Mockup Madness: The Gamification of the Checkout Experience

Phillip: [00:00:00] This one is called "What if we were honest about our inability to eat vegetables?" And what we see is a DoorDash checkout or an Uber Eats checkout that shows broccoli in the cart. But there's a little tooltip underneath that says, "This will eventually rot in your fridge."

Phillip: [00:01:28] Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast about the next generation of eCommerce. I'm Phillip.

Brian: [00:01:32] And I'm Brian.

Phillip: [00:01:33] Today we are going to dive deep into something we're calling mockup Culture. We'll also touch a little bit on our upcoming Visions Summit, which should be taking place any day now by the time you listen to this. Visions Summit is coming to you live June 15th in Chicago. You can find out more about our Visions Summit, where we bring the best and brightest of the industry and from outside of the world of eCommerce to come inspire us and talk about some of our boldest and biggest ideas here at Future Commerce. You can get more information about that at FutureCommerce.com/Summit. So and we'll be talking about some of these themes, especially, mockup culture as we get closer to Visions in the next few weeks. And but before we do, Brian, did you see that Dollar Shave Club is now a Shopify store?

Brian: [00:02:22] No, I didn't see that. That's funny.

Phillip: [00:02:25] That is funny. It follows a long lineage now of storied direct to consumer brands which have made the leap over to Shopify as a platform, and I thought maybe we could sort of tee up a conversation around that here right at the beginning and why we're seeing that now. Why do you think that we're seeing a lot of these wins taking place right now? Is that something that Shopify is manufacturing or is it a factor of timing in the market in the era in which we happen to be living?

Brian: [00:02:57] It's both. People are looking for ways to save money. Shopify has told a compelling story around having feature set in an ecosystem that makes it easy to implement new features and do new things. And when we say easy, we mean low cost. And so I think that's sort of the opposite of some of these other platforms where like, "Hey, flexibility is amazing and you need flexibility to stand out in the market." Shopify is like, "Let's both save you money and help you stand out. You can have both." And I think the other side of it is we talked about this way back, almost six months ago now at the beginning of the year at NRF when Shopify announced that they were going to effectively address the enterprise. So they released Shopify Components. They started responding to RFPs.

Phillip: [00:04:00] For the first time.

Brian: [00:04:01] For the first time.

Phillip: [00:04:01] That's a big change for them culturally.

Brian: [00:04:03] Right. They made some hires to address the enterprise. They built out a more enterprise-type selling group and that was traditionally something that they hadn't done. And so I feel like that has led towards more of these enterprise-grade deals. Obviously at NRF, they announced the Mattel deal, but here is yet another one. Some people would not consider the business model of Dollar Shave Club necessarily an enterprise business model, but I would disagree with that. I think this is a great example of about, you know, it's a big business. This is true enterprise-grade business. And so kudos to Shopify for making that move.

Phillip: [00:04:49] What do you know in all of your experience, what do you know in how these businesses typically buy software? And do you think that this Glossier being a recent one that just went over to Shopify as well and now Dollar Shave Club, we're starting to see these like DTC darlings moving to Shopify.... Do you think that that has something to do with this fact that they're engaging the enterprise more? And that would have been an enterprise-style sale? If you had to venture a guess because I know you don't know.

Brian: [00:05:21] I don't know. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that those are fairly new organizations that didn't have necessarily, maybe didn't have as built out as a procurement process as some of the legacy brands have. And so maybe that's why Shopify is seeing success there upfront because entering the world of RFPs is new for them. And so it would make sense that an enterprise business that is also a kind of a newer, more modern business would... It would be easier to engage with that sales process. I've also just found in general from ten plus years of selling and working with enterprise merchants and their purchasing processes that every company often feels very different. And the markers for why someone purchases and why those decisions get made are often very different from organization to organization. It could be as simple as a personality or a person. It could be a process that's complicated. It could be a procurement person that's looking through legal and working on terms. There are a lot of reasons why an enterprise software sale can get stuck or stopped or one partner can get picked over another. It can be anything from a political move to a lawyer who says, "No, we're not going to accept those terms."

Phillip: [00:07:06] It's funny that you would think that if you just chose software in isolation, that it's sort of like a menu. It's like you could statistically just score...

Brian: [00:07:18] With Adobe or Shopify, or Salesforce, or Commercetools, or BigCommerce, or Shopware, or whatever. If you're just doing like a little scorecard and you know what? Sometimes that's how decisions get made.

Phillip: [00:07:31] That's one factor of all the number of decisions that have to be made. Another one could be a publicity term and whether the agency or the software vendor itself wants to be able to publicize the fact that you partnered with them and there are terms around that sort of thing.

Brian: [00:07:50] Oh, yeah, there are terms around everything.

Phillip: [00:07:52] Like with like Mr. Beast, for instance. He has his own landing page on Shopify.com. That is where we are is that the opportunity... I mentioned this in a piece not so long ago. where Mr. Beast has his own landing page on Shopify.com. Why? Well, it's because this idea of entrepreneurship is so intoxicating to the Shopify set. So they provide tools and every type of tool that you need, more tools every day, to help you run a business. So you can start a business. You can run a business. And some of those are demand gen through something like their Shop app, some of those are subscription, and payments. Recently, they've had a storied past with being able to fulfill and do logistics. Shopify is trying to court people that want to be entrepreneurs who are the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. If you want to do a brand activation of the people that will be starting online businesses over the next ten years, you go to Mr. Beast. And the YouTube creators who have evangelized Shopify to date over the last decade have been sketchy drop shippers. So make no mistake, they're taking their own high/low model in that Shopify has to exist for the next ten years to have the brand equity and share a voice with a new type of entrepreneur you have to go to the Mr. Beasts of the World, but you also, for today, have to go caught the enterprise because the enterprise over the next two years, as we're seeing with some of these DTC. So you opened this with [00:09:42] why does Dollar Shave Club or Glossier choose a Shopify? There's an operational cost associated with selling online and it gets more expensive every day, especially the more custom software you have and the more esoteric your business model is online. By choosing a platform that imposes a constraint on you, theoretically, you can drive the cost down. [00:10:08]

Brian: [00:10:08] Theoretically. That's the theoretical side of it. I think that the counterargument here is that at scale, Shopify starts to get really expensive because you have to modify and add all of these additional things and have them host at other places. And you have to pay for all the subscriptions to add on to Shopify, and actually, you have to do a lot of work to make all these things work together in the way that you want them to. The more complex the business model is and the larger the business is, actually the more expensive Shopify gets is sort of the counterargument. I'm not necessarily saying this is true. It really depends on how you do it. And that's true, I think true for most eCommerce platforms. It's all about the how it happens and not just the platform itself.

Phillip: [00:10:54] This is the interesting era that we're living in right now. Shopify is one of the few truly omnichannel platforms.

Brian: [00:11:05] At a certain scale.

Phillip: [00:11:06] At a certain scale.

Brian: [00:11:07] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Phillip: [00:11:08] So but think about it for, for a moment. We've used Shopify in the past at Future Commerce. We've also used Webflow. That's not a great proxy for how businesses at scale operate, but having seen a little bit of it myself firsthand, yeah, you get a point of sale, it's fine, right? You get social selling. I can be in the Shop app, I can be on Facebook, and I can sell on Instagram. There are, just from what they provide you, there are a lot of options for running an omnichannel business. Again, when you're thinking about early demand capture. If you want to get people in at the very beginning stages of their business with this idea around entrepreneurship, there are a lot of options.

Brian: [00:11:57] A lot of options. And it's easy. It's so easy.

Phillip: [00:12:00] It's so easy. Let's shift gears a little bit. I actually have a really great segue here. A good friend of ours who is the premier, prolific Shopify developer, Gil Greenberg, a man who has created many, many, many a Shopify app.

Brian: [00:12:18] Love you, Gil.

Phillip: [00:12:20] And Gil is very close to the Shopify team over there and we've known Gil for a long, long time. An avid listener of the show. Hey, prior guest of Future Commerce who's come on once or twice to tell us about what he thinks the future of commerce is. He has recently released this really interesting mockup that he created of a checkout gamified solution for Mr. Beast, where now that Shopify Plus has this ability to really change every part of the checkout, right? So it's not such a walled garden anymore. You can do these really flexible checkout blocks now so you can create parts of the checkout that have your own brand experience in it. And to date, some people have used it for various things like upsells, cross sells. But for a brand activation, say for Mr. Beast, Gil Greenberg created a mockup of, well, what happens if you have to click 10,000 times to get a discount?

Brian: [00:13:20] It's so good.

Phillip: [00:13:21] It's such a Mr. Beast sort of a thing. And this is the beautiful kind of gamification of commerce that only Mr. Beast could do and only Mr. Beast's rabid fans would commit to. This is the greatest way of breaking best practice in that it, you know, it does fly in the face of a cult of best practices to say we're going to make it as many clicks as you can possibly shove in there to get to the checkout. Brilliant, brilliant piece of Twitter social media content that you feel like could be part of the native checkout. It probably breaks all kinds of rules and laws. You know, I'm sure Rob Freund, who was on the podcast recently and talked about the legalities of running sweepstakes and price fixing would have a lot to say. He's been a critic of Mr. Beast's sweepstakes activations in the past.

Brian: [00:14:12] I don't know. I have no idea what the legality of this is, but I would love to put this on an asymptote, so it would be hilarious to have the discount continual to improve. But on like on an asymptote-type graph.

Phillip: [00:14:28] You're watching...

Brian: [00:14:29] You could literally click infinite times, but your discount would just be like an infinitesimal amount more and you just keep going and it never hits more than 25...

Phillip: [00:14:40] Logarithmic basically...

Brian: [00:14:41] Yeah, exactly.

Phillip: [00:14:42] What's really interesting in that respect is when you think about how others are gamifying price as well. Like Telfar for instance, recently had this campaign where you set the price of the product forever. So they had these drop days where very popular products of theirs, you would go on, you would go to buy a product from Telfar and rather than it just getting stocked out because of bots, you would watch Telfar TV, and so as you're watching Telfar TV, Okay, now in the TV app, in that streaming experience, it's going to direct you to where you need to go to buy the product. When the product gets bought, the price goes up incrementally over time. So the product goes live on the site. Let me restate that. When the product goes live on the site, the price starts to increase every second. When the product goes out of stock, whatever price it was, when it goes out of stock is the price of the product forever.

Brian: [00:15:45] Right.

Phillip: [00:15:45] And this sort of gamification of price, again, I don't know what the legalities of that are. It's a great marketing tactic, right?

Brian: [00:15:54] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:15:55] But what you can see is that people are getting really, really creative with this thing that's become otherwise incredibly boring, which is out of the box eCommerce has a pattern that everybody follows and it's the easy thing to ship. But [00:16:09] the things that create inherently shareable content and the things that are truly remarkable and worthy of talking about are things that are building so close to the edge of possibility that it requires a tremendous amount of investment. [00:16:24] To your point before, maybe Glossier or Dollar Shave Club's business models were really cutting edge ten years ago, but today there are tools that make them commonplace and it becomes a commodity to buy an off-the-shelf eCommerce platform rather than build one based on whatever business model you had back then.

Brian: [00:16:42] Well, one last thing, and then I think there's a really nice transition here, but I don't find pricing strategies boring at all. You're right. eCommerce platforms have turned them into boring discounting games, but that's such a sad and a waste of an opportunity to think through how to connect with customers. And actually it's in that connecting with customers that we see new things being created. Back to your example of the mockup of this potential Mr. Beast discounting tool pricing [00:17:18] strategy. What we're seeing, and you wrote a whole article on this recently on mockup culture, is this idea that actually customers and fans and audiences are now having real influence on the greater brand. [00:17:38] And this is an upcoming theme of our Visions Summit. And we're going to be talking about hyperstition and how hyperstition is happening and what it means for commerce. But Phillip, maybe you could give a quick definition of hyperstition and how it relates to mockup culture.

Phillip: [00:18:01] Yeah. So I'll actually pull it up here because I really like the way that I framed it here. Hyperstition, by definition, is really the ability for a crowd of people to dream something up and manifest reality. So one of those things might be like the canonical example, might be like the Snyder cut, right? It's this idea that was so intoxicating that people popularized online that even though it wasn't actually real, despite the fact that people kept insisting that it was. This was like urban myth. Despite the fact that it didn't actually exist, the demand and the desire for it to become real was so strong that it actually created the reality itself. So the brand in response to Warner Brothers in this case, in response to online petitions and online activism, followed through. They made the Snyder cut reality.

Brian: [00:19:53] So we actually wrote about this. We were like covering hyperstition before we even knew what it meant.

Phillip: [00:19:58] Before we knew that there was a word for it. So hyperstition today really looks a lot like, in the age of generative AI, it looks like the fact that you could dream up any sort of collaboration you want. You could for yourself decide what a Wes Anderson version of Lord of the Rings might look like.

Brian: [00:20:20] Which you referenced well before that actually happened, by the way.

Phillip: [00:20:24] I love it. Let's take the victory laps. If you've been listening to Future Commerce or reading our content, you're ahead of the curve. But one of the really amazing things here is that the tools have such high fidelity now. So think about what imagery does. Imagery communicates an idea to people, and it's like it is its own medium. And you banged on about this for a long, long time. The Marshall McLuhan idea of the Medium is the Message. The message of generative AI is that creative people who command large budgets working for media companies are no longer the only people capable of making dreams realities. The medium itself of generative AI allows anybody who is able to type into a text box to manifest a vision of something, and that is hyperstition at scale. So what does this mean? Let's take it back to the original example that got us here. Gil's ability to mockup a potential Mr. Beast activation in a checkout on Shopify. Putting that out into the world is one example of something I'm calling mockup culture. His creation of this form of media, this video of him creating this activation summoned people from Mr. Beast's team and Feastables, the brand that Mr. Beast owns, into that thread to weigh in and say whether or not that was a good idea. In fact, some of those reactions kind of hinted at, "Hey, maybe this is a thing that we might see in the future," and we're not just seeing it only with Shopify checkouts. We are now seeing this kind of dreamed up reality of user interfaces and user experience for almost every kind of app you can imagine. There are a ton of creators that are participating in this.

Brian: [00:22:18] Movies. We've already mentioned this. Everything. Nike and Tiffany, Balenciaga and literally everything.

Phillip: [00:22:27] So one of the if I had to just, you know, shout out some creators here, Levi Ehrenberg, Jordan Singer, Alex Living, Soren Iverson, Shane Levine. There are a lot of creators that are in sort of that graphic design culture online. And these graphic designers use tools like Figma or Framer. And because those tools that they use to make sort of these funny satirical critiques on apps... So, for instance, an influencer, you know, the idea and the image in the post on Instagram or on Twitter that sort of makes and takes a cynical or satirical line on these consumer apps usually recreates very faithfully the user interface of either eCommerce or app commerce or social media site that they're spoofing. And it's to make a critique. So for instance, I'll reference a couple of my favorite ones that are referenced in the article that I wrote about this. For instance, it was what if you're looking at the... This one is called "What if we were honest about our inability to eat vegetables?" And what we see is a DoorDash checkout, or an Uber Eats checkout that shows broccoli in the cart. But there's a little tooltip underneath that says, "This will eventually rot in your fridge." Green onions or scallions. It says, "You may not actually eat most of these." Baby spinach. "You will make one omelet and then throw the rest away." For instance, also by Alex living this one is of Instagram. And so Instagram, in this case, you're in your Instagram feed and it's, you know, this Instagram model and there is a warning that is occluding the image, right? There's this sort of warning that's popped up that says, "Misleading image. The following attributes are detected in this image: Facetune, multiple filters, misleading angles, professional stylist, recent spray tan," you know, other enhancements.

Brian: [00:24:40] It's cigarettes. It's cigarettes for social networks. Cigarette warnings for social networks.

Phillip: [00:24:48] So it's the surgeon general warning as if it came from the social media publisher itself. So why is this important to understand? Because more people are creating this new form of critique online through the use of mockups. It is very dadaist in nature to go back a few years to a piece that you wrote about Dadaism. It's using the medium itself as a tool to make critique about the medium itself, and that leads us to what we teased in the beginning, which is that is itself an interesting philosophy and it has a name. And I think we could talk about that in-depth here if you want.

Brian: [00:25:31] Metamodernism is the name for it. I think this is really interesting because you mentioned the Dada piece. I was looking for this term maybe three years ago when I wrote that piece and I've worked it into a couple of pieces now, the quantum piece that I wrote, which I actually think still like, if I inserted Metamodern into that piece, it fits within my quantum theory really nicely. But I think that this is something that you and I have been noticing for a while. It's [00:26:02] when a piece of content or something is created that's both critique and embrace of something. And so some of these mockups are super interesting because they are commentary, they are ironic and sarcastic, but they're also good ideas. [00:26:23] They're also like in of themselves, they are interesting and good. And so this is where I think we're verging into participatory romanticism. So back to Visions from last year. It's not just that we look at an image and like pine after it, but it's also that we can now take part in the pining and make something that we think is like an addendum or an addition to or expand upon an idea that we find compelling or want to critique. Everything is so mixed up these days that it's almost like in order to communicate, we have to do things that are both sincere and ironic in the same breath.

Phillip: [00:27:13] And that, by the way, Metamodernism as a philosophy, has been sort of very easily explained as it's a tonal shift. So tonal shift where it's sincere irony, right? It's something that understands that there's nuance to the way that we have to communicate because the channels in which we communicate are inherently like systems of control, and you have to buy into the system of control to get your message out. And that is in stark contrast to what we've seen in the past where modernism had, you know, a lot of cynicism. And postmodernism was practically a countercultural reaction. What we're seeing now in Metamodernism is this idea that you sort of embrace it. So here's a really interesting way to think about this. A great example of modern media, which you talked about in your quantum piece, right? Quantum Customer Journeys. What was the name of that title? Do you remember?

Brian: [00:28:20] Quantum Yeet.

Phillip: [00:28:22] Quantum Yeet. Oh God. I'm getting PTSD.

Brian: [00:28:26] So it was supposed to be a working title.

Phillip: [00:28:30] Think about one of the examples you used was Nathan Fielder.

Brian: [00:28:36] It's like metamodern to a T.

Phillip: [00:28:39] But one of the ways to pull off a Nathan Fielder experiment, it wasn't Nathan for you. What was the special? I forget the name of it.

Brian: [00:28:47] Oh, The Rehearsal.

Phillip: [00:28:49] The Rehearsal. So this is like a multi-part series, The Rehearsal. Nathan Fielder. None of that would really be possible without a tremendous amount of capital and commerce going into it to make it work. So for one, episode one sort of revolves around faithfully recreating every facet of a local bar. And so to scale, to scale, and every little detail. It's like, meticulous. And the way that they go about that and sort of recreating this place in order to hold this rehearsal requires an incredible amount of spending of money and an incredible capital outlay. The audacity of it requires engaging in commerce to make a critique ultimately of the way that we engage in media as a whole.

Brian: [00:29:44] And then some.

Phillip: [00:29:47] And then some. It is multi-layered.

Brian: [00:29:49] It is multi-layered.

Phillip: [00:29:50] Probably an even better example of this is Bo Burnham's Inside and probably the greatest example of all of the pieces that he does in Inside... If you haven't seen it, it's on Netflix. It's incredible. A wonderful piece, like just an incredible piece of comedy, but brilliant art. But he has a song that he does called White Woman's Instagram, where he has to buy thousands of dollars worth of chotchkes to make this video. But throughout the piece sings and celebrates through small vignettes the name of Jeffrey Bezos over and over. And in many points in the doc or in the hour-long special, he's laying on the floor amongst a morass of just things he bought online. It is an incredible...

Brian: [00:30:52] Probably on Amazon.

Phillip: [00:30:53] And he makes a commentary about consumerism while engaging in consumerism in order to make his art. So [00:31:01] this multifaceted way of engaging in media and art has a direct bearing on commerce because commerce powers it all. [00:31:09] But I also see that it is now through hyperstition. This is the whole so what? Why does this matter? Who cares, right? Future Commerce. Just tell me about conversion rates and how Shopify is a 36% better conversion rate than every other platform.

Brian: [00:31:22] If you can cut my costs by 10%, I'll buy your plugin. Just cut my costs.

Phillip: [00:31:27] Yeah, but why does this matter? It's because businesses that are building the future of commerce, not the right now of commerce, the businesses that build the future, they build out at the edge of what's possible, which means it will always be unknown, it will always be risky, it will always be an expensive investment. It will always require an inherent understanding of where you think the world and the customer is going, not where they are at the moment. And at that point, you are obviating yourself from the system. You are moving yourself away from the system. What are you going to build? I don't think in the future of commerce, I don't think that the digital experiences that we build are built by brilliant people that have tons of capital to deploy that work for the largest agencies in the commerce industries of today. I think it's hyperstition. I think it's the users who will tell us what it is they want of our brands. That is the way it will work in the future because we're seeing it already.

Brian: [00:34:19] The CEO of Kickstarter, I believe it was, just launched his own roll up of brands. This is the kind of expertise you need. You need to understand how people are thinking about and attracted to and why they would put money into the first run of a product. And then you can all the repeatable parts, those are the stuff you can add on. But understanding to be on the bleeding edge, you have to understand what people are going to turn their eyes to and say, "That's interesting to me."

Phillip: [00:34:58] And you have to meaningfully toy with the system and break the system in ways that you know can be broken. You can step outside the lines, color outside the lines, but you got to know where the lines are to color outside of them.

Brian: [00:35:10] That's right.

Phillip: [00:35:11] That's the general idea of what we're talking about when we say mockup culture. It's a very long-winded explanation of why it matters. But it really does matter.

Brian: [00:35:21] It does. It absolutely matters. In fact, we're going to get into this, Ruby Thelot...

Phillip: [00:35:25] Ruby Thelot.

Phillip: [00:35:32]

Brian: [00:35:35]  He is a philosopher, activist, artist and so much more, he was on our Visions panel. He talks about sort of the art of the shitposter and like, the future of how brands are going to work is actually through the process of letting go of the brands and kind of handing it over to the community. I'm so excited to get into this further as we head to our Vision Summit in Chicago on June 15th. Because this idea of your brand not being your own now, you know, I think is essential for marketers branders and sellers for commerce because we've held such tight reins and we just saw the decision regarding the estate of Prince, the Supreme Court decision regarding the estate of Prince, So the decision between Andy Warhol and Prince, where the ruling went against Warhol. This is very interesting because this is going to give you as brands license to go squelch what could be really interesting and important iterations of your brand that you need to have happen. Just because you have the license to stop something from happening doesn't mean you should.

Phillip: [00:37:40] So I'm not familiar with the details. What was the actual complaint here? It was that Andy Warhol was using Prince's likeness or something of that nature?

Brian: [00:37:52] Exactly. Right. Yeah. So it was that Andy Warhol was not entitled to draw on basically this photographer's portrait of Prince for a series of images about the musicians. It was basically iterating on a photographer's art that they had.

Phillip: [00:38:13] I see. That's an interesting decision. We should at some point ask our friend Rob to come back and give us a little bit of the legal breakdown on some of that.

Brian: [00:38:23] But what I think is going to do is it's going to empower brands to really go step up and squelch a lot of this AI stuff that's happening right now. All the stuff that we got really excited about in mockup culture, there is now precedent to shut it down, but just because you can shut it down, does it mean you should shut it down? It actually might be the most powerful thing of all to sort of let go of your brand in some ways and say, actually participating in the community and having a voice in the community and be a part of the community that actually wants to do something with my stuff, even if it is criticism, it's better to be involved and be a critic or talk with the critics than to go sue them and shut them down.

Phillip: [00:39:12] Stamp it out. Yeah. One of the interesting approaches here is like, what is the evolution of brand? So we've watched the way that the world has grown up over time. We came through an era of a monoculture where everybody sort of had the same experience watching the same cartoons, eating the same cereal. We had this world that we all have some nostalgia for. We're living in an era now where I don't know that you can say that everybody has the same type of experience anymore. It's very different, very siloed. Everybody has their own sort of unique experience. So that's very individualistic. Could it be that we see that further, even deeper, in that the creation of a brand or the perception of a brand is no longer blue sky? My blue sky is the same as Brian's blue sky. Even if our brains perceive it as different colors, like is my blue your blue? This is a philosophical question. It doesn't actually matter because the location of the sky we can both agree on for the most part.

Brian: [00:40:26] And we can also agree that that color is blue even if we see it differently.

Phillip: [00:40:30] Correct.

Brian: [00:40:30] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:40:30] Theoretically. There's like a problem that arises. Maybe we both see brands the same way right now in the way that we see the sky being blue. It's not just that Hermes has like an iconic orange color. It's that the way we perceive Hermes has been through a monoculture, which perpetuated an idea that you and I see the same way [00:40:55]. What algorithmic timelines do and what generative AI allows for people to create through hyperstition is that my idea of Hermes or Gucci or Nike is no longer fundamentally the same as yours. [00:41:09]

Brian: [00:41:09] That's right.

Phillip: [00:41:09] It is dramatically different. I see it my way. You see it your way. And the participatory brand, there's a new level. A new opportunity is that there's a participatory brand where I don't ever have to have Brian's idea of Nike, Gucci, or Hermes. I can have my own. And that could be an evolution. And that's not for everybody.

Brian: [00:41:30] It's a personal relationship with a brand.

Phillip: [00:41:34] Your own personal Jesus.

Brian: [00:41:37] Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's already happened.

Phillip: [00:41:42] It's already happening. This is already happening.

Brian: [00:41:44] My view of Costco and your view of Costco are definitely different.

Phillip: [00:41:47] Wildly different. Wildly different. And maybe you could say that like, that is actually the world we live in right now. But let's say that we made it more literal where my digital experiences, this is dork mode, something that we've talked about for a couple of years now... The manifestation of an actual literal, from the logo colors and fonts to the actual physical manifestation of that brand and the products that it creates are hyper specific to me, and it's only hyper specific to me because I've bought into the hyperstitious idea that I bring something back to the brand to make it mine. This is not customization or personalization. It's something beyond that.

Brian: [00:42:28] Post personalization, baby. That's what we're talking about.

Phillip: [00:42:32] And that can't be for everybody. Again, I have to go back to a thing we talked about a couple episodes ago, which is if everybody did it, it wouldn't be special. If everybody did it, it would become its own commodity. The future will start very slowly and we will see and maybe we're already seeing...

Brian: [00:42:54] I think we are. Specifically with product creation. So I think that we're doing this in a decentralized way right now and we're doing it with products, things like Etsy and Kickstarter and alike have given us the ability to manifest stuff that actually makes sense for a group of people, but it's not done by specific brands in a concerted way, 1 to 1. It's happening organically across multiple venues. If you can harness that for your own brand and communicate to someone in a way that actually resonates with them. And that's the thing that I think you're really getting at here. [00:43:41] It's not personalization so much as your brand is going to hit differently for different people. You need to hit the notes that say the things that you're wanting to say to that person that maybe achieve the same outcome for a different person, but it's done differently. [00:44:03] So maybe it's you're viewing two sides of the same coin.

Phillip: [00:44:11] This is a thing that I sense. It's not really been said to us. But if you've made it this far into this podcast, so now it's just us friends, no one else is listening. This doesn't go out on the Internet or anything for anyone to see. The reason that it's so difficult for us to be prescriptive and tactical about things like this is because it doesn't exist yet. And that's why the concept to understand and to hold the concept with an open mind is an incredibly important thing that we continue to come back to for years now, which is it's not about how you can use this today to have a leg up in your business right now. It's about understanding the world that we will inherit and the world that is being created today through early indicators of ways that you're going to have to change and adapt lest you fall to the wayside and become like every other company or brand that's come before you has become completely irrelevant over time. If you can understand where the people who stan Bo Burnham are going to grow up in this world and want to find something more personal. And the people who create mockups on the Internet of user interfaces are going to grow up and change the way that brands have to interact with their customers. Understanding that today, yeah, you have to know how to use Figma in order to participate in mockup culture. Not anymore when you can just type a few words into mid-journey and have something pop out the other side.

Brian: [00:45:52] Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I definitely used hyperstitious thinking to save 10% on my ERP costs. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:46:04] That's a great way of landing the plane. Thank you, Brian. You've brought it right back around. And if not, 10% on ERP costs, maybe 36% better conversion rate supposedly, according to a study of dubious size, which we won't tell you, and/or a consulting firm, which refused to be named in its own work. So all of those things might be the future of commerce as we see it through the prism of today. What a great time. Any last words, Brian?

Brian: [00:46:37] Man, all I know is that if you click on our link 100,000 times, you're going to end up with a better experience with this podcast.

Phillip: [00:46:46] It's so true. Thank you so much. If you did click on that link and you got here via clicking on a link. Well, thank you.

Brian: [00:46:53] Keep clicking.

Phillip: [00:46:54] Keep clicking. We need you to.

Brian: [00:46:56] Keep on clicking.

Phillip: [00:46:57] If you want to help this podcast and we would never ask it of you. It only takes a minute. I'm not going to pressure you into it, but it super helps if you leave us a review. You can do that on Apple or Spotify and you can find more episodes of this podcast at FutureCommerce.com. If you want to be subscribed to the future, let's say you want to build the future, and you want to know what's coming next, you can do that by subscribing to Future Commerce Insiders and The Senses. You can get that through one handy subscription. It's totally free. FutureCommerce.com/Subscribe and we'll be in your inbox 2 to 3 times a week giving you everything that you need to know about what's happening in the world of commerce futurism. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Future Commerce.