I’ve learned that I need to use stricter prompts and set clearer boundaries to prevent myself from falling into that perfectionist spiral.

Since adjusting where and when I use AI, I now feel so much more confident in where I am with my business and my goals. For any brainstorming or strategizing, I ALWAYS start by writing my own thoughts down. I personally like to do this in a physical notebook or on my iPad. This allows me to stick to my own process, which I think is very powerful, and thoroughly analyze my thoughts and what I want out of them before bringing AI into the equation. AI can then, of course, help with execution, something I think it is much better suited for.

In the event that I do use AI for something that isn’t so black and white, though, I try to keep a few things in mind:

• Define the objective before asking for feedback.

• Establish the criteria for completion.

• Learn to distinguish a real problem from discomfort. Sometimes a revision is necessary. Sometimes you’re simply uncomfortable committing to a choice when other options remain available.

At the end of the day, I think we all need to evaluate how we use AI and how we can improve that. The adoption of this technology was so rapid that I believe there are several areas of our lives where we’re using it more as a distraction than as a tool designed to accelerate our work.

Don’t let it be the thing that delays the moment you get that work out there.

I’m looking at you, perfectionists.

I could sit here and give you a list of my favorites, and honestly, that is how the idea for this started. Then I pulled several dozens of books off my bookshelf that I apparently bought thinking they would make me a better entrepreneur. Then, after staring at them all scattered across the floor, I laughed.

How could I possibly rank these when they all suck?

I started skimming through a few books I read years ago, mostly to refresh my memory. I kept wondering how I was able to tolerate reading these at the time.

Poor 2022 Jaclyn.

In 2022, I was making my first real foray into the founder world, building a SaaS company. A few years before that, when I started my first job post-college in 2020, I would always read these kinds of books when I wasn’t working.

I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and reading about entrepreneurship felt like the best way I could learn. Well, now I can say with confidence that I had the worst confidence the first time I was a founder. I was constantly wondering when everything was going to magically start working because I was taking all of these books so seriously. I wanted to believe that the more books I read, the more prepared I would be, but in reality, they mostly made me feel dumb.

Almost all of the top recommended business books are written by men, and they have this incredible ability to take an extremely simple business concept and turn it into a 300-page philosophical journey.

Then a perfectly normal, reasonably intelligent person like me has to read the same paragraph three times to understand why the author just spent 60 seconds saying absolutely nothing.

I do think there are some benefits to reading general business books. Sometimes you come across a concept or theory that sparks another thought, gives you a new perspective, or helps you connect two things you hadn’t connected before. That’s probably the best part, but the problem is that I think a lot of people go into these books expecting them to directly apply to their situation.

They won’t.

Most of the time, it’s someone explaining how they built their business under their circumstances, and we somehow walk away thinking we now have the secret formula for our own. Then, for some reason, we’re surprised when it doesn’t work.

So anyway, I’m not going to tell you about any of these books, and I’m probably going to make room for some new ones on my bookshelf instead. What I will tell you about is how I’ve been learning now.

I made a total career trajectory pivot, and while I had a decent amount of background in marketing and brand strategy, I knew I had a lot to learn. I still believe the best learning happens on the job. But I wanted some extra reinforcement, too.

I have found some incredible resources on Substack.

There are incredibly talented writers sharing genuinely interesting concepts and perspectives, and the Substacks I find most useful are usually much more niche.

I don’t read general business or entrepreneurship content very often anymore. Instead, I look for things that are directly related to what I’m interested in or what I’m trying to learn. For example, I need to learn more about fashion marketing. So I’ll find someone who actually knows a lot about fashion marketing and read what they have to say. That feels a lot more useful to me than trying to absorb 47 different general business frameworks and somehow figure out which one applies to my life.

I also follow the right accounts on Instagram. Although I don’t always believe Instagram is the best place to get useful information, I do think it’s an excellent discovery engine.

I follow people who post about other creators, writers, news outlets, interesting businesses, books, and ideas. I use it to find things worth looking into elsewhere. Instagram is also how I was introduced to a lot of YouTubers.

I love YouTube, specifically interviews with people who have roles or careers I aspire to have. Sometimes hearing someone actually talk through how they think is more useful to me than reading 300 pages about how someone thinks I should think.

And before anyone thinks I’m contributing to the literacy crisis and trying to convince people to stop reading books:

I still read.

Everyone should.

I just don’t think the current bestseller list for business and startup books would necessarily be my first recommendation.

There are over 1,500 pop-up Spirit Halloween locations for the 2026 Halloween season, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. These stores bring life to those sad strip malls from August through early November before all the spooky costumes are cleared out. It’s interesting to think that this company has had so much success while only having its doors open for about three months of the year.

That got me thinking about seasonal businesses more broadly. How do you build a business around a very specific time window without becoming irrelevant for the rest of the year?

The first thought that comes to mind for many seasonal businesses is expansion, specifically expansion into other products, categories, and hopefully seasons. Basically, they look to give their customers more reasons to shop outside of such a small window. Expansion of that sort can come at a cost, though.

A great example is the Christmas Tree Shops. It began as a small, seasonal retailer in Cape Cod and then started to expand rapidly. As the company opened more stores, it needed a reason to keep people coming in year-round, so it broadened its product mix. The problem, though, was that the more categories the store entered, the less clear its reason for existing became.

There were plenty of other places to buy home goods, decor, snacks, furniture, and toiletries. By bringing on all of these product categories, the Christmas Tree Shops got lost in the sea of general merchandisers. If someone needed toothpaste, it was unlikely that the first thought in their mind was to make a pitstop at a supposedly Christmas-themed store. They’d probably go to Target or Walmart or wherever they historically would shop for that.

Then, by the time the Christmas season rolled around, the appeal of the stores had started to wear off. You could go whenever, and when you did, you were often confused by what they had to offer. The thing that made Christmas Tree Shops so good was its distinct holiday niche, and it started to lose sight of that. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2023.

Spirit, on the other hand, did the exact opposite and has found a lot of success. They decided they were going to lean all the way in on being THE Halloween store, not only in terms of the merchandise, but also the temporary nature of the physical store openings around the holiday.

It seems like I’m always coming right back to scarcity, but that is a major driver of success here. People drive by a parking lot and see orange signage going up in August and are reminded that it’s that time of year again and they need to stop in and get their costume. There is novelty to something you can only access for a limited time. Ultimately, the arrival of the stores themselves is the most powerful marketing tool for Spirit.

That’s all great, but it still doesn’t answer the question of what Spirit is doing in the other nine months. Well, just because the physical stores are gone doesn’t mean people still can’t do some costume shopping. The brand’s online store operates year-round, and while sales might be drastically decreased, so are the company’s costs considering all of the store employees are seasonal temp workers and they don’t have year-round retail rents to pay.

This model has worked well enough for Spirit that they’ve started copying and pasting it in the context of another holiday: Christmas. This Christmas season, there are expected to be 46 Spirit Christmas stores opening around the U.S., following the exact same model as Spirit Halloween.

Rather than fighting its limited window, Spirit has turned that window into part of the appeal. The company has built its entire identity around being temporary, specific, and scarce. Now, instead of abandoning that model to become relevant year-round, they’re testing whether the same formula can work for another highly specific cultural moment.

This isn’t to say category expansion is inherently bad for seasonal businesses. Expansion without a clear reason is, though. A brand can expand into new categories, audiences, or seasons, but there needs to be some underlying idea that connects them. Otherwise, you risk becoming everything to everyone and, in the process, giving people less reason to choose you at all.

I started writing this trying to figure out how Spirit does such a good job at staying relevant all year round, but I’m ending it realizing that really isn’t their goal. Their goal is to be extremely relevant during their three-month window. When that moment comes, they want people to eagerly anticipate their arrival, notice them, and generate hype around them.

I would expect to have very different visions in my mind of what going to the mall looked like as I got older, but I don’t. Because I stopped going, and so did the rest of us.

But maybe… that’s about to change.

Mall values rose 13% this past year, according to Green Street Advisors, which assesses mall health each year. To understand where this resurgence is coming from, though, we need to dive into a little history.

The Rise

The first mall in the US opened in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota. Following World War II, there was a massive wave of families moving out to the suburbs. Victor Gruen, the designer of this first mall, came to the US from Austria in the late 1930s and was unimpressed by the way American suburbs were starting to take shape. They lacked the strong, bustling community centers he was used to seeing in Europe. That idea became central to the concept he created for the very first mall.

People were thrilled initially. They loved the idea of being able to go to one place for everything they needed, the fact that it was temperature controlled, which was especially important to Minnesotans, and that it gave them a place to shop and spend time with friends and family.

Other developers caught on to the excitement quickly… perhaps a little too quickly.

At their peak, there were more than 1,200 malls sprawled across the US. At first, growth was purely about chasing the craze. Then came the realization that plenty of people still lived too far from one. Malls were massive structures and often needed to be built farther from downtown centers than shoppers were used to traveling for their everyday needs. So another wave went up, bringing malls closer to more communities.

The Fall

The problem was that this demand wasn’t always thoroughly assessed. Developers assumed people would be happy simply to have a mall nearby, when in reality they sometimes became nuisances in the communities around them. Traffic, construction, and massive parking lots replacing parks and fields started to outweigh the convenience of having shopping nearby.

Beyond losing frustrated neighborhood customers, the mall business model wasn’t particularly conducive to changing with the times. Malls needed to adapt, but they weren’t fast enough to fight back against the rise of online shopping.

One of the biggest issues, and a major reason malls couldn’t react quickly to technological advancements, was their reliance on department stores.

Department stores were the anchors of the mall. They capped the ends of those long corridors, occupied massive amounts of square footage, and traditionally brought in much of the foot traffic. Because of that, they had significant leverage over mall management companies. They could negotiate favorable rent, payment terms, extensions, and other concessions, and malls were okay with it because they brought the customers.

Until they didn’t.

Department stores were hit particularly hard by the e-commerce boom. It was one thing to navigate keeping a store open during that transition. It was another when your store was 20 times the size of many of the shops surrounding you, making the economics of keeping the doors open that much harder.

In 2016, Macy’s announced it would close about 100 stores, and Sears followed a similar strategy, announcing the closure of about 150 stores shortly after. This created an almost impossible situation for malls, losing the revenue from enormous department store spaces while simultaneously losing one of their biggest drivers of foot traffic.

And just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse, a global pandemic hit.

2020 really was the giant exclamation point at the end of the sentence telling malls to take a hike. What was once more than 1,200 malls across the country had dwindled to around 900, many of which were struggling or filing for bankruptcy.

The Comeback

Shockingly, though, malls seem to have found their stride once again.

While shoppers have been clicking “add to cart,” mall leadership teams have been testing and executing new strategies. For one, many malls have added amenities beyond retail. They now have entertainment options like movie theaters, adventure parks, water parks, and aquariums. Some are even incorporating offices and residential spaces.

These giant properties are being adapted to fit into Americans’ everyday lives, which now include much more than brick-and-mortar shopping.

While malls have taken steps to improve foot traffic, there is a bit of luck playing into this resurgence as well.

It just so happens that Gen Z loves malls.

According to Circana, shoppers ages 18 to 24 accounted for 62% of their general merchandise purchases in stores last year. We’ve seen this across several industries: they crave in-person social experiences. They want to have the Friday nights I had in middle school, just with cooler stores, restaurants, and activities to check out.

This is great news, but malls need to be careful not to fall back into the same cycle they found themselves in only a decade ago. The continued addition of experiences and attractions are important, but I also think there is an opportunity to rethink the retail itself. While writing this article, I started thinking about what I would do if I owned and operated malls.

My favorite idea: rotating pop-up shops.

Future Proofing: The Rotating Pop-Up

One of the biggest advantages e-commerce has over a mall is that the internet is constantly changing. There is always a new brand to discover, a new product going viral, or something you haven’t seen before. A traditional mall, on the other hand, can feel remarkably similar every time you visit.

So what if part of the mall was designed specifically not to stay the same?

Brands could apply to be part of a mall’s pop-up program and choose how long they want to be there. Instead of every storefront being built around a five- or ten-year commitment, a portion of the mall could operate more like a rotating roster of brands. The temporary nature is what makes it so interesting.

If I know a brand I love is only going to be at my local mall for the next six weeks, I have a reason to go now. And when that brand leaves, there is a reason to come back and see what replaced it. The tenant mix itself becomes part of the experience.

For malls, it puts empty space to work while keeping the retail offering fresh. It could also become a pipeline for finding future permanent tenants. Instead of trying to predict whether a brand will perform well in a particular mall, they can actually test it. If a three-month pop-up consistently drives traffic and sales, maybe that brand becomes the next long-term tenant.

For brands, it creates a much lower-risk way to experiment with physical retail. Opening a permanent store is expensive and comes with a massive commitment. A pop-up lets a brand learn how customers interact with its products in person, what sells, who actually walks through the door, and whether there is enough demand to justify something permanent.

And for customers, it makes malls a place for discovery again. You could walk into your local mall and find an emerging brand you’ve only seen on Instagram or maybe a brand you’ve never heard of at all. Instead of the mall simply housing the same national retailers you already know, it becomes a place where you can actually find something new.

Vacant storefronts don’t necessarily have to be a sign that a mall is dying. They could be an opportunity to make the mall more dynamic.

The mall doesn’t need to beat e-commerce at convenience. It needs to beat it at discovery. A rotating pop-up model could do exactly that: give brands a low-risk way into physical retail, give malls a pipeline of potential tenants, and give customers a reason to come back because the experience keeps changing.

Activewear.

Old Navy management specifically called out active as one of the categories where the brand has seen the most momentum. In fact, Old Navy is already the fifth-largest brand in the U.S. activewear market.

So unsurprisingly, they have already made moves to capitalize on that. On September 15, Old Navy announced Old Navy Sport, a new sub-brand that will become the company’s dedicated activewear brand. It will have its own identity, social presence, merchandising and will roll out approximately 40 shop-in-shops inside Old Navy stores.

The decision to invest more resources in activewear makes sense. There are plenty of ways they could do that, but they ultimately landed on the decision to give it a separate brand. Why?

Old Navy has been selling activewear for years. The opportunity now is to make it more than just another category within the store. The company describes Sport as a “dedicated destination” for activewear and says the new concept will focus on technical innovation, style and value.

This strategy works. There’s proof.

Aerie did something similar with OFFLINE by Aerie. What started as a growing activewear assortment under the Aerie brand eventually became its own brand. As of January 2026, American Eagle operated 47 standalone OFFLINE stores and another 52 side-by-side OFFLINE locations connected to Aerie stores. After they made this change, American Eagle reported that OFFLINE was attracting new customers, as intended, while Aerie’s core business continued to grow.

Old Navy is taking a strikingly similar approach, and they are not alone in this. Just one week before Old Navy Sport launched, Primark launched Primark Form, its new sub-brand built from its existing activewear business. Sound familiar?

The recent Old Navy Sport and Primark Form news proves that there is a clear opportunity for affordable activewear brands to establish themselves and behave like the premium brands, like Lululemon or Alo, but at a fraction of the cost.

But, why not just fix Athleta?

I have seen some make the argument that Gap could have just invested more into fixing Athleta rather than spinning off a new activewear sub-brand for Old Navy. This argument falls apart pretty quickly in my opinion.

For starters, Old Navy and Athleta are built for different customers. Athleta has spent years establishing itself as a more premium activewear brand. Old Navy competes on value. Taking Athleta downmarket wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem. It could just make the brand less differentiated, and would erode its historical value proposition of offering premium products instantly.

Old Navy, on the other hand, already has the customer, scale and price point to compete for the consumer who wants activewear without spending $100 on leggings.

They already have the product. They already have the customer and the market share. The question is whether giving activewear its own identity actually changes the way customers think about it because, after all, that’s what a sub-brand is supposed to do.

It should make something feel more distinct, more recognizable and more worth seeking out than it did when it was simply another product category. It will be interesting to see how Old Navy Sport chooses to position itself, from the types of marketing campaigns they run to the selected styles they release over time.

If Old Navy Sport works, Old Navy won’t just have a successful activewear category. It will have created another reason for customers to choose the brand.

After reading through some of the coverage, my suspicion was correct. Tennis fans are getting fed up with the behavior they’re seeing at matches, and they’re ultimately blaming influencers for it. But is that fair?

The USTA started a creator credential program last year, inviting 54 creators to the tournament to capture and share content with their audiences. Purely from a business standpoint, it worked. Ticket sales were up 9% from the year before and average ticket prices were up 20%. More people were introduced to the sport. It is exactly what you want to happen if you make the decision to work with content creators.

So this year, the USTA took it a step further, giving out 100 creator credentials and paying about two dozen creators to create content on behalf of the US Open for the tournament’s own use.

If last year’s numbers showed that this strategy was working, the USTA and tournament leadership should have expected even more growth this year. And if you’re expecting a wave of new fans, you also have to expect that some of those fans are going to behave differently from the people who have been coming to the Open for decades.

That’s where the “influencers are ruining tennis” argument falls apart.

Influencers are being paid by the USTA to bring in new people. They are doing the job they were asked to do. These disruptions could be caused by any new guests, whether they are influencers, content creators, or just normal people who are new to the sport. The “influencer” label just makes it much easier to play the blame game (while also being great click bait).

But beyond this, I really believe the businesses behind all of this are the ones that need to be held accountable.

The ex-consultant in me is begging me to call this a failure in change management. I hate to get into corporate jargon, but it really does apply. For the past six years, my job was literally to anticipate the impacts of decisions and how different stakeholders might react to them. When you make a decision that brings a huge influx of new people into an established community, you have to think about what that does to the experience for everyone involved.

Lifelong tennis fans know the etiquette and a lot of the unspoken rules of being a spectator. But you have to expect that new fans don’t.

YES, OF COURSE we would like to think that everyone will educate themselves ahead of time and come prepared to watch the sport in an appropriate manner. But that’s not realistic. It is not really how people work. Everyone has different opinions, priorities and perspectives, and plenty of people are simply not going to think to research tennis match behavior before they walk in.

I know this because I was one of those new fans recently. I went to my first tennis match at Arthur Ashe about a week and a half ago. I knew there was etiquette I was expected to follow, and I quickly Googled it on my way there. But I don’t think the top results really emphasized how strict some of these rules were.

Then I got to the match and watched several people getting up for another drink and chatting with their friends during play. It seemed… totally normal. I was actually expecting more people to be scolded or shushed, but it never happened. Now, we were in the nosebleeds, so maybe there’s a little less scrutiny up there, but still. If there had been clearer expectations on signage or over the speakers, this certainly wouldn’t have seemed so normal.

Now, I AM NOT making excuses for people being lazy or disrespectful. I’m saying that we know some degree of that behavior is going to happen, unfortunately, so the responsibility falls on the people running the experience to protect against it.

The US Open has since taken more steps to do exactly that. They’re displaying more signs instructing fans how to behave based on what’s happening in the match, and they published a “Things to Know Before You Go” guide on September 4th. That certainly helps. It just would have helped a lot more if these things had been in place before players were already dealing with the consequences.

I think this is an important lesson in managing growth, or even “virality,” these days.

Growth comes a lot easier these days, and it changes things, whether it can be attributed to an influencer or not. It’s easy to look at the numbers and think everything is great when you have more followers, more ticket sales, more awareness, and more people coming through the door. However, when you bring a new audience into an established community, you have to prepare for what comes with it.

How do you make sure your existing community doesn’t feel like they’ve been pushed aside? How do you prepare your employees, partners and other stakeholders for the change? And how do you make the new people feel welcome without making the old people feel replaced?

The goal should be to turn the new audience into part of the existing community, rather than creating a divide.

The US Open did a pretty good job getting more people interested in tennis. Now it has to figure out how to make all those people feel like they belong in the same stadium.

It makes sense to get into gaming. For one, there are roughly 3.6 billion gamers globally, and 86% of U.S. adults play video games, according to Microsoft Advertising’s 2025 research. Not bad. Audience aside, though, there is an even bigger incentive when it comes to gaming for marketers that I’ll get into.

To be clear, marketing in gaming is not new. Brands have been putting banners, billboards, and product placements into games for years. Basically, they took traditional marketing tactics and just transferred them into a new, virtual environment. Players see it, but likely don’t spend much time thinking about it. That kind of exposure is essentially passive. The brand is there, but the player isn’t actively engaging with it.

More recently, though, brands have started using more robust marketing strategies when it comes to gaming. Rather than simply placing advertisements inside games, they are creating gaming experiences that players can actually participate in. That’s where we start to see attention shift from passive to active.

But there’s another layer to this. It’s not just that players are “doing something” instead of looking at an ad. It’s that they are choosing whether or not they want to engage with the brand in the first place. And this is where Self-Determination Theory (SDT) comes into play.

Self-Determination Theory is a framework for studying human motivation and personality developed by psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci. The theory says that people are naturally motivated by three basic needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In simple terms, we want to feel like we have a voice, we’re good at something, and we’re connected to other people.

Gaming is basically a perfect environment for all three.

Autonomy: I chose to be here.

With the US Open Roblox experience, no one is forcing you to interact with the brand. You choose to join the US Open Event and that matters because you’re engaging with the brand on your own terms.

Competence: I can get better at this.

Games give you goals, challenges, progress, and rewards. The more you play, the more capable you can feel. A branded game can tap into that same feeling.

Relatedness: I’m part of something.

Games can give people a way to compete, collaborate, and experience something with other people. A brand can become part of that shared experience rather than simply talking at its audience.

So why does this actually matter for brands? Because there’s a big difference between someone seeing your ad and someone having a genuinely good experience with your brand. An ad may build awareness, but an experience people choose to enter, spend time in, and enjoy can create something more valuable: an emotional connection that makes them more likely to remember and choose the brand again.

A 20-second ad can make a brand visible, but 20 minutes spent voluntarily inside a brand’s virtual world can make it meaningful. Gaming makes that distinction especially clear, but the principle extends far beyond gaming. When brands give people something worthwhile to do, rather than simply something to watch, they create the conditions for deeper engagement.

Salomon is one of them.

I have been blown away by the dinners, activations, and collaborations I’ve seen from Salomon. And it feels like before I can even forget about one, I see the next thing. They are on top of their game, and it certainly shows.

You don’t need to have my marketing-leaning algorithm to know this, though. Just look at people’s feet. Living in New York, I could lose count of the number of Salomon sneakers I see in one subway ride. They have become one of the top shoes on New York sidewalks.

I had a lot of questions, though. How did this rugged outdoor brand become a shoe you see all over NYC? How are they partnering with luxury brands and hosting events during fashion weeks? Why did they make this pivot? Will we be seeing a shift towards making Salomon more of a fashion brand than a sports brand?

I will say, a lot of the initial questions and expectations I had were actually completely ignorant, and were squashed by the research I did. So, it’s worth sticking around to hear what I learned.

The History

Salomon started in 1947 in Annecy, France, in a small family workshop producing wood saws and ski edges. From there, the company expanded into ski equipment, eventually developing bindings, boots, skis, and other products for the alpine world.

In 1992, Salomon expanded into hiking footwear with its Adventure range, helping the company stay connected to its outdoor customer base beyond the ski season. It later moved further into trail running, developing increasingly lightweight and technical footwear for mountain environments. The XA series came in the early 2000s, followed by shoes like the Speedcross, which became some of the brand’s most recognizable trail models.

Interestingly enough, these lightweight, performance-oriented trail shoes were what caught the eyes of some high fashion individuals with an edgier, more rebellious street style in the 2010s. The shoes were not made for lifestyle wear, but they were so technical and visually distinctive that they gained traction outside of the trails. So much so, that some fashion retailers even started to gain interest in stocking these products that they previously wouldn’t have considered.

Then came gorpcore, the trend of wearing outdoor clothing and equipment as streetwear, which helped push technical outdoor products even further into mainstream fashion.

So it turns out, Salomon hadn’t made a deliberate effort to move into the mainstream shoe category in the way I initially assumed. It had a product that people really liked, and those people started wearing it in places the brand hadn’t necessarily intended.

Once Salomon realized there was a real market for this, it began offering shoes more suited to lifestyle and everyday wear, so you didn’t necessarily have to meet your friends at the bar in the same shoes people were competitively racing in on Alpine trails.

Staying True to its Roots

While I understood that this wasn’t necessarily the original plan for Salomon, I found it interesting that their marketing efforts, from what I can tell, now align much more closely with a luxury fashion house than an outdoor equipment store. I also learned that they hired Heikki Salonen, who was previously at MM6 Maison Margiela as Creative Director, in January 2026. Both of those facts made me wonder if we would find Salomon leaning into the fashion world and street style much more over the next few years, especially given how well that world has responded to the brand.

However after reading a Highsnobiety interview with Salonen, I know that is not the case. Salonen talked about watching Salomon shift into being considered “fashionable” while he was at Margiela. He noted that “Salomon should never become a fashion brand.” Interesting, coming from a man who spent his career in high fashion.

His point, though, was that the brand needs to preserve its purpose and stay true to its roots as a high-performance outdoor brand. They need to continue creating great products with the best technology to keep customers happy. Naturally, though, those products will also be considered incredibly beautiful, cool, slightly weird looking (in a good way), and aspirational. Salonen shared a reminder that “athletes care how they look,” which further justifies the need to combine function and fashion in everything they do.

I think this is an important distinction. Salomon isn’t trying to make products that appeal to the fashion world. They are trying to make products that perform exceptionally well for their core customer, while also understanding that aesthetics are part of what makes a product worth choosing in the first place. That combination of function and fashion is what allowed their products to move from the trails to the sidewalks without the brand having to fundamentally change who it is.

Salomon didn’t become cool by trying to be cool. They made really good products for a very specific customer, gave those products a distinct point of view, and let people decide what else they could become. The result is a brand that can show up at a fashion week dinner, on a New York sidewalk, or halfway up a mountain without feeling like it doesn’t belong in any of those places.

That, to me, is a much harder kind of brand to build than simply becoming fashionable.

It was so nice to see how much energy the festival brought to the city. Restaurants were busy, shops were full (of visitors probably in need of extra layers), and the streets were full of festivalgoers chasing after their Waymos. Outside Lands didn’t just change the energy inside Golden Gate Park. It changed the energy of the entire city around it.

Local businesses naturally benefit from that. More people in the city means more potential customers, more full tables, more coffees sold, more clothes bought. But that part happens whether a business does anything about it or not.

Which is what makes festivals interesting from a brand perspective. There are obvious opportunities inside the festival grounds, but I think there’s an equally interesting opportunity outside of them that doesn’t get talked about as much.

The appeal of being inside the festival is pretty straightforward. If you have a tent, booth or activation, the audience is automatically brought to you. You know who they are, roughly what they like, and you know they’re in a pretty open, discovery-oriented mindset. They’re already there to listen to new music, try things, find new food, meet people and have experiences. That’s a very good environment for a brand trying to get noticed or stay top of mind.

For larger consumer brands, paying for that access can make a lot of sense. You’re getting scale, visibility and a concentrated audience in one place. The best festival activations also give people something they actually want, whether that’s somewhere to charge their phone, get a drink, customize something or take a break.

But for smaller, local businesses, I don’t think the festival itself is always the best place to spend the money. If you’re a few blocks from the festival, the audience (a mix of locals and visitors) is already coming into your neighborhood. You don’t necessarily need to pay to reach them.

Think about how a major festival temporarily changes the behavior of an entire city. People go to bed later and wake up earlier. They need coffee. They need breakfast. They realize they didn’t pack the right clothes. They need somewhere to meet friends before the festival. They want somewhere to go after. They’re looking for things to do between events.

A breakfast spot a few blocks from the festival could turn that into a festival recovery starter pack: an electrolyte juice, coffee and an egg sandwich, packaged well enough that people are running there to make sure they don’t miss out on it, and cute enough that someone wants to post it before they eat it. They’re not really creating a new product. They’re taking things they already sell and pointing them at the exact 75,000 people who are going to need them each day at 9am.

Or take a clothing store. San Francisco in August has a way of reminding festivalgoers that packing for “California” and packing for San Francisco are two different things. A local store with a great outerwear selection could offer free patch embroidery on anything purchased to wear to the festival, built around a simple message: we know you didn’t pack for how cold it gets here.

It’s useful. It’s a little bit of a roast. It’s based on something that is actually happening. And now the person is walking into Golden Gate Park wearing something they bought from you, potentially leaving with something they’ll still have five years from now.

That’s the kind of thing I think can be more valuable for a local business than spending a huge portion of its marketing budget to put a logo on a sign and a small tent inside the festival. In this case, the goal isn’t just to make a few more sales that weekend. The goal is to make your business memorable.

That’s where I think the opportunity gets more interesting. A local business can use a major cultural event as a reason to create something its community will actually enjoy, rather than simply treating the influx of people as extra foot traffic. It becomes a way to participate in what’s happening around you and give people a reason to engage with your brand on your own turf.

To be clear, I don’t think this is unique to festivals. The same opportunity exists whenever a city gets temporarily flooded with people because something is happening: the Super Bowl, Art Basel, Fashion Week, the Olympics, a big concert, a championship game, a marathon, a major convention.

The event creates the audience. The city creates the opportunity.

The brands that take advantage of that don’t always need to be official partners. Sometimes they just need to pay attention to who’s coming, what those people are going to need, and how they can create something that makes the moment more fun. The businesses that do these things understand why cultural relevance matters and are always the ones with the largest, fiercest community around them.

Think about your last bad flying experience. Chances are, by the time you actually got on the plane, you had already dealt with a full parking lot, long security lines, construction, crowded terminals, or delays getting to your gate. Most of the frustration that people associate with flying happens before the airline has really had much of an opportunity to do anything.

Unfortunately, customers don’t usually separate those frustrations from the airline itself. Even if the airport is responsible, people remember the trip as one experience. The airline ends up absorbing the perception of everything that happened before boarding.

That’s the problem JSX chose to solve.

Instead of trying to become a “better airline” in the traditional sense, they asked a different question: Where is the customer experience actually breaking down? Their answer wasn’t the seat, the snacks, or the in-flight entertainment. It was the airport. By operating from private terminals instead of the main commercial terminals, passengers avoid much of the friction people have simply accepted as part of flying. You arrive closer to departure, skip the crowded terminals, and spend far less time navigating the airport itself.

I think businesses often become so focused on optimizing what they sell that they forget to examine everything that happens before and after the customer actually uses it. Customers don’t experience brands in isolated moments. They experience journeys, which include every interaction, every inconvenience, and every expectation, whether the company technically owns those touchpoints or not.

This problem isn’t unique to airlines, either. As I have been writing this, a similar situation came to mind in the healthcare industry. Insurance matters are incredibly frustrating, and doctors offices typically are the ones blamed for any insurance inconveniences, when in reality, they can’t do anything about it.

That’s why I think JSX is such an interesting strategy case study, and one that emerging companies can apply in other industries. JSX realized they weren’t only competing against other airlines. They were competing against one of the most frustrating parts of modern travel. Instead of accepting that as something outside their control, they built an entirely different operating model around avoiding it.

Obviously, not every business can redesign its industry the way JSX has. Even other, legacy airlines can’t mimic this strategy. JSX has a completely different operating model and therefore regulatory model that is followed for these flights. At a larger scale, it isn’t feasible. But I do think there’s a broader lesson here for young companies. Competitive differentiation isn’t easy to find nowadays, but a good place to start is by identifying the part of the customer journey that everyone else has accepted as “that’s just the way it is.”

Status is really nothing more than a perception when you think about it. Sure, it’s rooted in real, measurable social structures, but it’s ultimately become our own estimation of someone’s “eliteness” based on personal biases and assumptions. So where do those assumptions come from?

There are dozens of status signals. A status signal is simply a way of communicating status, to yourself and to others. The things you wear, the way you carry yourself, where you live, your job title, your hobbies, even your ideologies all communicate something about your perceived social rank.

For years, luxury was the clearest status signal. Designer bags, watches, cars, jewelry. It was a simple way to position yourself, owning items that many people knew nothing about other than, that was expensive.

But as technology has rapidly accelerated, so has accessibility. Luxury is no longer reserved for a select few. Dupes, mass production, resale platforms, and social media have made luxury feel much more attainable. Items that once seemed untouchable suddenly don’t when you can buy a convincing dupe of your favorite designer bag. Social media has influenced this as well. After the billionth Birkin unboxing, the mystique starts to wear off. Luxury hasn’t disappeared, but as a status signal, it simply isn’t as powerful as it once was.

The desire for status, though, hasn’t faded one bit. People are just turning to things that are more difficult to access instead.

Scarcity.

Exclusivity.

Sports are one of the clearest examples of this. Professional sports are built on scarcity. From a young age, kids dream of playing at the highest level. Imagine spending your entire childhood in a gymnastics gym, training every day with the goal of making the Olympics. Is the reward really just a gold medal? Of course not. It’s the exclusivity of accomplishing something almost nobody else on earth can.

Most of us will never compete at that level, but we still want to be part of it. Just like the fact that only a small percentage of people are talented enough to compete, only a small percentage of people are able to experience these events up close. Tickets alone can cost thousands. For the World Cup, even preliminary matches in New Jersey were over $1,000 for standard seats, and that’s before you even get into hospitality packages and VIP experiences.

During the Knicks’ playoff run, for example, the courtside seats became almost as entertaining as the game itself. (Being based in the New York/New Jersey area has given me plenty of examples this summer). You would often hear mumbles asking things like “Did Kylie come with Timothée tonight?” and “Who else is sitting courtside?” There was even speculation over whether Jordyn Woods would be carrying her “lucky” bag from her brand, Woods by Jordyn. It was a great marketing moment, because her product became part of one of the most exclusive cultural events of the season. Those seats are incredibly limited, and that’s exactly what makes them so desirable. There is only ONE time you can be at game 5 of the 2026 NBA championship, watching the Knicks vs Spurs. You can’t make a similar statement for a Birkin, something that technically can be bought by anyone at any time.

Luxury isn’t dead, though. Far from it, in fact. There just needs to be a shift. Luxury brands can no longer rely on simply being luxury. They have to insert themselves into the world’s most exclusive moments, and many of them already have.

Louis Vuitton is one of the best examples. The brand has created the trunk that carries the FIFA World Cup trophy for years, although this feels like the first tournament where people really started talking about it. Some argue a luxury fashion house has no place in sports. I completely disagree. It’s one of the most powerful positions a brand could occupy.

On the most exclusive stage in the sport sits the most coveted trophy in football, awarded to the players who have reached the absolute pinnacle of the game. Louis Vuitton isn’t the star of the moment, but it has become part of the ritual. By placing itself next to one of the rarest and most celebrated achievements in the world, some of that status naturally transfers to the brand.

It comes down to the simple idea that products can be replicated, but scarcity can’t.

The brands with the most status won’t just sell luxury. They’ll create, or align themselves with, “once in a lifetime” kind of experiences that are incredibly difficult and desirable to access.

As the bag became more popular, so did the criticism. People said it didn’t hold enough, it was too heavy, the handles were uncomfortable, and the zipper didn’t lock. The hype that helped make it famous also created a constant stream of feedback from people actually using the product.

Béis saw that feedback, and instead of letting it pile up, they decided to do something with it.

The brand invited a group of customers who had left thoughtful public reviews to help redesign the bag. They weren’t looking for the loudest voices but they were looking for people who could clearly and passionately explain where it fell short.

Those customers became part of the design process, workshopping ideas in person before reviewing updated versions of the bag. Today, the redesigned Weekender is on their website, and the launch has been met with excitement from the same community that helped shape it. I’d call that a success.

Béis listened to customer feedback, but more importantly, they knew how to interpret it. That sounds simple, but it rarely is. Companies have been misunderstanding their customers for decades.

Let’s throw it back to 1985. Coca-Cola’s launch of “New Coke” remains one of the biggest misunderstandings the company has ever had with its customer base. At the time, Coca-Cola was still leading the soft drink market, but Pepsi was steadily gaining share. Believing the product itself was the problem, Coca-Cola invited nearly 200,000 consumers to participate in taste tests to help determine a new formula.

The results were clear, they thought. People preferred the new recipe, so they replaced the original. Almost immediately, the backlash began.

It turned out the flavor wasn’t the problem at all. People weren’t just buying Coca-Cola because of taste. They were buying something familiar. Something nostalgic. Something they had grown up with. The company had answered the wrong question.

It wasn’t long before Coca-Cola brought back the original formula. Ironically, all of the publicity ended up helping the brand. They didn’t need a new product. They needed a better strategy. The mistake wasn’t listening to customer feedback. It was looking at it with tunnel vision, and assuming one piece of customer feedback told the whole story.

More than forty years later, the challenge has only become more complicated. Brands have access to more customer input than ever before. Surveys, reviews, TikTok comments, Reddit threads, customer service tickets, online communities. There is no shortage of opinions. Ironically, having more information doesn’t always make better decisions easier. Sometimes it just creates more noise.

I think one of the biggest challenges today is that the internet rewards expression, not necessarily accuracy. We react quickly. We post thoughts before we’ve fully processed them. We say what we wish were true about ourselves, or what feels socially acceptable to say. That doesn’t mean people are being dishonest. It just means a comment section isn’t always the clearest representation of how people actually make decisions.

Sustainability is probably the best example of this. Spend five minutes online and you’ll find countless people criticizing fast fashion brands for overproduction, waste, and poor labor practices. Much of that criticism is valid. At the same time, many of those same brands continue reporting strong sales. That isn’t because people don’t care about sustainability. It’s because sustainability is only one factor in a purchasing decision. Price matters. Convenience matters. Style matters. The economy matters. Those tradeoffs show up at the checkout, and are not always in the comments.

If a fast fashion company only listened to Instagram comments, it might think it needed to completely reinvent its business overnight. If it only looked at sales numbers, it might assume nothing needs to change. Neither tells the full story. The best companies understand that customer feedback isn’t one data point. It’s the combination of many.

Sales data shows what people buy. Reviews reveal where products create friction. Economic conditions explain shifts in spending. Culture helps explain why certain products gain momentum. And a deep understanding of your audience connects all of those pieces together into something useful.

That’s why I don’t think the lesson is simply to “listen to your customers.” Brands have been told that for decades. The real challenge is learning how to interpret what customers are telling you, even when different signals seem to contradict each other.

Béis didn’t redesign the Weekender because a few people complained online. They recognized a consistent pattern from customers who genuinely wanted the product to be better. Coca-Cola didn’t fail because it listened to customers. It failed because it mistook one type of feedback for the complete picture.

Customer input has never been more accessible, but understanding it has never been harder.

For those unfamiliar with the company, Marks & Spencer is one of the UK’s largest retailers, selling everything from clothing and beauty to home goods and groceries. It’s a retail giant, generating more than $22 billion in annual revenue, but it’s remained largely focused on the UK throughout its history.

After seeing the London Fashion Week announcement and digging into the changes M&S has been making over the last few years, I have a prediction. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of M&S in the U.S. over the next five years. This might sound strange considering M&S has already failed in the US once, but that was before they put all the pieces together to build their taste.

Back in 1988, the company acquired Brooks Brothers with the hope that it would help establish a foothold in America. It didn’t. The business struggled, and M&S sold Brooks Brothers in 2001 for less than a third of what it had originally paid. The company made another attempt through a grocery acquisition, but that wasn’t enough to gain traction either. By 2006, M&S had exited the U.S. market completely.

On paper, there were plenty of reasons the expansion didn’t work but I think it comes down to the fact that M&S hadn’t figured out how to become culturally relevant in America.

The conservative fashion that resonated with British shoppers didn’t resonate with Americans. The stores didn’t offer anything unique enough to convince shoppers to choose them over retailers they already knew and trusted, like Nordstrom or Macy’s. They brought a successful British formula to the U.S. and assumed it would translate. It didn’t. Cultural relevance is contextual. What works in one place is not likely to work in another.

The TASTE Transformation

Fast forward to today, and I think M&S is in a completely different position. The company has spent the last several years reinventing itself, but the transformation that interested me most happened in fashion. One of the most interesting ways to dissect it is by looking at where they started their journey to building taste: aesthetics.

In terms of its clothing, M&S had been losing ground even in its home market during the 2010s. In an interview with Amanda Wakeley last year, Maddy Evans admitted that when she joined M&S as Director of Womenswear Clothing in 2019, she had the same perception as everyone else. She thought of the typical M&S customer as an older woman, but as she got to know the customer, she realized the problem wasn’t their age. It was the assumption that older women didn’t care about style, but that just wasn’t true.

Around the same time, the company leaned heavily into customer insights. Through conversations with shoppers across the UK and feedback from both store teams and corporate employees, they realized something important. When people thought of M&S, they thought about quality and value. They did not, however, think about style. That was the missing piece that they needed to strengthen, while being careful not to throw out the quality and value that they were long respected for. These insights helped them better define their target audience, which expanded beyond an old lady with no style to adults of all ages who are interested in modern yet modest fashion. They found clarity.

Today you’ll find Gen Z creators posting M&S hauls on TikTok, styling their new collections, and introducing the brand to an audience that probably wouldn’t have considered shopping there just a few years ago. Improved aesthetics and in-store experience have helped to create this community, but Gen Z didn’t happen to just stumble into M&S one day unprovoked and realize it was suddenly cool. It took intentional efforts to meet them where they were and create that demand. The brand has found its way into conversations it wasn’t part of before, and that’s not something you can manufacture overnight. That is a long term strategy to build cultural relevance.

Their social content also deserves a lot of credit for this. It’s entertaining first and promotional second. Beyond following the latest TikTok trends, they are creating high-effort and highly creative skits. One of my favorite series is with Amelia Dimoldenberg from Chicken Shop Date. It doesn’t feel like they hired an influencer to sell a sweater. It feels like they partnered with someone who naturally fits their world.

Is M&S Ready For The US Market?

All of this is to say that I think M&S has not only succeeded in terms of clothing style, but overall brand taste. Can they replicate this in the US, though? I am convinced they will, and that’s backed by the fact that they already seem to be experimenting in a low-risk manner. In March, M&S launched a curated womenswear collection in 30 Nordstrom stores across the US. While some view it as a simple partnership, I think it is part of a long-term strategy and is how M&S plans to get its foot in the door in the US once again. Instead of betting millions on a full retail rollout, they’re borrowing trust from a retailer Americans already know. They get exposure to a new audience, customer data, and the chance to learn what resonates before making a bigger commitment.

M&S did the hard part of rebuilding its reputation at home, and it is already much better positioned for US consumers than it was its last go around. It has taken advantage of more modern fashion trends, improved its store experiences to make them destinations rather than just any old brick and mortar, and has dove head first into modern media culture. All of this combined with the right partners, and the customer insights I expect it will gather from its work with Nordstrom, should allow them to reach the level of understanding they need about American shoppers.

Just a few years ago, M&S was a store people shopped at because they needed something. Today, it’s becoming a brand people actively seek out and that’s a completely different position to be in if you’re thinking about entering a new market.

Every month I score brands using the studio jac Taste Test, a framework for evaluating modern brand culture across 5 categories: clarity, cultural relevance, aesthetics, community, and experience. If you're wondering how your own brand stacks up, sign up on my website bystudiojac.com for your comprehensive analysis, including a 30 minute video call to review your opportunity areas and discuss actionable next steps!

Between 2016 and 2020, NFL viewership began to slip. There are plenty of things that the decline could be chalked up to, but rather than pointing fingers, the league recognized it needed to evolve.

Fast forward to this past season, and viewership was up 10% from the year before, marking the second-highest per-game viewership since the NFL began tracking the statistic in 1988. I came across that stat recently and couldn’t stop thinking about it. A few days later, I watched a video of NFL CMO Tim Ellis speaking at Cannes Lions, and suddenly it all started to click.

I fell down a rabbit hole, watching interview after interview, including his appearance on The CMO Podcast. The deeper I went, the more I realized just how intentional the NFL has been about its evolution from being a historically conservative brand to a risk-taking, powerhouse of a brand. While no single person is responsible for a turnaround of this scale, it’s clear that Tim Ellis has played a major role in shaping the league’s modern marketing strategy.

So how exactly have Tim Ellis and the rest of the NFL leadership managed to reignite growth? In short, cultural relevance.

The NFL didn’t reinvent football. It reinvented the ways people connect with it. That’s what I mean by cultural relevance. It’s not about chasing trends or showing up in every viral moment. It’s about creating meaningful connections with people, even if that means rethinking your messaging, your partnerships, and the ways people experience your brand.

The NFL’s approach can largely be broken down into three strategies.

Take Risks in Untapped Markets

For many Americans, the NFL has been culturally relevant from the day they were born. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. identifies as an NFL fan, although many of those fans are casual viewers. But what about the other third? And beyond that, what about the rest of the world?

When Tim Ellis joined the NFL, one of his biggest priorities was expanding the league’s relevance beyond its traditional audience. Women, children, creators, artists, and international markets all represented enormous opportunities. It wasn’t going to be easy for a league that had long been perceived as a pastime for hyper-masculine, football-obsessed men, though. Ellis knew that attracting new audiences would require making decisions that some existing fans wouldn’t like. In fact, he openly prepared NFL leadership for that reality. Some of the steps they would need to take to expand their reach would make their existing fanbase uncomfortable, and they had to be okay with that.

One of the first opportunities was repairing the NFL’s relationship with artists and creators. When Ellis joined, many artists were uninterested in working with the NFL and viewed the relationship as toxic. That needed to change if they were serious about investing in culture. And it certainly did.

Last year’s Super Bowl halftime show featuring Bad Bunny felt uncharacteristic of the NFL to some longtime fans, yet it became the most-watched halftime show in history. Rather than catering solely to its existing audience, the NFL bet on bringing new communities into its world, including Latino audiences, women, and younger fans, and it paid off!

The league has continued its expansion efforts, finding several other avenues to bring new fans into the NFL world. It partnered with TMRW Sports to launch a professional flag football league, bringing female athletes into the spotlight. The NFL’s social channels feature several female flag football players already and this will only become more popular, especially with flag football being in the 2028 Olympics for the first time ever.

Youth engagement has become another major focus. Through NFL FLAG, camps, and player clinics, the league is giving kids direct access to the sport and, more importantly, to the people behind it. My nephew recently attended a camp with Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart. As if being on the same field as his favorite team’s QB wasn’t enough, he also caught a touchdown pass from Dart. That is something he will NEVER forget, and something that will keep him feeling excited and connected to the NFL. A perfect example of cultural relevance.

While the NFL has made meaningful progress with women, children, and creators, its biggest opportunity still lies overseas. During his Cannes Lions panel, Ellis shared an observation that perfectly illustrates where the league is today. Fans attending NFL games in cities like São Paulo, London, and Mexico City often wear jerseys representing all 32 teams, not just the two teams playing that day. They’re excited to be part of the NFL experience, but many haven’t yet developed loyalty to a specific team. That’s the next challenge, but really it should be viewed as a massive opportunity.

The NFL is partnering with organizations around the world to help with this expansion, which is a necessary move. The NFL knows American culture exceptionally well, but it can’t become culturally relevant around the world on its own. Building global fandom will require local partners, local stories, and local connections.

Marketing at All Levels

Building cultural relevance starts at the top of an organization, but it has to extend throughout every level of the brand to be effective. The NFL is a fascinating example because, while it is one of the most recognizable organizations in the country, people rarely form their deepest connections with the league itself. They connect with their favorite teams, and even more so their favorite players.

When Tim Ellis joined the NFL, he audited all 32 teams to evaluate their marketing capabilities, reach, and fan engagement. The results varied significantly. Some teams had built strong relationships with their communities, while others had plenty of room to grow. To close that gap, Ellis and his team developed a marketing blueprint that teams could use to strengthen local engagement and create more value for their fans. By investing in marketing at the team level, the league created a stronger foundation for fan loyalty across the entire organization.

From there, the NFL took the strategy one step further by investing in individual players. The “Helmets Off” strategy was designed to showcase players beyond the football field. Instead of only seeing athletes in uniform on Sundays, fans get a glimpse into their personalities, hobbies, families, travel, fashion, and everyday lives. It’s an effective strategy. Not only does it draw existing fans in closer, but it also invites new fans into the mix by showing them content that may be more relatable to them than a football game. Rather than asking people to fall in love with football first, the NFL gives them multiple entry points into the brand. A powerful example of cultural relevance.

Build Emotional Rituals

I believe the fastest way to connect with an audience is through emotion, and few brands do that better than the NFL. The league has built a collection of emotional rituals that fans associate with football season, creating anticipation long before the first kickoff and lasting memories long after the final whistle.

At first glance, having a season that only lasts about six months might seem like a disadvantage. Tim Ellis sees it differently. The limited season creates anticipation and by the time September arrives, fans are ready. There is a feeling attached to football season. People picture sitting on the couch in their team’s gear on a crisp fall Sunday, surrounded by friends and family, with their favorite game day snacks spread across the table. Football isn’t just something they watch. It’s something they experience.

That emotional connection extends far beyond Sunday afternoons at home and can be amplified for those who have the opportunity to attend games in person. Going to a game creates memories that stick with people for years, whether they are lifelong fans or attending their very first game. The Super Bowl, specifically, takes that feeling to another level. For many people, it is a bucket list experience to be in a Super Bowl stadium, bursting with every possible emotion: excitement, pride, anxiety, joy, stress, and so on. These moments deepen fans’ emotional connection to the league and become personal stories they will share for years.

The NFL recognized the power of those moments and found ways to create more of them. The NFL Draft is one of the best examples. What was once essentially a boardroom meeting has become one of the biggest events in sports and entertainment. Now fans get to become invested in players from day one, before they even see them on the professional stage. What was once an emotional moment for the rookies themselves, became an emotional moment for the entire fanbase.

That is what makes the NFL so effective at building cultural relevance. It doesn’t just market football. Instead it creates rituals that people look forward to, participate in, and share. Those rituals become traditions, and traditions create emotional connections that are difficult for other brands to replicate.

The NFL’s success wasn’t driven by one campaign, one partnership, or one viral moment. It came from a long-term commitment to becoming relevant in more people’s lives. This is what cultural relevance looks like. The brands that stand the test of time aren’t necessarily the ones with the best products. They’re the ones that continually find new ways to matter, and they evolve alongside culture without losing sight of who they are. The NFL didn’t change football. It changed the number of people who could see themselves in it.

That scrutiny comes from a lack of trust. Consumers don’t automatically believe that a successful actor, musician, or athlete knows how to build a great company. In many cases, that skepticism has been earned. We’ve seen celebrity brands launch with enormous hype, only for customers to finally get the product and realize it doesn’t live up to the promises. The product is average, or below average, and the branding feels superficial.

The disappointment goes beyond the product itself. People feel like they bought into the person behind the brand. When the experience doesn’t match the expectations, they don’t just lose trust in the company. They lose trust in the celebrity, too.

That’s what makes celebrity brands so interesting. They solve the awareness problem before they launch with ease compared to other, lesser known entrepreneurs. However, they still have to prove whether they deserve the attention they were given.

A brand that seems to understand this challenge is Reale Actives, Alix Earle’s skincare company. From the moment it was announced, the reaction was predictable. There was excitement from her audience, but there was also skepticism. People questioned whether another celebrity skincare brand was necessary and whether Alix had the credibility to build one.

Rather than trying to ignore that skepticism, Reale Actives appears to have built the brand around addressing it. Across the launch, they made several decisions that immediately strengthened their credibility and ultimately helped sales.

Building Trust

On top of being a celebrity founder, Alix also had the burden of overcoming the assumptions that often come with being a young woman launching a business. She is taking intentional steps to prove those wrong though.

Product / Founder Alignment: Alix has documented her struggles with acne for years. Her audience has watched her experiment with products, talk openly about her skin, and search for solutions. Because of that history, this doesn’t feel like a random career move. It feels like a business that naturally fits her personality, lifestyle, and experiences.

Strong Leadership: Reale Actives didn’t position Alix as the sole expert. Instead, they assembled a leadership team with deep experience in the beauty industry and introduced Dr. Mian, Alix’s dermatologist and Director of Clinical Innovation at Reale Actives. Giving consumers direct access to someone who can explain the formulations, ingredient choices, and clinical thinking behind the products adds a level of credibility that many celebrity brands fail to establish.

Quality

Building trust gets people to place their first order, but having high quality products will earn the second. Quality was one of the biggest question marks surrounding Reale Actives before the products even launched. People scrutinized the ingredient lists and questioned whether the formulas would actually work for acne prone skin but, at the same time, they were curious enough to place and order and try it out based on the baseline of trust they had for Alix and what they knew of Reale Actives.

Rather than avoiding the criticism, though, Reale Actives addressed it directly. Alix and Dr. Mian explained the reasoning behind the formulations, why certain ingredients were chosen, and how the products were developed with acne prone skin in mind. That transparency helped build confidence in the products, but the real test would come once the products were in the customers’ hands. Once the first orders were received, the speculation shifted to focus on real results, which are hard to deny. Reale Actives regularly shares customers’ before and after transformations, along with Alix’s skin progress since starting to use the products.

Quality also extends beyond the formula. It shows up in packaging, fulfillment, and how a brand responds when something goes wrong. When customers pointed out issues with the original packaging for the moisturizer, Dew More, Reale Actives quickly redesigned it. It was a small change, but it showed the brand was listening and committed to improving the overall quality of the products and experiences they provide to their customers.

Customer Service

Fixing the Dew More packaging also demonstrated something else: good customer service. Many celebrity brands mistake audience engagement for customer service. They have millions of followers, reply to comments, and create a sense of closeness with their community, but that same level of care isn’t enough when your followers become paying customers.

Reale Actives took a different approach. When customers expressed frustration with the original Dew More packaging, the brand didn’t simply release an improved version and move on. They sent customers who had experienced the issue an entirely new package with the whole product line, free of charge, which came as a welcome surprise to many.

That was an expensive decision for a young company, and they certainly didn’t have to do it. Ultimately it shows that they listen to and respect their customers, which will create tremendous loyalty in the long run.

Founder Involvement & Association

For years, the goal of celebrity brands has been to eventually outgrow the celebrity. Oftentimes they get into retail, prove the products are good enough to stand on their own, and slowly remove the founder from the conversation.

I think that’s outdated.

Consumers don’t dislike celebrity brands because celebrities are involved. They dislike them when the involvement feels manufactured. They can tell the difference between someone lending their name to a company and someone genuinely building one.

Hailey Bieber is a great example of someone who stayed deeply ingrained in her business from the start. Even after selling Rhode to e.l.f. Beauty, she still remains involved in the company. Consumers have and still feel like Hailey is deeply motivated and passionate about Rhode, and it makes them more likely to make repeat purchases and has turned Hailey into a well-respected, idolized business woman.

It’s too early to know whether Reale Actives will follow that path, but I think there’s an opportunity. If Alix continues to be deeply involved in product development, customer feedback, and the long term direction of the business, people may eventually think of her differently. Instead of “Alix Earle, the influencer who also has a skincare brand,” she could become “Alix Earle, founder of Reale Actives.” I think this concept has the potential to change how people think about celebrity brands altogether.

Reale Actives is still early in its journey, so many of these observations will evolve over time. But based on what we’ve seen so far, I think the brand is building on a solid foundation. More importantly, it’s challenging some of the assumptions people have about celebrity brands. Before wrapping up, let’s put Reale Actives through the studio jac Taste Test and see how it scores across the five categories.

The more I explored these topics, the more I realized they were all connected. Whether I was analyzing a hospitality brand, attending an event, studying a growing community, or looking at a company’s visual identity, I was ultimately interested in the same thing, and that is something I have started referring to as ‘modern brand culture.’

To me, modern brand culture is the combination of ideas, aesthetics, and behaviors that shape how people perceive and interact with brands. It extends far beyond traditional marketing. It influences where people spend their time, what they talk about, how it makes them feel, and ultimately what they choose to be part of.

I felt good about finally coming up with a name for these topics that I am so passionate about, but a label isn’t enough for me to be able to coherently share this concept with others. I wanted a framework that could help evaluate it in a more structured way.

One concept I kept coming back to was taste. Merriam-Webster defines taste as “the distinctive quality of an experience” and “a manner or aesthetic quality indicative of discernment or appreciation.” While taste is often associated with fashion, art, food, or design, I believe it plays an equally important role in business. It is the invisible force behind brands that controls the way they are experienced and why communities are drawn to them. It’s not just about aesthetics. It’s about creating something that feels intentional, relevant, and representative of the company and its community. While taste is often treated as something subjective, I believe many of the factors that contribute to it can be observed, evaluated, and improved. That belief led me to create The Taste Test.

The Taste Test is a framework for evaluating brands across five categories: Clarity, Cultural Relevance, Aesthetics, Community, and Experience. Together, these categories help explain why some brands feel cohesive, memorable, and culturally relevant while others struggle to create that same connection.

Clarity evaluates whether a brand knows who it is and communicates that effectively. Is its positioning clear? Does its messaging make sense? Is there consistency between what it says and what it does?

Cultural Relevance examines how a brand engages with the world around it. Does it understand the conversations, behaviors, and trends shaping its audience? Is it contributing something meaningful to culture, or simply reacting to it?

Aesthetics looks at the visual and sensory expression of a brand. This includes design and content decisions, and evaluates whether they come across aligned and intentional.

Community explores the relationships a brand creates. Are people simply customers, or do they feel connected to the brand and to one another? Is there evidence of participation, advocacy, and belonging?

Experience evaluates how a brand comes to life across every touchpoint. From a website visit to an event, product, newsletter, or customer interaction, does the experience deliver on the promise being made?

The Taste Test also reflects an evolution taking place at studio jac. While studio jac will continue designing and producing experiences, I am increasingly focused on the broader goal of creating various ideas, experiences, and tools for building memorable brands and thriving communities. The Taste Test is one example of that work.

I’ll be offering The Taste Test as a new studio jac service which includes detailed assessment with scoring, observations, recommendations, and my outside perspective on your brand across all five categories. For those looking for a quicker starting point, I’ll also be releasing a free self-assessment on my website that anyone can use to quickly evaluate their brand and get a high-level understanding of where they stand.

My hope is that The Taste Test becomes a shared language for discussing the things that make brands memorable, meaningful, and culturally relevant. I’ll be sharing Taste Test observations and breakdowns from brands, places, and communities that inspire me along the way to show how the framework works in practice. Stay tuned.

At risk of getting verbally attacked by lifelong Knicks fans for being a poser, I feel the need to call out that I am not even close to one of the most dedicated fans out there. I grew up on Long Island and have always rooted for the Knicks, but I couldn’t tell you the team’s record for past seasons over the last decade. Over the past month, though, I’ve dedicated many of my evenings to watching this team and the mornings after have been spent smiling at my phone while watching highlights, seeing the players’ personalities in post-game interviews, and camaraderie in press conferences. Somewhere along the way, I started thinking about how much there is to learn from the community that has formed around this franchise, and why this particular team has captured the city’s attention in a way few others have.

The New York Knicks are one of the most valuable franchises in the NBA, sitting alongside the Golden State Warriors and the Los Angeles Lakers. There is a glaring difference between the Knicks and the other two franchises, though… championships. The Warriors and the Lakers have spent the last few decades winning championships. The Knicks, on the other hand, haven’t won since 1973.

Fifty-three years.

And the last time they even made it to the finals was twenty seven years ago (1999). In all that time, though, Knicks fans never left. How can a team go more than five decades without a championship win and still maintain the most passionate fan base of all time?

For one, they are the NEW YORK Knicks. Just by representing the city of New York, they already have a huge advantage. For most of the team’s history, the Knicks have been the city’s basketball team. The only team. (No shade to the Nets, but they don’t have nearly the same history or roots in the city). Unlike football and baseball, where fans are split between the Giants and Jets or the Yankees and Mets, New York basketball has largely rallied around a single franchise.

There is more to it though.

When Mike Brown was named head coach in the summer of 2025, he acknowledged the Knicks fandom. He spoke about the privilege of coaching on the stage that is Madison Square Garden and called Knicks fans some of the most knowledgeable and passionate fans “probably in all of sports.” That knowledge and passion isn’t just because of the size and dominance of NYC, it has to do with the fact that basketball is woven into the New York identity in a way that cannot be compared to anywhere else.

New York City is covered in basketball courts. It makes sense that you won’t see soccer fields or football fields scattered around a city this dense. But basketball courts? They’re everywhere, and they are always full.

I didn’t grow up in the city but I wasn’t far away on Long Island, and I believe this love for the sport bled all the way out to the suburbs. When I first moved to New York, though, it was amplified a hundredfold. I came out of a subway station to tour an apartment and heard music blasting from down the block. A crowd had formed around a basketball court while an MC narrated the game through a microphone and speaker. It was rowdy and exciting and it felt exactly like a scene from a movie. It felt like New York. In New York, basketball isn’t just something people watch. It is part of the identity.

That strong tie to basketball is what makes fans as passionate as they are. For years that passion existed without the results. The identity was there but the team wasn’t, until now. What makes this time around different?

It isn’t that this is the most talented roster ever assembled by the Knicks. At this level, everyone is talented. Talent creates potential, but it is relationships that create resilience. When the pressure is high, as it is right now, teams win because of things like trust, communication, and chemistry, and this Knicks team certainly has that.

This team doesn’t feel like a collection of stars. They feel like a group of friends who happen to be elite basketball players. You can see it in the way they communicate, celebrate, laugh, and sacrifice for each other. Most importantly, though, they reflect the city they play for. New York has never celebrated perfection. If it did, the Knicks fans would have disappeared years ago. The city celebrates work ethic, effort, and grit. This roster embodies those values of New Yorkers.

For the first time in a long time, the team and the community feel aligned. The roster reflects the identity that Knicks fans have spent decades protecting.

That’s a common thread among great teams, companies, and communities. The strongest ones don’t succeed on talent or skill alone. They succeed in alignment, authenticity, and genuine connection. People can tell when something is forced. They can tell when a team, a company, or a brand is trying too hard to manufacture a story.

What makes this Knicks team so compelling is that nothing about it feels manufactured. The friendships are real. The effort is real. The players genuinely seem to love playing together, and the fans genuinely love watching them do it.

and finally… GO KNICKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!