Summertime and the Livin' is Busy
From the Library of Quick Study, August 2024
Hey. Hi. Hello. This is The Other 90, a blog about strategy from your friends at Quick Study. Today’s newsletter takes about 3 minutes to read.
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Let’s start here:
Does anyone else feel like this summer has been an odd one? These months are typically a time for disconnection and maybe even a remote vacation, but instead we’ve been inundated with news, bleisure trips over true leisure ones, and businesses on high alert for the next economic and/or election indicators. There is a whiplash to this; the idea that in a time where we normally find solace, we are instead finding noise. A piece from Dazed last week asked, “Why does nothing feel real anymore?”, and I nodded about it and then opened Twitter for the 1,000th time in a day.
“We need to maintain a solid connection with the material layer of life,” said Valentina Tanni as quoted in the Dazed piece. Summer used to be a collective moment for stoking that connection, and now it doesn’t seem like we have that collective moment as much (the closest right now is probably the spike in viewership around the Olympics, but even they aren’t immune to a disastrous content machine that values outrage over context.)
Here are a few updates to things we’ve been keeping an eye on lately while wishing for respite:
Space & Community
This piece on the evolution of Starbucks and its views on physical space reminds us that community-building isn’t necessarily something that brands owe us or should be in charge of.
The Rise of Anti-Trends
We may laugh sometimes at anti-trend trends, but there is usually a kernel of truth in them. According to this new study, it appears that social media does just as good a job at turning people off of products as it does turning them onto them. Is this really because the term deinfluencing became popularized? Not likely, but it does remind us that gatekeeping comes in all kinds of varieties.
Mowing the Lawn, Digitally
“I like repetitive tasks because they allow me to enter into a zen-like state.”
If people are too occupied to get some actual grounding time with nature, does doing it digitally replace what’s been lost? These anti-games share some mental space with others like GeoGuessr in that they are a digital facsimile of what it’s like to physically be in certain places and do certain things. They may bring you some of the experience and psychological impact, but as one GeoGuessr discovered, nothing beats the real thing.
Coming Next Week: A New Study Guide on the Busywork Economy
How many meetings do you have today? Probably more than you did a few years ago. Busywork is at an all-time high in America, and it isn’t just for the workplace anymore. Marketing has become saturated with busywork for consumers disguised as 360° campaigns and universes while brands build unrealistic expectations around the lengths people will go to learn about a brand.
Next week, we’re publishing our latest Study Guide, which focuses on what brands can do internally and externally to avoid the pitfalls of busywork marketing. If you’d like to be the first to receive it, be sure to subscribe to this newsletter if you haven’t already.
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.