We’re excited to announce that Space Doctors APAC MD Maya Madhusoodan and Director Sui Lai Kang will be leading training in semiotics and cultural insight at this ears ESOMAR APAC event 8th – 10th November 2023.

We will update this page as more details become available.

In the meantime you can learn more on the ESOMAR website:

https://community.esomar.org/asia-pacific-2023-registration

To celebrate the launch of our Creative Strategy offer Space Doctors are offering a limited number of close-in ‘hive mind’ troubleshooting sessions to clients struggling with a gap between strategy and creative execution.

Read on to find out more…

“We’re not getting the creative work that delivers against our strategy, no matter how we brief it in…”

“Why haven’t we been able to replicate the success of our last creative campaign?”

“We’re struggling to localise the global strategy”

“We have a strong insight and great concept, but it’s not translating well into our packaging design”

Any of these sound familiar?

If you’re working in branding, communications or design, we expect so. These sticking points are all versions of the same glitch in the creative process; the part that gets ‘lost in translation’ between the strategy and the final creative execution.

A lot can go awry…

Maybe it’s not the right expression of the idea.
Maybe it’s not distinctive or exciting enough.
Maybe it doesn’t resonate in the local market context.

Whatever the reason, you’re not saying what you intend to, and you’re often not sure why. In response, we have found our own way to be useful, focussing on closing the gap between strategic intention and creative expression, blurring the lines between strategy, culture and creative. We love untangling creative challenges to open up clear pathways forward that are insight rich, culturally driven and strategically faithful.

We can help you to..
1. Build cultural relevance: Tap into the ideas and cues of emerging culture to tell a more compelling story that is positively shaping culture, not just reacting to it

2. Identify the ‘creative idea’: Find the red thread that makes sense of the whole, the story that only you can tell

3. Manage the creative gap: Ensuring your strategy is translated in a way that carries the intended meaning and brings a rationale for how we evaluate different creative routes.

4. Localise creative: Identify how to translate a global strategy into local market contexts

5. Be more consistent and distinctive: Define the ‘creative DNA’ of your brand, platform or concept so you multiple impact across creative touchpoints (and which any creative agency can use)

Great strategy doesn’t always result in great creative. And not all great creative is strategic.

So whether you’re a client, an in house creative team or creative agency, if you think we can be useful at any part of the journey you might be on, get in touch with Cato Hunt at Space Doctors for our full Creative Strategy credentials or to register your interest in one of our close-in creative troubleshooting sessions.

Space Doctors Associate Director Roberta Graham spoke to Creative Review about the Barbie’s evolution over the decades, and how our work with Mattel helped to keep Barbie a positive role model for diverse audiences across the globe.

Read the full feature below for more on our Barbie ‘Dream Gap’ project and why the brand’s bold choice in addressing and reframing their space in culture paid off.

Photo by Elena Mishlanova on Unsplash

The Barbie hype is not over… 🎀

Space Doctors Culture and Trends Consultant Alex Bee talked to The Stylist Group this week on the reasons behind the world’s collective frenzy in anticipation for the Barbie film’s release last Friday 👇

Barbie has taken up that space at a time when we’re craving light relief from the huge amount of unrest and instability we’re experiencing on a personal and global scale. Barbie is offering us all a moment of playful escape from a reality which for the last few years has felt like a state of ‘permacrisis’.

As a toy for children, Barbie is a way to project and imagine the future, as adults we still want to put ourselves in her world. Culture is shifting into a space that is increasingly participatory (merch, collaborations, fan fiction, VR and AR experiences) and the Barbie hype represents a pink peak in the satiation of our appetite to be part of not only a story, but a movement.

Read the full feature in The Stylist Group below for more 🚀

Photo by Alex Middleton on Unsplash

By Coco Wu 

Over the last three years, glamping has become one of the hottest buzzwords in China. In the West, glamping normally involves luxurious facilities and high-end hotels. But Chinese glamping often takes place in idyllic suburban campsites with exquisite aesthetics, providing a more accessible version of nature for people to escape urban stress and connect with the natural world.

To understand why glamping has become so popular, it’s important to acknowledge the fundamental relationship between nature and people in China. Rooted in Daoism, people believe that nature is a venerable force that we should respect for its intrinsic power and intelligence – we can see this in Traditional Chinese Medicine, the core philosophy of which is to honour the natural flow and balance of nature. Therefore, people perceive nature as something to enjoy, but not challenge. A place for visiting rather than altering.

Photo source: @小莓亚子 from RED

However, after a rush of popularity, the glamping scene is changing, the hype is waning. At the beginning of 2023, China abruptly ended the “dynamic zero covid” policy and the number of people traveling abroad, especially to popular international destinations like Singapore and Thailand, has surged:

“This Spring Festival, all of my friends were traveling abroad, literally everyone. And I will take a world-round trip soon as well. People are taking the opportunity to travel as much as they can. It’s a mentality thing, like they just want to get out of the country, not because there’s anything wrong with our beloved country, but people are just so desperate to travel.” – a leading-edge consumer told Space Doctors during an interview.

The opportunities to travel further, go out more frequently and freely in the upcoming spring and summer is altering our relationship with nature once again – from a peaceful refuge, to a place in which we can play out a newfound sense of freedom. People are proactively looking for ways to release their built up energy and anticipation, let go in real life, embrace freedom, and, crucially, explore the unexpected in the outdoors.

We see the IRL-shaped hole left by long and unpredictable lockdowns being filled by experiences in natural environments, in places where people can experience the world with few distractions. Where they can connect to what feels ‘real’. Instead of online forums, we see a growth in anonymous socializing activities where people seek more genuine connections by convening with strangers in nature, liberated from social media anxiety and the confines of online rituals.

Photo source: @野栖户外-带鱼 from RED

Photo source: @野栖户外-带鱼 from RED

户外社交盲盒: Outdoor blind box events bypass the matching algorithms and shortcuts of connecting online, to create both spontaneous and more meaningful connections with like-minded people in nature.

A period of hyper focus on health has led to particularly high awareness of radical wellbeing; people are no long satisfied with passive moments of just rest and relaxation. Catalysed by the ‘996’ (working 9am – 9pm, six days a week) toxic rat race, people who feel overwhelmed in urban areas and are looking to nature to truly be themselves, offering a perfect space for the creativity that their productivity-focussed urban lives lack, where people can experiment with different art forms and freely express themselves.

Photo source: @小绿球大地艺术营地 from RED

A luxury hotel from Chengdu organized a traditional concert in a remote farm, inviting musicians to come and freely improvise.

As the glamping craze slows down, it has left a lasting influence on China’s future of social connection and creativity. Brands looking to connect better with the ever-changing outdoor landscape should take note of these implications:

• The waning appeal of glamping indicates that Chinese consumers are looking for more creative and active ways to engage with nature – not just passive enjoyment of luxury amenities. Brands can look for ways to curate unexpected outdoor experiences that engage people’s imaginations.
• People are eager for meaningful exploration, and to feel a sense of purpose and achievement when they engage with the natural world.
• People are increasingly intentional in both why they travel and how they travel. Nature is not only a space to release stress, but also a space for creative self-expression and building meaningful connections with like-minded people.

main image credit: @小莓亚子 from RED

Read Space Doctors CEO Fiona McNae in Fast Company on the critical role language plays when it comes to creating real change:

“Although shaping a regenerative future requires long-term, systemic, global change, we can take the important first steps today by changing the way we talk in our own businesses”.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

📅 Thursday, 1 December
⏰ 6pm - 8pm SGT
📍 WeWorks, 18th Floor, 21 Collyer Quay,Singapore, 049320

We are all stakeholders of the planet and influential in the transformation needed in the coming years. On the one hand, sustainable pledges and strategies by blue chip companies have been about minimizing the negative impact of businesses on our planet. On the other hand, we know people are tired of greenwashing, and younger generations demand authentic, responsible brands without a premium price tag. We know that minimizing impact is no longer enough, and we need to start thinking in ‘circular design’ or ‘regenerative’ ways. These can only be addressed in consortium.

How can we, in our various roles understand people’s needs of tomorrow, address the wicked problems we face today and come up with systemic solution?

Register here today and join us on for a fireside chat to discuss the role people, brands, businesses and systems design have in creating regenerative futures.

Should you have any questions in the meantime, do not hesitate to e-mail us at events@insites-consulting.com

“Gen Z” is probably one of the most hyped words in today’s marketing world. When we talk about Gen Z in China (年轻人，95后，00后，千禧后), they are often associated with certain stereotypes – rebellious, dramatic, Douyin addicts. But is that the cultural truth among Chinese Gen Z? Growing up in a world that is constantly in flux, how do they pursue their unique ways of self-expression?  And why are they shaped in the way they are?

At Space Doctors, we believe that culture is the hidden influencer. In this case, the social context is critical in shaping up a generation’s culture.

Millennials, were the first generation of the single-child policy, growing up in the market-driven China, the first generation to be exposed to international culture from an early age, and the first internet generation. Therefore, they are new to the great freedom they have. It is exciting for them to embrace this new space to find a singular path, different from their parents or counterparts. They were the first to start pushing back against conformity and carve a unique path to express themselves, liberated from labels and stereotypes. The traditional education and environment have refrained them from expressing unique individuality, so they need to reject, react, and rediscover the social norms to build their identities.

Gen Z however, were born as digital natives and highly connected using social media. Exposed to the diversity of various subcultures from an early age Gen Z feel able to express themselves more openly and feel more comfortable skin. Having grown up in a conflicting time when China is prosperous but competition is fiercer than ever and the broader outlook is more uncertain, Gen Z in China show a degree of disillusionment with materialism and question the hyper-consumerism that is surrounding them. The world is not a permanent construct for them, instead, they always want to “try on” what might work for them.

As a result, self-expression for them is less about standing out from the crowd, but more about exploration to gain a true understanding of the multi-faceted  authentic self to claim agency over their identity.

Speaking of Chinese GenZ, Garlica Princess (蒜香公主)  is someone that can connect you closer to the trendy GenZ pop culture. Garlica Princess is a rising pop star and known as the “sweet spicy girl”(甜辣女孩). At the first glance, you may recognize her as one of the “typical” GenZ stars – pink hair, quirky make-up, dramatic style, and “cool” attitude. However, as her name suggests, her actions and songs embody what she loves and stands for.

“I love eating garlic. I need it for every meal because it makes me feel safe. It’s stinky at first impression, but people kind of cannot live without it. I think I am like garlic. I am far from the social standard of beauty, but I have my own taste. Garlic is not only my favorite food, but also stands for me – someone not fitting in anywhere but has its own unique personality.”

Chinese Gen Z’s commitment to the journey of self-exploration, presents an opportunity for brands to support them on this journey. To build genuine connections with Chinese Gen Z, brands should:

• Give space and freedom for Gen Z to reveal or craft who they are or could be, rather than give them permission to do so
• Cue potential and optimism in communications in response to the constantly changing world and encourage them to discover a different side of themselves
• Provide the opportunities, tools and inspirations for people to reflect their passions

Want to explore how your brand could pivot to build genuine connections with Gen Z people in China? Get in touch

We helped IHG re-design their hotel rooms to deliver the best night’s sleep for a Millennial audience.

We identified four key cultural stories of sleep the brand could tap into. Two powerful insights were supported by ethnographic observation in hotel rooms: the importance of fluid, flexible space and the importance of thresholds.

We then worked with leading designers from outside the sector to reinvent the hotel room space in a way that uniquely addresses guests’ real unmet needs.

The design has been so successful that in late 2018 it was patented.

How effectively is your brand delivering the experience you and your audience want it to? Get in touch to find out how we can help.

How Space Doctors helped Saffron harness imagery, narrative, and culture for one of the biggest brand relaunches in digital memory

While global design agency, Saffron, were working on the launch of Meta – Facebook’s new company brand – the pressure was on to make this the most significant digital relaunch of (at least) this year. To ensure no details, opportunities, or meaningful moments were missed, Saffron turned to Space Doctors to help them understand the vital role of colour and emotion when crafting a definitive identity to bring in a new era of digital immersion.

In designing the ‘metaverse’, Facebook were trying to push the limits and lead the future of social media and the immersive digital environment. Reaching beyond the screen, metaverse design principles should inhabit the entire canvas of the user’s imagination – from the air you breathe to the light on your skin. Keeping in touch with Facebook’s core social values, this world had to be built on foundations of connection, empathy, and possibility.

We began this journey by researching the cultural codes of digital natives, how colour plays an emotional role in their lives, and how we could call upon their vibrant creative energy to define this digital frontier specifically for them.

We then dug deeper into the design codes of virtuality itself – how light, interactivity, energy, and motion unfold across the spectrum of VR/AR and MR to create a narrative meaning that would speak to the social essence of the metaverse.

To focus our insights, we synthesised the two research pieces into unique colour worlds detailed through imagery, texture, narrative and cultural context. Now armed with an intricate visual outline for design, the creative team at Saffron had the tools they needed to form a new brand identity that could hold the vast range of human experience the metaverse was striving to offer.

Could your brand identity use a cultural refresh to encourage more engaged and meaningful customer interactions? Get in touch to find out how we can help.

 A nightclub with beds isn’t an entirely new concept, but in Shanghai, it reflects a way of people normalising pleasure in unexpected places in China today. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a gradual but significant shift of how Chinese youth think about life, achievement and wellbeing. From the “involated” (内卷) generation, lying flat and opting out of the seemingly endless rat race; to the rise and fall of the “996 work culture”; and most recently, this evolved to a more pragmatic “45-degree life”, a middle ground that balances working hard and letting ourselves relax. 

It’s more than work-life balance – it’s a bigger shift of how people in China define “a good life” and how we aspire to lead our lives. People are moving from hardcore work or fitness routines, highly restrictive diets to treating health & wellbeing as a lifelong pursuit. The approach is to make these behaviours sustainable and enjoyable over time.  

From chasing achievement to finding everyday balance 

In China, it can feel radical to prioritise pleasure, but increasingly it is like an act of self-actualisation and expression of freedom. Indulgent moments are often thought of as something that is special or something that should be limited. But this is getting reframed in China as something that is essential for our health and wellbeing, in the every day.  

An early cultural signal of this shift in mindset, came with the term “punk health” back in 2017, a seemingly oxymoronic concept that became widely adopted by urban youth in China. But it signifies a practical shortcut to a balanced lifestyle, expressed by pairing a vice with a healthy ingredient: goji berries in beer, ginseng infused coffee, staying up all night but eating royal jelly or bird’s nest soup would make us feel better. 

Five years into “punk health”, the erstwhile trendy term may be fading but the idea of taking life more casually and acknowledging the human body’s physical limits has become more relevant. Pleasure is normalised and we are leaning into experiences that slow us down, fortifying our daily life.  

What does this mean for brands? 

Needs are shifting from extreme compartmentalised healthy behaviours to solutions that empower, feed the mind, body and soul.  People are seeking a new balance in pleasure, energy and nourishment that can stay on as a lifestyle, as opposed to a fad. Food & beverage brands have been quick to deliver this need by offseting “bad behaviours” and encouraging the consumption of more holistic, tasty food that doesn’t deprive the soul of the joy of eating / drinking. Many such products take cues from traditional Chinese medicine, but with sleek and contemporary branding.  

But this insight does not just apply to F&B category. At Space Doctors, we advise businesses in China to take this shift in cultural approach into account while thinking of planning for this new aspiration via brand purpose, communication, product or experience you offer:  

• How can brands empower consumers in their quest for a more balanced, sustainable and healthy lifestyle that embraces the need to work hard, but also search for empowering solutions that bring in balance?  
• With benefits and claims, it isn’t just about fortification or removal of nasties, the language of 2x or ‘anti-x’. Claims are moving towards a more proactive improvement of health, addressing a more systemic approach. 
• Multi-sensorial experiences that enable more active stimulation, pampering, pleasure, rest, rejuvenation are sought after virtually and

Based: United States / Remote

Space Doctors is a B Corp certified, global cultural and creative consultancy. We shape brands and organizational futures by making them connect and respond to meaningful cultural change.

We are looking to hire a Strategy Director in the North American market team who is passionate about  applying cultural insights to strategic business transformation. You are experienced at understanding how to leverage a wide range of data sets (semiotic codes, category, brand decodes, design decodes, ethnographic data, big data) to impact on business futures, creative, experiential or design strategy.

As an experienced industry professional, you will have built strong relationships with clients based on your excellence and leadership in strategic brand development. And this will be an asset to our consultative, collaborative style of business development, which is based on valuable relationship building.

Further details on Job Scope: 

Strategic application of Cultural Insights: 

Identifying client growth opportunities: As a strategy leader, your role is to partner with clients to identify, scope and design the best approach to resolving client challenges

Team leader: Working with our insights and creative expression team, you help answer briefs in an inspiring and transformative way.

Offer development: developing new kinds of outputs which deliver our insights and stories in the most compelling and extraordinary ways for our clients

An advocate of Space Doctors– by attending and presenting at events and conferences. This includes supporting and collaborating with wider SD team on initiatives such as pitches and conferences.

Experience and Culture: 

At least 8-10 years of experience in North American market, understand and respect the challenges and opportunities market across sectors relative to our business and our B-Corp mission objectives.

Experience of working with clients at a very senior level, and demonstrated ability for generating client relevant strategy backed with cultural evidence and insights

You will work with the small and agile team who are passionately working towards driving further meaningful, sustainable growth in the industry. You will be involved and contributing to the growth of the team in North America

Our team is not solely limited to work in the region. We collaborate and contribute to the global team’s thinking, projects and overall culture.

Advantages

Experience in both consulting and client side, proven ability to develop a team.

Competitive salary and benefits

How to Apply

Get in touch with our US based SVP Michael Thomas directly at m.thomas@space-doctors.com 

How Space Doctors helped Durex discover and represent the emerging realities of sexuality around the world

What do sexuality and semiotics have in common? To us, they’re both all about exploration, attention, and discovery. When Durex needed a fresh, culturally powered read on a category that still remains taboo in many markets, an innovative approach that put semiotics to work was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Durex were struggling to establish meaning beyond being the world’s number one condom brand. Wanting to gain relevance in conversations of broader sexual well-being, they needed to understand the cultural shifts impacting how people talk and think about sex across intersections of sexuality, ethnicity, generation, and region.

Using local analytics from our in-market teams across the globe, we defined a set of Cultural Codes of Sexual Wellbeing and plotted them onto a Semiotic Map of Sexual Wellbeing. This tool enables each regional Durex team to visualise market-specific nuances they can use to identify the visual and linguistic levers they need to pull to activate these codes.

We then decoded key competitors in each market by studying core brand assets and communications. These Global Category Codes highlighted connections between dominant and emergent narratives, as well as how Durex can disrupt them to elevate and differentiate its brand in the future.

Durex now have a wealth of accessible information helping them to tell more powerful and distinctive stories, directly inspired by and tailored to specific cultures and markets.

This project was about unlocking the world of discovery. Without returning to traditional, demure imagery, Durex have found ways to represent sexuality in a way that champions inclusivity, sensitivity, and authenticity. That feels important for the future, not only for Durex as a brand, but for society as a whole.

Watching pet videos on TikTok after a long day, taking fashion inspiration from BTS’ pastel coloured two-pieces, obsessing over Baby Yoda and the way he says “patu”, or wearing earrings shaped like Bernie Sanders’ famous mittens (yes, they exist) ─ what connects these seemingly irrelevant behaviors is the power of cuteness to help us cope with the world we live in and strive for a better one.

Cuteness has long been associated with Asian aesthetics, especially with the Japanese concept “kawaii”, from characters like Hello Kitty and Pikachu, to young women’s beauty and fashion – often with lots of pink and frills. Brands that adopt these types of aesthetic in their visual identity used to be reserved for children, teenagers or women with a particular taste of style.

Now, cuteness is a driving force of culture, a global aesthetic movement that we are increasingly seeing across different aspects of our lives: from social media to pop culture, and even some parts of political activism. It has become an alternative mode of communication, a radical form of self-expression even, that challenges authority and liberates us from social norms and stereotypes.

The study of cute can be traced back to Darwin, who proposed that infants possess innate qualities that prompt adults to care for them. Similarly with dogs, scientists suggest that puppies may embody qualities that people consider the cutest at the age when they have the best chance of surviving with human intervention. But its positive outcome, according to today’s behavioral science, is more than our instinct telling us to protect the vulnerable. Seeing something we regard as cute is said to promote careful behavior and narrows our attentional focus, promoting positive emotions and motivations.

One interesting cultural example that captures this is “Cloud Cat Petting”, a Chinese trend where people spend time looking at cats online to just feel better, to mentally squeeze and stroke them as if they were their own pets. The global version of this may be r/Eyebleach, a subbreddit filled with adorable animal images for people to cleanse their eyes and mind, a counter offer to what the Internet often is for us ─ a place you find an exhausting amount of unpleasant, shocking, upsetting things about the society we live in. Cuteness in this sense helps us heal from the fatigue and gives us alternative means and perspective to what we experience on a daily basis.

Another example that shows the positive force of our relationship with cuteness in the context of sociality, is the rise of artists and celebrities who embrace aesthetics outside the traditional expressions of gender, sexuality and age. As mentioned earlier, cute aesthetics have been seen as characteristic of certain type of femininity or juvenility, such as harmlessness and cheerfulness. Artists such as Lil Nas X, Harry Styles and BTS’s disruption of traditional notions of masculinity uses aesthetics typically associated with innocence, femininity and cuteness as a strong statement of self-expression and assertion of self-confidence.

This shift of cuteness from passive to impactful can be seen in Asia too. Whether it’s an illustrated meme commenting on unhealthy societal pressure, or raising awareness around serious issues like global warming, classic cues of cuteness such as soft and colorful illustrations or typography now not only belong in the space of novelty but also where serious dialogues around life and society are taking place.

This cultural phenomenon is an important one for brands to understand. In this new context not only is cuteness a powerful force with positive psychological effects that can be leveraged in branded communication and designs, it now also exists as a universal mode of communication that transcends region, gender and age.

Many brands have already seen the value of cuteness as currency. Pop Mart just celebrated their 10th anniversary of collectibles business and is now worth 7 billion USD. Alibaba uses animal characters to represent their services as an eco-system which they call Alibaba Zoo, and even high fashion brands like Louis Vuitton or Loewe are partnering with beloved animated characters for their luxury items.

These brands are tapping into the power of cuteness through connecting to characters which embody deeper benefits. But we believe within this cultural shift there is opportunity for brands to go beyond the aesthetics of cuteness alone. By exploring the rich nuances which lie within new codes of cuteness brands can harness its potential to convey meaningful, accessible, authentic and even therapeutic values in a culturally resonant and compelling way.

Cultural Strategy Director  

April 2022 

Based: Singapore /or role can be remote/virtual based in APAC time zones 

Space Doctors is a B Corp certified, global cultural and creative consultancy. We shape brands and organizational futures by making them connect and respond to meaningful cultural change.  

We are looking to hire a Strategy Director in the APAC team who is passionate about  applying cultural insights to strategic business transformation. You are experienced at understanding how to leverage a wide range of data sets (semiotic codes, category, brand decodes, design decodes, ethnographic data, big data) to impact on business futures, creative, experiential or design strategy.  

As an experienced industry professional, you will have built strong relationships with clients in the region based on your excellence and leadership in strategic brand development. And this will be an asset to our consultative, collaborative style of business development, which is based on valuable relationship building.  

Further details on Job Scope:  

Strategic application of Cultural Insights:  

• Identifying client growth opportunities: As a strategy leader, your role is to partner with clients to identify, scope and design the best approach to resolving client challenges 
• Team leader: Working with our insights and creative expression team, you help answer briefs in an inspiring and transformative way.  
• Offer development: developing new kinds of outputs which deliver our insights and stories in the most compelling and extraordinary ways for our clients 
• An advocate of Space Doctors– by attending and presenting at events and conferences. This includes supporting and collaborating with wider SD team on initiatives such as pitches and conferences.  

Experience and Culture:  

• At least 8-10 years of experience in APAC, understand and respect the intricacies of the region and its disparate cultures. 
• Experience of working with clients at a very senior level, and demonstrated ability for generating client relevant strategy backed with cultural evidence and insights  
• You will work with the small and agile team in APAC that are passionately working towards driving further meaningful, sustainable growth in the industry. You will be involved and contributing to the growth of the team in APAC  

• Our team is not solely limited to work in the region. We collaborate and contribute to the global team’s thinking, projects and overall culture.  

Advantages 

• Fluency in English & another Asian language, i.e. Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesia, Japanese, Korean 

Competitive salary and benefits 

To find out more, please contact apply@space-doctors.com enclosing your cv by 15th May 2022. 

No agencies please 

It’s a happy coincidence for us that International Women’s day falls during B Corp month. It gives us an even more significant opportunity to celebrate what we owe to the remarkable women of Space Doctors, and how they lead and challenge us to be a B Corp business elevated by ethical values and practices.

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is ‘gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow’. The goal is to platform the pivotal role women undertake in climate change response, and how their participation and leadership results in more effective climate action for a more sustainable future for everyone. Environmental and social progress are deeply codependent – we can’t achieve one without the other. And, as a B Corp, Space Doctors is always striving to do better with that intersection front of mind.

We’re proud to be part of the B Corp mission to transform the global economic system to benefit all people, communities, and the planet. Last year, we were recognised as The Best For The World™ B Corp in the Workers impact area, achieving a top 5% score by putting in place exemplary employee-friendly practices, such as ownership opportunities, job flexibility, and fair-chance hiring policies. This puts us in the grateful position to be able to share our knowledge and learnings of best practices, and today we’re grasping the chance to spotlight the brilliant women that got us to this point.

Space Doctors was co-founded by our CEO, Fiona Mcnae, a trailblazing leader whose insight and determination continue to open doors and inspire us to chase and create the best work. Our highly successful Singapore branch is run by a fully female team, our global senior leadership has diverse make-up which extends beyond gender alone and our vast associate network allows us to work with inspiring individuals from varied cultures, backgrounds and perspectives around the world on a daily basis. We see our community and its inclusive gender representation as an opportunity to go beyond optical inclusivity and towards a better, stronger business model.

To discover, challenge and create in a way that’s exciting and relevant to our audiences, our organisation needs to represent the diverse cultures in which it operates. We need to view gender inclusivity as an organisational imperative to be practised all the time, not just as a box to be ticked. Having an intersectional perspective on the world is not only a powerful asset for our work as a creative consultancy, but it’s essential for Space Doctors as we strive to collect and implement the most progressive cultural insight possible for our clients.

When we really elevate women’s voices, communities thrive and things get done. The women at Space Doctors make us more powerful, creative, compassionate and future-focussed. But we can always do better with inclusive actions. As UN Women puts it, “without gender equality today, a sustainable future, and an equal future, remains beyond our reach.” As Space Doctors looks ahead to a more sustainable future for both our business and the wider world, we’ll work to champion the diverse perspectives that need to be seen. Happy International Women’s Day!

Last week, our brilliant London director, Cato Hunt, represented us at the Marketing Research Society’s conference for Semiotics and Cultural Insight. The virtual event brought analysts and creatives from various global organisations together for a cultural deep dive into the uses of semiotics for influencing behaviour and improving brand activation – our absolute bread and butter.

Cato led two discussions during the day. She first appeared alongside Adam Dent, Global Creative Design Lead at Costa Coffee, to tell the story of our partnership that developed the future of Costa’s store experience. She also led a panel of three more of our industry peers through a dialogue surrounding breakthrough applications of semiotics and cultural understanding.

Each discourse unpacked inspiring practical examples of semiotic research in action. But one of the most exciting takeaways from Cato’s talks, and the one we want to reflect on further, is the place for semiotic thinking as an internal organisational strategy – not just as a method for gathering and responding to consumer insight.

In a digital landscape where consumers of all demographics are quickly becoming brand experts, it’s essential to connect with them on a memorably emotional level as well as a transactional one. To arrive here, we need to start valuing softer metrics at scale and find ways to communicate and activate them across organisational functions. And, as Cato’s talks gradually revealed, semiotic thinking is the ideal site for that.

As Adam and Cato reflected, our work with Costa began in 2019 and required a massive creative overhaul. In six months, we developed, scaled and began to roll out a new concept with a goal to inject pace, flow and functionality into the Costa customer experience, all while preserving the legacy environment of warmth and relaxation so valued by its core users.

To align all available expertise around the creative goal, we brought together a hybrid, multidisciplinary team of reps from across the Costa experience around a space of experimental play for delivering real time results. Adam noted that working in silos doesn’t create a holistic story or culture – not for organisational strategy or for the end consumer. This reflection on our success with Costa demonstrated to MRS audiences how semiotics can support a strong cultural methodology to shift mindsets towards agile creative work.

Our next panel featured three more experts, including Mariline Alsuar-Dean, Sexual Wellbeing Global Consmer Insights Lead at Reckitt. While considering the role of sensory semiotics in the design of differentiated experiences, Mariline put forward the idea that semiotics should be used to have better conversations with R&D departments. She suggested that giving R&D teams the semiotic vocabulary to transcend a feature-centric product design mindset and start creating towards the experiences they’re trying to deliver connects them more powerfully to both the consumer and the brand vision.

Service and Speculative Designer, J Paul Neely, also had a lot to contribute around organisational applications of semiotics in tech futures. He argued that, while R&D will always be limited by technological barriers, there’s nothing that can’t be shifted immediately by behavioural research and understanding. So, conversations about new tech propositions will always have more exciting momentum if we can include semiotic thinking and use it to collaborate on a cross-functional level.

Colin Mair reflected on his former work as Head of Innovation, Insight and Technology at Heathrow, and how semiotic methodology played a key role in managing organisational change; making tangible widespread cultures of innovation for teams to align around. Looking to the future, he identified the opportunity to further open up semiotic vocabulary to give energy and application to more organisational functions.

As Mariline reminded us, semiotics give us the power to stay true to brand identity while adapting the message to have meaningful conversations across different markets and cultures. Semiotics give us powerful tools for nuance and communication. But, after our inspiring day at the MRS conference, we’re excited to see what futures will emerge while we apply those tools to transform cultures both inside and outside of brand organisations.

If you’d like to chat to us about how semiotics and cultural insight could help your brand, please get in touch. Or for more like this straight to your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

In much of the northern hemisphere, December 21st brings the winter solstice – the shortest day of the year, traditionally marked by a celebration of the ‘sun’s rebirth’. It’s a time centred on growth, renewal, and transformation. And as the days start to get longer, it’s also a symbolic reminder that brighter days are up ahead – an important global message as we reach the end of a challenging year.

But this year’s solstice brings an especially significant new beginning for Space Doctors. After 20 years as an independent organisation, pioneering and professionalising the cultural and semiotic insight sector, we’re delighted to announce that we’ll be joining forces with InSites Consulting to create a new global strategic Brand Transformation Consultancy.

We’re excited to bring our unique blend of expertise in cultural and semiotic insight, brand consultancy, and creative strategy to the InSites Consulting client teams and the 18 office global infrastructure. We will join forces with the existing InSites Culture + Trends team, with their Human Behavioural modelling and Illume network of leading edge consumers and the broader industry-leading capability in on-line consumer communities. And we’ll continue to place social and environmental responsibility at the heart of our work together.

For our clients and associates, this will mean more scope, more impact and more opportunities. For us, it will mean more of what we love – delivering deep, strategic cultural & semiotic understanding that transforms brands and businesses, all while making a positive impact on the wider world we share.

If 2021 – a year of relentless uncertainty – has taught us anything, it’s that embracing change while leaning into collaboration and community only builds resilience, transforming challenges into opportunities. So we’re extremely grateful to be sharing this news with you as we usher in a new year of possibility.

We’re wishing you health, rest, and reward over the holiday season as we look ahead to many new collaborations in 2022.

With warmest wishes from the Space Doctors team, now part of InSites Consulting.

As life slowed down in many ways over 2020 and 2021, we had a little more time to reflect on and invest in what’s really important to us at Space Doctors. Next to commercial conversations, discussions about wellbeing, balance, and sustainability have come to the top of the pile this year.

Global organisations like ours have the responsibility and influence to make our environments the best and most healthy possible places to be. That means caring for the planet, while also looking after our own little worlds and communities.

Last year, with a big birthday on the horizon, we wanted to make sure Space Doctors could look to the future with a clean slate. So, in December 2020, we started our journey to retrospectively balance all of our carbon emissions generated from our founding in September 2001, right through to our 20th birthday in September 2021.

As a company, we needed fresh activities to focus and unify us towards joint values and away from the everyday. But achieving a large-scale project like this with the right detail, data, and tangible action is an incredibly complex and time-consuming task, so our birthday wish wasn’t going to be realised overnight.

We couldn’t trace and chase 20 years of emissions on our own. That’s why we partnered with the World Land Trust, a global conservation charity whose work goes a fair bit further than just planting trees. Their Carbon Balanced programme allows companies to offset unavoidable emissions by funding the permanent purchase, protection, and restoration of threatened forests and ecosystems across the world. Once the seed was planted, we all united around the ambitious deadline.

But before we could choose which specific WLT projects to invest in, we needed to audit just how much carbon we were dealing with. Our two most carbon-greedy activities over the past 20 years have been air travel and utilities. Luckily, research and analysis are in our blood at Space Doctors. And with thorough guidance from WLT about the specific information we needed to pull, we leveraged a mix of hard data from our travel agency’s yearly reports and from our utility providers, as well as our own calculations and educated estimates based on the memory and records of our long-standing colleagues.

Breaking down our business processes in such detail was overwhelming, but also a valuable chance for us to be critical about what ‘normal’ looks like and how it has to change. It took us a few tries, but now we’ve seen the facts, we’re not going back.

Sustainable actions and values can’t just be a bolt-on. They have to live and breathe in the wider context of an organisation and be woven through the ways we think and operate. Offsetting is just the beginning. Space Doctors may be Carbon Balanced, but what we now do with that blank slate is what really matters.

We’re a global company, so while we know we’ll continue to have a carbon output in the future, this project has kickstarted a conscious mindset that’s here to stay. We’re now an official corporate supporter of WLT, and our rolling agreement to offset unavoidable emissions means we’re now constantly taking the time and resources to plan around more sustainable alternatives to reduce emissions in the first place.

Large-scale projects like the Carbon Balanced programme are a fantastic way for teams to situate themselves in their impact on the wider world while looking after the wellbeing of their own communities. But whatever the scale of our sustainable stories, we have to start telling them.

In 2022, we need to do more than just plant trees. But let’s plant the seed, set the standard, and act with positive momentum for the health of both the planet and our people.

Life is all about learning. As characteristically curious and research-driven people, the Space Doctors teams are lucky to work globally on complex cultural and strategic questions. We love what we do, but we’re not immune to the fatigue that piles on from the inevitable amount of screen time it takes to connect.

Last month, after a long year and 7 months of keeping up with hybrid working and digital acceleration, we needed to disconnect to reconnect; to spend some proper time together. No screens allowed. That’s why our Hove and London teams called on Nigel Berman and his team at School of the Wild to take us outside for a very different learning adventure – a day of connection, creativity, and mindfulness.

Once both teams had met at Lewes train station, we set off on a long walk across the Sussex Downs, just a stone’s throw from our Hove office – lucky us, right? As we walked, talked, and listened, racking up around 18,000 steps (but who’s counting?), we soaked up our surroundings and enjoyed the feeling of being physically present and connected.

Nigel listened closely to our needs and built a varied itinerary of activities around them – all with nature at the heart. We ended the day (well, before it really ended at the pub, as all company days out do) around a campfire – sharing tea, toasting marshmallows, and trying our hand at various crafts. Although it was unusual at first, we quickly discovered together how creatively enriching it is to lean into simplicity and use our hands to physically and mindfully try new things.

In Nigel’s own words: 

We bring leaders and teams outside to help you reconnect, think differently and work together better. Working at the intersection of people, nature, and change, we provide an opportunity for you to have a meaningful conversation with your team about the future direction of your organisation and how you work together. It’s all done outdoors and it’s fun!

Simple but stimulating, different but natural, close to home but totally refreshing, a day with School of the Wild was exactly what we needed to reenter collaborative work with stronger connections and more open minds. Why not get in touch at nigel@schoolofthewild.com to see what they can do for your own teams?

The world’s mega-brands are no longer owned by corporations. They are social movements. Extinction Rebellion, Pride and BLM are today’s true blockbuster brands in the sense that their iconography is everywhere. They are household names, visually ubiquitous and mythologically massive, taking up imaginary and physical space in the way Nike and Apple once did.

Once global corporations wholly defined the whole idea of what a brand was – as famously and critically documented by Naomi Klein in No Logo, back in 1999. The energy driving global myth and symbol was truly in the hands of McDonalds’, Disney, Nike and others like them.

But today that energy has slipped away from corporations. It’s been captured by the world’s new multi-nationals: social movements that rise up and spread quickly and dramatically, leaving their acronyms and symbols on streets around the world.

The creation of icons, myths and stories is taking place in the world of social action, drawing energy and inspiration from that source. The result is a new kind of branding, which turns big ideas such as Love, Justice and Survival into symbols people want to put in their windows and write on the walls. It’s no longer about consuming and commodifying, but compelling action and changing consciousness.

The big question for corporate brands is: where does this put them? The simple answer is to play catch-up with their social counterparts and try to apply their model commercially. But playing catch-up is never a great strategy. It puts traditional brands on the back foot, and can easily seem shallow or cynical.

Perhaps a better way forward is to recognise how the whole landscape of global storytelling has changed. Corporate brands are no longer the world’s storytellers-in-chief – but share the platform with other voices and myth-makers. Through authentic partnership and collaboration, new kinds of stories will emerge.

Louise Jolly

Image Credit: Creative Commons

We’re all about connections here at Space Doctors. We know that if brands want to make deep audience connections, they must make deep cultural connections. So, naturally, we also grasp every opportunity to make meaningful connections of our own through our academic partnerships.

For two years now, we’re proud to have partnered with Exeter University’s leading MBA programme. In each year of this unique collaboration, a new cohort of inspiring international students work with our team in various ways to enhance and complete their final year dissertation projects and to generate valuable focused insight into emergent business thinking. Throughout the programme, we offer participants the space, support and resources to take their practical knowledge and curiosity further.

As Jackie Bagnall, MBA Director at the University of Exeter, puts it herself;

“Leadership development needs to be both rigorous and relevant, and it is by working with organisations willing to create the space for inquiry and reflection, that The MBA is able to realise that goal.”

As leaders in cultural analysis for a broad range of organisations, we value the opportunity to stay connected with the wider business research community. In exchange for industry expertise and a pair of fresh eyes over their work, we benefit from insights into areas that are of vital importance for our company, our clients, and the wider world of business.

As a visiting speaker in November 2019, our CEO, Dr Fiona McNae, engaged MBA students in innovative thought around how semiotics and smart storytelling can influence meaningful behaviour as we navigate the cultural challenges emerging from the climate crisis.

We can’t wait to see what more will emerge from this rewarding and important relationship, and nor can the university — as Jackie concludes for us;

“We are very grateful for the opportunities and insights offered by Space Doctors. Working on live projects alongside committed and curious professionals is an important part of the Exeter MBA. Our students are inspired to deliver something meaningful and of value to their clients, using their learning to create a tangible impact.”

Fiona McNae and Anna Perry

Image credit: business-school.exeter.co.uk 

Life on earth has been anything but easy these past couple of years, and as the recent IPCC report makes clear, unless humankind takes rapid and concerted action soon things are only going to get harder. 

Amongst the doom, in a surreal turn of events, billionaires appear to be turning their backs on their own contributions to the mess and focussing instead on visiting, populating and advertising in outer space. But with our home planet’s future looking so bleak, can we blame them for looking to the stars? Well, according to Future Farm’s new culturally critical ad campaign — yes, yes we can.

As reported in Campaign last week and on the brand’s Instagram channel, the plant-based meat alternative brand’s campaign began life in East London as a bold, unbranded mural. ‘Done with Earth? Mars Awaits’, it said, promising an exciting, alternative future. But, designed with a purposefully retro, Starship Troopers-esque aesthetic, this ‘planet-b’ prospect was framed as an outdated, overly-theatrical idea of what progress really means.

So, if real innovation isn’t rocket ships and sci-fi sensationalism, what is it? Enter — phase two of the campaign, which sees the mural graffitied with activist text and symbols that transform the message to say: ‘F*ck Mars. The Future is Earth. The Future is Plant-Based.’

Image Credit: Future Farm Instagram

Borrowing from a tech-led colour palette of vivid purples, yellows, and reds, the coding rejects traditionally natural and leafy semiotics of sustainability. Instead, the visual language of veganism is shifted into the future towards feelings of urgency and excitement.

The anarchist cues bring us (quite literally) back down-to-earth, while the centralised image of the product itself balances this rallying mission to save the planet with the offering of a material, pro-pleasure solution. 

Selling that achievable balance is what great sustainable storytelling is all about. What really matters is making regenerative options more accessible and appealing so that earth can be enjoyed for longer. And connecting with culture through a pro-planet and pro-pleasure stance on progress is exactly how we get there.

Besides, rich blokes in their rockets are just old news for those of us really invested in extraplanetary advances. Especially when NASA’s soon-to-launch James Webb Space Telescope is about to provide a look back 13 billion years, for goodness sake.

Anna Perry and Gareth Lewis

If the days after the fudged “freedom day” in the UK are anything to go by, there will plenty of new opportunities for brands to offer new kinds of protection and care as countries relax their lockdowns.

Travelling across the country this week, it’s been noticeable how common masks still are, while at the same time, pubs, shops and restaurants are rammed. It seems that people want to maintain a sense of being protected, or they are conscious of the ongoing need to look after others, while also wanting as much fun and connection as they can get. This is underpinned by a public mood that seems to be equal parts euphoria and terror.

Navigating these feels challenging for everyone, therefore products and services that can genuinely make it easier for people may stand to benefit. Brands that work with key areas like personal hygiene and categories that have had less opportunity during lockdown like sex tech can obviously make the most of this opportunity. It also feels like a major opportunity for the hospitality sector to show leadership.

Brands and services should be asking themselves – How to make the new freedom feel okay, not just for those individuals who would style themselves as fearless, but for the many?

If you’d like to chat to us about how your brand can play a role in the transition out of lockdown, please get in touch. Or for more like this straight to your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

At Space Doctors we are beyond happy and incredibly proud about being recognized as one of the Best for the World™ B Corps of 2021! 

The Best for the World are B Corps whose scores in one or more of the five impact areas assessed towards the certification reach the top 5% of all B Corps worldwide. At Space Doctors we have been recognized for our efforts in the Workers area: ‘Your best practices in work environment aspects like compensation, benefits, training and ownership opportunities not only contribute to better conditions for your employees but also mark the pace and set an example to follow’.

As all B Corps are already businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose, this is a recognition that makes us incredibly proud!

We’re delighted to be Best For The World and a part of the global #BCorp community. 

We are looking to hire a Culturally-Smart Project Director

June 2021

Based : London or Brighton

Space Doctors is hiring! We are a global cultural and creative consultancy and B Corp. We are known for shaping brands and organisations such as Microsoft, P&G, Danone, J&J, by helping them connect and respond to cultural change. Alongside our core capabilities of semiotics, cultural insight and ethnography/human insight we have recently launched our Collaborative Intelligence offer, which uses an AI ecosystem to produce unparalleled cultural understanding and tracking at scale. And we’re looking for a new Project Director to join our global team, to support us to deliver extraordinary insights and consultancy for brands and organisations whilst helping clients make more environmentally and socially positive decisions.

Elements of the role:

• As part of our cultural and semiotic insight team, you’ll plan and conduct research that addresses our clients’ challenges
• You’ll be able to research and identify the insights that the clients will find valuable and inspirational
• You’re excited by cross disciplinary working across multiple platforms (which would include our Collaborative Intelligence tools) to develop recommendations for our clients
• You’ll be skilled at creating the project structure, managing the project through to delivery, and interfacing with our analyst network.
• You can be lead contact for your clients and will enjoy growing on-going partnerships with them
• You’ll contribute to building Space Doctors external profile – through events, marketing, new business, conferencing and be able to talk about what we do and the difference we want to make
• Your understanding of cultural narratives and semiotics means you naturally can tell compelling stories

Are you…:

• passionate about understanding culture to inform imaginative and progressive new ways forward?
• intellectually curious, open and aware of culture and communications, and able to read culture and come up with an interesting point of view?
• able to frame and reframe your thinking?

• a skilled communicator; engaging, clear and entertaining?
• proactive, with clarity of purpose?
• an agile thinker and problem solver, able to improvise?

Skills:

• You will have 5-7 years of experience; preferably in a research insights environment.
• Some experience with client management is important, as is a proven ability to work across multiple teams and projects
• You get a kick from collaboration with an integrated team

Advantages

• Experience of using data analytics platforms for research would be an advantage
• An interest in sensory insight approaches, ethnographic methods or speculative insights

Space Doctors pays competitive salaries and provide an excellent benefits package to our team.

If this sounds like you, please contact apply@localhost enclosing your CV by 30th June 2021.

No agencies please

Data Analyst

May 2021

Based : role can be remote/virtual

Space Doctors is a global cultural and creative consultancy and B Corp. We shape brands and organisations by helping them connect and respond to cultural change. Alongside, our core capabilities of semiotics, cultural insight and ethnography/human research we have recently launched our Collaborative Intelligence which uses an AI ecosystem to produce unparalleled cultural understanding and tracking at scale.  Now we have an opening for a Data Analyst to join our global team to support us to execute the next steps in our innovation plan.

Elements of the role include:

• Partner with the cultural insights team to plan and conduct research that addresses client challenges
• Develop report structure, data visualization and insights to deliver recommendations
• Use different, complex datasets for statistical analysis and machine learning applications
• Develop data pipelines using different datasets
• Maintain strong knowledge of both well-established and new-to-market digital marketing analytics tools and platforms
• Evangelize the use of data to inform research questions and strategy
• Defining new tools and solutions across multiple data sets against innovation plan.

Skills:

• 2-4 years of experience; preferably in Marketing Analytics, or Digital Analytics.
• Excited to bring creativity to the ways in which data can be applied in new ways to inform insight and strategy.
• Experience with Python and data visualisation
• Understanding of relational data structures and SQL
• Experience with data mining, cleaning and organizing of complex, unstructured datasets from different sources
• A genuine passion for technology and pragmatic approach to developing solutions
• Gets a kick from collaboration with an integrated team
• Intellectually and culturally curious across different topics

Advantages:

• Some familiarity with marketing insights and working in an agency or consultancy
• Fluency in English & Mandarin Chinese

Competitive salary and benefits

To find out more, please contact apply@localhost enclosing your cv by May 31^st 2021.

No agencies please

We’re excited and proud to announce that Space Doctors is now officially a B Corporation!

We have long held sustainability, diversity, inclusion, and fairness as core values of our business. Our B Corp certification strengthens that commitment and legally ensures that we place impact on people and planet alongside profit in all our decision-making.

This means we will promote higher degrees of equality and inclusivity and we’ll play our part in addressing biases within our marketing services industry. And we will ensure our work and our recommendations to our clients are socially and environmentally progressive. We believe this is quickly becoming an imperative to business longevity.

Leadership in the emerging economy is purpose driven, with business aspiring to do no harm and to benefit all. Today, as a new B Corp, and working with our purpose of Creating Meaningful Futures, we will commit to bringing these values to each and every project we undertake with you.

You can find out more about our social and environmental commitments in our mission statements and our Declaration of Interdependence.

Let’s talk about how we can help you promote sustainability and inclusivity through any of your new initiatives.

Get in touch at contact@localhost

Space Doctors unique way to bring meaning to data.

Building relevant, transformative strategies requires the ability to identify, understand and track cultural shifts at speed and at scale. Integrating the speed of AI and breadth of big data with our expertise in semiotics & cultural insight, we have developed an agile new approach that brings greater meaning and real-world applicability to metrics.

We call it COLLABORATIVE INTELLIGENCE.

We help you see beyond the dominant data story of today to bring deeper understanding of the cultural changes impacting your brand or organization, so you can respond with greater speed, relevance and cultural sensitivity.

Whether you need to identify emerging innovation opportunities, track what’s influencing your design target, or need to create more distinctive, inspiring and relevant communications, we can help.

OUR AI ECOSYSTEM PROVIDES ANALYTICS ACROSS THREE AREAS
which reveal, monitor and predict cultural shifts over time

• TRACKING: reveals patterns of change through a quantified picture of emerging signals and their sources
• LANGUAGE: rapidly identifies emerging conversations and linguistic evolution
• VISUALS: give a window into consumers lives and identifies emerging visual signifiers

Culture doesn’t happen in one place, neither does our AI.  Covering social media platforms, search, forums, ecommerce, review sites and media across 187 languages, including China-specific platforms and websites.

Collaborative Intelligence brings sense-making and actionability to data;  so if you’re struggling with data that’s not driving effective decision-making today or helping you anticipate tomorrow, we’d love to hear from you.

Find out more here Collaborative Intelligence – Space Doctors 2021 and drop us a line if you’d like to talk. f.mcnae@localhost

Cultural change at warp speed

We live in a world that’s constantly changing, adapting and reassessing. Culture is speeding up, with complete shifts in acceptability, meaning and cultural priorities taking place regularly. The divide between generations hasn’t been this wide since the ‘60s. And social media’s democratisation of access to self-expression reveals the true multiplicity of voices, micro-cultures, sub-cultures, identity groups and specific geographies in which large brands need to resonate in order to stay abreast of cultural change.

We know that our clients are finding traditional three- or five-year brand planning nowhere near enough to cope with the context shifts and new voices that can turn an icon, product or social concept from beloved to absurd within a few months. And we’re often asked to use our day-to-day sensing of culture and cultural shifts to advise on quick-turnaround, often highly reactive new communications, positionings or products.

Some assume that the depth and nuance unlocked by semiotic insight means it can’t also offer speed and responsiveness. However, nothing could be further from the truth. And the usefulness of semiotic analysis to respond to change becomes even clearer when we reframe responsiveness away from individual interactions with a mobilising event or new driver, and towards a confident brand’s understanding of emergent culture, and of its placement within that culture.

Lessons from Covid-19 

Last March, we all marvelled at the quick brand pivots of beer or perfume factories becoming hand sanitiser plants in the blink of an eye. But the brands that have really succeeded in leading during Covid-19 are those which quickly understood the cultural shifts which were accelerated or seeded by the pandemic.

These were able to adapt their brand activity and personalities to incorporate the changes in consumers’ lifestyles, life narratives, and internal understandings of their lives – and ultimately, express themselves in resonant and exciting ways.

Nike’s ‘You Can’t Stop Us’ campaign focussed on community resilience, with a viral August 2020 spot in particular merging images of different athletes in different eras to show the importance of unity in ensuring excellence. It stood out in a sea of brands pledging dollar sums and stressing their safety procedures – and also showed Nike’s characteristic uncompromising focus on quality by using artistic innovation to make up for the difficulty of shooting with actors. Perhaps most importantly, because Nike had expanded its core message, in line with changing culture, from individual effort to no-holds-barred solidarity some time ago – notably, using Colin Kaepernick despite controversy – the positioning felt real, resonant and trustworthy.

What Space Doctors does 

In this series, we want to showcase the many ways that semiotics can trigger brands to respond, pivot, and reassert themselves authentically and resonantly, without sacrificing speed.

We’ll show how to achieve great results at pace by:

• using culture as a ‘shortcut’ medium, sidestepping the time-consuming administration of traditional qualitative and quantitative research;
• honing brands with enough depth and personality to make the right call intuitively;
• quickly mobilising large international networks of insights specialists and subject experts to get new propositions “global-ready” at speed;
• working with other data, including AI analytics and our Cymbol panel tool, to produce insights which are rapid yet deep;
• And decoding emergent culture, so that our clients can accelerate and shape conversations, not chase them.

Cultural analysis can be rapid and flexible, allowing clients to zero in on specific questions and nuances. At Space Doctors we are uniquely set up to respond rapidly to change – and give our clients the confidence to do the same.

Whether your project requires the Collaborative Intelligence of our AI eco-system – which accesses unparalleled cultural understanding at speed and at scale, our team’s two decades of industry leading semiotic expertise with a semiotic database of thousands of cultural and cross category codes, or super-rapid mobilisation of our expert international network.… we can get to the answers you need fast.

Read on – get ready to lead!

If you’d like to chat to us about how we can help you transform your brand or business, please get in touch. Or for more like this straight to your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

By now, we all know that the desire to be an ethical consumer isn’t a flash in the pan – and it’s not purely altruistic, either. Climate crisis feels vivid and immediate as we experience wildfires, pandemic, and resource shortage, while realignments of political and social priorities cause disruption and uncertainty.

In a world in which a disease can move from zero to worldwide mortality and economic devastation in less than a year, consumers value agility and resourcefulness – for themselves, their families, their communities and the businesses they depend on – more than almost anything else.

Of course, launches of hot new products will still feel exciting and relevant: come hell or high water, the new iPad Air will sell big. But dominant heroization of new ideas and new productions is giving way, in favour of a new model of brands as master organisers in a world full of confusion, inefficiency and waste.

While there’s still huge appetite for virtue-as-lifestyle products like bareMinerals’ vegan lipstick, Stella McCartney’s recycled cashmere and KeepCup’s reusable cups, introducing similar products isn’t enough to make a brand truly relevant to the world of ‘good business.’ (This is especially true when a company’s ethical or sustainable offering is accompanied by many non-sustainable products.)

Instead, consumer focus is on the business’s own ways of operating: its dedication to creating a less destructive world of consumption for everybody, rather than simply offering an option for the most conscious shoppers.

 In the near future, businesses will feel most welcome and most relevant when their innovating impulses are turned to radically efficient organisation, rather than moonshot creation. This aligns with changes in what 2020’s culture values in individuals: understanding, responsibility, empathy and community spirit, rather than display, arrogance and competitiveness.

Enacting these values can mean taking a consumer-facing educational role. ThredUp, for instance, is famous for its sharing-economy resale clothes service. But last year it went further, partnering with JCPenney’s and Macy’s to create second-hand sections in department stores to educate users ‘in their forties and older’ – non-digital natives – about online resale.

‘Good business’ also means taking meaningful action in non- or less-consumer-facing aspects of a brand’s operations.

Most consumers have never heard of Footprint. But the packaging company’s plant-based plastic replacements are used by consumer-famous businesses including McDonald’s (compostable cup lids), Beyond Meat (fibre-based sausage trays), Chick-fil-A (paper straws) and MillerCoors (biodegradable six-pack rings which degrade in saltwater after 12 hours). By implementing sustainability in non-core elements of their businesses, these brand names boost their relevance to consumers who want to know that their purchases aren’t causing destruction.

Solutions like Footprint’s can be scaled by simple investment: not just of cash, but of existing skills and experience.

A quick look on a design blog like Dezeen will surface innovative upcycling prototypes any day of the week: from Mater’s stools made from insulin pens, to Reykjavik design studio At10’s bioplastic animal-skin meat packaging, to Elena Amato’s kombucha-leftover cosmetics packaging. But Footprint partly credits its ability to scale its own sustainable packaging to its founders’ experience at Intel. If more businesses and entrepreneurs apply their corporate know-how to innovative starting points like these, we can expect more sustainable solutions to become quietly commonplace.

Another advantage of size is a business’s capacity to make maximum use of the resources available, whether they’re material, cultural or digital. Large companies and organisations can aid sustainable business by reusing resources previously understood as ‘waste.’

“Waste is simply material without an identity,” says architect Thomas Rau: a phrase recalling anthropologist Mary Douglas’s influential 1966 declaration that dirt is “matter out of place.” Rau is working with the city of Amsterdam to create databases of reusable materials embedded in buildings. Rather than simply demolishing old buildings and rebuilding fresh, new construction projects can start by using Rau’s databases to extract and reuse existing materials.

The insight that one company’s waste product is another’s key resource is being applied with inter-industry projects like Regrained. Beer companies regularly trash the excess grain left over from brewing; Regrained turns that ‘waste,’ which is actually nutritionally dense, into supergrain bars.

We can expect to see ‘unwasteful’ brands like these emerge as organisations like The Plant in Chicago encourage manufacturers to think outside the box. By putting a variety of food production businesses in the same facility, The Plant creates a single, collaborative closed loop as diverse businesses find ways to make each other’s waste into their treasures.

Over the last year, agile business responses to Covid-19 saw perfumeries and breweries become sanitiser manufacturers, nightclubs and resorts move online, and supermarkets support the most vulnerable. Now, we all know what can be possible when businesses agree to act urgently and cooperatively.

And the ethos of effective organisation – of harnessing and using every single resource we have – will be the dominant decider of relevance in the coming era of adaptation.

If you’d like to chat to us about how we can help you cultivate brand resilience and make a meaningful difference through ‘Good Business’ initiatives, please get in touch.

For more like this straight to your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

How Space Doctors impacted the design work behind the 2021 Ocado brand refresh

Ocado has established itself to be synonymous with an incredible range of quality groceries. But their visual identity risked losing its zing and zest over time and was in need of a refresh. We worked with the Ocado team to set a new course for their visual design, towards something distinct, vibrant and long-lasting.

Digital spaces demand more of a brand’s visual identity. It was vital that Ocado was able to come alive brilliantly here, and for every customer interaction to be meaningful and well received. Space Doctors delved into culture – using semiotics and cultural insight – to discover how Ocado’s visual world could evolve to become more potent.

Our analysis explored Ocado’s colours. Their previous green and charcoal colour scheme felt too serious – it risked seeming impersonal or lacking in emotion. These muted colours had a quiet subtlety that felt at odds with the vitality and variety of choice Ocado is known for. More energy was needed. We sought a new way that not only evoked a fresh new vibrancy, but that was ownable for Ocado.

We knew shape and form would also be vital to evoke a sense of dynamism and opportunity. The brand’s organic shapes were strong, but as people view the world on ever tinier screens, they needed to work harder to be distinct. We considered how the Ocado swirl and wordmark could be tweaked to stand out and be even more clearly recognisable.

The resulting redesign shows Ocado having evolved. It feels emergent, bright, fresh and distinct – and robust enough to remain so into the future.

Lisa McDowell, Head of Brand Marketing at Ocado Retail, said of working with us;

“We love working with Space Doctors at Ocado Retail. Their contribution across multiple projects has been invaluable over the last year. Our teams across Marketing, Merchandising, Insights and Creative value the rich and wide ranging culturally-informed category insight, through to the granular analysis we’ve done on our visual and packaging identity, fleet design and value messaging. Our relationship with the team at Space Doctors has helped us stretch our thinking, shape successful creative briefs and carve out new exciting opportunities.”

If you’d like to chat to us about how we can help you reinvigorate your visual identity, please get in touch. 

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Image Credit: Courtesy of Ocado

Is ‘Staying Relevant’ For New Consumers A Contradiction in Terms?

Brands, advertisers and innovators often think of themselves as operating within a landscape made up of their product or category. Like residents of a physical landscape, they constantly assess changes in its makeup and inhabitants: watching for new generations or new regions appearing over the horizon, checking for earth tremors in shifting political or economic priorities, and retaining relevance by adjusting responsively.

Like this, a fast food brand might keep its cool by introducing some Gen Z nihilism to its communications, or a retailer amp up its e-commerce presence for the Chinese market. This ‘vigilant landscape’ model can make a brand feel flexible and welcoming. If it’s done well enough, it can even make a brand like Levi’s, Microsoft or McDonalds feel timeless, like a part of culture that ‘stays relevant’ by being ever-present, offering something for almost everyone.

But what this model forgets is that new audiences don’t just enter the landscapes of category and product: they create them.

Take beauty. Ten years ago, it would have been hard to predict today’s huge audience of beauty consumers who haven’t experienced ageing, aren’t necessarily looking to solve problems, and see skincare as affirmative self-care. But now, brands from Lush to Kinship are thriving within the fresh category of recreational skincare.

By looking at Glossier’s alignment with the category, we can see how a willingness to become whatever’s wanted – to start afresh where the market’s needs are – make a brand feel as though it truly belongs to its audience.

Image credit: Glossier

Emily Weiss famously kicked off the Glossier brand by soliciting the opinions of her Into the Gloss blog readers. Ideas for the most relevant products came from actual potential customers, in a now-established co-creation dynamic that’s helped many brands connect with their audiences before their products are even out the door.

But this pre-production focus group wouldn’t have succeeded were it not for the insight behind it: that already-pressurised young women were averse to entering a skincare category centred around transformation and optimisation. Instead, the always-on, constantly photographed Gen Z were looking for ways to feel nourished, un-judged and healthy.

Active listening is an essential step for any brand. But what’s more important is taking the leap of imagining: if my category didn’t exist, would my new market or demographic invent it?

And what might they invent instead?

Glossier claims to ‘create the products you tell us you wish existed’ – and it does, with innovations like viscous conditioning cleanser Milky Jelly. But by bringing in a wave of white packaging, sensory skincare experience and buildable, barely-there coverage, it also offered beauty that felt like time and space to pause.

Many category-shifting brands whose successes are perceived – like the rise of DTC beauty – to be tech-driven, in fact succeed by reimagining categories and products for new audiences.

Monzo, for instance, won the quickest crowd-funding success in history by offering British Millennials a bank built from the ground-up on their own needs and desires. Its app features, while impressive, weren’t anything that Barclays or HSBC couldn’t have done; but spending notifications, budget-tracking, ‘pots’ for putting money aside and a friendly, transparent tone showed that Monzo’s vision of what a bank could be was built around Millennial needs.

Image credit: Monzo

This means that the brand still feels like a part of Millennial culture, while few other banks have managed to transcend functionality for younger users.

More recently, Depop reimagines what ‘shopping’ might mean to a generation more concerned about sustainability and sociability than any other.

While the site’s offer of easy access to vintage and hard-to-find style are tailor-made for Gen Z, even more important is its rejection of the ideas that a buyer can’t also be a seller, that a laboured-over personal style can’t be monetised without celebrity, and that investment pieces are only for the rich.

Image credit: Depop

Obviously, existing brands are in a different position to new brands created by and with their target audiences. But that doesn’t mean they can’t learn from game-shifters’ ability to ask themselves the question, ‘What would it look like to radically centre my audiences’ actual needs?’

Rather than aiming to protect existing cultural relevance, ambitious brands can reconsider their assumptions – generation by generation and market by market – to stimulate genuine freshness, connection and loyalty. Embracing reinvention allows the needs-based imaginative leaps that help brands strike new audiences as truly relevant.

If you’d like to chat to us about how we can help you centre your strategy around consumer needs, please get in touch.

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Our interconnected world, in which brands need to appeal to several regions simultaneously, has made local translation of values, core concepts and brand positionings trickier than ever. As a result, brands are turning to innovative partnerships and new methods of staying culturally relevant.

When a brand’s values are clear and uncompromising, and the originator and target cultures are relatively similar, successful translation of brand identity is relatively easy. (For instance, Ben & Jerry’s expansion of its US social justice-focussed messaging to include criticism of the UK’s actions towards channel-crossing refugees).

But for more significant cultural differences, and complex categories – like luxury – brands don’t only need awareness of dynamics in the target culture, but expert translation of them.

There are a few different ways to go about this.

Many brands use influencers or KOLs for creative strategy, not just promotion – as when Brooks Brothers partnered with Scarlett Hao to translate the LBD (little black dress) for a Chinese audience. Others partner with well-known local brands. Fenty Beauty would be unlikely to partner with Starbucks in the US, but in China, its collaboration with HEYTEA was a hit, applying the same carefully playful aesthetic to a cheese-and-peach drink and a limited-edition makeup bag.

There’s also the option of giving more power to carefully-hired local staff, even to non-executives.

Hermès has enjoyed consistent Chinese success by realising that in an enormous and diverse country, even a Chinese centralised brand team might not hit on optimum presentation for every one of the 26 stores.

The brand’s answer is to let local managers adapt – within guidelines – their stores’ look and feel, to appeal to local shoppers specifically. And it clearly works: when China relaxed its Covid-19 quarantine, one Guangzhou store took $2.7m in a single day, flooded with shoppers to whom visiting their local Hermès means “getting back to normal.”

This distributed method of branding strikes at the heart of the luxury industry’s traditional ‘lone genius’ creative designers or innovators. In that conception, cultural relevance comes from a single person, duo or small group regarded as unusually able to pick up on cultural shifts and specificities. From Coco Chanel to Kanye West, many of these creators have become icons.

However, this method of staying culturally relevant makes a brand very vulnerable.

Uncontrollable factors, like the creator’s age, nationality, state of health or shifting ideology, can produce creator actions that damage branding and reputation. We saw this difficulty with Dolce & Gabbana’s culturally insensitive chopsticks ad (featuring a Chinese woman trying to eat pizza with chopsticks) and Stefano Gabbana’s subsequent anti-China social media posts. In addition, having a single decision-making voice makes it hard for other employees to provide guidance, fresh ideas, and cultural data.

Another luxury brand, Moncler, has seen another way.

Once a simple technical outerwear company, Moncler now achieves broad cultural relevance, earning $1.5bn annually from fans around the world.

Internal, non-consumer-facing initiatives are part of Moncler’s cultural advantage. Its MAKE training eco-system uses the brand’s real strategic challenges as learning tools. That creates not just immersive training, but an avenue for junior employees’ ideas to reach the senior people delivering the training.

But Moncler’s most exciting cultural relevance strategy is its Genius Creative Hub. Since 2018, the brand has offered monthly collaboration drops with a wide variety of designers. For every ‘edition’, Moncler partners with seven or eight designers from across the world, creating diverse offers for a variety of tastes.

The Genius Creative Hub provides the idiosyncratic cultural pulse delivered by a traditional luxury creative, with no risk of ideas getting stale. And monthly drops are in-tune with modern and younger luxury consumers, who don’t shop seasonally but iteratively and responsively. Cultural shifts can be reflected within a month, keeping the brand constantly top-of-mind among fans.

The speed also helps Moncler to meet consumers where they are. The brand’s February Weibo livestream – launching a collection with Japanese streetwear legend Hiroshi Fujiwara’s studio Fragment – was one of the luxury industry’s most successful pandemic promotions. The stream included streetwear influencer Li Chen acting as host, actress Song Qian trying on the clothes, and comedian Pang Bo entertaining, against two backdrops: a stage set and a pop-up ramen noodle stand.

The collection sold out on the day, and the livestream got 31.5 million views (Gucci’s Weibo livestream record is 25 million). The event felt not just exciting, but very Chinese.

Moncler intends to keep going with livestreams, collaborating with KOLs to ensure that its drops feel fresh and relevant to local culture. Each livestream, CEO Remo Ruffini says, will be ‘inspired and designed to perfectly fit digital platforms as the first touchpoint with the customer’ – tailoring experiences for its most passionate consumers, wherever they are.

If you’d like to chat to us about how to translate your core values in a truly local way, please get in touch.

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Image Credit: Moncler FRGMT Hiroshi Fujiwara, via Moncler

It’s an issue most brands experience: when entering a new market, there’s a fair amount of study and work required in order to feel relevant to the local culture. Some global branding failures become legendary: “Pepsi Brings You Back To Life” translated into Mandarin as “Pepsi Brings You Back From The Grave”; HSBC’s $10m rebrand after a campaign which translated “Assume Nothing” into “Do Nothing” in many regions.

These are obvious – but language translation is probably the easiest error to avoid. More subtle failures arguably do more harm, often seeming not just unintentionally funny or odd to potential new consumers, but actively offensive.

For instance, Zara’s 2019 global campaign assumed that cutting-edge Western cultural interests would feel impactful and welcomed everywhere.

During the past few years, brands have garnished acclaim – and cultural strength – by using models with conventionally-unattractive traits: Fenty’s unretouched overweight, gap-toothed, pregnant and/or very dark-skinned models; H&M starring a Special Olympics winner with Downs syndrome, Chelsea Werner; Vogue and L’Oréal collaborating on an issue exclusively featuring women over 50.

This trope works because North American and Western European cultures have very strong likings for female self-expression, inclusivity, and for novelty. These values combine to make a virtue of widening the definition of beauty.

But by featuring a heavily freckled Chinese model, Zara prompted very vocal offence by Chinese consumers who interpreted the campaign as a slur on Chinese women’s beauty. Imperfection wasn’t interesting or aspirational for the Chinese mass-market: to them, it felt like a Western brand “defaming the Chinese” by cherry-picking an ‘ugly’ Chinese woman to represent the country.

It’s very common for western brands to fail to adapt their offerings to China, which leads to the market gaining a reputation as very difficult to crack – especially in the eyes of people who remember a time when “being western” was enough to spark interest. But any brand which doesn’t make itself culturally relevant to a new target market is likely to fail, wherever that target market is. Chinese consumers enjoy bold beauty – just not done like that.

Muji’s expansion to the US ended in disaster in July, filing for bankruptcy with a debt of $64 million.

The pandemic didn’t help – but the brand was in trouble before that, due to a mismatch in cultural priorities between the US and Asia. Muji had presented the US with solutions for needs they didn’t have, and undesirable core values – while targeting the wrong audience within a huge and diverse country.

Muji’s core values have strong cultural power in the US – but they don’t have the same meanings that they do in Japan. Instead of connecting with specifically American cultural constructions of sustainability, purity and simplicity, Muji presented Japanese versions of these values. By equating ‘simplicity’ with functionality and value, Muji set itself up in competition with unbranded products from Amazon Marketplace, and looked overpriced by comparison.

The focus on functionality and value was also a mismatch for American priorities, including love for conspicuous consumption. Solutions to make the most of space might be nice-to-have, but aren’t real priorities, for Americans whose homes are large. And while many Asian consumers invest in basic but durable items, few Americans are bothered by frequently replacing their possessions.

There’s certainly a slice of tiny-home-living, minimalism-loving Americans that appreciate Muji’s values. However, they’re unlikely to shop at big stores on Fifth Avenue or in Times Square, where Muji invested in flagships. More discerning placement, or even partnerships with similar local brands, might have seen better success

The experiences of Muji and Zara show how culturally-relevant concepts and positionings need to be reimagined when crossing markets, not just promoted. If your brand positioning is strong enough, it can likely be translated. Core concepts like ‘acceptance,’ ‘beauty’ or ‘simplicity’ have a meaning in most cultures. But that meaning may not be quite what you expect.

If you’d like to chat to us about how your core values can be translated into new markets, please get in touch.

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At the time of writing, the tech press is buzzing about Google Search testing a dark mode version of the internet’s biggest window on the world. This follows recent announcements that Microsoft Word’s dark mode is becoming even darker (dimming the canvas/page as well as the background), as is Twitter’s – moving from a dark blue to black.

Even the White House has used its inauguration refresh to welcome both Biden and a new dark mode, challenging the supremacy of the white webpage background and adding some fashionable flair to the .gov domain.

This trend has been gathering pace over the last few years but has been accelerated (like many things) by Covid lockdowns and the resulting increase in screen time.

The most obvious reason for this increasing popularity is surely dark mode’s primary promise: reducing the impact of screen time on our eyes. According to one study, website and app visits have doubled since January 2020, with a tangible increase in children needing glasses over that time. While the idea that light text on a darker screen means less strain on the eyes is intuitive, there is evidence to suggest it’s actually detrimental when reading for a long period of time.

What is certainly true, however, is that dark mode reduces blue light which can make it easier to fall asleep after using screens before bed, and it reduces battery consumption (on OLED screens at least).

But beyond these rational reasons for using it, there appears to be a lure to dark mode that speaks to something more subconscious.

Could it be that when we need it most, in the chaos of Covid and enforced screen time, dark mode puts a lens of futurist nostalgia and magnetic comfort onto our digital lives?

While digital UIs have harnessed skeuomorphic, paper-like backgrounds for decades, the cultural memory of the terminal screen’s black-background punctuated with vivid colour endures through science fiction. From the cascading green glyphs of the Matrix to the bold pastel graphics of the computers in the Star Trek universe, the expansive possibilities of technology linger in those unknowable gaps.

The dark, dynamic interfaces of fictional worlds additionally imply a laser focus – whether that’s ‘hacking the mainframe’ or even risking life and limb on a Tron bike. In our oversaturated, dual-screening world, where decreasing attention spans have been compounded by the pandemic negatively impacting focus, it’s unsurprising that UI conventions implying concentration and purpose are appealing.

The notion of screens providing comfort and drawing us into their glow has long been familiar from cinema and TV.

However, the bright white glare of the computer screen has often made late night work feel like an interrogation scene in which technology itself is asking why you always leave things till the last minute. Dark mode flips this script, giving images, videos, and graphical elements absorbing, prismatic depth.

Instead of being overwhelmed by the flood light of the screen, dark mode presents us with constellations of icons and content that reveal their finer details and pop against a background that doesn’t compete for attention. The ‘lanterns’ floating in a digital night sky make our elongating time spent in proximity to the screen more immersive and desirable. The ‘quieter’ visual experience asks us to lean in, and we’re far more inclined to oblige.

Whether presenting a digital world that’s vibrant and exciting, or calmly captivating, dark mode takes the familiar and imbues it with an appealing otherness. Everyday tasks take on a hint of tech’s utopian promise, and our portal of connection with the world beckons more than it overwhelms.

In the not too distant future (we hope), we will emerge from lockdown and dive back into our hectic lives. While dark mode might feel dulled in comparison to a newly stimulating environment, it likely signals an evolution in our interactions with devices. The absorption of dark mode may actually be a theme of more proximate interfaces to come. When smart glasses and neural interfaces become mainstream, their defaults are likely to be closer to lights in the darkness than text on the page. 

If you’d like to chat to us about how cultural shifts are impacting UI design, or simply discuss the inclusion of the Tron bike as an interface, please get in touch.

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For the second year in a row, Chinese New Year is a muted affair. This year, people are more settled in the new normal, but are truly missing human connections, finding virtual proxies to replace it. In this context, brands are facing a cultural conundrum; how do we stay relevant to a culture in which traditional festivals are forced to be anything but traditional?

We’ve deconstructed how brands such as Alipay and CocaCola, have connected at a deep level by focusing on the meaning of rituals and micro-moments, but global icons, like Apple, have missed the cultural mark, despite mobilising big name filmmakers and grand storylines.

Alipay – leveraging cultural rituals for seamless digital user experience.

Hongbaos* and 福fú* are the most ubiquitous signs of CNY; auspicious symbols of blessings and good fortune, integral to new year rituals, home decorations and seasonal brand activations.

This year, Alipay have pushed the (red) envelope further with the very human centred experience of creating and collecting fú with family and friends; signalling one’s good fortune for the year. People can write their own fú in calligraphy and Alipay will print them and send to users’ hometowns, capturing the sentiment of receiving fú from the family, despite not being able to travel to be with them.  Alipay has linked this with ‘Ant Forest’ – an award-winning green initiative and proxy for loyalty rewards. Users can grow fruits in a digital farm with green energy points that can translate into a real basket of fruits from local farmers – simultaneously creating intimacy between distant family members, connection to local produce and facilitating sustainable behaviour.

Users “Collect ‘fu’’s, virtually with friends and family members. The app encourages people to scan “fu” characters wherever they see them, i.e. logos, home ornaments, etc and facilitates togetherness by completing tasks on Alipay with a team of friends or families. Image credit: Alipay.

Here, through the seamless integration of online and offline experience, Alipay has captured the spirit of connection and gifting that characterises the experience of Lunar New Year that has been denied to us this year – staying relevant by creating practical and emotional solutions to help consumers navigate a familiar event in a new context.

Coca Cola – going beyond cultural cliches.

Every year, brands try to connect with younger generations by depicting the obligations of Chinese New Year. The common trope has been to show how young people tolerate the numerous family reunions; the overbearing aunt or the intrusive grandma asking them questions about their personal lives, only to remind young people of the personal and cultural values of connecting with older generations.

Coca Cola portrays micro-moments like relatives sleeping over, running errands to the store in the cold, trips on a bumpy road, making rice dumplings in grandma’s kitchen etc as precious moments that are now sorely missed, from the point of view of the youngster. Image Credit: CocaCola.

Coca Cola was quick to adapt to the changing sentiments of the youth, who now see that, in their absence, the obligations of their annual family reunions are something that they miss. ‘CNY confessions’ shows three young people who had taken their families for granted in the past. The stories are powerful, not only because of its representation of the everyday micro-moments and mundane occurrences that now have new significance, but because the narrative focuses on people navigating their own experiences of CNY, rather than adhering to a grand, sentimental idea of what it is supposed to look like. These ‘confessions’ are 心声 – our true desires – personal reflections of the sentiment of CNY from an individual’s perspective rather than an assembly of cultural clichés. In depicting the change to these everyday moments, Coca Cola creates a space to reflect new, normal, experiences, whilst ensuring that it can still play a role in injecting optimism and a warm sense of togetherness.

Apple – Novelty or losing relevance?

Apple has continued its legacy of launching a CNY short directed by an award-winning director, this year: Lulu Wang. Shot on the iPhone, the story puts a fresh twist on a well-known Chinese fable of the ‘Nian’ monster.

This well produced film has a Ghibli-esque feel in the way it celebrates a child’s open, fearless and unbiased mind, whilst also alluding to shifting values we see in ‘parent-child’ relationships as being less controlling and more collaborative. However, despite a few superficial scenes of fireworks and dragons, we’re struggling to find a cultural relevance with the values of Chinese New Year, particularly one that is relevant to consumer’s experience over the course of the last year – a sentiment shared by many netizens.

Many comments on Chinese social media criticize the film for being nothing more than a grand display of the iPhone’s low-light features, accusing the brand of ‘showing off’ and lacking the “taste” of Chinese New Year (nian wei-年味).   “@枫之舞的海洋: In my personal opinion, I think it’s not as good as the previous ones, this is a film to show off Apple’s camera.” Image credit: Apple.

Here we see Apple failing to create a message that is relevant to either the fundamental principles of Chinese New Year, or the changing cultural landscape around it – demonstrating that brands, even in creating fantasy escapism, need to be able to reflect cultural change in order to connect to consumers without seeming just like an advert of a product’s features. 

These examples show us that you don’t need big names or mega productions to connect with people. The most effective campaigns reflect the changing cultural landscape and mirror our experience within it. When your brand resonates with the shifting cultural values it can create distinction within the category and, more importantly, become a tool through which people can navigate a changing world.

Notes:
* Hongbaos: Red envelopes filled with money to wish good luck in the New Year
** Fu: 福 represents happiness, blessing, good fortune, and auspiciousness; traditionally, people put the calligraphy of “fu” character as home ornament upside down, as it means “fu” has arrived in Chinese.

Image credit: CocaCola

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Sustainability and mitigation of the climate crisis present a challenge to brands. In practical terms, there’s a huge encyclopaedia of solutions to minimising impact on the earth. Many categories are adapting these on a massive level: from the Kering-created Fashion Pact global coalition of fashion and textile businesses committed to sustainability, to the rising number of brands (including Patagonia, Danone and Warby Parker) becoming B Corps with a legal responsibility to minimise their environmental impact.

At the same time many brands struggle to identify sustainable initiatives and communicate their ambitions in this space in a way that stands out from the crowd, connects to where sustainability culture is going, and – perhaps most importantly – is consistent with what the brand at its core is all about. Not only do the brands discussed below address the issue of sustainability head-on, but they make a bigger impact than most by aligning their sustainability strategy and execution with what is unique about the brand itself. Put another way, they do a good job of aligning emerging sustainable values with core brand values.

Harvey Nichols’ The Restory service is a good example of adapting a brand’s cultural identity to support a new sustainability offer. Known for high-value exclusivity, the personal touch, and enabling fantasy, Harvey Nichols would lose cultural relevance by introducing sustainability ‘hard truths,’ or pivoting to more sustainable but less fashionable offerings.

Instead, The Restory after-care service offers to repair, restore and even ‘reimagine’ luxury purchases. This service adds an ethical as well as an exclusivity-focussed opposition to disposable ‘fast fashion.’ It helps consumers to live more sustainable lives with very little effort. And the name ‘Restory’ cleverly connects sustainable consumption with imagination and fantasy, offering a new ‘story’ for clothes rather than relentless reminders of reality.

Similarly, Chinese brands are moving to make new recycling requirements easier for consumers. E-commerce behemoth JD.com has created a solution to rubbish sorting: free consultation via photo or smart speaker.

Confused consumers can snap a photo of their rubbish and instantly receive data on which categories each piece falls into: dry waste, wet waste, hazardous waste and recyclables. They can also describe the waste to their JD smart speakers and get immediate categorisation answers.

With this offer, JD.com reinforces its identity as an incredibly efficient, phygital-enabled, tech giant. The feature actually builds on the brand’s AI shopping consultant, which receives ‘want this’ photos from users and tells them the best places to buy the item in the image. Rubbish sorting makes this feature and these values feel relevant to the changing culture of sustainability in China, and its characteristically complex, regulated nature.

Last but by no means least, IKEA’s sustainability strategy enables great cultural relevance while holding on to its beloved core identity. Its core value of ‘ease’ comes with decades of helping people kit out their homes with minimal effort. Now, the brand actively helps consumers to navigate cultural shifts in sustainability which can be very confusing.

IKEA’s ‘Accidental Environmentalists’ ad represents a big shift from the dominant focus on congratulating consumers discerning enough to buy green, or shaming those who don’t. Instead, IKEA offers to take on the burden for them by framing energy-efficient and sustainable products as working in the background of people’s lives – so that just buying a bed made of recycled materials makes you into a ‘sleeping activist.’

Meanwhile, IKEA’s ‘Home of Tomorrow’ concept in Poland offers education in easy ways to have a more sustainable home. Consumers can come to the space (or view it online) to learn about practices they may have heard about, but not have the blueprints for, such as indoor gardening, furniture repair and zero waste housekeeping. Supporting the initiative, IKEA’s transparency about its process of becoming a circular business makes sustainability feel like a learning journey that consumer and brand are travelling together.

Brands can get started on sustainability with little effort by adapting and channelling – not sacrificing! – their core identities to include environmentally responsible action. Brands that face this challenge most effectively act in a way that connects core brand values to the dynamic culture that dictates the need for change. They can also help consumers to feel culturally relevant themselves, by doing the work of providing and enabling intuitive sustainability efforts for them, making the easiest choice the most sustainable.

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Branding means reaching out of the core functionality of your category and product, to embrace values with cultural resonance. When done clumsily, this can feel pretentious or cheesy (no, your toothpaste brand isn’t in the business of ‘happiness’). But when a brand is able to identify core values that feel true and that resonate, it can make the difference between a product purchase and a positive, long-lasting brand affiliation.

Today, the incredibly fast tempo of cultural development, and the diversity of modern brands’ audiences, means that no idea stays the same for very long, or translates exactly into every market. To grow, brands must retain the ability to constantly reimagine – not to reinvent completely, but to adapt – their identities and their relationships with consumers’ cultures.

The challenges of Covid-19 have let us all see some inventive reimagining. Some brands have pivoted with astonishing dexterity to connect with people whose priorities and needs changed overnight.

Asian music streaming app Joox adjusted to the needs of its newest market – South Africa – by becoming a live concert promoter, reality TV creator and music patron in a matter of weeks. Joox isn’t just a music streamer. In markets across South Asia, it also enables social messaging, joint karaoke, loyalty points and other features allowing it to embody ‘connection through music.’

In South Africa, this concept expanded during the pandemic to encourage a whole country to come together over music.

Supporting the nation’s musicians by paying them for half-hour live concerts, complete with tip-jar, Joox helped musicians to keep producing and thriving in difficult times. And by creating a talk-show and a reality TV competition – in which novice musicians competed over weeks, X-Factor-style, to win the prize of being warm-up act to Joox’s big-name virtual concerts – it reinforced the role of music in bringing the country together and helping people support each other.

Meanwhile in Indonesia, Dutch Lady Milk offered a small but significant reimagining by providing a WhatsApp-based ‘Summer Home Camp’ to keep kids amused.

The brand has always focussed on the value of ‘child development,’ often presented as competitive optimisation of children’s skills. But when it pivoted from communication about nutrition and brainpower, to meeting parents’ needs to keep children occupied during an enormously stressful Ramadan, it reimagined ‘child development’ as the act of supporting families.

Of course, brands have been reimagining for a long time before Covid-19.

One of LEGO’s Covid-themed Instagram posts is an effortless example of its successful pivot, some years ago, away from the functional category of ‘collectible toys’ and towards a more adaptable concept.

LEGO had always represented playfulness. But by identifying the most culturally relevant type of playfulness, the brand could redefine itself as being in the business of ‘creative play.’ Having such a flexible and resonant core value lets LEGO flex its business to suit different cultural eras and different localities, in line with shifting ideas of creativity.

That’s how we ended up with a pandemic Instagram post that positions LEGO, not as something to distract newly-homeschooled kids, but as a tool to help adults imagine an office out of the basic building blocks of their own homes.

Starting around the time of the last Great Recession, which increased the value of creativity and innovation, LEGO has granted cultural permission for adults to play. This play isn’t escapism, but inspiration for expansive, open-ended thinking to aid the hustle. It’s communicated via complex kits explicitly ‘for adults,’ support for fan accounts and conventions, and crowdsourcing competitions for new designs which reward creators with a percentage of sales.

During LEGO’s relatively recent expansion into Asia, the brand didn’t assume that the value of ‘creative play’ would translate simply into societies with different cultures, histories and economies. Rather, it took a good look at what creativity meant in its new markets. That let the brand tap into a very relevant cultural debate: a tension between traditional focus on hard work and great test results, to encouraging creativity and imagination.

LEGO’s Singapore #BuildAmazing campaign includes adults and children, presenting the brand’s constructive play in opposition to a culture of overwork which has recently become a focus of criticism.

Of course, Millennial-focused ideas of creativity as enabling innovation and hustle are no longer emergent. And LEGO is shifting in tune with new meanings of ‘creative play’ – as shown in its first global campaign for 30 years, #RebuildTheWorld (2019), which taps into emergent ideas of Gen Alpha’s creativity.

This resilience-based creativity is shown helping characters to deal with and adapt to disasters (like a dragon loose in the high street), with a call for broad change and reconstruction rather than the individual’s ability to produce innovation. In the face of climate crisis and political instability, the children of today are expected to use their creativity to adapt to unpredictable disasters and to work together – and LEGO will be by their side for that.

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In the last article, we examined the importance of engaging small communities to enhance brand relevance. In this piece, we will explore the secret of how to make communications truly Chinese as we see the continued dominance of China Chic and a dynamic creative industry that is gaining in confidence.

In recent years, we have witnessed a growing trend of national pride in China, the logical consequence of constant financial growth and dominance. China chic (国潮) is a term that describes the trend of China-centric design, appearing in lists as the “word of the year” for some time. Initially, the term was used in a similar way to “Brit style” in the West, incorporating unique native cultural elements into the latest trends. However, over time, the impact of “China chic” has been expanded across various categories, including obvious ones like fashion and cosmetics, but also finds its mark in technology, automobiles, and retail. As China chic develops, it increasingly manifests people’s ambition of reviving traditional heritage in a modern context and reflecting the profound pride in their national identity.

 Cosmetic brand Florasis (花西子) takes the lead of incorporating traditional Chinese heritage into packaging design and product innovation. Image credit: 花西子Florasis 

However, the younger generation, who have grown up in a period of constant progress, newness and innovation, don’t fully identify with this aesthetic representation of a traditional set of values. They are hungry for something more original and nuanced. Exposed to the influence of western aesthetics throughout their lives, they are seeking out a sense of authentic identity that distinguishes them from the global Western cultural norms, and instead affords them a unique expression of Chinese heritage in a contemporary era, reflecting their experiences. 

Qiaozhi (乔织) – a Gen Z founded Hanfu (ancient Chinese clothing) brand designed a glowing clubbing Hanfu dress on Taobao Maker Festival. Its graceful ancient aesthetic in daytime gives way to innovative boldness at night, integrating old and new to shift distant heritage into a space of expressive modernity. Image credit: Qiaozhi 乔织

Digitally, we also see the rising trend of “China chic going overseas”(国潮出海). The new assured confidence has evolved to create a more nuanced version of chic to show off to the world. “Culture exporting”(文化输出) – one of the latest buzzwords on Chinese Internet – plays out in TikTok bringing viral entertainment to the west with classic Mandarin song Yijianmei topping the Spotify charts, Chinese KOLs such as Grandpa Amu gaining millions of followers on YouTube and Chinese street fashion videos going viral.

‘China chic’ is taking its turn to lead the world, rather than to follow.

And with this, we have seen a new “China chic” aesthetic emerge. An appreciation of regional nuance, originated from the belief of “regional uniqueness leads to the path of global acceptance” (越是民族的，越是世界的) and a new level of confidence in the Chinese identity of TODAY.

An emerging fashion style called “tucool”(土酷) has declared its dominance on Chinese social media. Tu, literally translated as soil, usually connotes rural, corny, out-dated in Chinese culture but is now having a period of cultural renaissance as an aesthetic innovation.

“Tucool”, as a cultural phenomenon, cherishes nostalgia and rural aesthetics, disrupting the top-down authority of fashion and manifesting instead through a characteristically Chinese tongue-in-cheek style, taking bold pride in grassroots culture. As Chinese youth aspire to gain confidence in themselves, “tucool” has created a strong voice for them to celebrate national pride without the baggage of blending into the mainstream or tradition.

MARRKNULL released its fall/winter look in 2020, which took inspirations from street fashion in rural China, its daring prints and flamboyant colours challenge the impression of “made in China” – turning the “impossible fashion” to the “utmost fashion”. Image credit: Marrknull 实验室 

This new aesthetic of ‘Tu Cool’ goes beyond a desire to simply explore and celebrate traditional values. It has a more profound purpose of challenging  stereotypes and creating a style to confidently express emerging identity, establishing a new aesthetic that is inclusive; a celebration of the old and new, at once nostalgic, quirky, and bewildering.

For brands that are looking to grow in China, this new self-assured pride needs to be acknowledged.

Increasingly, there is a need for brands to integrate and truly embody these values both via aesthetics and shows of pride and regional recognition.

Balenciaga’s Qixi Festival campaign has been widely criticised in China. Image credit: Balenciaga

However, Balenciaga’s recent attempt to participate in this culture shows that accessing it is not as easy as imitating it. Although in many ways referencing (if not copying) ‘Tu Cool’ the criticism levied at Balenciaga’s Qixi Festival release described the capsule as tacky and offensive. This reveals an insensitivity to who the proprietors of China Chic truly are and glosses over the fact that a western luxury powerhouse doesn’t necessarily have the right to adopt the self-depriciating aesthetic that characterises Tu Cool.

Brands need to go beyond just the veneer, packaging and user experience, both digital or physical, to honour these changing values. Memorable and ownable assets for brands will have to embody the new values of Chinese pride and look to different sources within China for inspiration in order to appeal to the growing self-assurance of the young Chinese generation. Cherry picking trends is no longer enough.

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Image Credit: MARRKNULL实验室

In the last article, we covered the rising celebration of everyday heroes in Chinese society and the spirit of empowerment that they have conjured at an otherwise vulnerable time. In response to the pandemic, we have seen an acceleration in the shift of Chinese businesses towards more agile and democratic approaches to consumer engagement. This shift is leading to a new understanding of the power of “communities” in the new normal.

Back in February, as traditional supply chains were severely disrupted and many offline trading centers were forced to shut down, rural farmers faced an unprecedented challenge to clear their stock. Giant e-commerce platforms reacted with agility, for example Taobao launched The Rural Support Program and opening up its livestreaming platform to farmers, for free. 15 million kg of products were sold during the first three days of The Foodie Livestream Program to 41 million followers across all city tiers in China.

Throughout this challenge, influential livestreamers were also connecting with struggling farmers to assist in clearing their stock. Mayors, politicians, and celebrities from different cities went on livestreaming platforms to endorse their hometown specialties, reinforcing a sense of community and value of rural workers.

The engagement of farmers in livestreaming has opened a new window for urbanites to witness the authentic roots of the products they buy; narrowing the distance between urban and rural workers, tearing down the long-established social class barriers and creating a new medium to connect mainstream society with the formerly sidelined and ignored.

But as the pressures of the crisis ease, the change in consumer engagement is persisting.

Alongside leveraging the spirit of local communities and the nationwide livestreaming boom, a new phenomenon of social selling has been built through experienced homegrown brands. Social selling –  the act of connecting with smaller, local communities to nurture sales — is built upon a series of tactics rooted in “private traffic”(私域流量); direct communication between content providers and consumers without dependence on third party platforms. The initiative includes creating group chats on WeChat, posts in WeChat moments (directly engaging consumers) as well as creating bespoke apps and engaging communities there. Adapting in this unexpected crisis means brands are attempting to build solid customer relationships by any means possible in this dynamic, new marketplace. As the circumstances have driven closer connections amongst smaller communities, consumers, more generally, are aspiring to interactive, reciprocal and democratic engagement with brands more than ever before.

There is no doubt that the COVID outbreak has displayed the vulnerabilities of the old-fashioned offline selling paradigm for all to see.

However, leveraging the emerging post pandemic consumer culture in China is still more than a simple matter of accelerating digitalization.

Increasing numbers on WeChat is not the fix all for brands wanting to turn traffic into rocketing sales. Rather, the most successful brands are mobilising a qualified community of clients and consumers, as well as associated value-added services to create genuine, and empowering, connection with consumers.

Faced with the significant drop-off in offline sales, international luxury brands have also rushed online. During the lockdown period, luxury brands including Prada, Giorgio Armani and Miu Miu launched flagship stores on Tmall one after the other. However, without local relevance or attempting to connect with consumers beyond sales, these campaigns hardly managed to make any noise in the fast-developing digital era in China. Louis Vuitton experimented with a new luxury shopping experience as the first high fashion brand to livestream on social e-commerce platform Little Red Book. However, beyond being the first, the livestream was unremarkable, attracting criticism and backlash. The standard livestreaming set up used was seen to cheapen the brand’s luxury status as its formulaic approach aligned it with “low-end’ cheap products on TaoBao rather than playing to the platforms strength of providing an authentic and flexible connection point with its consumers.

Louis Vuitton’s first debuted livestream on Little Red Book took a formulaic approach to livestreaming – simply introducing products and aiming at selling, arguably damaging its brand equity as a luxury icon. Image credit: Louis Vuitton, via 小红书

In contrast, home grown brands are leading the way in engaging and innovative digital content. On the first ever online Shanghai Fashion Week, Shanghai based brand Ffixxed Studios, abandoned conventional livestreaming. Instead they created a theatrical parody of a livestream, transforming their showcase into a light-hearted and enticing party. In livestreaming , it’s not only about accessing the front row experience of a fashion show, more importantly, it’s creating a moment for consumers to laugh and enjoy the brand; to participate in it, not just consume.

Image credit: FFixxed

Ffixxed Studios took livestreaming as marketing experiment rather than sales exercise.

With increased digitisation as the global normal, particularly in China, which has been leading this change for a decade, ecommerce has become more sophisticated than ever. It is clear that good commerce performance can’t only rely on moving bricks and mortar to mobile. Brands that seek to make a connection with consumers via community activity, entertainment and meaningful engagement are those that are best adapting to a new, inclusive digital landscape. To create sustainable engagement with consumers in the new normal, a careful balance needs to be struck between generating sales and generating entertaining consumer-friendly content, otherwise brands risk becoming increasingly irrelevant to discerning and demanding customers.

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Image credit: Louis Vuitton, via 小红书

With imminent global recession further threatening an already wounded world, bouncing back to a flourishing economy seems like mission impossible. The spotlight has been placed on independent businesses as the key to economic recovery globally. In this article, we examine the new value being placed on the everyday heroes behind these smaller, more agile businesses leading the recovery, and how larger brands can learn from their resilience.

In China, striving for a prosperous economy has long been demonstrated through the tenacity of the entrepreneurial spirit of everyday citizens. In the wake of the 2002 SARS outbreak, companies such as Taobao were born out of the vision of making it easy to do business for anyone, anywhere. Nearly two decades later, this dream has come true for more than 10 million merchants on Taobao, now one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms.

In the new world shaped by Covid-19, the value of championing small business continues to be reinforced, but this time, it’s IRL and on the streets.

For more than 20 years, Chinese authorities have been pursuing initiatives to remove street vendors from major cities as part of plans to form more organized and orderly cities. Historically, street vendors and urban management officers (城管) have been playing a game of cat-and-mouse that has, on occasion, bubbled over into violent confrontations.

However, there has been a remarkable U-turn in the wake of the pandemic. On a recent visit to stall owners in Yantai, Shandong province, the Prime Minister Li Keqiang began to tout the “stall economy” as the “spirit of the country” as Beijing moves to mitigate the economic impact of the virus and offer support to the millions of workers who fall through the gaps in the nation’s welfare system.

Street vendors used to signify a lack of hygiene, were considered coarse, thought to exploit government systems and were metaphorically referred to as rats in the streets by the officials. Now they are the shining stars, the ‘everyday heroes’, reinforced by messaging from the top.

Overnight, in big cities such as Chengdu, 2,234 roadside business areas were built and 17,891 vending spots have sprung up, contributing to the creation of over 100,000 jobs.

This rapid reversal of attitude has inspired a nationwide celebration of the revival of the “stall economy”, albeit in a characteristically Chinese tongue-in-cheek way.

Photoshopped images of James Bond selling scallions, Iron Man grilling street barbeques, and Wonder Woman pulling a noodle cart have been circulating on the internet, elevating the former ‘rats’ to Hollywood super humans.

Image credit: @青红造了个白 via Weibo

Memes about alternate careers for young professionals use gallows humour to cope with the rising fear of white-collar job losses as a whole generation of university leavers face an economy with severely restricted prospects. Young professionals are contemplating a pivot to setting up artisanal coffee shops from a bicycle-driven cart or even roadside legal services, in the name of humour, but also tangible and self-reliant work.

Image credit: @云夜于清 via 知乎

Jokes and viral memes aside, this shift illustrates the recognition of the social importance, value and spirit of the essential worker. Making a living in challenging conditions, battling with authoritative and capricious regulations and striving for a better life, “street vendors” have demonstrated the hero spirit and tenacity that is so desperately needed as we face an uncertain global future.

This change in cultural values is beginning to cause a shift in brand marketing as we see big brands championing the spirit of everyday heroes.

Image credit: Pepsi

Pepsi, in collaboration with Chinese state-run People’s Daily, launched exclusive packaging that celebrates essential workers who continue working despite the risks. In replacing the polished faces of idols, computer game characters and international sports stars on its cans, PepsiCo is making a powerful statement of appreciation for the folks who keep us safe –  one which taps into our increased desire for connection to real people and  real community; the true heroes of China that have proven themselves throughout the pandemic.

It is clear that emotional trust and experiential empathy are key drivers in difficult times. Within the familiarity of everyday life lies opportunity for brands to make both positive societal impact and create more meaningful connections with consumers – consumers who are looking to nurture the tenacious spirit of the everyday hero and feel economically empowered once again.

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Image Credit: @青红造了个白 via Weibo

Back in 2018, London’s Royal Academy curated ‘From Life’ – an exhibition documenting the past, present and future of rendering the human form. As part of it, the first mass-participation life drawing class took place; filmed in the RA’s historic Life Room, just a few tens of thousands took part that night, many of whom had never drawn before, but all eager to quietly observe and translate the body onto a blank sheet of paper.

Fast-forward to May 2020. Two months into the UK Lockdown and the BBC hosted ‘Life Drawing Live’: probably one of the largest mass participation art events ever seen (and enjoyed by a few of the Space Doctors team!).

On one level, the concept felt like a very natural extension of what’s proliferated these last weeks. Organisations, institutions and content-owners flipping their assets into shared virtual experiences powered by a livestreaming platform for the attention and enjoyment of many. If it works for theatre or music, why not artistic pursuits? Without doubt, this format of shared experience will be around for some time as the notion of being there in-the-moment and participating morphs into something more intimate, stripped back, even more meaningful… however different it feels versus the time before.

But what of the ‘art’? Perhaps one of the greatest things about the event was that it didn’t matter how it looked, but how it felt! The mass inclusivity of the platform combined with the physical separation of the participants removed all sense of pomp or social pressure to create something beautiful, usually associated with group drawing sessions. The ‘art’ therefore exists purely as an act of mindful consideration and the simple pleasure of drawing, rather than a symbol of status, talent or accomplishment, not only reframing the traditional format but our relationship to art itself.

For many, lockdown’s sheer harsh novelty has quickly opened-up a very real need for experiences that will calm, provide safe haven as well as stimulate. BBC4’s hugely engaging draw-along was just that: an opportunity to spend two hours considering the pleasure of a 2B pencil and the size of the model’s head in relation to their feet. Bliss.

So whether its cook-a-long tutorials with the brilliant Pasta Grannies, live poetry with authors like Rupi Kaur or daily craft challenges from makers’ gurus Gathered; we’re seeing new parameters start to emerge and grow roots; fresh fun ways for people to get a fix of social connection via a new unleashing of innate creativity that also lets busy, stressed minds wander.

What does this mean longer-term? Yes: people will seek-out ever more mind-wandering opportunities, craving stimulation from new activities to provide diversion and escape. Let’s not under-estimate the power of a truly simple experience. Yes – make it shared, make it collective but above all make free of complexity and complication.

Now, did someone say Pasta Grannies?

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Image credit: BBC, Life Drawing Live!

This month saw us hold our first virtual Inspiration Sprint and as we all settle into new ways of working our subject: ‘The Cultural Ecosystem: An anthropological approach to organisational culture’ felt particularly apt.

Guiding the way was business anthropologist and cultural analyst Dr John Curran, bringing with him over 20 years’ experience of helping global brands and organisation understand how culture shapes the behaviours of their employees and consumers.

We know better than most what organisations and workplaces stand to gain by harnessing the power of culture, and in recent years we’ve applied our own semiotics-led approach to organisational culture decoding to the internal challenges of clients like Procter & Gamble and Heathrow Airport. So, it was great to have John help us think in some deep, new ways about the influence culture can have on the behaviour, emotional lives and productivity of individuals and teams in the workplace.

Internal culture shapes the way we see our organisations, the norms and the expected behaviours and can strongly shape or limit the impact brands and businesses can have on the wider world. Understanding this is becoming increasingly important as we draw closer attention to issues of environmental and social progress and the positive role that organisations can see themselves adopting. This needs to start with their internal sense of self, of clarity, of intent and desire to work with the prevailing external cultural change.

Thanks John for fantastic inspiration as we continue to extend our methodologies to build coherent, sympathetic and productive relationships between internal organisational culture and external cultural change.

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Why now is the time for brands to double down on their environmental pledges

COVID 19 and the climate crisis are intimately connected. There’s compelling research that the continued destruction of natural habitat will lead to more outbreaks due to humanity’s increased overlap with the formerly wild, and because of animal and microbe migration to newly warm geographies.

George Monbiot, amongst others, has also pointed out that our current brush with pseudo-scarcity is simply an aperitif for the true deprivation that will accompany a global temperature rise between 3-4°C. What’s more, our current level of meat consumption means industrial farming relies on preventative antibiotics, the perfect environment to grow drug-resistant bacteria that can step in once the next pandemic hits.

But it’s not all doom and gloom.

While devastating, in the grand scheme of things, COVID is a kind of warning shot – the earth telling us that rampant plundering of resources and burning of fossil fuels won’t be tolerated for much longer before the planet returns to the calm bliss of single celled organisms chilling in rock pools for a couple of billion years.

For brands and big business there are broadly two sustainability responses in the time of COVID: use this as a smokescreen to slip out of even paying lip service to climate concerns, or stay true to climate pledges and assure consumers that climate remains not just important, but crucial to a future that possesses at least some of the convenience and visceral social connection we’d taken for granted for so long.

It’s no surprise that the fossil fuel industry would use this as a time to back away from any climate concern they claim to have – especially in the context of oil prices slipping below zero, something which they’re predicted to do again. The story is similar for businesses in a range of industries, from farming to aviation. A number of airlines, for example, are seeking bailouts without environmental conditions attached – presumably so the recent drop in emissions that has allowed cities to emerge from dystopian grey fog can quickly be reversed to be shrouded again in a choking cloak of unbridled excess.

But while ‘Coronavirus Profiteers’ are as worrying and frustrating as they are predictable, there are many brands and businesses taking this opportunity to put their money where their mouths are on sustainability.

Let’s look at some principles for keeping sustainability at the forefront of brand actions during and after COVID, so we can continue driving more sustainable behaviour change in consumers and more sustainable operations in business.

1. Join the dots between the pandemic and the climate crisis

As part of Earth Day, Timberland, who have pledged to plant 50 million trees by 2025, shared its ad ‘Caring is not enough’. The ad features the voice of a child directly addressing nature to explain our current absence, and to promise that when we come back, we’ll treat nature better. It’s a moving invitation to take action (as simply caring isn’t enough), that’s seamlessly tied to the issues we now face because of COVID. In the acknowledgement of our dialogue with nature, we move away the idea that the world is a human playground to be used as we see fit, to a desire for a healthy relationship with an entity deserving of respect, and from which we need to ask forgiveness. But the overriding feeling coming away from the ad is one of hope – that the beauty of the natural world is still vibrant and will endure if we treat it correctly.

2. Take worthwhile action, even when COVID makes it easy not to

Fashion is an industry highly disrupted by COVID, and yet 17 more apparel brands have signed up to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Jeans Redesign Project since the full force of the pandemic hit. This initiative, to tackle waste, pollution, and harmful practices associated with the production of denim is part of the vanguard trying to change fashion’s ‘bad habits’. Brands like Balzac Paris, unspun, and Wrangler who’ve pledged to take part in difficult times now have a powerful story to tell about their ethics and dedication to sustainability.

3. Rethink infinite growth models

Amsterdam has taken to heart Kate Raworth’s 2017 book, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21^st-Century Economist, and are planning to employ the model to fix the economic difficulties that will inevitably be left in the wake of COVID. The model establishes two concentric rings (hence the doughnut): the inner ring reflects the minimum requirements for a good human life, while the outer ring reflects the environment’s carrying capacity. Living in the baked goodness of the doughnut’s middle means we’re not destroying the planet while people are given a good quality of life. Crucially it’s a model that doesn’t rely on infinite growth on a finite planet. So, we might ask ourselves, if a whole city can do it, why can’t your business do it?

This is a time to reframe and restructure your business for a more sustainable future by understanding our new context – where sustainability is now immediately and directly linked to mortality in a way it has not been in the past – and proving to consumers that it is a real purpose for your brand or business. The various websites listing those who’ve helped vs. those who’ve shirked responsibilities during COVID is evidence that actions in this time will linger, so why not use this crisis as a catalyst for real and meaningful change by showing that you, as business leaders, and as humans, really care?

There is no vaccine for the climate crisis. It takes each of us to care enough to take action to prevent a catastrophe compared to which COVID is merely an appetiser. But it’s still not too late to course correct and head towards a greener, fairer, and happier future.

There’s nothing more critical or more important than making socially and environmentally progressive choices. We’re here to have that conversation with you. Get in touch.

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Today, everything is emergent. Culture is transforming at pace. To negotiate this successfully you will need a readiness to anticipate and respond to the range of possibilities the future could hold.

Space Doctors uses Speculative Strategy as a powerful tool to help our clients imagine and prepare for the possible, plausible and preposterous of tomorrow, so we can build more agile and resilient brand strategies today.

Here’s what we mean, and what we do. It’s a super helpful framework for right now, for finding your way forward and for building more meaningful futures:

Speculative Strategy – Space Doctors 2020

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As physical distancing makes the thought of a cold pint in a bustling beer garden feel like the last comforting memory of an astronaut drifting further into space, technology provides a lifeline – moving from a familiar way to connect to an essential way to stave off isolation and loneliness.

Technology has been a driving force of cultural change over the past 30 years but as Covid-19 has brought a radical interruption to the global landscape, our use of technology is reframing its place and importance in all our lives.

Beyond proving that many jobs can be successfully done from our sofas and revealing the yawning void between the self-isolation experiences of celebrities and their followers, this period of enforced experimentation is impacting the way we use and consider technology in real time.

Here are 3 key ways in which the culture surrounding technology is shifting and what it means for post-lockdown life:

Ground-up Repurposing

People are flocking to platforms that allow them to continue their modes of connection as before (at the time of writing Zoom is at the top of most mobile app stores and gaming chat platform Discord has upped the maximum capacity for a single chat 5 fold). As they do so, they’re discovering that functionality, look and feel, and content are not reflective of the experiences and connections they need in a lockdown world. This is leading to a ground-up repurposing of technology: Zoom is hosting family gatherings while Tinder became a way to circumvent government restrictions and get news on the Coronavirus situation in China.

People are ingenious and are claiming digital spaces for the purposes they need, not just what they were intended for. Increasingly malleable and customisable platforms are likely to become the new normal, while agile tech companies will be able to re-skin or sub-brand their platforms to fit specific use cases.

Playful Performativity

Doubling down on our digital connections means we’re all experiencing Warhol’s fleeting fame through a 21^st century lens. We might not be famous per se, but we are appearing on the small screen at a rate that would make influencers desperate for affiliate-link revenue blush. Beyond transforming the platforms we use to connect, we are transforming the way we appear on screen: whether that’s a surreal background overlay on video chat, appearing as a mythical creature through filters, or simply wearing above-the-neck fancy dress. Stripped of the subtle physical cues that provide levity and connection in everyday life, we are moving towards sillier and more spirited representations of ourselves, moving away from the flattened, desaturated version of us that’s typically mirrored back to us on screen.

Unlocking the archetypical jester in all of us is an excellent coping strategy, but also speaks to a new normal where a truly sideways, provocative view of the world is welcomed and more common. Suddenly, we have permission to paint the walls with our dreams.

Navigating the Challenges of Community 

One of the truisms of Web 2.0 is that it not only allowed us to project a curated identity to the world, but to choose the community to which we projected that sculpted ‘me’. However, the immediate and tangible concerns of Covid-19 have reinvigorated the importance of local community, often mediated by technology. WhatsApp groups have sprung up at the scale of a street or neighbourhood to care for those at risk, and to swap stories and tips on getting by in this odd and potentially lonely time.

When the community becomes geographic again, it’s not possible to screen out people who share different views to you. A new normal might mean straightforward messaging technology continuing to facilitate connection with those around us in a way that breaks down echo chambers and information silos – achieving something that algorithms never could.

Each of these examples points to a new relationship with technology that’s more human, malleable, and playful. Digital etiquette is shifting to accommodate an influx of users, presenting a big opportunity for technology to read the human response and make hacks feel like intended uses, and an opportunity for people to make those digital spaces feel more human and inclusive.

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In world of ‘social distancing’, what is the New Normal for Care and Connectivity?

As streets around the world, which usually hum with activity, continue to fall silent in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are all witnessing our lives change rapidly; taking on new forms, shapes, places and meanings. We know that culture is constantly changing, but what makes this event more remarkable is that we are not only seeing change at an unprecedented rate and far reaching depth, but those who are not changing are being met with bemusement, at best, and even outright hostility in many cases.

Tensions are mounting as our social fabric frays. In Brooklyn, these folks in apartment windows got in a shouting match with those down on the street. “Flatten the curve, go home,” one chants. #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/XjYQDewnaT

— Nick Brown (@NickPBrown) March 15, 2020

Over the coming weeks Space Doctors will be tracking these rapid cultural changes, exploring how they cast a new light on how we will live our everyday lives. Fundamental ideas like how we greet each other, that we held to be quotidian and even part of our cultural identity are being rapidly reframed as we are forced to relate to each other, both locally, as a community and globally, in new ways.
Because despite the tragedy that is besieging the globe, cultural change is accelerating, and we are being forced to reconsider all those rhythms and systems that we thought were the norm and that we thought were good enough.

In this tumultuous time, we need to anticipate A New Normal.

The language of the pandemic highlights an area in which the most change is demanded and felt. ‘Social distancing’, self ‘isolation’, ‘work from home’ are all terms that emphasise a withdrawal from society, a retreat from participation. We are threatened with language of loneliness and the realities of our situation present the very real risk of people falling through the gaps, something that we all need to be aware of and active in our efforts to prevent.

This begs the question, what does care and connection mean in a world where we are tasked with reducing our exposure to others?

Although the changes that we’re all being asked to make feel daunting, the reality is that we are all well practiced in communicating through a mask, through layers of media that have long facilitated a new intimacy. What is clear is that the immediate response to isolation is a greater connection to others and to culture more widely. In times of stress, we seek hope, reassurance and comfort through humour, not social distance.

In China, over 400 million people tuned into live streamed DJ sets and ‘cloud clubbing events’ and museums opened their digital doors to invite people in. It isn’t just social and cultural connection that is expanding; even the windows on our conference calls to our colleagues have become more intimate, with domestic backgrounds replacing the dingy, heartless call pods that previously housed the connection to our colleagues around the world.

But it is not just digital connection that is bringing us closer to our world. A consequence of isolation is that we are more exposed to our immediate geographical communities. From seeing new faces in windows that were previously empty throughout the day, to the sounds of communal singing in blocks from Italy to Wuhan our world is blurring with the worlds of others, and even if we can’t shake their hands, we can smile at them through the distance that is currently uniting us.

Grassroots organisations and volunteers are creating means by which to extend care to those in communities, providing services that have been disrupted by our situation, those that, whether we like it or not, our governments cannot provide. Community WhatsApp groups and leaflets, designed to connect neighbours and offer help, are increasingly common as people look for opportunities to help, to care for their neighbours and connect with each other.

Rebels,

Now is the time to use our numbers and skills to support our communities. If you wish you can print off the below to post through doors on your street,

Rooted in love.
We are all we need💚

(Remember to wash your hands before handling and take all sensible precautions) pic.twitter.com/9L5IRasVTJ

— Extinction Rebellion UK 🌍 (@XRebellionUK) March 15, 2020

For business, this means that we all have a responsibility to facilitate this connection and provide opportunity for care. It is clear that people do not want emails explaining how brands are concerned about the pandemic – they want action. They want resources channelled to where they are needed, they want reassurance that their colleagues will be paid if they are forced not to work, they want business to protect our society and to take the action to facilitate this new culture of connection that we have found ourselves in.

As terrifying as the challenge facing us is – the reality is that we will all play a part in shaping what our ‘new normal’ becomes. We have a collective responsibility to make this new world one which has learnt from the unintended consequences of the past, to start building a better normal today.

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The symbols of protest in the 20^th Century are etched into popular culture. Bodies strewn across a race course, a flower in the barrel of a gun, a fist raised in defiance, a solitary figure standing strong in the face of power. We are alive with vicarious righteousness when we see brave and impassioned people facing power – an expression of opposition through action.

But the nature of what we’re facing is changing. The issues that we choose to protest are at once increasingly universal and ever more partisan, but what is clear is that the desire to stand up and be heard is becoming more commonplace and that some sense of injustice is felt by all.

As a cry for change increasingly becomes part of the everyday, so too do the symbols. Space Doctor Harry Kinnear decodes the mundane symbols that have become charged with meaning as we turn to the familiar to subvert and attack the systemic stasis that threatens our futures.

Everyday Opposition

The use of everyday objects in protest draws on a Dadaist tradition of deconstructing power through appropriating seemingly meaningless objects and giving them meaning. The quotidian nature of the objects elevates their significance as they are contrasted with the sophisticated and purposeful power of that which they oppose. The growth of knitting activism, with its associations with gentle hobbyists, creates power through contrast and satire, evolving, via yarn bombing, into the defining symbol of the largest protest in US history – the Women’s March in 2017 and the Pussy Hat. Creating incongruity with the everyday, such as Extinction Rebellion’s boat (The Berta Cáceres) in Oxford Circus, takes objects that lack distinctive meaning in one context and makes them unavoidably attention grabbing in another.

Perhaps the most potent symbol of the everyday is the use of umbrellas in Hong Kong protests since 2014. Protection from rain becomes protection from the state, co-opted as defence from tear gas, rubber bullets, identification and assault. The use of metal rice bowls (with their associations with the state gifted job security to loyal cadres in mainland China during Mao’s rule known as 铁饭碗 Iron Rice Bowl) to smother teargas cannisters or clingfilm to cover exposed skin from pepper spray bring domestic objects onto the front line and remind us of the power of these everyday objects as both practical things and powerful symbols.

Open Sourced Opposition

A key driver of this new approach to protest is the consistently anonymous and accessible nature of protest movements. Both Extinction Rebellion and the Hong Kong protests lack clear leaders, are self organising, have flat hierarchies and are open for anyone to join with little need for qualifying factors – a move away from a more vocational, activist model of the past. In order to facilitate this movement, protest and its capital are open sourced, belong to everyone and are easily accessible. Extinction Rebellion’s materials are open access and easily shareable by all, the Hong Kong protesters are organised via anonymous social media groups, sharing resources, advice and information vital to effective assembly. In this way, both organisations lack a centre of gravity and are, instead, a collection of organic groups – liberated from the limitation of a vocational, activist core. The informational know how and symbols (and causes) of protest have never been more available to everyone, never more inclusive.

The Consumer Activist

A new paradigm, in which everyone is both close to the issues of the day and is easily able to protest, allows for a new swathe of symbols to be taken up and imbued with meaning. Now we are increasingly able (and expected) to embody protest in the everyday – in the food we buy, the clothes we wear, the way we travel, the cleaning products we use; every category provides opportunity for mini acts of protest allowing us to dissent in the bathroom, on the streets, at work, on our bodies and, well, anywhere.Our embodied existence and how we choose to consume is itself an act of protest. Heroes like Alok V Menon challenge the hegemony with their authenticity – using their clothes and their identity to not only satisfy their right to express themselves how they wish, but also to defy and change the structures that resist that right.

Oatly campaign to get CO2 emissions on food packaging and have become an enabler of plant-based diets for millions; Loop is a circular shopping platform that allows people to reject plastic in their packaging. All these products give us opportunity to resist and make our own futures, like Alok V Menon; at least within our own personal spheres. Ironically, perhaps, the ability to change the structures of society is more effective via the consumerist route – you only have to look at the explosion of plant-based meat alternatives to see how the biggest food companies are changing to cater for consumer-driven demand.

The proliferation of protest has created a cultural context in which the everyday becomes an opportunity to resist. In response to the glacial pace of change from systems that seem increasingly anachronistic to the prevailing culture, people are exerting their agency over their personal spheres; embodying the change they wish to see in the world through the symbols of protest they choose to use, wear and create. Brands and organisations have a powerful opportunity within this to act as facilitators or even accelerators of change by seeking to meet consumer demand through progressive internal and external policies and product innovations.

In this context, protest has never been more accessible, nor has it before held such potential for tangible, everyday change.

One of our Directors Al Deakin takes a look at Starbucks’ latest TV spot #whatsyourname, and outlines some of the secrets to its success.

Alongside a generally positive reception from the LGBTQ+ community, Starbucks’ ad from earlier this month has been met with some cynicism by jaded marketing types; predictable grumbles about virtue signalling sit alongside the perception that championing trans rights is all a bit last year. There may be some cautious self-preservation here – people with a professional interest in the zeitgeist not wanting to be caught out of step with the socially conservative future looming on both sides of the Atlantic.  If this is the case, then all the more reason to promote the campaign.

Here’s why I think it’s a success. both as a commercial intervention and as a portrait of transitioning.

It chooses empathy and realism over melodrama.

In other words, it avoids the exaggerated cliches associated with this kind of advertising. There’s no highly charged montage of different people transitioning, no rousing power pop ballad, no suggestion that Frappuccino consumption will end the culture wars. Instead the experience of a trans man as he quietly struggles with being dead-named (called by his pre-transition name, deliberately or by mistake) is portrayed steadily, intimately and empathically. We see things from his point of view throughout and while the accurate use of his name by.a Starbucks employee is affirming, we don’t come away thinking everything’s been sorted as a result. The spot dramatises small but significant moments which the Starbucks brand can credibly associate itself with.

It finds the universal in the particular. 

This is the story of a young man seeking recognition and belonging, and that’s something most of us can relate to. The ad is neither purely cause-based or tokenistic – it tells a  story with universal resonance through sensitive attention to detail. The potential commercial win here is indicated by recent research which suggests the need to “create my own identity and have it accepted” beyond issues of gender is a significant driver for Gen Z.  So, by telling this particular story, the campaign may enable the Starbucks brand to connect more broadly with this chronically ad-pestered generation.

It gives the brand a positive and realistic role.

You can walk into any Starbucks and (hopefully) get your name called. The ad offers a clear reminder of that experience and adds emotional resonance to the ritual of getting your coffee, which is unlikely to harm footfall. Yes, Starbucks employees don’t always get your name right in reality, but they get it right enough to keep this credible.

It’s underpinned by real commitments 

Parallel to the campaign, Starbucks announced plans to offer comprehensive care for transgender employees, covering procedures like facial feminisation surgery that are usually excluded by insurers. Inevitable, stories have surfaced  of dead naming incidents within the Starbucks organisation, but the company have responded quickly to them and worked openly with all the employees who have exposed it.

I’m not saying the spot’s perfect or Starbuck’s commitment flawless, but it needs to be seen in the context of this reality: last year transphobic hate crime rose by 37% in the UK.

Whatever caveats you may want to give those figures, they demonstrate something going the wrong way, fast.  Couple that with the prevalence of anti-trans rhetoric from rich and powerful people across the political spectrum – much of this focused on the practice of deadnaming – and the fact that Starbucks have found a commercial opportunity in the affirmation of trans experience should be seen as something to celebrate.

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Image Credit: Starbucks, What’s Your Name

At Space Doctors we place culture at the centre of our work. Closely following emerging cultural narratives allows us to help our clients tap into trajectories of change and create more meaningful brand futures. To keep our thinking fresh, varied and impactful we constantly look to cultural innovators for inspiration and provocation. One way we do this is by inviting guest speakers from across a broad range of specialisms to share new thinking and expertise from their corner of culture with us, we call these ‘Inspiration Sprints’.

Our most recent speaker was Artist and Lecturer Angel Rose Denman whose work has been exhibited internationally in spaces such as Centre Pompidou, Somerset House, The ICA, and The British Film Institute.

Based between Hastings and Los Angeles Angel Rose’s interdisciplinary practise uses performance, writing, video, and printed media to explore the expansive notion of ‘freedom’ and its essentially contradictory nature.

Angel Rose treated us to a performance of her extensive work on the theory of Fun and a first look at her most recent thinking on the function of irony and transgression within contemporary culture.

We grabbed a few minutes with Angel Rose to dig a little deeper into how serious she is about fun:

What lead you to choose fun as your subject? 

I started thinking about fun seriously while I was finishing my MA at the University of Brighton. I was reading the Marquis De Sade at the time, and I was really interested in his ideas about freedom. For Sade, sex is the point where reason fails, and I wondered if I could make a similar argument about fun. If fun is the point where reason fails, could there be some sort of disruptive political potential in this? I wrote an essay/manifesto called ’The Meaning of Fun’ based on this and eventually turned it into a zine called Serious Fun, which I produced in collaboration with a Marxist drag queen called Oozing Gloop.

Pleasure vs Leisure – what is the difference between fun and consumption? Is all fun ‘good’ fun?

I agree with Ben Fincham’s observation that fun is so often conflated with play or games or other forms of consumption that may or may not actually be enjoyable.  Fun is mostly relational. It’s a slippery subject and that’s why I was interested in it. While we were creating Serious Fun, myself and Gloop were also reading a lot of Adorno. In response to his ideas, we wanted to emphasise the aspects of fun that are communal, free and based on the imagination, in order to propose a new kind of ‘fun’ that might be found or created outside of the system of the culture industry. A fun that isn’t simply just a relief from work… Fun as fundamental driver. Fun as a value that should be at the heart of all our pursuits. I feel like fun is a bit of dirty word in many circles, because it’s perceived to be the opposite of seriousness.

Image credit: Angel Rose, Serious Fun

What role does fun play in health and wellbeing? Should fun be prescribed on the NHS?

The way I define fun is ‘a meaningless activity that gives our lives meaning’ , so in terms of mental health, fun should absolutely be prescribed on the NHS!.. but then again, if it was enforced, it probably wouldn’t be so fun…

On Irony and Transgression: is counterculture dead? Where is counterculture located today?

What I tried to outline in my presentation for Space Doctors was the idea that irony and transgression, which were traditionally used by the left as a way to undermine power structures, have been co-opted by today’s alt right internet cultures. This is an idea put forward in Angela Nagle’s book Kill All Normies. I don’t think counterculture is dead, but I agree with Nagle that the left-wing countercultural strategies seem to have exhausted themselves, and this poses an issue for the artists and thinkers on the left today.

What do you do for fun?

I used to be heavily involved in the queer night club scene in London, but nowadays I’m usually too lazy to leave the house. But when I do go out, I think dancing is the most fun thing to do. It feels like freedom. I used to work at a retirement home and the old people would always get nostalgic about public dancing, because they remember how that type of freedom feels. Dancing in your bedroom mirror is pretty fun too!

Tells us a little about something that is fascinating you in culture right now… 

Raw Carnivore Diet. I accidentally ate raw meat once and I’ve never puked so much in my life, so I was genuinely shocked to see people doing this as a lifestyle. I was also intrigued by how political it is, in the sense that it seems to be becoming popular with the angry young men of the alt right, as a backlash against liberal values encompassed by veganism.

At a time when global culture feels so serious it’s easy to forget or dismiss the importance of fun and its cultural value, Angel Rose’s refusal to accept this makes a powerful and compelling point!

Leaving us asking ourselves:

If fun is the meaningless act that gives life meaning, how does it impact our work in creating meaningful futures?

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Image credit: Angel Rose, Happiness is Coming

Chinese New Year is one of the biggest celebrations on the planet, prompting a huge migration of people as hundreds of millions travel across the country to be reunited with their families and celebrate the coming year. Of course, brands from around the world are keen to tap into this moment of celebration with tailored comms rolled out across the region.

As we usher in the Year of the Rat, and the new beginning it heralds, we asked some of our brilliant analyst network to pick out their favourite pieces of brand communication and explore what makes them stand out in the deluge of branded celebration

Nike

Watch the video here

Nike’s first Chinese New Year ad has received a wealth of positive comments in China with its humorous take on the tradition of giving and receiving 红包 (red packages of money) between generations over the Chinese New Year festival – the biggest human migration on Earth as families reunite to celebrate the coming year.

The ad stands out through the clever mobilization of core principles of the New Year – that of traditional values, enduring family relationships, respect for and deference to elders – and blending them with a story of upward mobility, modernity and humour. We see the development of our characters and the landscape they occupy through time; becoming more sophisticated, technologically advanced and mature – highlighting the longevity and progress of Nike and China in the same breath. By adopting a comedic tone (as opposed to the more saccharine, tear jerking default of big name CNY comms) the ad connects with a modern audience used to memes,

stickers, emojis and tongue-in-cheek internet commentary as part of the everyday lexicon. Nike have achieved a culturally powerful blend of tradition and modernity that feels relatable, rather than lofty or didactic. As Chinese consumers increasingly look to brands that express an authentic Chinese culture that they can identify with in the modern world, Nike’s spot makes for a potent cultural message and powerful piece of comms that addresses China’s cultural quest for an authentic expression of their nuanced identity, one that links the past with the future.

Burberry

Watch the video here

Combining the brand name and the Chinese zodiac sign, Burberry created a cartoon character, “Bobo mouse”, for the New Year. The fashionable and adventurous Bobo casually chats with the brand spokesperson, Dongyu Zhou, on WeChat, sharing photos of her travels around the world, celebrating the Chinese New Year. Relevant and playful, this piece resonates with a young generation in China who see themselves as both global citizens and ambassadors of the traditional culture, eager to experience the world.

Sixia,

Apple – iPhone Pro 11

Watch the film here

Apple’s short film Daughter explores a changing society, reflecting how such ideals of “团聚” (reuniting) are not as ideal as conceived. The heart-warming film respects traditional family values whilst also highlighting authentic contemporary experiences that many women face during the holidays.

By referencing cultural narratives of female empowerment and the rising awareness of “leftover women” Daughter represents a breakdown of these traditional gender stereotypes, reconciling the characters’ generational differences and accepting untraditional, unconventional gender roles.

Traditions and conventions, after all, are ideals. By highlighting these real and raw stories, Apple connects with audiences who are challenged and confronted with their own modern and unconventional stories. Apple stands out as it uniquely pays tribute to ideas of family and tradition while powerfully expressing a more nuanced, real identity that resonates with a reality that cuts through the limits of ideal.

Katie Li

China is a nation in which tradition and modernity sit side by side, constantly jostling with each other, rising and waning at different points of the calendar. In order to resonate communications should embrace this state of flux and demonstrate understanding of the tensions which make China such a unique market.

By reflecting the variety and nuance of lived realities across China brands can become a meaningful part of culturally relevant moments like CNY, exploring and supporting people’s changing experience as they navigate life and grow.

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Back in November our Founder and CEO Fiona McNae shared some of our thinking on the power of narratives as tools for positive action as part of The University of Exeter’s MBA Speaker Series. The presentation explored how the stories we tell now and in the future can help us guide our way through the often daunting climate crisis.

Stories are powerful carriers of ideas, of meaning, fundamental to human communication. They help us make sense of the world around us, sharing information in a way that is embodied, felt and real.

Once in a while stories can even change the world.

The Climate Crisis has become front and centre of many global and local narratives. It is clear the time to act is now. And yet real meaningful behaviour change still feels out of reach for many.

The dominant story of our collective future feels overwhelming and even hopeless as disaster framings of an uninhabitable earth feel like an increasingly real and growing inevitability.

These stories are shaping our view of the world, changing what we think, what we feel, and what we do. Just as positive stories can drive meaningful change, narratives which remove our sense of hope and ability to control our own destiny breed apathy and inertia.

Without a counter narrative the end of the world story is given the power to become a reality.

But thankfully, it’s still only one story of a possible future.

We frequently use stories in our work. We explore diverse social and cultural issues to identify powerful new narratives and help our clients to share more positive, culturally relevant ideas which encourage positive change.

As part of an ongoing internal initiative to enhance our positive impact on the climate conversation the Space Doctors team and many of our associate network have been applying our creative cultural minds to finding ways to contribute towards defining a more aspirational future for our world.

In this presentation – the first piece published from this initiative – we have looked to the many positive stories gathering pace within the climate conversation and wider culture. We know that powerful stories become lived realities. By acknowledging those we need to leave behind we can identify those we need to bring to life to ignite action and activate behavior change.

Stories can change the world. Perhaps they can save it too.

To learn more download the pdf presentation here: Stories for a Zero Carbon Future

Want to talk about telling more meaningful stories? Get in touch.

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Space Doctors are excited to have Gareth Lewis back to a new global role in the UK after a fantastic 3 years establishing our regional office in Singapore.

Our Asia business is thriving with some super-exciting and pioneering projects in Semiotic, Cultural & Human insight and consultancy thanks to Gareth and the growing team.

We’re also thrilled to announce that Maya Madhusoodan, who has worked alongside Gareth for two years, will take on the role of Managing Director of our Singapore office. Maya has played a huge role in building our business in Asia and bringing her extensive regional expertise and phenomenal talent to bear.

Big congratulations from all of us to Gareth and Maya for their incredible hard work and success!

Identity has always been wrapped in clothing. The stitches that pull fabric together also gather the stories and narratives that we communicate to others. Our clothes communicate our place in the world, through implied meanings of class, social status, affiliation to tribes, beliefs and our outlook on the world. Cultural movements are reflected in our garments and can be read as physical manifestation of a communal psyche – what we wear is what we believe in.

Fast fashion and its ready availability has made a trend-led sense of identity available to the whole urban world.  People can easily access fashion and whatever identity they want to express. We have found community and a commonality in being trendy, youthful, fashionable, modern and globally aware consumers – a world of opportunity and potential at our well-heeled feet. And yet, fast fashion has also brought with it a culture of hyper consumption and waste. A short-sighted approach by the industry has led to a huge burden on our planet. It is now no news that 60% of clothes find themselves in landfill within a year of being made. In response we have seen a parallel rise of ethical fashion – a bid to mitigate the harm of an industry focussed on disposable turnover.  A set of home-grown brands from Asia, such as Grana, Matter, Shokay and Fake Natoo, each in its own way has begun speaking out against the harm of consumerist culture. Their stories revolve around ruthless transparency of cost structures, ethical trade, quality over quantity, preserving traditional fabrics and craft, workmanship, care and a social angle of empowering indigenous communities threatened by fast fashion and other environmental pressures.

Grana pursues quality through being ruthlessly transparent about their production and associated costs and mark-ups, which helps consumers build trust both in terms of garment quality and the integrity of the business. Image credit: Grana

While their efforts are noble, many ethical fashion brands are not accessible to the majority of people. They are expensive, often rely on small scale online sales, don’t entirely solve issues of waste management and, more importantly, their scale of impact just cannot be matched by bigger brands with a huge reach. Beyond these practical problems, there is a real risk of the message behind the action being adopted as an elitist sign of exclusive enlightenment – a club of consumers that are performing status through the consumption of ethical and sustainable fashion, elevating themselves morally above those who do not (cannot) do the same.

Fundamentally we need to see sustainability on the streets rather than the catwalks – a move from the elitist to the democratised.

And we are beginning to see a shift.

Increasingly, there are ‘fast fashion’ brands (a phrase that has rapidly become pejorative) who are taking more responsibility for their environmental impact; a momentous push into the future with innovative materials, recycling plants and circular-loop business models, encouraging people on the street to confront the problems, slow the cycle and adopt more sustainable lifestyles. This isn’t just Fashion Weeks in luxurious venues, this is consumer participation in genuine movements towards sustainability.

Image credit: H&M via Weibo

Can the circular model save H&M from its piles of unused clothes?

H&M is struggling with a mountain of unused clothes. But they were also early in adopting upcycled new materials in their product lines. It launched its Conscious Exclusive collection in 2015 featuring eco-friendly clothes constructed with sustainable fabrics made from cellulose fibres in pineapple leaves and other plant-based flexible foams using algae biomass. They showed us how citrus juice by-products could be transformed into silk like fabrics.

The aesthetics of the collection echoes the affinity to nature, emphasizing a certain care and respect in its flowy silhouettes and striking colour palette. H&M explored the theme of the healing power of nature while embracing textile innovation further by pledging to honour a Zero-waste lifestyle. They have moved their efforts on by teaming up with a network of facilities, other brands (such as Danone) to come up with ways to create textiles out of waste.

They have also started urging consumers to become fashion recyclers, sharing their sense of purpose with consumers, making it clear that everyone needs to contribute to the regenerative culture, but still reducing the barriers for consumers to engage.

A model at Reclothing Bank’s fashion show, with make-up marking important dates and numbers on her face. Image credit: Reclothing Bank

China and the rise of second hand

Reclothing Bank, a label from Shanghai, upcycles secondhand clothing in its collections. Zhang Na, the label’s founder, speaks of old clothes as vessels containing traces of people’s lives, as objects that inspire reflection. She introduced her collection through contemporary social theatre, portraying life in Modern China with the help of Shanghainese families, models, and actors. The label earned itself a cult following, demonstrating the benefits of aligning brand story with the narratives within a culture. And it’s not just high-end labels rewriting the cultural narratives around second hand. High streets in larger cities are no strangers to upcycled and vintage fashion, such as Pawnstars in Shanghai or Vintage Caravan in Beijing. Clothing swaps and second hand clothes stores are visible and popular parts of consumers’ lives. Beyond small scale entrepreneurs keen to address sustainability, China is also seeing a rise in huge scale ecommerce platforms such as Xian Yu.

Image credit: Xian Yu 闲鱼

Xian Yu, Alibaba’s second hand platform, has seen 8,500 tonnes of clothes given new homes since it launched in March 2018. Beyond the significance of diverting 24 million garments from landfill, users of Xian Yu are given ‘green power points’ on affiliate app Ant Financial as a reward for shopping, but can also gather them through opting in to schemes such as paperless billing and taking public transport – encouraging wider lifestyle change. These points are then translated into anti-desertification efforts through planting trees. Since 2016, when Ant Financial launched, 400 million users have activated accounts.
This is not a small movement – this is not consumer indifference.

The urgent rise of a conscience in the fashion industry reflects the changing consumer culture evident in Asia and across the world. It is clear that as we construct our identities in the future that sustainability will feature significantly. Consumers want to contribute, to be forces for good, and to look and feel damn good doing it. The sustainable future that more and more voices are clamouring for will change our relationship to the clothes and shoes we wear – our beliefs are changing and how we choose to be seen and what we wish to be associated with is changing too. People have already started opting for brands that deliver on conscious production. The remodelling and refashioning of clothes is the next creative pursuit and the fashion industry is talking about creating longer standing relationships with owned clothes rather than having a disposable approach.

Global brands are making considerable strides into technology and infrastructure that produces greener products at scale. Brand owners and marketeers have a responsibility to help consumers truly understand the connection between their choices and the impact on the environment. Brands can do more than just talking about their sustainability efforts in isolation (as it might come across as too indulgent), but it’s evidently possible to weave that effort into the brand story. Consumers are willing to be taken on a journey towards a more desirable future, so why not take them there now?

Key Takeaways

• Empower consumers with the knowledge of new materials (recycled and recyclable) so they understand the value of making the right choice, not just for themselves, but for the environment. Help them connect the dots.
• Sustainability cues need to be a crucial part of a brand’s identity. As consumers construct new identities of which eco-consciousness is an integral part, they will seek to adopt brands that do the same. Provide them with a new visual and verbal language that brings together the glamorous, practical, and savvy, (and whatever else your brand stands for) with the sustainable.

Image credit: Nuan, Fake Natoo

A mutual fascination between the communications industry and the far right is nothing new. The Nazis admired American advertising, anti-Semitism boosted tabloid newspaper sales and after the war, Madison Avenue borrowed a trick or two from Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl. So it’s not surprising the marketing community is entranced by the success of Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party – the established logic of marketing being “if people like it, it must be good”, with ethics and a social conscience imported from somewhere else.

This week’s Campaign feature on the Brexit Party front man goes further than the dispassionate analysis of his tactics you might expect from the trade press. It actively celebrates and helps to mythologise him as a public figure. There he is, in luxurious black and white, grinning at us from a hundred magazine stands and agency reception tables supported by congratulatory drop quotes, checked only by the obligatory “we thought long and hard about this” editorial disclaimer. Needless to say, it’s not the hand-wringing in the body copy that has the impact.

Equally sinister, but more ludicrous, is the breezy attempt to draw some “objective” lessons from Farage’s success. “Be bold,” suggests one “not offending anyone is not the cardinal virtue of advertising” as if describing Trevor Beattie in the 1990s rather than one of the 21st century’s leading enablers of race-hate.

History is important here. The book we should all read, but probably don’t have time, is Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. Arendt was a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany and her book is the definitive analysis of the rise of the far right in Europe in the first part of the twentieth century. Among a long list of terrifyingly relevant insights (check out her widely shared passage on lying leaders) she describes how an unwitting celebration of extremists as “fascinating cultural phenomena” by thought leaders of the time was fundamental to their eventual triumph.

Their views weren’t just normalised, they were indulged. “If you put the policies to one side for a moment,” the cocktail-hour conversation went “You’ve got to admire the man’s charisma and how the whole thing works…” And so the cult of personality advances.

There are differences between our time and the 1930s – not least the likely result of any Brexit party victory being chaos rather than the trains running on time – but this week’s Campaign is an example of why we need to be urgently aware of the similarities.

Those ego-fluffing portraits are hitting the news-stands the same week that Farage’s transatlantic crush is leading rallies in openly racist chanting, a tactic which many analysts believe could win him the next US election.

In that, he may be “finding the people who are most important to him and delighting them” as Campaign would have it. He’s also advancing a global emergency.

– Al Deakin, Director of Insight

Gen Z: the oldest are graduating, entering the work force and even becoming parents, whilst the youngest are coming to their tenth birthdays. Born roughly between 1995 and 2009, they are often seen as (and even judged for) lacking intimacy and being tethered to technology.

Gen Z are not a single entity, but they do clearly share common concerns around fairness, diversity, and sustainability that see them frequently labelled as ‘woke’. With the world in flux, one could go as far as to say that as a generation, the wellbeing of the planet is quite literally in their hands. They are bestowed with a responsibility to take care of resources that previous generations took for granted. They inherited a precarious natural environment and generations of bad decisions, not to mention the trials and tribulations of social media, mental health, rising populism… we could go on.

So, whereas previous generations consumed and innovated almost for pleasure, Gen Z are taking a more active role in ensuring that their decisions are considered, they make conscious purchases and want their values heard.

Like generations before them, Gen Z are bringing new cultural ideas and behaviours to the fore. With this wokeness comes a vigilance against brands that talk the talk without walking the walk. True, long-term resonance with this generation means a genuine reimagining of how brands work – from supply chain systems to authentic communication of openness and inclusion.

What does this mean for brands?

Now more than ever, brands are moving to understand and market to this newest and enigmatic demographic. This presents a HUGE opportunity for brands to provide experiences and services that ensure consumers can feel good about their actions whilst actively contributing to the renewal, growth and wellbeing of their societies and of themselves.

With that in mind…

• How can your brand offer Gen Z fresh, innovative solutions that work for more people?

• Is your messaging consistent, authentic, and expressing a world that’s diverse and accepting?

• How can your brand reframe the ‘value’ it is bringing to consumers to reflect a more generative model where consumers are either sharing or giving back? 

• Are you giving Gen Z consumers the chance to own and evolve a part of your brand?

Here are some brilliant examples of how brands and experiences are helping Gen Z to change the world:

New Systems

Gen Z are connecting with brands that throw away the rule book and find new models in a bid to reframe traditional capitalist agendas. 

Refeed America

Start-up Refeed America in name alone suggests a rekindling of a lost America – an alternate reality to Trump’s Make America Great Again that envisions more equitable food distribution models. It uses geo-technology to connect surplus food to those in need, thereby reducing food waste.

Target Incubator

Target celebrates its consumers with an incubator program that looks to support “a business that is better for people or the planet”, and inspiringly recognizes the absolute imperative role of corporations and previous generations to give way and fund young minds with fresh perspectives.

Hacked Learning

Gen Z are utilising new educational tools to access learning opportunities that aren’t overshadowed by inequality, in a world where traditional schools and universities are becoming fraught cultural territories.

LRNG

LRNG privileges ‘experiences’ and encourages teens to pursue their interests by connecting them to peers and mentors who help them evolve their skillsets for the “modern economy” with local and national career opportunities.

Think Global School 

Think Global School says it all in its name with a borderless curriculum across twelve countries. These less traditional routes help normalise home-schooling and redefine education as a living, breathing thing ­– more preparatory and pliable than a fixed institution that cannot change quickly enough to meet the future.

Media as an ethical tool

Gen Z are increasingly showing us how we can harness the positive attributes of social media as progressive medium for creativity, storytelling, political/social/environmental change.

#HalftheStory

#HalftheStory directly counteracts the perfectionism of life online by encouraging its global community to share that “part of yourself that exists outside of your social media story”.  It offers an antidote to Instagram’s harmonious colour palettes and pristine curation and frames social media as a tool for self-reflection and honesty.

Instagram Close Friends

Digital natives Gen Z are using features such as Instagram’s ‘Close Friends’ lists to create inner circles that allow for greater freedom of self-expression and a sense of safety in online spaces. This more private and supportive environment is especially important for teens who are non-binary or are tackling mental health issues. ­Through embracing customised, more intimate audiences, Gen Z are able to exclude potential trolls, facilitate positive reinforcement, and make mainstream platforms their own.

Reframing Aspiration

In an uncertain world, Gen Z are more comfortable than previous generations in not aspiring to traditional ‘markers of success’. Where once ownership was all, now sharing and giving take just as much prominence. Brands are tapping into this in various different ways:

Lyft

Instead of the previously defining moment of owning your first car, companies like Lyft offer car subscription models that flip the milestone of owning a car and highlight an acceptance and celebration of fluid accessibility and cooperative ownership.

Facebook’s Charitable Giving

Even the celebratory birthday present is being reframed as an opportunity to give (collectively) rather than receive through Facebook’s Charitable Giving Tool that prompts users to create fundraisers two weeks before their birthday.

Independent Discovery and Experimentation

Having grown up with the world’s knowledge at their fingertips, Gen Z are comfortable with finding their own way when it comes to creative development and self-expression, and brands are tapping into this in various ways.

American Eagle

American Eagle’s latest campaign featured the retailer’s Gen Z shoppers who also shot and styled the campaign themselves. The brand handed over its creative direction to the people who know and love the brand most and able to tell its story best.

Make it with VCSO

Photo-editing app VCSO profiles a variety of Gen Z creatives in their recent campaign, highlighting the unique approaches of the artists who make what feels right to them rather than others, working fluidly across multiple disciplines, and discovering and using their own processes.

Get in touch if you’d like to chat about how you can better connect with Gen Z!

– Hannah Hoel

Image credit: ASOS, Collusion

Space Doctors PTE Ltd – Director of Insight

April 2019

Singapore based

We’re looking for a Director of Insight to join the Singapore office. Working alongside the Managing Director you will be a key contributor to the growth of the business in Asia Pacific.  If you:

• Have passion for cultural insights and experience in solving brand and business challenges via incisive, critical thinking
• Have built strong relationships with clients in the region based on your excellence and leadership in insights
• And would like to be part of a small, but thriving entrepreneurial team in APAC

…then please read on and apply.

You:

• Have a real passion for and expertise in cultural, human and strategic insights, evidenced by 8+ experience as a practitioner in the field including working with international clients on multinational projects, and impressive examples of how your contribution has driven brand and business performance for major clients in APAC

• You will bring with you a strong network of potential client connections and a passion for how cultural insight can positively influence their business. You should also be motivated by – and take pride in – winning business from a wide spectrum of new clients.

• Space Doctors is established globally for 17 years and our Singapore office is 2 years old. We’re a tight, ambitious team. You’ll have a ‘whatever it takes’ attitude and an entrepreneurial mentality. You’ll lead by example, be a hands on ‘do-er’, and be prepared and excited about doing what’s needed as the business continues to grow in APAC.

• You will be expected to display strong leadership abilities alongside excellent collaborative skills. This includes the abilty to establish great working connections across our offices (in Singapore and the UK) and insight partners and analysts across the world.

• Critically, you’ll be excited about becoming a member of the Space Doctors team and contributing in an active way to Space Doctors company culture. This might involve visiting colleagues in the UK or welcoming UK staff to Singapore, enrolling in our communications program or throwing yourself into the innovation space and identifying new ways of applying our research techniques.

• You’ll need to be happy working to financial targets and KPI’s.

• You will also be eager to represent our company and champion our approach at public events, conferences and in front of clients and industry partners.

About Space Doctors

Space Doctors are experts in helping brands and organisations connect more deeply with culture so they become more meaningful, relevant and impactful.

We inspire and shape how brands show up in the world by using insight unearthed through semiotics, ethnography, trends, design and consumer research.

We help solve the toughest questions through thoughtful, provocative conversations that challenge standard ways of thinking, opening up possibilities and new paths forward.

We operate across 50+ markets and have offices in the UK and Singapore. Our clients include Procter & Gamble, The Coca-Cola Company, Samsung, InterContinental Hotels Group and Diageo.

Take a look around our website to find out more.

Salary and Package on application.

Please send your cv and covering letter to apply@35.178.244.76

Closing date for applications is 30^th June 2019.

Caroline Lucas, MP For Brighton Pavilion, the UK’s first Green Member of Parliament and former leader of the Green Party joined the Space Doctors team to share her perspectives on the imperatives for sustainable change that we all need to embrace in order to make a Zero Carbon Future a reality. She talked about how business in particular needs to drive that change and framed some of the key challenges that organisations like Space Doctors can tackle through our work with clients.

Listen to Caroline’s full presentation here:

Image Credit: Creative Commons

The concept of ageing is in a flux. From being one of our biggest fears, it is emerging as a time of opportunity, exploration and personal enrichment. Ageing has been depicted in all sorts of narrowing stereotypes, so deep-rooted that we often hardly notice it. Be it the ageist memes, the angry grandmother, the grumpy grandpa in retirement ads or the humorous takes on sensualized seniors, ageist clichés are aplenty in our culture.

We at Space Doctors believe that brands must stop playing the role of savior to people fearing the approach of age. Through miracle cures, therapies and tricks, they promise to help people turn the clock back or hold off the ageing process that bit longer.

In 2016, Wang Deshun appeared on a catwalk bare chested. They dubbed him as ‘Lao Xianrou (old Fresh Meat), aka the Hottest Grandpa. He quickly became a global symbol for older people’s ability to puncture stereotypes and rediscover oneself at any stage of one’s life. Reebok was quick to sign him up for their ‘Be More Human’ campaign to send a strong message of not being hindered by ideas of age for being fit. This is also shaping China’s views on ageing – making it clear that age doesn’t mean decline and can, in fact, be a time of personal flourishing.

Brands like Dove continue to act as heroes in people’s lives. While age is represented positively, the brand still acts on behalf of its consumers, for them, not with them.  In its communications, Dove makes campaigning statements with a view to changing perceptions and empowering women of all ages to feel beautiful.

It’s still a revolution– but within limits. Dove remains implicitly superior to its consumers, fighting their battles for them. The brand offers them therapy that’s more psychological than physical, helping them feel better rather than look better. But it is therapy nonetheless.

They want to explore this time of life authentically, creatively and adventurously, for themselves.

They don’t want to deny age, proclaiming that ‘it’s just a number’ as in the utopian, boomer-driven dominant model we have just been exploring. The emergent story is more about shedding the constraints of the past and moving forward experimentally to see what the ‘third phase of life’ can truly be.

Adapting to this challenging new vision of ageing will be a challenging, yet exciting brief for brands. Many will need to rethink their most basic assumptions about the power dynamics in play between them and their consumers.

As people step into their own power as part of the ageing process, brands will need to offer – not top-down fixes or patronising empowerment narratives – but practical and emotional resources to enrich the process.

The Freebird Club is an inspiring example. The brand offers a global homestay network for older people. Avoiding both the disempowering narratives of residual culture, and utopian ‘living-the-dream’ dominant codes, the Freebird Club partners with older people to enable authentic exploration, connection and self-discovery.

Like the Freebird Club, brands now need to act as partners, allies and friends, not as miracle workers or therapists. They will need to earn the right to take part in the adventures of age. And that will mean playing a creative role in the process of enquiry and experimentation that is now underway.

The kind of workplace that WeWork has had a huge hand in creating – one whose set-up, ethos and aesthetic has influenced not only other shared spaces, but thousands of private companies’ offices – can easily translate into living and education spaces. Already, there’s a clear aesthetic shared between WeWork and other ‘third spaces,’ from consultancy HQs to Starbucks, which identify above all as social places of growth.

WeWork and others reflect a new truth that the real ‘workplace’ of the 21^st century is the screen. That’s where knowledge-economy, flexible century workers complete the vast majority of their billable hours, where they concentrate and produce by being focussed on their computers to the exclusion of all else. Even if you’re employed at an office by a single employer, you’ll probably have heard a colleague say, ‘Sorry I missed seeing you yesterday – I just had so much piling up, I worked from home, so I could really get it done.’

Because the “real work” takes place virtually, the new “point” of offices is to act as the third space between leisure and “work work”, to offer a place to connect. Offices are for meetings, serendipitous chats, inspiring others and being inspired – and we see this evolution mirrored semiotically in office design.

Over the years, the innovative office ideal has moved from the clean open spaces of the ‘90s, to the bright playful playgrounds of the ‘00s, to the subtle, natural-looking design, with wood tones and yellowish lighting, which unites WeWorks, Starbucks and other growth spaces. This isn’t out-and-out sociability that crosses into play or family/ friend time, the ‘non-work’ self – rather, these are unfinished-looking areas where employees and freelancers alike can grow organic connections and new ideas.

For freelancers and for the ‘intrapreneurs’ who make things happen in companies, human connections are everything. Dating-style networking apps (e.g. Bumble Bizz or Shapr), and co-living communities such as China’s You+, show just how important connection is not just to freelancers, but to all of us.

A freelancer who socialises with clients has a better chance of being hired again. People from different parts of an industry might come together to provide clients with a collaborative offer. Two friends from the same industry putting their heads together can spark an idea for a brand-new company or a sustainable grid that takes care of and protects each other.

And in the last couple of years, these connections have also directly empowered those within them. New networks have sprung up, not only to help people collaborate on projects or ideas, but to help them to make sure they’re being paid, listened to and treated well.

Space Doctors predicted a move towards bottom-up collaboration between workers, partly based on the openly-networked spaces (like Starbucks and WeWork) which people are choosing to work in. The media industry, in particular, is seeing a flurry of freelancers’ and contractors’ unions spring up, and recently, even Google – the prime dominant example of a ‘modern, innovative office’ is experiencing pushback against its strong company-culture-focussed mission. Googlers killed the company’s collaboration with the Pentagon, Project Maven, by rebelling on ethical grounds, and walked out across the world on 1^st November 2018 to protest sexual harassment.

The “emergent-emergent” model of work in the future will focus on bottom-up collaboration between workers, freelancers and hybrid workers – and the workplaces of the future may be very different.

For instance, recently, the “Digua” creative community in Beijing has reclaimed many of the city’s unused Cold War underground bunkers, turning them into their own co-working spaces, libraries or communal creches. This is a community with a purpose – to help each other be the best they can be in a challenging city.

This fascinating development shows how a co-working space can be as small as a living-room, and as easy to organise as a Meetup page. A group of people with shared work interests, from a generation which has always been short on money, may well come to see co-created communal spaces as a healthy alternative to paying a monthly premium to a WeWork.

What does this mean for your business, especially if you are a legacy organisation coping with the cultural changes?  

Even if you don’t employ freelancers, a huge and influential number of professionals now spend formative parts of their careers freelancing, and many of them will be represented among the Millennials in your office. We can see this expressed in interior design influence, as big multinational companies copy design elements from co-working spaces.

Co-work culture is becoming so dominant that it affects employees’ expectations, attitudes and behaviours, impacting internal culture, space design and work styles. HR handbooks need to provide for the various uncertainties employees experience and cause while moving flexibly between screen (which can be anywhere in the world), office ‘third space,’ and transient locations in between.

Meanwhile, companies catering to SME and start-ups need to design propositions that bear in mind this fluidity of personnel and working styles. For example, insurance providers can consider the evolving health issues related to screen time, and software providers can think about how to replicate the energy of an in-person meeting over video call.

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These are just some first thoughts on implications of these vast changes in working culture. If you’d like to learn more or talk about how these might influence your business, please drop us a line at: contact@35.178.244.76

These were some of the questions Grayson Perry asked to the audience during his brilliantly entertaining, irresistibly thought provoking stand up show Them and Us at The Palladium in London last Tuesday evening.

Throughout the show, every member of the audience (armed with an electronic voting device) was asked by Grayson to participate in a live democratic election, giving our ‘honest and anonymous’ answers to questions selected by the artist. Which of the following do you associate yourself as being: Liberal Elite, Country Folk, Urban Hipster, A Normal Person…? Are you well-mannered or considerate?

In true Grayson Perry fashion, the artist and social commentator managed to connect with each and every one of us by asking us to reveal small snippets of our identities – our answers in turn shining a light on who we believe we think ourselves to be. We laughed, we grimaced. Seconds after our votes were in, our collective answers, the answers of the community we were now part of, were revealed to us in the form of a poll on a large screen. 62% of us preferred dogs to cats. The majority of us identified ourselves as being ‘normal people’. “Fuck off,” shrieked Grayson in response to this latter statistic. We were taking part in a live social experiment – fun at first, but soon to become disturbingly illuminating.

As the show progressed, so did the questions. Did you vote Labour or did you vote Tory? Did you vote leave, or did you vote remain? Grayson went on to present a series of images: a middle-class suburban home with a paved driveway, a record collection, Waitrose. We were asked to vote on whether or not we associated each image with being Labour or Conservative. It was brilliantly semiotic, uncovering the culturally-imposed associations we have not only with objects and images, but with groups in society who simply put, either share our personal views and aesthetic tastes or don’t. Them and Us.

The expression ‘culture is upstream from politics’ is one that Grayson continually returned to throughout the show. A revealing concept that our political views, opinions, and biases are not and cannot be removed from the cultural context that surrounds us as individuals. Towards the beginning of the show, Grayson asked the audience to vote on our preference of two different flags he had created. One flag depicted the Ramones and the other flag depicted the leaf used in the National Trust logo.  The majority of the audience voted for the flag depicting the National Trust leaf. I guess we weren’t feeling all that punk sat in a theatre in central London on a Tuesday night watching a transvestite asking us to vote on our preference of handmade tapestry flags.

As the show progressed and as the audience became more aware of the shows political undertone, Grayson returned to the two flags. Which flag is Tory and which is Labour? *face palm* The same (majority Labour) audience that had voted for the National Trust flag were now voting this flag to be most closely associated with Conservative voters. The same audience that were majority ‘remain’ voters had not chosen the Ramone flag but the leave (sorry I meant to say ‘leaf’) flag.

Like all Grayson’s work, the point wasn’t obvious, but crystal clear. It felt equally as indulgent and entertaining as it did socially and politically informed, and despite its comical value, there ran throughout a sombre tone that seemed unavoidable. Our votes, despite being anonymous, had really mattered and as a collective, we were forced to take collective responsibility for our answers – answers that I’m sure most of us didn’t feel accurately represented who we felt ourselves to be as individuals. But the more palpable learning was, perhaps, not how we view ourselves, but how we view others based on our cultural understanding of the environments, objects, events, etc. that surround them – and how quick we are to judge and make assumptions on who is right and who is wrong.

Image Credit: Creative Commons

There’s something about money that feels inherently complicated. So simple in its transactional nature, yet seemingly opaque—its value arbitrary and relative—we’ve long been told that money needs to be handled properly or our lives risk falling into disarray. The contemporary finance industry, with its never-ending stream of increasingly complex financial products and dramatic crises, has only contributed to this perception. For many, financial literacy can seem almost impossible to learn.

No wonder then that managing one’s personal finances is so often portrayed in popular culture as a daunting endeavour. Just watching Wealthsimple’s 2017 Super Bowl ad “Mad World” is enough to induce minor stress. Lately however, this is starting to change. Driven by rising mobility and access to information, there has been a growing consumer call for transparency, clarity and flexibility in banking and personal finance. New financial brands and products have emerged, disrupting traditional ways consumers interact with their finances. Here, we look at 5 such emergent examples, and explore the new language of financial literacy they’re championing.

Monese 

The UK’s first 100% mobile bank account, Monese allows consumers all over Europe to open a UK current account in minutes, enabling consumers to live, work, and travel within the UK almost instantly and effortlessly. Amidst the fraught Brexit negotiations taking place now, Monese’s undisguised support for freedom of movement (“Nomads, Expats & Migrants welcome” is one pronounced slogan) is particularly significant. The ease, fluidity and mobility Monese offers is echoed in its very name, the open-ended swirls on its card, and its reassuring palette of cool blues, greens and whites. In an age where money has been negatively politicized as the driving wedge of global inequality and injustice, Monese’s inclusivity and clarity subverts this, reclaiming money as the empowering, equalizing medium it can be.

Emma 

Emma is a free banking app that aggregates user’s bank accounts and credit cards into one consolidated financial health summary. Its aim, to simplify and democratize financial management for everyone, is manifest in its playful, unintimidating interface. Featuring bright colour coding, gamification and emoji-like icons to help users track their spending and provide helpful advice, Emma delivers a seamless toy-like experience so reminiscent of a video game that one drawback might be how easy it is to forget it’s actually real money being managed. The name, Emma (an amalgamation of the founders’ initials) conveys a softness that underscores the app’s guiding principle of “caring about our customer’s financial well being”. In other words, Emma has succeeded in making financial management not just engaging but, dare we say it, even endearing.

Revolut 

Touting itself as a digital banking alternative that opens up a “world beyond banking”, Revolut is a mobile-based current account that allows consumers to save, budget, do peer-to-peer exchange, trade cryptocurrencies and transfer 25 different currencies with zero fees. For a product that seems so boundless, its deceptively simple interface is a refreshing change from the information overload typical of complex financial services. Openly calling out industry conventions as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘litter’, Revolut’s brand of challenger insouciance is underscored by a dated logo that evokes the naïve optimism of Web 2.0. More precisely, it recalls Air BnB’s old logo before it was canned in favour of the corporate self-respectability and legitimacy of its generic sans-serif iteration. Revolut’s refusal to conform to the tech typography takeover across today’s digital brands cues a new kind of financial platform that’s unapologetic, candid, and even a little cheeky.

Buddy Bank 

buddybank is an iPhone-only bank from UniCredit that calls itself a conversational banking app and 24/7 personal assistant. Its mission, as stated by founder Angelo D’Alessandro, is “to undress the banks” and “transform banking into something cool”. While its less than sophisticated name detracts somewhat from this aim, for the most part buddybank’s stylized and colloquial tactics manage to hit the right note. Its deep indigo theme cues just the right amount of reassuring, yet nonchalant presence (nothing too eager or gratingly chirpy, as its name might suggest). With its Apple-only affiliation and integrated concierge service that asks users personal questions to get to know them—hobbies, favourite foods, dream trips and more—buddybank is the millennial lifestyle ethos embodied a financial app: all about cultivating authenticity, affirmative experience, and beautiful design.

Loot 

As a digital-only current account aimed specifically at students and millennials, Loot’s focus on spending insights and real-time budgeting comes as no surprise. Its popularity, aside from its immediacy of access, stems largely from its ability to nurture a like-minded community of students and millennials, and tap into shared anxieties, aspirations and experiences of this demographic. Loot’s blog, the aptly titled ‘Skint’, is nothing like a financial management help site. More a hipster lifestyle-cum-travel-cum-millennial musings zine, Skint cements Loot’s millennial credentials by crucially demonstrating that while financial management is vital, it is but one of the many issues that need navigating around in the brave new world of young adulthood.

The above examples are but a handful of the scores of new financial brands and products promising unprecedented simplicity and clarity in crunching numbers. But more remarkably, they demonstrate empathy and invite users to actually enjoy the experience in various ways through their tone of voice, design, UX, and UI. By effecting such a gradual but positive behavioural and attitude shift towards the normally painful task of financial management, the potential to truly transform one’s fortunes is unleashed.

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To find out more about Space Doctors and our offers, get in touch: contact@35.178.244.76

What do you do when you know you have a good product but face cultural barriers when you try to export and brand it abroad? That’s the dilemma confronting Japanese sake brewers looking to expand into foreign markets with their rice-made beverage that is a centuries’ old brewing tradition.

Sake has many advantages going for it as the next “big thing” in the United States, by far the largest market for the drink outside of Japan. It’s pleasant on the palate and versatile with a variety of cuisines. Although often misidentified as “rice wine,” the fermentation process is more similar to beer brewing than wine production, making it unique from other alcoholic beverages with European origins. Each component ingredient in sake—the rice, the water, the yeast—factors into its unique character and flavor profile. And unlike wine, vintages are irrelevant so consumers don’t have to worry about memorizing good years and bad.

Some of the larger sake producers, like Ozeki and Gekkeikan, have had a presence in the U.S. market for years. As with wine, mass production leads to a generic product that tends to lack elegance and complexity. Increasingly, though, smaller artisanal sakes are appearing on liquor store shelves as American consumers discover the virtues of premium sakes with greater complexity and nuance than the big producers.

In fact, sake exports to the United States have given the industry a new lease on life, offsetting a decades-long decline in domestic sales as younger Japanese—viewing sake as somewhat old-fashioned—gravitated toward beer and wine consumption. But there is still a sense that overseas sake sales have more room to grow in order to break into a larger share of the global food and beverage market. The Japanese government, in particular, sees sake exports as a potential economy booster and would like it to become a mainstream product in the United States.

Deciphering Sake

But that goal seems out of reach at the moment. A major problem has been branding sake in foreign markets, where knowledge of the drink is still relatively nascent and advertising space is crowded out by major beer, wine and liquor brands. To be sure, American consumers may be increasingly able to tell the difference between premium sakes and mass-produced ones, but there still seems to be a learning curve in discerning the subtleties of one premium sake from another.

More descriptive labeling could help tease out distinctions in premium sakes. Sake labels, often printed in calligraphic Chinese characters (or Kanji), can be obscure and intimidating for many non-Japanese consumers. Information such as where the sake is produced, how dry or sweet it is, and what level of rice milling was achieved in its production (generally the more the rice is milled the more refined the structure and quality of sake) are similarly unreadable for most Westerners.

Further, many of the artisanal sake houses gravitate toward label designs that are shibui (or subtle) rather than eye-catching. Kokuryu, a sake producer from Fukui Prefecture, for instance, labels its bottles with understated textile-like patterns—an elegant presentation that suggests sophistication but doesn’t necessarily pop out on the shelves.

 A spectrum of visual appeal

In the face of these impediments, Japanese sake producers have seemingly taken three general approaches to labeling their products in the United States. One approach is to leave the design and labeling more or less unchanged from what would typically be seen on shelves in Japan. These sakes tend to be the more upscale brands, such as Kokuryu and Kubota, who being more uncompromising in sake authenticity, are likely unwilling to alter the look of their products just to appeal to foreign consumers.

Another approach clearly is aimed at non-Japanese consumers, often dispensing with Kanji altogether and coming up with labels that may sell more in foreign markets. Some producers veer dangerously close to designs that evoke antiquated Western stereotypes of Oriental exoticism.

Osaka-based Daimon Shuzo, for instance, prints its Tozai line of sakes in brush stroke fonts with inscrutable titles like Snow Maiden and Living Jewel, which connote a certain Japanese

exotica. This look might appeal to American consumers who want an easy entry point into premium sake but who may nevertheless be less adventurous than Kubota drinkers. (Try ordering Tozai from a sake sommelier in Japan, however, and you might get a blank look. Tozai is aimed at the U.S. market; Rikyubai is the traditional label Daimon Shuzo uses in Japan.)

More recently, Joto Sake has appeared on American liquor store shelves. Taking the exact opposite tack from the traditionalist approach, it has a pulp cartoon design on its “one cup” packaging. Certainly, it’s the very definition of eye-popping, with its kaleidoscopic ménage of talking fish, Mount Fuji and spray painted graffiti. This might appeal to a younger cohort of consumers, both in Japan and abroad, who have grown up on manga and anime and may be attracted to a more youthful presentation even if the product may not be so high end.

Purists, like Kokuryu, might balk at this further adaptation to the English-speaking American consumer but some very fine brewing houses are adding more English tasting notes to their packaging. Hakkaisan, an award-winning brewer from Niigata Prefecture, writes glowingly on their sparkling sake bottle: “Our crisp Sparkling Haikkaisan Nigori sake is born of the soft and clean waters of Niigata. Perfect as a celebratory aperitif or for pairing with your favorite foods, this elegant sake will add sparkle to any occasion.” The implicit message is also that sake doesn’t necessarily need to be paired with Japanese food—in fact its lactic acid properties make it a good match for pizza and burgers as well!

What lies ahead for Sake

Each of these approaches targets varying types of consumers, from sophisticates to novices, but they attempt to do the same thing—convince consumers of sake’s unique appeal. Though whether sake will eventually become as well-known and accepted a liquor like vodka in America remains to be seen, surmounting the culture gap and perceived inscrutability of sake would certainly increase its relevance.

But as with all “next big things” there is a shelf life to their popularity. How will producers brand sake in the future once the novelty of their product wears off? Will sake brewers lean toward trendier labels that veer away from the traditional or will they double down on their “Japaneseness” once foreign consumers are up to speed on their products? The journey of sake to the west still has a long way ahead.

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Weston Konishi, certified sake expert and longtime sake enthusiast

Foreign health brands entering the Chinese market have a lot to be excited about. Gaps in state healthcare, with doctors overworked and appointments scarce, means that the government encourages private investment. Moreover, the habit of travelling abroad for superior healthcare means that Chinese consumers are already primed to favour foreign healthcare brands over domestic.

But when trying to communicate with this market, brands must address the fundamental differences between Chinese attitudes to health and the Western allopathic tradition. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), health isn’t the absence of illness—it’s a body and mind whose elements are all perfectly balanced.

A Chinese saying illustrates the difference between the Western and Chinese concepts of health like this: “Chinese medicine treats humans, Western medicine treats diseases.”

Not only is TCM is championed powerfully by President Xi Jinping, used to treat everything from hearing problems to late-stage cancer pain, but TCM-influenced concepts—like respecting natural rhythms, constantly adjusting internal balance, functional nutrition, and addressing the whole body when treating illness—are very much present in Chinese lives. Additionally, the deeper, semi-conscious associations brought about by TCM in culture are still firmly ingrained.

To give one example: the liver has been believed for thousands of years to manifest problems through the eyes—so communication around liver disease will gain more resonance if it focusses on clear, bright eyes without eye bags or wrinkles.

This relationship might be called semiotic. Healthy eyes are the sign of a healthy liver: so that signifiers cuing eye health are really talking about liver health as well. Similarly, many esoteric remedies include parts of animals which represent some aspect of good health—a turtle is a sign of longevity, hence turtle shell powder is an ingestible signifier of long life.

TCM is a medical system built not on periodical tables, equations and deductions, but on connections, holistic world-views, and networks of semiotic signs in which Chinese consumers—yes, even TCM disbelievers—still live. Ignoring these is to expect consumers to jettison thousands of years of cultural cues and complex networks of meaning.

We at Space Doctors know that branding doesn’t work like that.

Two cultures: why scientific neutrality won’t work in China

Because TCM concepts (from acupuncture to face mapping) have been eagerly seized on by the Western wellness world, it’s easy for pharmaceutical and clinical brands to assume that TCM is predominantly about wellness. It’s convenient to think that any Chinese consumer affluent enough for private healthcare is also “sophisticated” enough to have converted completely to Western allopathic medicine.

However, this binary division between communications for holistic wellness, and for clinical health, is not necessary—it’s just so rooted in Western cultures, that Western brands have difficulty seeing past it.

In 1959, British scientist and writer CP Snow gave a seminal lecture named The Two Cultures. As a novelist and a physical chemist, he was frustrated by the near-complete lack of mutual understanding between the sciences and the humanities/arts.

This lack of understanding has since become a principle in the West. Equations and data seem like the enemy of cultural creativity, while many pharma brands assume that a hint of artistic or cultural affiliation detracts from the message of serious health—pharma brand communication must involve white coats, stern looks, calm authority and neutrally-voiced, direct messaging.

But Chinese consumers are used to objective-sounding scientific bodies and authoritative institutions being exposed as lying or unreliable—health companies’ blanket guarantees are rarely taken on face value. Recently, the Chinese government doled out mass penalties to researchers and drug manufacturers, after it was discovered that 80% of clinical trial data submitted to support new drug applications were fraudulent.

Due to scandals like this, reputation is king in China. Word-of-mouth is the holy grail, but is obviously a big challenge for new market entrants. Another reputational tactic is make all claims specific and verifiable—Chinese consumers expect to do lots of research and data review before taking the plunge on any new product.

Most of all, though, new health brands need their own compelling, distinctive brand narratives. A preference for coherent cultural legacies is one reason for the much-discussed Chinese love of designer goods: an established house with a centuries-old reputation, and a well-publicised history of fervent admirers, is displaying a sound reputation.

In Western countries, medicine which displays social or cultural affiliation in this way, or attempts to form relationships on those terms—medicine which is notably ‘branded’—is assumed to be lighter, closer to the world of wellness than to disease and cure.

But when trying to build a believable presence in China, pharma brands need to develop a strong personality and visible history in order to communicate convincing legitimacy and efficacy.

How brands can successfully showcase holistic personalities

Ahead of building solid word-of-mouth reputation, vivid, interesting and authentic branding is the best way for health brands to develop trust in China.

This means building a brand in a way designed to show strong and relevant personality. Brands can:

• Select influencers not on their reach alone, but on their “fit” with the product as a sincere user;
• Display a richer history and persona than Western pharma companies may be used to giving;
• Recruit local copywriters and illustrators who can bring nuanced, culturally resonant stories to life;
• And most importantly of all, tell resonant, relevant semiotic stories about themselves and the health benefits they offer

Super-targeted, efficiency-only, sterile ideas of health won’t work for consumers who think of health as total physical and mental harmony; who see their symptoms as inherently networked, not treatable in isolation. And super-targeted, efficient, sterile health communications won’t work either.

In order to prosper in China, Western marketers will have to challenge their own assumptions about the science/ culture divide. Successful brands will present a trustable, holistic personality, which can embed itself securely in the semiotic web of meaning, allusion and unconscious response that is Chinese health.

In the past, herbal pills came in flowery or bland packaging that used green or brown as a signifier of safety, emphasising ‘calm, benevolent nature’ almost to the point of being boring. Now bright colours, jovial language, and happy graphics are injecting life into the natural supplements category. Beyond just the world of nature, newer brands adopt the design language of tech, the visual information language of apps, and the colour palette of clean eating to entice a more youthful audience.

These brands have captured and capitalised on a key cultural shift: young people are ever more concerned with both longer term health goals and making themselves ‘better than well’ in the here and now. These people aren’t exclusively yogis or vegans or those with low immune systems, but are regular millennials who are making connections between their health today and their body and wellbeing in the future. They seek not to fix a medical problem, but to optimise their lives by making themselves even “better than healthy” – faster, stronger, more alert, more intelligent, and more resilient. The standard nature-conscious and basic medical language of the existing category is unlikely to appeal to this generation used to intuitive tracking apps, minimalist lifestyles, mindfulness, clean living and personalisation. If the industry wanted to grow and get younger generations excited about spirulina and magnesium, a radical change was needed from the outset.

So how did they do it?

Companies such as Ritual and Vitl have embraced intuitive cues from the latest technology brands and products and the clean eating movement. They’ve moved away from the uninspiring imagery of flowers and green-brown colour schemes to cleaner graphic designs, sans serif types, bold brand statements, colour blocking, even incorporating cute or kitsch colour schemes.

– Becks Collins

Image credit: Ritual

We live in a hyper-orientated world. From Google maps to Citymapper, and from Yelp to Uber, our everyday movements are not only informed and influenced by smartphone applications but are also tracked, collected and analysed. Our movements are quite literally defined by a complex network of geo-locating technologies, ubiquitous computing, and navigation applications.

These applications, while making our lives easier, cut down the opportunities for spontaneous and creative explorations of the cities we live in. Our movements and potential encounters with our environment become prescribed and efficiency-oriented; no time for pointless strolls. Pokémon GO became a sensation by ostensibly allowing just that: walking in the city not simply to get from point A to point B but just for fun! By inserting a narrative into the very act of walking, Pokémon GO gamified the experience of being in the urban space.

Pokémon GO became one of the most downloaded and profitable applications of 2016, with more than 500 million users at its peak. Now that the hype is long gone, we are left wondering what the game’s legacy is both in terms of transmedia storytelling and location-based entertainment. Pokémon GO’s success was largely a result of a millennial nostalgia for the console-based Pokémon first released in 1996 during their early teen years. But unlike the older versions of the game, in Pokémon GO, players find and collect Pokémon in real world locations and landmarks: a Pikachu behind the bins, a Squirtle in your bedroom. In Pokémon GO, the whole world becomes a gaming arena. Images and interactive content manifests in specific locations, creating augmented reality (AR) environments. By integrating the real environment into the game, Pokémon GO allows us to re-think space in relation to media.

Mobile phones are the perfect device for site-specific story-telling as they incorporate geo-locating technology (GPS), broadband connectivity and the capacity to reproduce high-fidelity image and sound. Narratives are enriched multimedia and multi-sensorial elements.

Although geo-specific augmented reality has existed for at least ten years before Pokémon GO was launched (with relatively popular mobile games such as BotFighters and Ingress already incorporating GPS into their core functionality), the game was the first successful mainstream application of the technology. The augmented reality aspect of the game mainly involved two-dimensional Pokémon images superimposed upon the camera feed. This was an important aspect of the game’s viral social media marketing, with players sharing screenshots of Pokémon in real locations or with them in selfies. Despite the simplicity and the many flaws of its design (namely the countless server crashes, battery drainage, and inability to trade Pokémon between players), the phenomenal uptake of Pokémon GO heralded the coming of AR as the next mainstream feature of mobile tech. At Apple’s latest iPhone X presentation, there was a strong focus on the augmented reality features with a particular emphasis on AR games. The merging of our everyday lives with gaming narratives and interactivity creates a compelling opportunity for storytelling that captures the audience’s imagination. The story unravels in the city and the player becomes the protagonist: the narrative intertwines with real life.

Mobile phones are the perfect device for site-specific story-telling as they incorporate geo-locating technology (GPS), broadband connectivity and the capacity to reproduce high-fidelity image and sound. Narratives are enriched multimedia and multi-sensorial elements. Before the ubiquity of smartphones however, site-specific and transmedia narration was pioneered in the art world. In 1999, for example, Canadian artist Janet Cardiff created a series of site-specific projects around Whitechapel in London. missing voice: case study b starts as a conventional historical audio-guide of Whitechapel Library, but the listener soon understands that Cardiff’s voice descriptions follow a bizarre trajectory. “Try to follow the sound of my footsteps, so that we can stay together,” she says, before taking the listener on a 40-minute tour around east London. During the walk she describes a crime scene and slowly constructs a mysterious narrative within the space, forming a complex emotional map of the surroundings. The artwork is completed by the body of the listener moving through space. The listener has to combine information coming from the environment—images, sounds, smells—with a pre-recorded narrative. As the narrative is interlaced with the listener’s memories of the city, familiar streets become strange, and new places are introduced or formed through the interactive story. By effectively creating their own customized story, each listener is able to take ownership of the final narrative.

In a similar way, Pokémon GO transforms urban experiences and creates hybrid spaces which combine real and virtual elements, allowing for the creation of an augmented yet personalized narrative of space. What truly elevates the Pokémon GO experience however, is that other users are also participating in this process, thereby forming temporary communities that socialize these new spaces. The players meet, talk and exchange stories. This assemblage of virtual elements, physical spaces and social relations creates a hybrid, new topography; an original territory created by and open to creativity. This is a counterpoint to naive conceptions of consumer culture where the consumer was understood as a passive receiver of media and brand communication. Conversely, the consumer in Pokémon GO co-creates the story and has a stake in it.

The new topography of Pokémon GO allows us to envision new ways for identity formation and brand communication. However, blurring the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds, as media scholar Mary Flanagan warns, could cause a form of “entertainment colonization” in which the players unwillingly commoditize unaware bystanders. The real world turns into a spectacle: a dirty alley becomes a Pokémon nest and passers-by unwillingly become background characters of Janet Cardiff’s Whitechapel-based audio crime story. This form of entertainment engulfs public space while at the same time remains inaccessible by those who lack the cultural capital or the means to consume it. For every individual able to enjoy the augmented environment, many others remain nothing more than background characters with no control over their representation or participation.

Ultimately, spatial and immersive design seems here to stay. It is increasingly gaining importance from retail marketing to mobile gaming, and from educational applications to futuristic entertainment platforms. If Pokémon GO has proven anything, it is that an innovative platform can motivate the user to leave the comforting safety of their homes and get out, interact with others and encounter all the unexpected possibilities that the real and augmented world offers. Interestingly, these experiences have the ability to persist in the memory of the player long after the game has ended, as the player has, in effect, “lived” the game. It offers a degree of immersion and powerful engagement that many brands covet. The challenge now is to think about how brands can leverage transmedia storytelling platforms to connect meaningfully with individual consumers and wider communities as these technologies develop further.

In a world of expansive digital connectivity and opportunity however, the established societal ideals around the moral goodness of suburbia are being challenged by our growing involvement in digital realities. Exposed to so much, it is no wonder we are beginning to look beyond our physical boundaries and agitating for more. Idealised suburbia is being physically and metaphorically reframed both in real life and on screen as we explore virtual and mystical worlds beyond it.

Conventional representations have familiarised us with the concept of the suburbs as complete social eco-systems. Inhabitants enjoy the safety and security of a traditional close-knit community, within which individuals indulge their voyeuristic tendencies, holding their neighbour’s morals to account with twitching curtains and prying eyes. These typically class-defined spaces are policed by unwritten rules and conventions, determining nuanced hierarchies within their predominantly middle-class communities. Whilst surveillance maintains stability, the iconic symbol of the white picket fence marks a physical and metaphorical boundary. They are designed to protect and preserve our territories from not only the undisclosed threat of the exterior world, but often from the neighbours themselves too. Suburban neighbourhoods rife with gossip, judgement and jealousy tread a fine line between the cosseted safety of privacy and the dangers of display.

This format highlights tensions between the status-quo and any deviation from the establishment. Issues of race, gender and class are often personified by the presence of an outsider, whose existence threatens to disrupt the eco system’s outward stability. These outside characters represent a contamination of a supposedly seamless social system, typically setting off a series of events exposing its hidden imperfections.

Since the release of the progressive 2030 Vision Statement last year, Saudi leadership has announced a series of social and economic reform initiatives. They represent the single-minded and ambitious intent of Saudi leadership to modernise the conservative Kingdom, attract much-needed foreign investment and prepare the economy for a diversified, post-oil future.

You will be familiar with the landmark social reforms. The decree in September 2017 rescinding the ban on women driving was met with wide media attention and universal acclaim. From next year, women will be allowed into stadiums for the first time and this is only the beginning. The government is also expected to reverse bans on cinemas and mixed-gender celebrations.

There are significant economic reforms too. Prince Salman’s recent announcement of Project NEOM is a bold vision of the future that re-draws the rules for success in the conservative Kingdom. A planned next generation city and global hub for innovation, trade and creativity. It will be a private economic zone backed by $500bn of investment where robots may outnumber people, and male and female bathers mingle in a futuristic and open society.

Prince Salman’s staggeringly ambitious reform programme is reflected in his meteoric rise to power. At only 31 years old, he is determined to guide Saudi Arabia into the 21st century.

His passion for reform is reflected in a wider generational rupture that will re-shape Saudi society over the coming decades. This new generation will appear at the thrilling apex of cultural and social transformation. Like the South African Born Free Generation or the Post-War Boomer Generation before them, The New Heirs to the Kingdom will evolve the traditions and prejudices of the past and introduce experimental and nascent cultural innovations.

In this age of flux, brand managers need to keep their cool. Strategies to reach and connect with The New Heirs must navigate a new culture of ‘open innovation.’ Trends, attitudes and behaviours will rapidly rise, fall and quickly re-emerge in different forms. Brand managers need to be agile and astute – they need to read and interpret the signals, then respond with precision and thought.

The impact of reform is already apparent. According to Bloomberg, the projected benefit to the economy of the decree allowing women to drive could be as much as $90bn over time. Alert to the obvious opportunities, Ford, Nissan and Volkswagen rushed to release progressive digital campaigns celebrating the decree.

Drawing on Space Doctors’ experience exploring emerging markets around the globe, we identified just some of the ways brands can keep pace with the Kingdom’s reform programme and connect with the New Heirs to the Kingdom.

1. Chart the Cultural Shifts. To effectively plan future activity in the Kingdom, brand managers need to be alert to the possible, likely and certain pivots in social and economic policy. We can identify and track the seeds of change through understanding key policy statements (e.g. Vision 2030), institutional dynamics and the influential profiles of visionaries and leaders in Saudi society.
2. Build Relationships. Saudis of all ages and backgrounds are prolific users of social media. Some surveys show that the Kingdom has the world’s highest percentage of people on Twitter relative to its number of internet users. Influencers like Nilo Haq (@nilohaq) and Saudi Gamer (@saudigamer) have huge fan bases and lead the cultural conversation in Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world. Do more than listen to them. Establishing relationships with digital influencers will help brands learn from, and adapt to, the groundswell of popular change in the Kingdom.
3. Identify the Known Unknowns. Conservative social and economic policy has hidden market opportunities from investors and brands. As we saw with the driving decree, reform will reveal until-now hidden market potential. With an understanding of the cultural shifts and better knowledge of our consumers, we can identify the hidden opportunities for brands and their products to innovate, adapt and shape the future of the Kingdom.
4. Understand Brand Saudi Arabia. The imperative to build and project Brand Saudi Arabia as a beacon to attract investors and tourists will intensify. Project NEOM gives us a first glimpse into this emerging Saudi Arabia; hi-tech, sophisticated, open and optimistic. Brand Saudi Arabia will reflect and steer the popular aspirations and attitudes of the population. Brands need to align with this new emerging context for their communication.
5. Listen. Most importantly, brand managers need to keep their ear to the ground. Changes are happening rapidly and the unique cultural drivers in the Kingdom are resulting in unexpected and surprising consumer attitudes and behaviours. Simple replication of strategies that have worked elsewhere in the GCC will not account for the unique collusion of historical, economic and social events that bring the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to this apex.

The New Heirs to the Kingdom will shape their own futures. Only by taking responsibility for actively deepening dialogue with this generation can brands catalyse meaningful engagement and command lasting influence.

– Kourosh Newman-Zand & Mariah Hartman

Amber Case recently visited Space Doctors to talk about calm technology, culture and designing with sound. Here are some of the highlights from her discussion with Gemma Jones:

We’re fascinated by questions of how culture and technology interact with each other, and how we can shape more positive futures. Get in touch if you’d like to talk about how your brand or business can best harness, innovate, and communicate culturally-relevant technology.

In the midst of fourth wave feminism, particularly in the United States, women are looking stronger than ever. They are visually represented with more bulk, more muscle, or just more curves as a way of taking up space and asserting their place in the world. Culturally-savvy brands and icons push these cues of female power to propagate body confidence, and emotional and psychological confidence. The contemporary woman is not afraid to make room for herself and these semiotic cues of strength come from the wrought body itself. Power dressing isn’t attained with shoulder pads but must be worked at, laboured over, and celebrated through ongoing rituals like exercise and positive affirmation that continually prove that a woman’s body will not stand in her way. She must lean in, earn her right in the workplace, and in culture, with ongoing exertion, and by making herself visible.

Vanity Fair evinces not just her stellar physique and sculpted muscles but also her unequivocal femininity. We see her naked: the raw flesh behind the tennis championships, the body that won the Australian Open while in the most precarious first trimester known for nausea and miscarriage. Annie Leibovitz’s portrayal revealed her real or unfiltered female body that is no longer just an athlete’s. Overnight, Williams went from competitive athlete to Woman. Her dark skin moulds to muscles, glands, and yes, new life, enveloping her strength in seductive copper and curves with hair loose, long, and shiny. She is more than a woman; she’s a goddess emerging from a hard shell.

Disrobing

Shifting from the spotlight of Black Excellence, Williams was, until recently, a hard graft body, strong and able – a champion. In 2014, in Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine calls her “the best female tennis player of all time” after revealing how a black body becomes a space of invisibility. Later, in “The Meaning of Serena Williams”, Rankine further positions Williams as a contemporary cultural icon— a black woman who unapologetically takes up space. Her body and body language betray her unabashed penchant for winning, and form a powerful example of how a black woman leads the way for all women. Like Beyoncé, Williams is an icon of African American strength and leadership but is also a leader who transcends race altogether, becoming a symbol of female power. If we adopt her cues, her body attitude and language, we are on our way to winning in life. Be strong, be powerful, and make it known.

Her win at the Australian Open certainly suggests a superhuman, the very cinematic play of a woman who does not let her body stand in her way, let alone fall prey to the fear of miscarriage. The outdated concept and misnomer “miscarry” suggests an incapacity, a lack of abundance and a woman who is incapable. Williams dispels this volatility, apparently unafraid and even more tenacious than usual – continuing to embody and herald the female body as absolutely heroic.

In 1992, Demi Moore’s Vanity Fair cover (that Williams’ mimicked) shockingly equated pregnancy with Hollywood glamour and since then, the pregnant belly has been revealed, embellished, photographed, and is confidently proliferating throughout popular culture. With Beyoncé’s recent unveilings, it is an exciting time for a woman in the U.S. to be pregnant. Fertility is not just a private celebration but a cultural commodity. While many celebrities bare their bellies, few images catapult them to goddess status, demonstrating that “excellence” is a prerequisite for successful pregnant disrobing. Not any celebrity can get away with glorifying something so private.

Over the years, the pregnant belly has gone from decently cloaked to naked – without the restrictions of immobility, wedding vows, fidelity or other excuses to sequester or shame the occurrence. Although as recently as 2014, Karl Lagerfeld still shocked the fashion world by sending a pregnant bride down the runway – a bold sign of dismantling America’s Puritan ideals and persistent tension over the female body. This year’s photoshoots with Beyoncé and Williams reveal an outward and blatant veneration of female fertility. They aren’t just female nudes. While they definitely echo sex – Beyoncé’s more than Williams’ – they are celebrations of a power that is distinctly female. Power dressing isn’t about adding armour but about embodying strength and ultimate dominion.

Power Dressing

Dressing the female body is still fraught with tension, especially when it comes to coding power. In a recent move toward proper decorum, Congress announced that women are banned from entering the Speaker’s Lobby in sleeveless dresses, sparking another debate around dressing in a so-called man’s world and how to make the female body more asexual. Whereas in February 2017, Hadley Freeman hinted that feminisation was a palatable pill to swallow for leading right-wing political female figures. She observes how all the women on Fox News look and dress alike, citing the Republican preference for long, bottle-blonde hair as seen in Kellyanne Conway, Ann Coulter, and Ivanka Trump. Hadley rightly notes, “American right-wing women all dress exactly the same, which is to say, mainstream feminine – dresses, not trousers; heels, not flats; no interesting cuts, just body-skimming, cleavage-hinting, not-scaring-the-horses tedium.” These women stand in shocking contrast to the abundant, nude black woman. The Ivanka Trumps barely skim the surface of residual models of female power and just because they may be in the spotlight, it doesn’t mean their sartorial cues are exemplars of power. Rather they represent a re-emergence of the traditional domestication of women.

Hadley recalls another dated trope of power dressing, noting that “some left-wing women wear pantsuits (remember those?),” a uniform notoriously donned by Hilary Clinton during her presidential campaign and for which she was continually criticised. Evidently, it was not the wardrobe choice of a winner. According to her Twitter account, she is a self-proclaimed “pantsuit aficionado”, a cute and perplexing announcement for a leading female politician. Likewise, her wardrobe was a compromise: the most available and immediate tool to code female power and a safe, unthreatening, option for the first female presidential candidate. This physical adaption of corporate America was a concession for the most patriarchal office in America but in light of more poignant options, the pantsuit worked against her, failing as male camouflage while simultaneously obscuring her gender. In 2007, Clinton’s cleavage made the Washington Post, but she since eschews sexuality, even modifying dresses so as to demonstrate her own inner power. Is it possible that in striving for equality and even excellence, Clinton actually hid one of her most powerful assets: her femininity?

Michelle Obama’s bare arms are partly responsible for bringing physical female strength into the mainstream when she first took office as First Lady. Even after leaving the White House, her shoulder-bearing, off duty tops reveal body contours that seduce fans who idolise her femininity and that likewise reconsider if the cues of female power don’t include a little more skin than we expected. Dressing for a man’s world is a dangling question – something Michelle never did, whereas Ivanka is very much the legacy and daughter of a male president. More emergent cues of female power suggest dressing for a woman’s world – or at least a less binary one. In recoding power, women must find their own limits and dress code within culture.

Recoding Power

Both Beyoncé and Williams have been spotlighted for flaunting the pregnant body and perhaps overexposing motherhood as nothing more than a glossy image. One critic, Robin Givhan, wrote in the Washington Post that, “Like so much else in life today, pregnancy must be performed.” While there is a stage mom on steroids aspect, the images defiantly turn the page on the emaciated body of not too long ago, the damsel who is too thin to menstruate à la Kate Moss or Fiona Apple.

Fertility is a rooted and mythological cue of female power, enlivened today even in the crimson robes and ceremonies found in the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopic The Handmaid’s Tale. Within the cultural context of America, these recent photo spreads politically challenge the still unsettling discussion around who owns a woman’s body, let alone how to dress it. As excellent women take up space, love their bodies, lean in, and shape our culture, they restructure it. A big belly that is both naked and pregnant is part of that foundation. As perfectly posed and on brand as those images are, they are still raw and unfiltered. Exposing those mysterious mounds invokes abundance, goddess worship, and paganism – fertility that’s a deified and prized resource. Recoding power isn’t just about taking up space but unearthing inner strength and life within.

— Hannah Hoel

The industry has adapted the selfie for its own ends, but has perhaps missed some of the deeper desires it reflects.

Asia leads the world in selfie-taking, according to a 2014 study by Time magazine. Four of the top 10 “selfiest” cities are in Asia, a find hardly surprising given that over half of the world’s social-media users reside here. Selfie culture has become so dominant in Asia that two global smartphone giants, China’s Huawei and South Korea’s Samsung, compete with front-facing camera specs and ownership of spin-off category terms like “groufie” and “wefie”, respectively.

Naturally, the obsession over achieving the perfect selfie has culminated in beautifying image technology as vanity gains new social currency. With Samsung’s recent default “Beauty Face” mode for its front-facing cameras, Huawei’s built-in front-facing camera filters and the billion-dollar valuation for China’s selfie-editing app Meitu, Asian selfie culture has spawned its own beauty industry.

As Asia’s popular culture leader, South Korea wields the biggest influence on beauty standards. Korean cosmetics account for nearly a quarter of China’s cosmetic imports, and Korea’s cosmetic exports have enjoyed astronomical double-digit growth annually since 2010. In the fast-growing Asian beauty market, the archetypical Asian selfie-taker becomes a key target audience. The cute ‘v-line face, enlarged eyes, and fair-skinned look’ popularised by Korean female celebrities is consistently imitated in Asian selfies. Correspondingly, Asian and Western beauty brands such as Mamonde and L’Oreal have sought celebrities who epitomise this ideal, like Park Shin Hye and Fan Bingbing, to be Asian brand ambassadors. These celebrities, needless to say, are prolific selfie-takers.

Selfie culture and the beauty industry are rooted in a desire to look good. As the most socially significant, and foremost means of self-presentation today, selfies reflect deeper desires for interpersonal connection, individual visibility and greater control of self-image. Beauty brands in Asia have cleverly responded by using selfies themselves and selfie-bait to establish a personal rapport with consumers. Selfie-styled campaigns like Shiseido’s 2015 Japan campaign with Lady Gaga’s selfies inspired selfie-taking, which seamlessly integrated the consumer into the brand image. Edit9, a Korean face-pack brand, rode to Instagram selfie fame with charming sticker-like masks that guaranteed user-driven buzz. Big-name Western beauty brands like Estée Lauder and Clinique have managed to succeed in China partly due to savvy campaigns pushing brand stickers on Nice, China’s Instagram replacement app, thereby fuelling selfie-taking. Above all, such tactics drive makeup sales, rising by 13 percent globally in 2016 as more consumers turn to makeup for a selfie-ready, instant beauty fix.

While the #NoFilter and #NoMakeup selfie trends may seem antagonistic to the beauty industry, makeup philosophy in Asia, led by K-beauty ideals, has long centered on natural beauty. Unlike in the West where heavy makeup of the Kardashian kind is extolled, in Asia, makeup is seen as an enhancer of natural beauty. Korea’s invention of the cushion compact was so revolutionary—over 50 million units sold globally in less than a decade—mainly because users could now achieve the “mul-gwang pi-bu” K-beauty ideal (literally, water-bright skin) nearly effortlessly. Meanwhile, by converting Western consumers to natural beauty, the  #NoFilter and #NoMakeup trends may be fuelling the growth of Asian beauty brands. With Asian beauty brands expected to account for 80 percent of global cosmetics revenue gain by 2019 and Asian makeup sales to surpass US$150 billion this year, according to a report by Euromonitor International, it appears that beauty brands in the region are on the right track.

Selfie-compatible campaigns have helped beauty brands in Asia thrive in a saturated market. By creating opportunities where consumers intuitively want to take a selfie and share it, these brands elevate the consumer from a traditionally passive role to an active brand participant. In the all-important brand-user conversation, the consumer is now protagonist.

By perpetuating a homogenised beauty standard however, Asian selfie culture undermines the impetus behind selfie-taking and applying cosmetics: self-fashioning and self-discovery. It also intensifies industry competition. Instead of traditionally dictating appearances, beauty brands should reposition themselves as agents that empower consumers to define their own looks. Laneige’s ‘Beauty Mirror’ app and L’Oreal’s ‘Makeup Genius’ app, which allow user to virtually try on makeup in selfie-mode and share different looks on social media, are great examples. The disposability of selfies is used to showcase product diversity and educate on product usage. It harnesses the accessibility and spontaneity of selfies to market products as user-friendly—all of which encourage purchase.

The beauty industry’s compatibility with and swift adoption of selfies demonstrates that it is poised to lead the evolution of selfie technology into virtual, animated and interactive imaging. Mobile beauty apps are already a booming industry: ModiFace, the world’s leading mobile beauty firm, has more than 40 million downloads for its apps. Such developments will strengthen brand-consumer partnerships through facial mapping, data capturing, the creation of user-driven content, and greater selfie-sharing and brand responsiveness. As a medium, selfies are a valuable big-data cache for beauty brands constantly seeking to refine product ranges and anticipate consumer needs. There is additionally huge potential for collaboration between the beauty, consumer electronics and tech industries, where smart furniture like selfie-mirrors and selfie-lights are gaining traction. For beauty brands today, seflies embody new media, marketplace and incubator.

—Rachel Ng

Originally published on CampaignAsia

History teaches us that language has never been a static entity. It evolves and shapes itself against myriads of meaning in culture over time. Indeed, the beauty of language exists in its fluidity; in its ability to harness nuance and deliver clarity. In today’s linguistic landscape, we cannot escape proliferated ideas like ‘fake news’, ‘post-truth politics’ and ‘alternative facts’. This begs the question: Is unambiguous brand communication now more important than ever?

The Chinese philosopher Confucius said that, ‘in language, clarity is everything’. Yet miscommunication, misinterpretation and deliberate lying has played an integral part in socio-political rhetoric in the West. We need only turn to recent developments in the US and UK to see how misinformation has a definite consequence in determining the future: Brexit, Trump campaign, global women’s marches.

It is this very landscape that has been a driving influence in brand communication. Activism-themed messaging responding to these subject matters continues to be the overarching trend of 2017. Taking a stand, having a clear point of view, and demonstrating an awareness of local and global affairs is now an essential part of successful brand definition. Topics that may have once been considered taboo (politics and religion) are now more critically engaged with by brands striving to remain relevant.

The concern now is how brands respond to these topics; skirting around issues as opposed to meaningfully connecting with them has seen some brands find themselves in hot water. Pepsi’s recent campaign featuring Kendall Jenner is illustrative of brand communication failing at nuance and clarity. The ad has been criticised at best as a trivialisation of a serious social issue, and at worst as a mockery of a contemporary civil and human rights movement (Black Lives Matter). In this instance, Pepsi’s tackling of important social issues came across more like box-ticking diversity tokenism, downplaying the social movements to which it alluded.

Diesel’s ‘make love not walls campaign’, on the other hand, is an example of cleverly interwoven nuance and clarity successfully breaking down borders with its visual language. Nuanced symbolic messaging is seen in its references to 60s counter culture and flower child era romanticism, accompanied by the clarity of an underlying statement or manifesto; against Trump’s ‘build a wall’. The power of youth rebellion as a transformative force is offered as a timeless form of communication.

A fine balance has to be struck; engagement, interpretation and cultural representation cannot be superficial (the difference between Pepsi and Diesel).

Could a Universal Language be the answer?

Frantz Fanon wrote that, “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” Language locates you, both literally in time and space (through grammatical rules) and figuratively as a locus of an individual’s age, class, geography. It can also empower and disempower. At the same time, linguistic phenomena lend themselves as inextricable parts of culture. The 2016 sci-fi film, Arrival, which has gained a cult following, interrogates our human relationship with language. The film proposes the idea that a universal language, which is not grounded in our human experience of the world, could unlock infinite power and mutual understanding, allowing us to overcome borders, barriers and our misunderstandings of each other. (In the film, it unfolds that the words humans interpret as ‘weapon’ could also mean ‘tool’ or ‘gift’ within different linguistic cultures.)

The idea of a universal language has already been used by brands communicating themes of ‘shared’ or ‘universal cultures’ (like drinking or playing sports). This equally can be interpreted as a fragmenting force on borders and territoriality. Heineken’s recent social experiment ad, ‘Worlds Apart’, promotes the notion that we can amicably discuss our differences while sharing drink.

Having a universal language eliminates the risk of misinterpretation. It is for this reason that Google and Monotype released Noto, a font covering over 800 languages and 100 writing scripts. The AI technology used enables cross-language communications, transcending time and culture, reminiscent of Arrival’s proposition that language is the key to overcoming borders.

Google’s “Noto”

In the absence of a human universal language, taking a stand and honing in on an acute understanding of culture is key if brands are to be successful in this day. What is tricky, yet crucial to navigate, is the subtle balance between nuance and clarity. A masterful understanding of this can enable brands to create truly meaningful futures.

– Alexandra Ncube

An output of Culture Club, an internal monthly gathering to pool ideas, share views, and knock heads over subjects that underpin and inform how today’s culture will look tomorrow.

One year on, Space Doctors’ CEO Fiona McNae, reflects on her talk at TedXExeter, the dream that she is encouraging us to help forge into a reality, and the resoundingly positive effects we could create together.

If individuals take a conscious moment to consider how their communication is likely to be received, then we will better share our intended meaning. And so mutual understanding will improve; and the cumulative effect of that could be a very significant catalyst for change in the world.

The TEDxExeter theme in 2016 was ‘Dreams to Reality’, which reflected the real sense of transformative possibility that I took away from a very remarkable day.

In my talk I suggested that communication itself is a tool of progress and transformation.  At Space Doctors, we advise brands – some of the most influential communication vehicles in the world – on articulating their message, their positive purpose and role in our world.

We encourage brands to interrogate their communication more closely. We guide them in examining the gap between intended and received meaning, and finding ways to make their communication more impactful, effective and imaginative.

We have another layer of responsibility. There is a further challenge for us to question the assumptions that underpin communication. Why choose this pose, this juxtaposition, this representation of ethnicity, this idealisation of an unattainable lifestyle? Are these choices necessary, socially responsible, environmentally progressive? Are we doing and saying the right thing?

A brand’s voice is powerful, expertly designed for influence and often backed by multi-million dollar budgets across media. It is of critical importance that this kind of influential mechanism is treated with respect. Brand owners need to be aware that in not considering closely enough the assumptions that underpin their advertisements, like the sometimes staggering regressive cultural references they deploy or in not fully attending to context, they can become part of a propagation of values and ideas that are sometimes far from socially responsible or positive.

It is Space Doctors’ goal to help brands structure their messaging so that they are understood not only as a strong, relevant brand in their category, but also as a brand that holds itself to account in the broader terms of social progression and positive cultural contribution.

There is a moment of creation for every piece of communication, from a brand identity to the signs in a radiography department in a public hospital. In this moment of writing or designing, we can all act to intervene, to be alert to the unintended messages to which you may be exposing your audience, your patients. This responsibility to act rests with every individual involved in designing and building communications.

In 2001, David Brailsford became the Performance Director for Team Sky, the UK’s professional cycling team. He introduced a philosophy of “aggregate marginal gains”, a principle that simply aims to improve every area of performance by just a single percentile. It is transformative simplicity.

The same principle applies: if as individuals, we choose to engage just in this critical moment, then we will have significant collective impact on quality of communication, of understanding and empathy.

TEDxExeter 2016 was a deeply moving and transformative event, a catalytic inspiration that motivated those watching and listening to look deep within – and it turned the mirror back on us as an organisation.

Manwar Ali’s frank and honest reclamation of meaning and discussion of the power of a single word ‘Jihad’, the openness and directness in which he stood in front of a crowd and proclaimed his error, his failure, was pure grace and redemption. Danny Dorling set right some of the narratives of fatalism, providing a clearer context by showing us the truths about the world’s evolving social geography that are not part of the dominant discourse. He shared through a series of innovative global maps, messages of hope, and dampening the ones of fear.

At Space Doctors, we teach our clients to immerse themselves in relevant context, to hold it close as they think about their brand and how it influences and is influenced by the world. And we must practice what we preach. As an organisation we must listen to, understand, and participate in some of these big pivotal debates.

We will strive to engage with culture in all its fullness, the messiness, the imperfection and heroism, the brilliance of the ways that people are, in order to give positive advice to brands and organisations. We must stay connected with the complexity of culture and refuse to sanitise it – to examine closely the ebbs and flows of the cultural context that we, and our clients exist within.

And we look forward to continuing our connection with TEDxExeter and its brilliantly inspired organising committee lead by Clare Kennedy, as we attend TEDxExeter 2017 ‘Hope’ on April 21^st.

–Fiona McNae, CEO Space Doctors

Need To Know:

• Semiotic insight is a critical tool in understanding contemporary China, because it can unlock deep cultural truth whilst tracking emerging cultural change.

• China is rapidly transforming our shared future, and will continue to shape consumers’ lives for many years to come, but this change is built on strong cultural foundations.

• Culture comes to life through language, and significant differences in language lead to significant differences in the way consumers interpret the world.

Chasing the Market

China is as large as it is complicated, and it is studied as much as it is misunderstood. Its prominence, both culturally and economically, continues to inspire fascination around the world. Academics, brands, and companies are constantly battling to get as close as possible to the restless realities that can be found in China. There is no other market on Earth where you can see such huge forces re-organising society; new structures, new meaning, and new futures being created at a speed as yet unseen in global history.

In contrast to the rapid pace of change is a profound and unsurmountable attachment to the past. Incubated philosophies and traditions are so entrenched in everyday life that despite their profound influence, they can easily become unnoticeable to locals and foreigners alike. Commercial semiotics enables researchers and research buyers to track and ground these powerful, yet often unacknowledged transformations. 

The Chinese market has matured far beyond idolising Western consumer goods and any brand that does not think this should reconsider its understanding of consumer culture. A more culturally-aware approach is essential in order to reach a position in which one can supply content consumers treat as valuable

Research should seek to understand this vital connection between consumer and context. But the way may be difficult to navigate due to the complicated nature of Chinese culture and the constant intermingling of past, present, and future that belies China’s intricate and dynamic culture.

Legacy and Leadership

China’s 5,000 years of continuous history both legitimises current Chinese leadership and emphasises the importance of legacy. The paradox of looking forwards and backwards with equal fanaticism is a key tension influencing contemporary Chinese society. 

Paradox can also be seen in the frictionless mixture of Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. Despite dogmatic tensions between the three, these spiritual disciplines coexist with each other and modernity. They represent the spirit of China; an omniscient force weidling influence in every corner of society. This collision between deeply rooted codes and the restless forces of modernity creates the complexity of contemporary China.

China is the vanguard of the future, containing all the excitement (and the corresponding problems) that our brave new world can muster. Pollution, demographic crisis, hyper connected e-commerce, VR, and robotic emotional carers are all willingly embraced, and this is the point: China has an appetite for change, no matter what it may take to achieve.

毕业大学生就业上淘宝创业找阿里” “Graduate from university, find a job at Taobao, do pioneering work at Alibaba

China’s marketplace changes at speed, often at a pace unmatched by more clunky foreign business structures. The pollution is bad? Fine, let’s invest 36% of the total global total expenditure on renewable energy. No problem is too big, and no solution is out of reach.

Another way of looking at this is to consider the explosion of innovation within the homegrown cosmetics industries. Or consider Alibaba: the company’s history is built with strong Chinese cultural girders (humble beginnings, grand dreams, community roots) and also provides a dynamism that sates a hungry, future-facing nation. Through embracing breakneck innovation and honouring traditional structures of organisation, Alibaba harnesses both the past and future to create an unstoppable force of Chinese innovation and connectivity that is managing to shape the future without challenging beliefs and values.

Alibaba demonstrates how Chinese innovation works best in China. Western innovation that isn’t adapted and grounded in Chinese culture will be forced to adapt (Facebook) or face failure (Tesco).

Semiotic Roots

China’s language perfectly demonstrates the country’s cultural complexity. Simplified Chinese, China’s new written language, was officiated by the PRC to replace the “perversely difficult” classical Chinese—in an attempt to foster literacy across the nation. To this day the debate regarding its success and benefit is still on, with many blaming it for eroding the rich meanings inherently present in traditional Chinese scripts.

However, written Chinese is still viewed as sacred (particularly in scholarly circles), with each character willed with a wealth of significances. Thousands of years of history and meaning expressed in a few strokes; each character comes pre-set with a library of references rich for semiotic analysis.

The potential for inoccuous characters to be combined in ways that reveal hidden and often controversial or offensive meanings is a stark reminder that language can deeply reflect societal views, which no matter how anachronistic, are still mobilised every day. It demonstrates a fundamentally different way of approaching language compared to Romantic counterparts.

Gamifying Tradition

This encoding is also evident in Chinese internet slang. Although the internet is controlled strictly, users mobilise ingenious language adaptations to fool the top-down censorship. For instance, modern language users are drawing on a tradition of punning in the Chinese written language to culturally innovate. 

Technology (particularly keyboard input methods) will have a profound effect on how language is used in China, given the requirement for a fluent interface between a non-alphabetic writing system and digital rendering. Understanding both the foundational structures of linguistics and culture, and their mutating contemporary expressions allows Space Doctors to create penetrating insight into emergent behaviours.

A look at China’s restless reality reveals fertile ground for semiotics and communication, both grounded in deep cultural understanding and the rigours of modernity.

Semiotics is most useful when connecting seemingly disparate factors, organising webs of meaning that quantitive and qualitative approaches can’t always provide. Context matters. For semiotics, the more nuance, the greater the ammunition with which to create simplicity out of complexity.

To look at China through the lens of semiotics is to see a kaleidoscopic and brilliant view of modernity, and the genesis of the future.

—Harry Kinnear

CHOCOPHONICA ON TOUR

March saw 2016’s European Insight Innovation Exchange – this year held in Amsterdam – where Space Doctors presented some of our latest thinking on sensory semiotics. This included both a conference paper and live sensory experiment – ‘Choco-Phonica’. Originally conceived for Bompas & Parr’s British Museum of Food, the experiment was created in collaboration with Bompas & Parr and Oxford University’s cross-modal research laboratory to explore whether cultural soundscapes can influence our perception of chocolate.

A hugely successful conference, IIeX exhibited some profound and insightful speakers covering a huge range of topics. Here are our top takeouts:

Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration

We all try to collaborate, but it can sometimes be easier said than done. Several examples of surprising and unexpected collaborations between agencies which focus on pushing the impact of Market Research emerged amongst the speakers, notably Mark Earls’ Copy, Copy, Copy; an exploration of finding inspiration in places that do not seem ostensibly beneficial.

Angry is good

Twitter’s Jake Steadman highlighted an interesting development in the increasingly emotional responses in data that are being captured on sites such as Twitter. Imagine going to a restaurant in 1977 and hating it. You go home, you mull, if you’re still angry, you write a letter free from the heat of the moment, composed and collected, or you let it go. Fast forward to 2016, and we are able to tell that restaurant exactly how angry we are when we are angriest. Not only do we get far more data, but that data is raw-er, and emotionally more honest. This raises intriguing questions about how we can better capture in context emotion and customer journeys.

It’s all about context

As experts in semiotics we know that context is everything, that meaning cannot float free. But it was great to hear so many papers tackling this issue of context – concept testing in particular – paving new ways for clients to better understand what is more likely to happen in real life. Contextual measurements are better predictors of behaviour and this is an important realisation for the industry, with much more possible development to come over the next few years.

Implicit response

Non conscious impact measurement is currently receiving a wealth of attention and development leading to some fascinating innovations, as exemplified by the winner of this years iiEx Insight Innovation competition Heartbeat MR App. This will be one of the big areas of development in the coming years, and something that we’ve been bending our brains around with regards to new applications of semiotics.

Space Doctors is excited to explore collaborative, hybrid thinking that combines and cuts across disciplines. We are currently exploring the combination of behavioural economics and commercial semiotics in collaboration with leading experts like Nick Southgate in order to drive thought leadership and evolve our methodology.

What is behavioural economics?

The core tenet of behavioural economics is that people do not act in line with traditional models of rational behaviour. Humans don’t use conscious, cold logic to analyse various options but instead opt for what meets our preferences. We were treated to a whirlwind tour of behavioural economics and learned about key insights that demonstrate how consumers often “deviate from these models of rational behaviour.”

The split between system 1 and system 2 thinking is at the heart of many of BE’s findings. Our brains think in (at least) two distinct ways; system 1 thinking is largely intuitive, automatic, and emotional and system 2 thinking is overtly considered, effortful, and driven less by emotion. We are evolutionarily hardwired to avoid unnecessary effort and our brains consequently use low-energy system 1 where possible. There are countless examples showing how “there are lots of changes in our environment we totally miss.” When asked to count the number of passes made in a video of a basketball game, most respondents didn’t notice a man in a gorilla costume walking directly across the screen. As people are not consciously engaged with the world and with their decision-making, Nick sees “the job of marketing as designing decisions for other people”.

Designing decisions involves making use of many psychological principles. The ‘framing effect’ describes how presenting a choice as a loss or a gain will change people’s attitudes. ‘Choice architecture’ considers how presenting choices differently changes responses. Other key considerations included the “vividness of the present” relative to the future, i.e. that we can confidently picture the near future but the more distant time we attempt to imagine, the vaguer and blurrier the picture.

One major online retailer decided to build in an option to skip the ‘Register now’ step when first-time customers opted to check out, instead breaking the process down into numerous other, more purpose-driven, steps (enter payment details, etc.). By the time the consumer clicked ‘Remember my details,’ most customers had in fact registered but the increased ease of the process reduced the number of consumers dropping out of the process to the tune of a $300 million increase in online turnover that year.

Behavioural Economics & Semiotics: A Powerful Combination

Nick believes that consumers are just looking to make simple, confident decisions and rationalise them after the fact. Brands are heuristic, offering a shortcut to an easy, reliable decision based on cultural meaning created over time. The exciting opportunities for cross-discipline hybridisation of behavioural economics and semiotics present themselves.

Behavioural economists construct hypotheses about people’s attitudes and actions, conducting empirical research from consumer behaviour. Commercial semiotics deconstructs the meanings and values we ascribe to brands and products, closely interrogating why particular stimuli elicit certain responses from our brains when in system 1 gear. Rather than assuming universal human behaviour, semiotics analyses mass culture to isolate the drivers and informers for particular attitudinal states and how these vary within cultures.

Given that people do not act according to rational models, neither behavioural economists nor semioticians ask consumers to self-report the reasons for their actions. As Nick said, “People’s thinking and feeling about a brand only matters inasmuch as it [translates into] behaviours.” Behavioural economics gives us data on how people act; semiotics breaks down why they act and how it will likely change in the future.

An output of Lunch & Learn, an internal, monthly lunch where we invite experts to teach us new and exciting things.