That One Bench In Brooklyn
From the Library of Quick Study, October 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:
A few weeks ago, Quick Study and our spouses convened for breakfast on a rainy Sunday morning in Williamsburg (this is easy to do when your company is just two people). My wife and I arrived early and sat on a bench a few blocks from the restaurant, enjoying the misty weather and watching the ferries go by. I recognized the spot we were sitting from TikToks I’ve seen of run clubs meeting near or passing by the bench on their river-adjacent routes. Then, a few days after our breakfast, I saw the bench again in the background of some photos an influencer posted to their Instagram. All this to ask: is it possible to have a parasocial relationship with an inanimate object? Because I’ve now become invested in the digital life of that one bench in Brooklyn.
What else has Quick Study been invested in this month? We’re hard at work on a 2025 strategy for a major sports league, while also researching our next Study Guide. And of course, we’ve been reading. Here are a few things that stuck out to us in the last month:
So many music festivals have been canceled this year. What's going on?
We recently worked on a music strategy for a big beverage brand and found the current moment in live music entertainment to be fascinating. It seems we’ve hit an inflection point in what people will pay for a live experience that they could just see on their phone instead.
How “Am I The Asshole?” ate the internet
Our capacity for judging others knows no bounds, even if the others are fake and/or engagement bait.
An essay about the usefulness (and sometimes demonization) of awkwardness. As strategists who are often interviewing subjects about prickly subjects, it’s important to become comfortable living in the awkward moments because they help reveal true tensions and opinions. And that “awkward” person in the room might just be the key to revealing the opportunity of the situation if you give them a chance to.
From Our Vault:
We’ve been seeing more conversations this month about the rebirth of the mall, so it’s worth sharing our original research from 2023 when we visited 18 malls in 6 states to uncover what it will take for brands to succeed in today’s retail environment.
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.