What Brands Should Build Next...
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Story time…
A few months ago, Edmond Lau, the terrific Australia-based strategist and straight-A meme-ology student (who you may know from his LinkedIn graph-style depictions of micro cultural trends) and I met.
We started talking about the rise of “thought-fluencers” and asked a simple question: how can we get out of the constant rut of analyzing what is current?
We weren’t interested in another round of clever brand reporting or culture-chasing analysis, the kind you can find everywhere nowadays. What we were circling instead was something stranger and riskier: properly scoping out blue sky ideas that sound implausible at first. Blockbuster fantasies with no neat case studies or historical proof to lean on.
The kind of big thinking that might feel nonsensical or delusional, right up until the moment you realize they actually make perfect sense. For instance…
What if IKEA made furniture designed to be split up after a breakup?
Why isn’t Aesop, a stalwart of tastemaker bathrooms everywhere, creating bathroom furniture?
What if clean-girl favorite, Rhode, started selling injectable peptides that renew from outside in?
Or what if Equinox, the king of luxury gyms, created a hotel? (Oh wait, they already did. Well… then our thinking is heading in the right direction)
That’s because brands are already expanding their ‘Brand Universes’ at speed in a bid to remain culturally legible to audiences who no longer experience culture in neat, single-channel ways. Attention is won through ecosystems and places people can step into, return to, and participate in.
It’s why we’re seeing brands tackling food, film, art, and fashion simultaneously, seeing these fields as true extensions of their universe-building exercise. Every great brand, sooner or later, stops behaving like a product and starts behaving like a universe.
Brands in general now expand in layers, moving from cultural experiments and hype moments to fully institutional, capital-intensive businesses. What starts as marketing can evolve into infrastructure. What begins as a product can become a place, a movement, an expansion of any kind. Read from smallest to largest and most entrenched, the hierarchy looks something like this:
1. Shock Objects (smallest / attention-first): Meme-ready or unexpected drops designed for cultural discourse rather than monetizable scale (i.e. Supreme brick, MSCHF’s viral stunt products, Liquid Death “coffin cooler”).
2. Community as Product (fastest-growing layer): Run clubs, creator collectives, Discord groups, live events and membership ecosystems where belonging drives retention and revenue (Nike Run Club, Patta Running Team, Duolingo Discord groups, The North Face XPLR Pass, Gymshark meet-ups).
3. Lifestyle Extensions (category expansion): Brands moving beyond their core product into adjacent verticals like cafés, homeware, media or wellness (Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar, Prada Caffè, Goop wellness summits, Apple Fitness+, Versace dogwear, Jacquemus beach club takeovers).
