From the Library of Quick Study, May 2024
We've run out of gates to keep
Hi. Hey. Hello. This is The Other 90, a blog about strategy from your friends at Quick Study. Today’s newsletter takes about 5 minutes to read.
If you’re looking for an effective, actionable strategy without the long-term commitment, reach out and say hi: hello@quick.study.
Let’s start here:
It’s been a wild spring for our Solocultural world. Loneliness remains a top subject in the take-o-sphere as the blame game circles phones, lack of play, working from home, and anything else a new study will point to.
If you recall from our 4-part Study Guide series earlier this year, Soloculture is defined as the unique worldview a person holds based on how they consume, manipulate, and contribute to the transmission of information. A key factor in the onset of Solocultures has been the ongoing fragmentation of our consumption - both the platforms we consume on and the content being consumed. Some recent signals of our continued descent into Solocultures include the changing soundtracks of TV shows, being so back at the same time others are so over, the ability to use fast fashion as a gateway to new subcultures on the daily, and moving to placate your politics (an ever-existing conversation that’s picked up new heat of late).
The ad-pocalypse that’s come to our feeds is not much help in building a cohesive narrative view of the world around us either. Take it from Ed Zitron: “This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money.” How depressing.
BUT! There are some intuitive ways for brands to be successful in the Age of Soloculture. We’re currently on tour with learning sessions for brands & agencies designed to dig into the background of Soloculture and highlight its implications in actionable ways. One client called the presentation “super relevant” and remarked that their team “was energized coming out of the session.”
If you’d like to set up a Soloculture learning session or have Quick Study develop a custom Study Guide for you that includes brand-specific research and implications, reply to this email or send a note to hello@quick.study.
Gatecreep
Curation as a service is one way people (and brands) are manipulating and contributing to the transmission of information in our Solocultural present. Newer apps like PI.FYI and the continued growth of newsletters into full-blown media companies like Magasin and FOUND show that good curation can be a powerful antidote to the noise machines we keep in our pockets also known as phones. But is it possible for our cultural obsession with sharing to go too far?
According to Google search tool Glimpse, use of the words gatekeep and gatekeeping has skyrocketed in recent years. Headline after headline announces the opening of a gate to others - a salon, a pharmacy, and plenty else. We are, frankly, a culture that’s become bad at keeping gates closed and obsessed with leaving them open, something that’s recently been remarked on in newsletters about sharing and in conversations about the state of criticism.
This sharing feels like it should bring folks closer together, but instead often serves to separate us even more. One reason for that is the volume of our own sharing is so much that it crowds the feeds that others see and creates more noise. Our research found that 68% of Americans introduce friends or family to something new at least a few times a month, and almost 20% say they do it multiple times a week. And that’s just the “new” stuff we are sharing, not to mention all of the repetition we put into our feeds and group chats. Speaking of repetition…
What happens to culture when we don’t manipulate the information we consume before we send it back out into the world? A culture that lacks gatekeeping also runs the risk of stunting its growth. Obsessive sharing begets many things, one of them being a copycat culture that is less about creating newness and more about recycling what exists to fit in. The recent return of @ShitBloggersPost is a timely reminder that so much of what we see is not an evolution but a repeat purchase from CopyCat-R-Us. In a recent interview with The Cut, actress Laura Herrier lamented this side effect of a world with too many gates left open: “Everyone is sharing way too much information. We’ve all worked hard to find places and a distinct style, and I don’t think it should be given out on the internet all the time.”
When looking at our continually fractured understandings of the world, maybe the best way to beat Soloculture is somewhat counterintuitive: share less. Force some discovery through doing and making instead of gatepeeping. Perhaps that will shake us out of our spiral and into a discovery mode for new things actually worth sharing and connecting over. If we’re going to feel fragmented, let’s at least create some forward momentum from it.
Control State: A New Study Guide Coming Soon
We’re excited to reveal the topic of our latest consumer research: control. The element of control in the relationship between consumers and brands has always been a delicate balance, one that is sometimes based more on perception than truth. Over the past five years, consumer expectations related to control have changed drastically. New research conducted here at Quick Study and elsewhere can guide brands toward the right buttons to press when it comes to building relevance while respecting the control balance. (No, the buttons aren’t CTRL, ALT, or DEL.)
Keep an eye out for Control State in your inbox soon.
The Other 90 is written by Rob Engelsman, a former baby model and now Cofounder & Strategy Partner at Quick Study. To find out more about how we help brands and agencies get to smarter plans faster, email hello@quick.study. You can also find Quick Study on LinkedIn.