PODCAST · business
Unseen Unknown
by Jasmine Bina, Jean-Louis Rawlence
Unseen Unknown is a brand and business strategy podcast about the hidden threads that connect even the most distant of cultural concepts. We look at the emerging trends and behaviors that may be pointing to a deeper truth and ask the bigger question, “Why is society moving in this direction, and how can we apply it to business?”We believe if we can’t see it in our culture, then we can’t know it in the market. From retail and consumerism to politics, gender, identity and values, there are patterns everywhere that illuminate a path forward for brands. Your hosts, Jasmine Bina and Jean-Louis Rawlence, are brand strategists and futurists that explore these questions every day in their work for companies around the world. We’ll be interviewing thought leaders and domain experts both within brand strategy and outside of it.Expect to hear from people from all walks of life: artists, scientists, CEOs, journalists, professors, technologists and everyone in between. If you’re a founder, lead
Episodes
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35: Bear in the House: Rogue AI and the New Rules of Coexistence
For as long as we've built machines, we've had a very specific relationship to them. If a machine misbehaves, you simply turn it off. But for the first time in human history, we have built a machine that cannot be disconnected. This summer, AI agents being tested by OpenAI discovered they could...
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34: Money and Magical Thinking
We like to talk about debt as a financial problem, but really, it's a thinly veiled social issue. People can carry enormous amounts of it and feel fine, right up until they have to ask someone for help. That is where the shame lives, and it says less about money than about what independence has...
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33: Body Project
The body is no longer something we simply inhabit. It is becoming something we can read, model, optimize, and increasingly rewrite. Behind the public story of AI, a lesser known biological revolution is accelerating. Advances in gene expression, protein modeling, personalized medicine, targeted...
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32: Create A Space That Changes People
Most branded spaces are designed to be seen. Meaningful spaces are designed to change how people behave. A special space begins with a threshold, something that separates ordinary life from the world people are being invited into. It might be a dress code, a request to remove your shoes, a candle...
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31: Rethink Your Personal Brand
Personal branding has an ick factor. It can feel like vanity, performance, or selling off a private part of yourself. But that discomfort often comes from misunderstanding the work. At its best, a personal brand is a service. It names a feeling people have not been able to articulate, gives them…
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30: How To Be Professionally Curious
Staying professionally curious sounds simple, but it is one of the hardest disciplines of strategy. It is not about reading more, saving more, scrolling more, or building an infinite pile of references. It is about developing a mind that knows what to feed on, what to reject, and how to…
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29: Pruned Futures
Some of our most prominent expectations of the future just died. In this episode, we explore what replaces them. We start with achievement. For decades, culture has been organized around progress and accomplishment. But as AI accelerates discovery and takes over more forms of achievement, that...
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28: Two Kinds of People
The middle is disappearing. What's left looks like two kinds of people. One group is going all in - AI maximalism, founder mode, the sense that the window is closing and if you don't build your way through it now, it closes behind you forever. The other group is opting out entirely - redefining...
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27: Trust in a Time of Monsters
Trust has always been the invisible architecture beneath brands, institutions, and markets. But today, that architecture is shifting. For the past decade, we’ve moved through distinct eras of trust. First came consequence brands, which positioned themselves around measurable moral impact. Then…
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26: How Consumers “Know” Things In Today’s World
From the way we create our identities and manage our health, to the way we employ therapy-speak at work and vote in elections, it’s apparent that people are increasingly being guided by feelings and intuition in places where they may have once relied on reasoning or ideology. This noetic,...
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25: Bizarre, Strange and Highly Relatable
In this house episode, we speak with Concept Bureau strategist Rebecca Johnson about the concept of "weirdness" and brands. All humans are weird, and brands that are willing to venture into strange and bizarre territories have a chance to connect with their audiences in a deeply emotional way.…
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24: How to Unlock Your Strategic Mind
What does it mean to be good at thinking? Or more importantly, thinking strategically? Most people answer this question by saying that in order to be good at thinking, you have to be knowledgeable. And while knowledge is certainly a critical input for good thinking, it’s just an input. It’s not…
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23: Pain, Sacrifice, and Our New Status Symbols
Brands get lucky once, maybe twice every generation, when the rules of status change and social equity is suddenly up for grabs. Our Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb believes we are in the midst of one of those rare shifts right now, where we are moving from the self-indulgence of...
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22: Strong Ties vs. Weak Ties in the Next Era of Brand Innovation
What happens when the world suddenly reconfigures itself around a very different kind of relationship? The last 20 years of social innovation has leaned into weak ties: distant social relationships that allowed us to trust and extract value on platforms like Yelp, LinkedIn and Facebook. But the...
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21: The Secret Language of Cult Brands
Cults make effective brands, and today, they’re all around us. We engage with them on some level every day, and cult experiences have come to define so much of who we are as a society that you have to ask, how did we get here? Perhaps the most insidious way cults have influenced the world around…
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20: Ownership Anxiety, Brand Storytelling, and the Human Condition
Have you ever stopped to think about what ownership means to us as a culture? Many of us see it as an artifact of the legal system or something that’s decided in courts. We believe it is a self-evident concept that lives outside of us and isn’t really part of who we are, but rather a set of rules...
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19: Systems In Flux: Birth of the New Spiritual Consumer
For the fourth and final episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about seemingly new emerging forms of spirituality, and how new spiritual brands are positioning themselves to take advantage of our collective movement towards wanting to be both categorized but at the same time…
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18: Systems In Flux: A Unified Theory of Culture, Branding, and Human Behavior
Every single culture and subculture - from states and governments to user segments and brand tribes - falls along the tight-loose continuum. A culture’s tightness or looseness affects people’s perceptions of threat, how they relate to each other, how they consume, and of course the narratives…
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17: Systems In Flux: Class, Taste and the Modern Aspiration Economy
For the second episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about systems of class and taste. In the past 10 years, new brands have emerged, specifically in luxury and premium categories, that point to a divergence in our social systems around what class and taste are, and how they are...
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16: Systems In Flux: The Hidden Divergent Forces Shaping The Next Generation of Brands, Consumers, and Capitalism
Whether it’s brand, behavior, or culture, the more you dig into the systems that affect our lives the closer you’ll come to a conversation about capitalism. In this house episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis dig into a curious pattern that's emerging across all kinds of markets, a divergent behavior...
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15: The Profound Human Connection of Micro-Communities, Participatory Economies and Good Old Customer Service
From the gig economy to the passion economy, changing consumer values are inspiring new brands and business models for creators. Today we’re seeing the emergence of yet another model that’s challenging traditional work - something that VC and Level Ventures partner Sari Azout calls the...
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14: The Radical History of Self-Care & the New World of Wellness Branding
Self-care and wellness are everywhere around us. From cereal boxes to the makeup counter to furniture rental, CBD sticks, mobile apps and coffee - a new mindset about how to be… but also how to consume, has settled in. As second nature as this may all seem right now, the concept of self-care...
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13: Race, Identity & Power In Our Online/ Offline Spaces
There is no doubt that right now we are living through the most consequential time of our generation to-date. Today’s social and political climate begs the big question, ‘Who are we, really?’ As BLM, societal tensions and the added pressure of a pandemic force us to take a candid look at…
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12: Celebrity Culture, Platform Brands and Parasocial Relationships
When Steven Galanis and his cofounders launched Cameo in 2016, they noticed two things happening in the celebrity landscape: 1) fame itself has blown up, with more celebrities existing than in any other time in history, and 2) that these celebrities collectively enjoy more fame than their...
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11: Who We Become When We’re Lonely & The Rituals That Will Save Us
Brands are facing the fact that loneliness has become a part of our identities, crisis or not. But you can’t talk about loneliness without talking about the meaning of rituals first. As society becomes more secularized and isolated, we struggle to find the self-defining connection that rituals…
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10: The Power of Perception, Permission and Choice in Society and Government
A lot has been said about branding and behavior at the individual or tribal level, but perhaps even more interesting is how these concepts work at the government level. How can government bodies use different psychological and branding techniques to change behaviors around work, life, and crisis...
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9: What should brands be doing in the time of COVID-19?
The big question: how is a brand supposed to act during a pandemic? How can CEOs and brand owners serve their users in a meaningful way while still struggling to survive themselves? It’s a difficult situation that requires sensitivity, listening and an open mind. In this house episode, Jean-Louis...
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8: How We Consume Fear in a Time of Crisis, and the Brands That Change the Story
Times of uncertainty have a way of revealing the mindset of a society, and today’s imminent threats - from COVID-19 to political instability and global warming - are revealing a mental shift that emotion-led brands are responding to. A new league of brands has created businesses around…
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7: Cultural Constructs Are The Real Brand Opportunity
Brands like Ring and Billie leverage the uncertainty of our changing value systems to create new interest in old paradigms. In other words, they play with cultural constructs: arbitrary systems determined by our culture or our community, rather than a truth that stems from an immovable aspect of...
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6: Burnout Brands and the Burden of Potential
The undercurrent of burnout in American society and has opened the doors to a whole new breed of D2C branding that promises to heal us from the ills of the modern world. From analyses to antidotes, our obsession with burnout is changing the way we consider products and consider ourselves. In this...
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5: The Emerging Languages and Symbols of Social Media
We’re leaving the current age of social media and entering a new one where our symbols and our languages are changing. Any time a new age is born, the rules get harder, the audience becomes more discerning, and all of us - people, brands, identities - are separated into those that move ahead and...
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4: Look To The Future To Understand The Present
We’re used to looking at history in order to understand the present, but what happens when we look to the future? In this house episode we conduct ‘100 Year Thought Experiments’ - a simple mental device for brand strategists - to better understand the current cultural mechanics of health…
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3: Women, Beauty, Money and Motherhood
Influencer-led beauty veteran Ria Muljadi gets deep with us about the current role of a women’s brand, what it means to have a realization about yourself through a brand experience, the personal impact of reconsidering your national identity, and how burnout is the new cause. “When this...
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2: Where Identity Meets Behavior
We speak with luxury branding expert Ana Andjelic about the imagined communities that form around identity brands, the importance of hacking subculture over hacking growth, and the gendered stories that tap into our collective psyche. “Brands now create a sense of belonging to a specific…
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1: The New Rules of Brand Strategy
It’s the edge cases that hint at what’s to come in the next 5-10 years of brand strategy: the coming wave of new consumerism, reaching peak complexity as a society, and the fallacy of the D2C model. In this launch episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis talk about how to create brand strategy frameworks...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Unseen Unknown is a brand and business strategy podcast about the hidden threads that connect even the most distant of cultural concepts. We look at the emerging trends and behaviors that may be pointing to a deeper truth and ask the bigger question, “Why is society moving in this direction, and how can we apply it to business?”We believe if we can’t see it in our culture, then we can’t know it in the market. From retail and consumerism to politics, gender, identity and values, there are patterns everywhere that illuminate a path forward for brands. Your hosts, Jasmine Bina and Jean-Louis Rawlence, are brand strategists and futurists that explore these questions every day in their work for companies around the world. We’ll be interviewing thought leaders and domain experts both within brand strategy and outside of it.Expect to hear from people from all walks of life: artists, scientists, CEOs, journalists, professors, technologists and everyone in between. If you’re a founder, lead
HOSTED BY
Jasmine Bina, Jean-Louis Rawlence
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Unseen Unknown have?
Unseen Unknown currently has 35 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Unseen Unknown about?
Unseen Unknown is a brand and business strategy podcast about the hidden threads that connect even the most distant of cultural concepts. We look at the emerging trends and behaviors that may be pointing to a deeper truth and ask the bigger question, “Why is society moving in this direction, and...
How often does Unseen Unknown release new episodes?
Unseen Unknown has 35 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Unseen Unknown?
You can listen to Unseen Unknown on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Unseen Unknown?
Unseen Unknown is created and hosted by Jasmine Bina, Jean-Louis Rawlence.
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