GOOD THINKING WEEKLY: EPISODE 1
An executive summary of great marketing / brand / trend Substacks (and more)
2023 felt like a year of resetting and 2024 feels like a year of rebirth.
In light of that, we’re birthing this little weekly round-up: Good Thinking Weekly.
I read an extraordinary number (read: potentially unhealthy though deeply satisfying amount) of Substacks. Very often I share snippets with my network but most just sit on the brain until needed. There’s a better use for this consumption. This is my answer to that. This is fun for me, and I’m wondering, is it fun for you?
The lens will be areas of categories and subjects I don’t think we’re paying enough attention to.
Once every month (or so), we’ll do a deep dive into one subject that doesn’t get enough air time.
FOOD & BEV
GUTS AND GLUCOSE ARE IN
Fairly sure we’re seeing the end of the functional beverage trend but it was interesting to see Zoe, most known for its glucose monitoring device so big with the launch of a new gut/glucose-friendly drink in Marks & Spencer. With the rise of Ozempic, I think that glucose is set to be the health trend of 2024.
A bit more?
(for future reference, these sections will be more details/thinking that you can skip over if the topic isn’t interesting to you)
The queen of CPG trends, Snaxshot, has it on their list too.
We’re already seeing glucose-friendly brands, like Perfy and JoyDays, emerging.
With interesting data emerging on vinegar and glucose spikes, I could see more drinking vinegar re-entering the CPG space. If this old 2018 round-up is any clue, we’re ready for a reinvention here.
PEOPLE WANT SPECIFIC AND SPECIAL RECOMMENDATIONS
I enjoyed this interview with gift guide guru Kaitlin Philips. I love that her very well-respected gift guide is a Google doc—dreams. But what stood out to me in the interview was this:
“ There's this one woman who will dm me and ask for a restaurant rec in a specific city, and then turn around and just pay me $20 for each bit of info. I love her. (I genuinely have no idea who she is.)”
A bit more?
I’ve been tracking the desire for personal recommendations for a while. In theory, AI will be able to solve this but the reality is I don’t think it really will. People are craving recommendations from people they trust who have the same sensibilities as them (hence the rise of all these hyper-specific Substacks!)
The Strategist dabbled in this this year with The Amy Sedaris Gift Guide column.
The opportunity here is here for brands big and small. This week Mexico City-based home goods store Casa OK, started a content series recommending specific hotel/Airbnb venues within Mexico. Specific recs from similar sensibilities. This could be a big space and it won’t be truly filled by AI because AI has never sat on a seat that was the perfect (or wrong!) height, felt the perfection of great lighting, or the joy of good linens.
REAL ESTATE
MILLENNIALS ARE GETTING PRICED OUT OF CITIES
Millennials are aging out of cities. As someone who recently moved to a small town, I can tell you that there are a lot of us out here! Anecdotally, from my friend group, I can tell you this is global. More than 70% of my friend network now lives outside the city. No doubt this was accelerated by Covid but it makes you think about what businesses are missing here.
A bit more?
A reinvention of chain restaurants and bars. Chain rare somewhat beloved (there’s now a festival for them) but we need a new era. Something like Ray’s Bar (not yet a chain and currently in the city) to emerge to serve this group.
‘3rd rate cities’ with 1st rate culture. You only have to look at what’s happening in upstate NY and the Catskills to see what this will look like. You might be able to eat better up there than in the city these days.
A new approach to mortgages. Friends and unmarried couples going in on real estate ventures because they can’t afford to stay out of the market forever / many aren’t getting married anytime soon.
The re-rise / re-invention of the mall in the US. The rise of the food hall in Europe (like Markt Halle Neun in Berlin or Grand Central Market in LA).
More country clubs but with many more relevant amenities (not just pickleball but sports simulators for teens, trampoline park, podcast studios, playrooms, etc.) Country clubs have a lot more potential than brands are tapping into yet.
SEX
EVERYONE IS THIRSTY
When three of your fave Substacks both call out how sexualized photography is making a comeback and then it might be worth mentioning?
A bit more?
While it was posted back in October, Snaxshot points to the new Single and Fat campaign that is, I agree great. Their tagline “food lube” has me chuckling.
Link In Bio pointed to the brilliant Away spoof on the Jeremy Allen for Calvin Klein White campaign that practically melted the internet this week (and generated 12.7M in media!).
Feed Me pointed to Mad Happy and their hugging models (not sure this is quite sexual, made more sensual) and JCrew’s thirst trap wheat pastings. Seems like puritanical is out.
This aligns with a larger trend in sex around norm busting. Polyamory is mainstreaming, kink and proclivities are losing their taboo, and the rise of Feeld—the moment is here. We see this word exploding (pun not but maybe intentional) and will share a deep dive on this, too, in the next couple of months. There's more for brands, outside of this world explicitly to play with here (wow, it keeps happening) than you might think.
DRUGS
YOUNG PEOPLE QUITTING WEED?
On TikTok, #quittingweed has 39M views. This article claims there’s “a drop in overall drug use among young people (from 21 percent in the year ending March 2020 to 18 percent in 2023).” It also points out that that 86 percent of this group uses cannabis so I don’t think weed is out anytime soon.
A bit more?
There’s an interesting here is the potential parallel to alcohol. You’re under a rock if you haven’t noticed that abstaining from alcohol is the health trend of 2023.
This aligns with the rise of a highly discerning cohort of consumers. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are hyper researchers. They watch reviews, they watch hauls, and they know a lot about the things they are consuming. If this drop is coming, it’s because they are making connections between cannabis and something they don’t like whether that’s mental health side effects, hidden ingredients, etc.
No brand or product is going to be safe from scrutiny. Hopefully, that will extend to vapes at some point—sigh.
ASHTRAYS ARE MISSED
I loved this State of Merch round-up (I love a lot of Emily’s stuff). A lot of things were fun to see on this list but she calls out her love of ashtrays and bemoans their death. Then I was on The Gift Shop’s site (a restaurant merch store) and saw 10 vintage restaurant ashtrays.
A bit more:
I’m seeing a trend away from the puritanical decade we’ve been living in
An uptick in smoking actual old-fashioned cigarettes (Don’t take this as me promoting smoking but I am noticing that people are dabbling in it as a sometimes passtime, it’s almost always American Spirits.) Are smoking bars going to be a thing again?
WELLNESS
SOMATIC ON THE RISE
I’ve seen the word ‘somatic’ half a dozen times this week (and not because my algo is serving it to me). I’ll have to track this and learn more about it but usually, when this happens for me it’s a small wave that will turn into a tsunami fairly soon.
A bit more?
"Somatic workout" surged to 246,000 queries…blending movement and mindfulness, meets a need for alignment between body and mind, often overlooked in our modern world.
“Somatic sexology” helps people feel their sexuality more fully and profoundly. A somatic sexologist uses various methods to heal mind-body divisions – breathwork, movement, touch, and even talk-based approaches.
People on TikTok (I may just call this TT going forward) are into it for trauma release.
MENOPAUSE IS NOT PAUSING
Unpublishable, perhaps satirically, wrote this on their 2024 predictions:
“MENOPAUSE PLASTIC SURGERY will follow the MENOPAUSE COSMETICS boom of 2023, further 1) positioning menopause (specifically) and bodily changes (generally) as obstacles on the quest to remain THE REAL YOU and 2) framing menopause as a medical catastrophe to be reversed rather than a mundane (if challenging) life event one must move through.”
A bit more?
Whether it was intended to be funny or not, I think this just highlights what an interest there is right now in menopause and perimenopause.
A deep dive to come on MENOPAUSE but this goes beyond just menopause and I think is a returning respect for the ‘elders’. We’ll see companies finally start to make brands for and tap into demos over 50 in new ways.
Not just by casting older models, which is practically mainstream at this point, but by making campaigns targeted just at them. Building worlds just for them.
I quite like this brand, Tabu, as an example. But we’re just scratching the surface.
PETROCHEMICALS GET READY FOR YOUR CLOSE-UP
I love Jessica’s substack. Granted very focused on beauty so might only be relevant for a subset of you but I thought this observation in her 2024 predictions was interesting:
“Dior Lip Glow Oil and Vaseline are made mainly with petrochemicals and are trending as the petrochemical market expands, which is not by accident. Petrochemicals are the largest driver of global oil demand — they’re the oil industry’s new major growth market, due to a decrease in fuel demand and a focus on clean energy options… If you look at the Dior Lip Glow Oil ingredients, it’s mostly petrochemicals, which are very cheap for beauty brands to formulate with. It makes for high profit margins.”
A bit more?
If you go back up to my comments about Gen- Alpha and Gen Z being hyper-researchers, I think this will come around eventually. Even though clean beauty is big with older cohorts it hasn’t yet sunk in for this group. I think that will change.
Yawn is an example of one Alpha-focused clean makeup brand— there will be more. With research and awareness of the microbiome and what it can do for you physically and mentally.
Maybe the biggest players will be in the new chemicals space. With AI being able to make super quick advances, I wonder if there’s going to be a whole new series of replacements coming our way that will be cheap and good for us—a girl can dream.
AUTO
RENTING ELECTRIC IS PAIN IN THE ASS
Hertz is offloading ~20k EV rental cars — a third of its electric fleet — citing low customer demand and high repair costs. The company said it would use part of the proceeds to purchase more gas-powered cars. I’m in favor of electric cars. I just wish it was practical for rentals. If you live or are in LA then it’s a no-brainer. But as someone who has spent a lot of money on rental cars driving all over Europe in the last 3 years, I can tell you I never chose electric. You can’t go far enough without having to recharge. This is not practical if you are going on a weekend road trip with just 2 days to spare.
A bit more?
This EV charging station OOH combo is interesting.
No one I know likes renting cars, period. So maybe it’s just time for a reinvention there altogether.
CULTURE
WE CAN’T ESCAPE THE STANLEY CUP, BUT SOON WE WILL
If I have read 1 I've read 50 articles about the ‘genius of the Stanley Cup comeback’ this week (maybe because they went from +70M in revenue to +730M in revenue in 4 years—whoa). It’s a phenomenon (one that’s likely on the way out though). Most of the articles touch the surface and make the connection between the CMO having come from Crocs. I thought this deeper dive into the story was also interesting. It gets into the role that The Buy Guide had in the Stanley Cup becoming the stocking stuffer of 2023.
“The Buy Guide women sent a free Stanley Quencher to Emily Maynard of Bachelor fame after she gave birth. (As the women put it: “There is no thirst like nursing mom thirst!”) Maynard shared the Stanley on her Instagram Stories, which led to an inflection in growth. Using this as a datapoint, The Buy Guide women convinced executives at Stanley to launch an affiliate program, which they did. Stanley had never had a formal influencer strategy, but they began to invest in one.”
A bit more?
Stanley had overlooked a whole audience segment because it didn’t align with their current (not nimble) positioning.
If your legacy brand you can do what they did just by actively listening. Look outside of your lens and see hope the world has evolved. Maybe you fit in somewhere you least expect.
DIVORCE IS BEING REDEFINED
There’s been not a day in the last few months that I haven’t opened Instagram, TikTok, or even Apple News where I haven’t seen someone talking about divorce in a new way. Pretty much no one is saying that divorce is fun or even desirable but many many more people are openly sharing their struggles with it, the positives they are finding coming out of it, or ‘new’ or ‘improved’ ways of approaching it.
A bit more?
DIVORCE will be the first deep dive we are going to do. It’s drafted and ready to send next week. It will go into divorce benefits, divorce celebrations, and a ton of other ‘new’ behaviors we’ve been noticing.
Here are just this week’s Instagram posts that I saw. 1, 2, 3, 4
RELIGION IS GETTING A NEW LEASE OF LIFE
I think this article is interesting not because of the yassification of EVERYTHING but because I have noticed a growing interest in religion and a modern approach to spirituality.
A bit more?
Have to get back to you here. I’m seeing it but I have to find more examples.
YIKES
PEOPLE DON’T LIKE LOOKING FOR JOBS
This post is in praise of a recent marketing stunt by TopGolf. The brand posted a fake job that could only have one appropriate applicant: Tiger Woods. This was following the end of Tiger’s and Nike’s 25-year relationship. At first glance, I liked it. The comments gave me pause.
A bit more:
I’m wary of telling brands to be careful, I think most brands play things too safe.
That said, given that Top Golf’s audience is probably, in good part, made up of people working in tech, finance and services, you’d think they’d have an awareness of what’s happening.
Brands should pay attention to the global emotional temperature. Sometimes it's worth a few haters and you should always try fun things, but perhaps for this moment in time, it would be good to stay away from job spoofs, especially if your audience is in the line of fire (and firing).
WEBMD GIVES ITSELF A PRESCRIPTION FOR CRINGE
WebMD made this bizarre return-to-office video that featured employees dancing to “Iko Iko”. They pulled the video but, of course, it’s everywhere.
A bit more?
We find these return-to-office things fairly misaligned with other trends we’re seeing (like the 3rd tier cities above, working moms hating them).
Does anyone think that showing a bland corporate office and weird dancing makes anyone want to come back? We don’t need ping-pong tables but when you look at how much people spent (time/money) on making their home offices nice I think we’ll have to do better than these interiors if we want the returns to happen.
We will do a deep dive into FIRST JOBS and how corporate life is going to change as many none-digital-natives age out of the workforce.
A few things to close:
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