“Brands After Vibes”

‍Brands After Vibes. Cultural forecaster and brand strategist Emily Segal presented her 2024 thesis of “what comes next” for brands. The co-founder of NEMESIS proposed that brands like A24, which have curated a mood board-like, vibes-based feeling across the totality of their brand experience, is akin to the way AI ‘understands’ similarity in content. Read the full analysis on NEMESIS Substack or watch the presentation from VISIONS Summit on Future Commerce Plus.

‍Costco Connection Surges: Each month, Costco mails out 15.4 million copies of its magazine, plus 300,000 copies at warehouses, making it the third-largest publication in the U.S.

Amazon Takes on Temu: A sign of the times as pressure mounts on consumers amid rising costs, Amazon unveils a a new ultra-low pricing strategy, aiming to rival Temu by launching a new store. Like other ultra-low pricing strategies, the category is focused on affordable deals for everyday items, but it comes at the expense of pressure on Amazon’s vendors. The pricing controls are effective “cost caps,” which limit pricing competition in a free market.

‍Worldcoin Rebrands as World: Worldcoin expands its vision beyond identity resolution on the blockchain, aiming to establish a human-centric identity and community network. Worldcoin rebranded this week to World. Co-founded by Alex Blania, World sees a future with a global identification system using iris-scanning technology. World seeks to address the challenge of verifying human identity in the digital age, particularly in distinguishing humans from AI. By providing a secure and universal identity solution, Worldcoin intends to facilitate equitable access to digital services and resources worldwide, ensuring privacy and security for users.

‍Ring’s Halloween Contest: Ring introduces a ghost search competition, encouraging users to find “haunted” activity on their video doorbells to win prizes this spooky season.

Speaking of Ghosts. Ghost Nutrition, anchored by hero SKU energy drink Ghost Energy, is entering into an acquisition agreement with Keurig Dr. Pepper. The CPG giant will acquire 60% of the lifestyle and nutrition brand for $990M. 

‍Breaking Barriers in Dreaming: REMspace claims to have communicated with dreamers twice, linking consciousness in dream states. If true, it could prove to be a monumental step for conscious dream research, which hints at future solutions to the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ in physics, and potential new interfaces with artificial intelligences.