#44 – The end of childhood, planning's 50th birthday, and brands as places
Guten Abend!
This issue of Strategy Bites is a bit more random, a scattergun approach to inspiration, if you will. Not a specific theme, just lots of different bits and pieces.
It’s both about a big, fat 50th birthday (navel gazing, yay!) and the end of childhood (and the problematic consequences); it’s about sports brands flipping the script (IYKYK), and AI turning the tables (a little); it’s about making Temu and Shein pay for their trash, and it’s about brands as spaces with meaning (both maybe wishful thinking.)
Enjoy the clicks.
Six Links of Inspiration:
Dear Planning, Happy 50th. The infamous planning guide is turning 50 – there’s really no excuse anymore to call planning a young discipline – and it invites all sorts of musings on the state of the industry. This one here is a love letter to the discipline, the challenges and opportunities its facing every day. “As data-driven precision and boundless creativity drift further apart, the playing field for strategy doesn’t disappear, it grows.” Strategy, to me, seems more fun than ever. And done right, can make bigger impacts than ever before.
What Would Happen if Fashion Were Taxed Like Cigarettes? The French government just paved the way for a fast fashion tax, flying straight in the face of people’s obsession with landfill boosters Shein and Temu. “Brands could face a fee of up €10 per item on products that qualify as most environmentally damaging.” People will probably be quick to point out how this it’s not a governments role to tell people what to wear and that it will limit or reduce choice for people. Yeah, but I’d argue that sometimes you have to nudge towards more longterm healthy behaviours (think saving for pensions, or saving the planet, etc.) And, even with “reduced choice”, French people will still out-dress almost all of us.
Strategy in the era of AI. There’s no point in summarising a summary, so head over to Zoe Scaman’s presentation for a quick guide on how to integrate AI into your strategy process. Check it out. It’s obviously her way of doing it – so play around with it and hone your own style.
Why brands should think like place-makers. Brands as people, brands as communities – there’s already plenty of models to stimulate interesting (or not so interesting) thinking around brands. Here’s a new one: brands as places. Gemma Jones’ article explores how brands can benefit from thinking like place-makers. I love the definition of a place as a “space with meaning” – this alone is an inspiring way of looking at brands. ”Thinking like a place-maker calls brands to consider time-tested criteria for cultural relevance that can be lacking in our digital-first era; community participation, long and short term thinking and the balance of authenticity and progress.” Overall, there’s an exciting tension at the heart of this metaphor, as the filling will always be done by the public, the humans occupying the space, with the brand being the result rather than the input. You can’t force the meaning into your brand, you can only provide a space and some guardrails for it to happen. Brands are containers.
Are Football Clubs About to Start Manufacturing Their Own Kit? Football doesn’t feature a lot in this newsletter. And I intend to keep it that way. But the news that Barcelona FC might sever ties with Nike is worth sharing. Even more share-worthy considering that the Catalan sports
teambrand apparently isn’t considering a huge Puma offer, but is contemplating to move manufacturing in-house instead. This article talks through the pro’s and con’s of such a move. This might just be a little power struggle between two sports juggernauts in attempt to get to a more favourable deal. Or it’s a proper power shift towards the “talent” (or “creator”), away from the producer (or “brand”) who is suddenly realising that they’re contributing tremendously to the (positive) perceptions of the US sports giant.End the phone-based childhood now. On the danger of sounding like a broken record, here’s another article about how phones are changing childhood. The reason I read this stuff: I have two kids now. The reason you should read this stuff is because it’s not just about smartphones – it’s about childhood and how our society has changed childhood. And how, today and tomorrow, we’ll pay the price for that. “The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world. […] Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.” One of the many dire consequences are captured in this depressing quote that Meg Weisenberger highlighted in her Linkedin post sharing the article: “Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them.”
This is it for now. Thanks for reading all the way to the end, it means a lot to me. And if you found just one little thing inspiring in this mix, feel free to share this post with some friends.
See you next week,
Maximilian