[Podcast] Branding in an Age of Autocracy: Marty Neumeier on Trust, Truth & Power

As democracy fractures and trust erodes, branding enters unfamiliar territory. What happens to brand building when truth becomes optional and power consolidates?

In this episode, we’re joined by Marty Neumeier—one of the most influential voices in branding—to explore what it means to design brands in a world increasingly shaped by autocracy, AI, and cultural volatility.

We unpack:
• Why branding depends on openness, trust, and shared meaning
• What AI, media, and power shifts are doing to perception
• The risks of brand neutrality—and the cost of staying silent
• The role of brand builders as educators, sense-makers, and cultural participants
• Why Level C is pushing brand education into new territory
• How business can remain human in an increasingly controlled landscape

This is a timely, wide-ranging conversation about branding’s responsibility, relevance, and future. If you’re a strategist, creative, or leader—this one asks more of you.

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Transcript

The idea that companies want to dominate their customers instead of giving them more freedom, more options. And the reason this is bad isn’t because they’re not going to be profitable. They will be profitable in the short term, but in the long term, they kill the brand and they make it possible for new companies to come along with better customer service, just customer orientation. And they’re going to knock you out, and you’re not coming back.

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Hello folks, and welcome to another edition of JUST Branding today. On JUST Branding, we’re diving into a powerful and incredibly timely topic. We’re going to be looking at branding in an age of autocracy. As democracy faces increasing pressure around the world and trust in institutions continues to decline, we’re going to be asking, is branding still viable? And if so, what is the role of branders today? To explore this mighty topic, we’re joined by the mighty Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap, Zag, The Brand Flip, Meta Skills and Scramble. Marty shaped how an entire generation of strategists and creatives think about brand, especially in his work with his training program Level C that Jacob and I have both gone through and loved and found a lot of value in. So this is going to be a very interesting topic with the world’s most visionary and challenging branding education foremost mind. And so today we’re going to unpack the forces really reshaping our work and ask how do brand builders respond to this moment of truth. So Marty, welcome to the show. How are you doing and what’s on your mind at the moment?

Thanks so much for inviting me, Matt and Jacob. This is fun. We talked before maybe a couple of years ago, but boy have things changed. Things have really changed. So this is very timely. And I know you’re going to ask some questions that I don’t know the answers to because nobody does. But it’s not something I haven’t been thinking about. So I have ideas about it. I have guesses. I’m not sure I have predictions, but we’ll see. Maybe I do. Right.

So in terms of where you stand, are you going to give us an opening gambit on this? And how do you want to do this, Marty?

Well, so we’re talking about the moment of truth in branding. And the reason it’s the moment of truth, I think, is because, as you say, autocracy is on the rise. And we don’t know exactly where that will lead. And at the same time, at the worst possible time, I would say, we have the advent of AI suddenly, unexpectedly, because it wasn’t quite ready. But it got rushed out by one group, and then another group followed, and now they’re scrambling. And we, so just at a time when we’ve got sort of three big problems, autocracy rising, inequality off the charts, and environmental collapse, we get this huge new invention, if we can call it that, that’s gonna speed all this up. So it’s not just gonna speed up anything good. It’s gonna speed up everything, everything, right? So that means autocracy will increase, inequality will increase, environmental collapse is likely to increase. And I have yet to hear anybody in the AI sphere talk about how they’re aiming to solve those three problems. That’s not what they’re about. That’s not what they care about. And so here we are trying to deal with it as basically people who don’t have any power. The power has all gone to oligarchs and bad actors in government, at least in the US.

Yeah. It’s a scary thought, isn’t it, that particularly with AI, we jump on chat UTP and we ask it questions and it gives us answers. But the power to manipulate that is huge, right? Across the masses, it’s a bit like, in a weird way, well, it’s far greater than television, right? But when everybody started getting a TV set in their front room, the power of the broadcasters came to the fore and the advertisers, from that perspective, to influence the minds of millions. How much more with AI? It’s a huge question that I don’t know if we’re ready for, as you say, like, who is looking after that? I don’t know who is. And it’s a daunting thought.

Yeah, nobody is, except for the providers. And they’ve got a lot of investors to answer to. And they’re just genuinely excited about it because of the power that it brings. And like, look at this, look what we can do, right? It’s that kind of thing. But nobody seems to be, I wouldn’t say nobody, but most people aren’t connecting the dots to see where this could lead. And so that’s what I’m always doing in my career, is like, what’s the consequence of this, of accepting this? So I think what probably is going to happen is that ordinary people like us will see some advantage in using it for ourselves in our little worlds. And at the same time, the accumulative effect will be to worsen autocracy, inequality and the environment. So in the long term, really bad, we can speed up all the bad stuff that’s going on, while we get a little bit of advantage, which might seem really a lot to us, because if I can build a little business on AI, that’s good. Maybe I was not doing so well. And now, hey, I got this free thing. At least it’ll last for a while until everybody’s doing it. I can get ahead. And I’m seeing a lot of that. It’s very discouraging to see everybody just being very selfish about it and not thinking, well, what’s the result, the end result of this? So that’s what I’m, that’s what I’ve been thinking about.

Let me be a bit contrary at this point, right? What if, what if it’s the flip of that? What if it enables some of the things to get better? Why couldn’t that be the case, Marty?

It could be.

That would take probably people who had very good motives, who weren’t greedy, who actually cared about people, who cared about the future. I mean, the oligarchs now, their idea is the future is to leave the planet because they know it’s going to be ruined and so they don’t mind helping to ruin it. So I think it’s up to those of us who only have collective power to do something about it. So that’s what’s been concerning me because up to about, I would say, two years ago, I was pretty happy with the progress of business and branding and everything. It seemed like it was getting better and better, more democratic, companies were behaving better, a lot of things, and then suddenly it flipped. I mean, really suddenly. And I think AI was a trigger, and I think the potential of some of these very powerful people to get more powerful under an autocratic government was too much for them to take, and they just went for it. And they went over the line, they stood up behind Trump on his inauguration, lined up with him. I thought that was shocking, and a lot of people did too. So now, there’s no turning back for them. They’re committed. I don’t think they can ever get their personal brands back. I think that’s over. So what do you do if you can’t? You double down. You just keep on, you double down. That’s what I’m afraid of. So politics is not my business. I’ve never cared about politics. I’ve had to since 2016. But I’m just really interested more in cultural things, right? So business is part of culture. So I care about that. But here we are being forced to pay attention because if we don’t, we’re screwed.

Yeah. I was just thinking when your book Scramble is written, because there’s a Trump-esque character, isn’t there? I don’t know if anyone else had noticed that when they read through the book. But when I thought, oh, there we go, that book might… One of my thoughts that flashed through my head was like, I wonder if that will age Scramble a little bit. And then he’s back again and pushing things forward. So it’s just as relevant, even probably more so now than ever when you…

And so it was responding to the Trump presidency without naming Trump, was having a bit of fun at his expense, but not that he didn’t deserve to be pilloried a bit. But also in that book, the solution to their brand problem involves using AI in a good way. And so that’s, my assumption was, well, that’s what’s gonna happen, because there’s so much potential in using AI to help customers, to streamline business, to take care of a lot of problems that we had with service and all that kind of stuff. But instead, it’s being used to cement power. It’s being used to manipulate people. It’s being used to increase surveillance and the potential for damage there. So all the power is moving to the top. It has been for a while, but we kind of thought we were making some progress. The rest of us, you know. So now we have to deal with that and branding has a big role to play. But it’s not gonna be for the faint of heart. I mean, most people are just gonna go with the flow and, you know, if a client or a boss wants them to do something, they’re gonna bend over backwards to do exactly that and just say, well, it’s not my company. It’s not my decision. I’m just a pawn in this game. I have to make a living. There’ll be a million things you can excuse your behavior with. So the only way that’s gonna change is if people have a very good idea of what’s gonna happen. And there are, thankfully, a lot of people who are good at predicting that on the political side, the business side and so forth. You can go to Substack. You’ll see all of them. I mean, all of the people who are on the side of the angels are on Substack and probably some who aren’t, but you can find really good voices there. And that’s why I’m spending a lot of time there, is because I think if there’s going to be a comeback for democracy, it’s going to start on Substack, probably, because people are able to work together and collaborate on new ideas. And what we really need is more than just going back to the way it was. That’s not going to do it. The way it was caused the problem that we’re in now. So we have to go much more forward with democracy and make it better so that it serves more people equally. And I was lucky enough to grow up in a time when, in the US and California, when we all felt pretty equal. It was actually great. And I even knew it at the time that this was terrific. So a CEO in the 50s made, I don’t know, six times at the most, six times what the average employee, line employee made. And they were definitely special because they lived in better houses, but they lived in the same neighborhood. Right. They weren’t in some gated community. They didn’t have seven houses. They had one house and maybe if they were really doing well, they might have had a second house somewhere. And you’d see them at the grocery store shopping like everybody else. And then that started to change and everybody complained about it. They remarked on it, but they didn’t stop it. Nobody tried to stop it. And now they’re making, I don’t know, hundreds of times as much as the average employee. So inequality is off the charts. But back then, you weren’t incentivized to become a rich CEO or a rich founder, because the more you made, the more taxes, the higher your tax rate would be, and up to 90%. So, you know, you’re going to just say, well, it’s not worth it. And so when that changed starting, you know, in the early 80s, and you could make more and more and more money, the incentives changed, and the incentives incentivized people who loved money, not people who wanted to contribute to democracy or make better communities or anything like that. Money, money, money. And that soon, I was in Silicon Valley in the late 80s, and it was still very idealistic. It was great. And then it started to change. As many people realize, you can do well in this industry, right? If you can understand it, you work with these crazy programmers. And within 10 years, they took it over basically. And now we’ve got investors owning everything, pushing for higher profits. They want me first kind of thing. They want first call on all the decisions that corporations make. So it’s gotten really bad, and it just got worse in the last couple of years. So what happens to branding in that situation? And so what became obvious to me is that branding depends on democracy. It depends on customers having a level of power over their lives, right? And not being captives. And so autocracy sets a condition where companies don’t need to compete on a level of playing field. They can tip the playing field so that only the oligarchs make money and they don’t need branding because they’re using sheer raw power. So if they don’t need it, who needs branding? Well, everybody who isn’t an oligarch or doesn’t have a number one gigantic company that’s manipulating their customers through surveillance, all those people still need it. So there’s lots of room for branding, but it’s just become more difficult. Now, it’s completely about winning over customers. You know, it just made it more important, really. But then you’ve got those huge companies that actually don’t need it. So it’s, you know, don’t bother trying to get Amazon for a client or Tesla or any of those. They don’t care. They don’t need you. They don’t need branding. They need customers. And as long as customers can be manipulated, they got them. They’ll keep them.

I’ve got an example here that I think fits into somewhat of what you’re saying and probably even worse than some of the examples you’ve given. So in the UK, there are like six major water companies that all the houses are basically have to take the water from. Like you can’t move water company, right? Like it’s just in your area, that’s the company. So they have a monopoly over the population, right? So this is exactly what you’re talking about. There’s been a lot of uproar in the UK because at the top, the CEOs, which they say they have to pay this to get the best people. Okay, they’re on, I think the estimates are around 3 to 4 million pounds with bonuses and everything, which is crazy when you think the average employee that they hire or the average in the UK is about 40,000. So that’s the disparity of wealth generation that you’re talking about. But what makes it even worse and what makes a lot of the media here go crazy is that these water companies, they’re not repairing the system, they’re not looking after the customers, they’re pumping sewage into wrong places. And there’s a lot of uproar. So even the politicians have, in the UK anyway…

These are privatized water companies?

Yeah, yeah. They used to be public and then they became privatized, I think.

It doesn’t make sense to privatize a monopoly.

No. What you’re talking about with these other companies, it seems to be that on steroids. So yeah, it’s a big challenge in the inequality. Like the CEO, do they add, I don’t know even what the percentage is beyond the 40,000 average to 4 million, right? Is that the value that these people really add to the business and the value that customers are feeling? Absolutely not. So something’s off, isn’t it, really, when you think of it like that?

Yeah, something’s off. How does branding thrive when customers don’t matter, when customers are held captive?

What would the role of brand be in such, you know, in a social way in that sense?

Oh, well, there’s a sort of golden rule in branding. Now, you have to remember what branding is all about. Branding forms a contract with customers saying that we’re going to give you this stuff, and in return, you’re going to give us some money and some loyalty if we do our job right. That’s the deal we have. If the deal isn’t fair for a regular company, you’ve got no customers, or you’ve got a really lousy group of customers. So that’s really important. The other thing is that you have to understand that branding is a long-term investment. It’s not marketing. Marketing is more tactical and short-term and super important and very difficult, but it’s hands-on every day, you know, creating sales and making sure products are distributed in the right place at the right time. It’s super complicated. Branding is more strategic, so it’s actually more CEO-level stuff because it’s about the future of the company. Providing the CEO thinks there is a future for him in the company. That’s one of the problems is if you know you’re only there for three years, how much are you going to look into the future? How far does your vision stretch? It certainly is important for private companies, founder-run companies, because this is their baby, right? So I wish there were more of those and less of the shareholder-owned companies, because it’s such a temptation to put shareholders before customers. So anyway, but it’s a long-term thing. So branders have to remember to remind their clients and bosses that it’s a long-term investment. And anything you do to undermine the long-term investment by doing something short-term, you’ve got to think twice about that. And often, you do have to do short-term things to survive when you get stuck. But that’s not branding. That’s scrambling.

I come across this all the time, Marty, particularly, I just think of a client that shall remain nameless, but I got in with the leadership team and I was asking them about the vision, right? And they all looked at me blankly, and one of them said, well, have you read the briefing pack that we sent you? And I was like, yeah. And they said, well, if you’d read that, Matt, you’d have known that we’re all gonna exit. We’ve made it like a pack, packed, that we’re all gonna exit within three years, right? We’re gonna go in and sell. And I was like, yeah, I’ve read that, and I completely understand that that’s your personal goals. But that isn’t what the brand is about, is it? Right? Like exactly what you’re saying. Like we have to leave some value there for someone to buy, even if you want to exit as a leader. What is the value that we’re offering customers 10, 20 years from now? Like, what is that? So I think this is, you know, with the investment cycles and the seed money, this is a challenge that…

So really all you can do is help them achieve their goal and maybe nudge them towards leaving some value there for the next owners.

Right.

But the next owners should be smart enough too, to know what they’re actually buying. Are they buying a tapped out company where the brand is going to self-destruct any minute because they’ve been, customers have been mistreated? They have to be able to look into that. And a lot of them don’t have that ability. So, but that there’s a better job for you, Matt, is to work for the company that they acquiring company.

Yeah, that’s it. They put up with me long enough. That would be great.

Yeah.

But the problem is, is we’re all trying to make a living. That’s the problem. And sometimes we cut corners. And I have thoughts about that too, but maybe later.

So what can we do? And we don’t have truth or trust or creativities under threat. What can we do as brand is?

We’re helping customers become who they want to be. That’s the way to creating a long-term brand. Think about customers first and what can you give them? And maybe some small way that’ll make them achieve their goals or be the people that they want to be. So first of all, you have to know who they are and have some idea of who they want to be and how you can help them. But if you can do that, you’re very important to them. The loyalty will thrive because they probably can’t get that anywhere else. You have to make sure they can’t by giving them something that’s unique. So that’s really important is to put customers first. So the sort of chain of command, if you will, it’s kind of like if you want to create a brand that lasts forever, it’s kind of this continuing loop, right? And it starts with management. Management has to support employees. So they’re the next ones that have to be, you know, that are next important after the employees. The employees have to serve customers, right? So they have a huge role to play serving customers really well. Customers are the ones who support the investors. And the investors should let the company do it their way, because without customers, they don’t get anything, not for, you know, not forever. If they want to jump in and take profits when they shouldn’t be, the long-term effect will be that the company is gutted, because customers leave, they feel mistreated, they’re not first, right? So it’s, so customers are, have to come before shareholders. So that’s a mistake that, or let’s say a temptation. I don’t think, I think most CEOs know this, that’s just a temptation to listen to shareholders first, instead of saying, well, wait a minute, customers come first, you guys are the last ones on, in line to get the money, but you’re going to get it, because we’re going to create a company that lasts for a long time, and the profits are going to be really strong. Patience is what they have to say. So that’s something that really needs to be taught better in business school. So Andy and I are working on all those kinds of things. I don’t know if you know what we’re doing, it’s what he’s doing, which is amazing, but we’re working our way into higher education, as in addition to working directly with people who are professionals in the field. And there could be some really good benefits to both sides from this. But anyway, education is very slow to change, and so we need that to happen. But branders can go out there and say, look, customers come first and be all about the customers. It’s all about helping customers who become who they want and figuring out where the overlap is between company needs and customer needs. Where it overlaps is the sweet spot. And you need to keep finding that it can move, it can move around a lot. Customer needs can change, company needs can change. But have to remind the company that they have a purpose. I hope they have a purpose. They have a position in the marketplace that’s unique. They should, if they’re any good. And all their missions and goals and all that should fall out of that. So that’s your job, is to help keep it straight, because it’s very complicated. I mean, the biggest problem a CEO has is getting a complex company to execute a simple idea. And that takes help. And so this is why Andy and I have been talking this for a while, and I put it in my first book, that branding will never reach its potential until there’s someone at the top of the company who cares about it. And it’s probably not going to be the CEO, because the CEO is concerned with shareholders and operations and finance. It’s going to be someone who cares almost exclusively about customers. And so that was Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was that guy. He didn’t look at spreadsheets. He didn’t talk to, he didn’t go on investor calls. He didn’t care about that. His goals were much bigger. He wanted to just blow people away with the products and make stuff that lasted forever, that was indelible in the marketplace. And so we see now that what’s happening when he’s not there, it’s kind of eroding. Apple is, there’s been no great invention since the iPhone. Even his main, his next thing, Steve Jobs’ next thing was to fix TV, which is in terrible need of repair. And before he died, he said, I cracked it. I cracked the problem of TV. And that’s all we heard. We never heard what was the solution. Are you doing something about it? And I don’t know if he was unable to lead it or just unable to convey it. Whatever happened, there was nobody to drive that through.

There’ll be a journal somewhere like, I don’t know, Isaac Newton’s journal that wasn’t published for some years after his death.

Taped under the old desk in his house.

Yeah, somebody find that, and on the front it will say, you know, I fixed TV.

Yeah, yeah.

Solutions for TV. No, just a couple of quick things. Yeah, just a couple of quick things there. For those that don’t know, Marty just referenced Andy Starr, who’s the co-founder of Level C, good friend of mine, and Jacob. He was on the show as well with Marty in the previous season. And it’s going to be fascinating what you guys come up with. I know I’ve heard Andy talk a lot about this idea of being the Bauhaus, the new Bauhaus, Level C as a training program, and evolving that side of things. So it will be really interesting to see.

Yeah, we’ve been using that as a metaphor for us to think about what’s our role in history if we have one, if we could create it. And we thought of the Bauhaus because what the Bauhaus did is it took the industrial age, which is pretty gritty and horrible to be in, unless you were an owner, and organized it so it could be beautiful in a way that was particular to an industry. In other words, they came up with a whole new way of designing products and buildings and everything that was consistent with the capabilities of industry. It didn’t say, let’s try to put handmade decorations on everything, we’ll just do them with machines, because that would be dishonest. So it was like, what’s the most honest way we can deal with this very difficult age, we’re in the industrial age, in a way that’s better for users and customers and so forth. I’m not saying that we believe that the Bauhaus created the look and feel of tomorrow. It may have, it’s certainly contributed to it, but I’m just saying, we need that now for AI. We need people to come along and humanize it in a way that’s appropriate for what AI is and what it does and also to sort of to keep it in its place so it doesn’t just take over, run rough shot over people. And so that’s, the Bauhaus had that role. And so the buildings that we have today, all the modern buildings came from Bauhaus and the way products look and art went through a big transition. Thinking went through a transition, book design, everything changed because of the Bauhaus. Now we need that again. And I have been going back even further because there’s a bigger model in history and that’s the Renaissance. So what did the Renaissance do? Well, the Renaissance took basically the Dark Ages before there were any machines, really. Nothing was mass produced. Life was not easy. It was, government was basically oligarchy. It was surfs. Everyone was a surf. So it was rough. It was difficult. And there wasn’t a lot of enlightenment. So the Renaissance opened all that up. And the first, the way it did it is by using printing in a really good way. So printing was the first mass production machine, the printing press, and it allowed knowledge to spread much more easily. Right? So you had books that would, I don’t know, they’d be as big as a desk, you know. If when you opened them up, they would be, they would cover your desk. You had two, two guys had to carry them from one place to another. And they cost a fortune if you wanted a book. I mean, it would cost as much as a mansion to have a book. So all of a sudden, you have books that, well, they’re not cheap, they’re not like paperbacks of today, but they’re affordable for merchants that say that class could afford a book. And so they did that. And then they started in Italy, they started translating them into vernacular Italian and so forth. And so they’re not only in Greek and Latin. So it opened it up for everybody to be able to read. And it was a good thing. And science spread. Science began because people could read each other’s progress in a book, all that stuff. It took years and years, of course, to happen. So I was very interested in that. I have been for the last five years interested in what the Renaissance did and how it applies to today. And I think it applies very well. And then I’ve been working on a book for that whole time centered on Leonardo da Vinci and his efforts to get his notebooks published and his failure to get it published, get them published, which set back science and art 200 years, because his notebooks were essentially lost to civilization after he died. They were never published. They just stayed in their original forms. And that set us back, because we didn’t realize how well he was combining art and science. And now we want art and science back together really badly, because science is running rough shot over us via technology, and it’s turned us into a culture of where money is the only thing that matters. And art is the opposite. It’s the reason that life is worth living, right? It’s because of the quality of stuff and art. And the spiritual part, right, is getting killed. And nobody knows what to do with it, but I think that art and science together will fix it.

So for folks out there, Marty, I’m going to plug in. Marty’s not paying me to do this, by the way, but Marty’s referenced the book Octavo, which I did actually help proof, and it was a stunning read. So definitely get hands on that. I think you’ve got some more coming out, haven’t you, Marty, that have been published on Substack, have I got that right?

We will see. I’ve got two more that deal with other issues that we’re dealing with. The background is the things we’re facing, like planetary destruction, and the sort of, what we have here is Christian nationalism getting its hands into everything, and it’s not a good trend for religion, it’s not a good trend for spirituality at all. So I was gonna deal with those two, and I still may, but what I’m finding is, because of the state of publishing and being manipulated by autocracy also, I mean, the places you can get published are getting smaller and smaller, and people are reading less because they’re not getting what they want out of books. So it’s in a bad way, so I’m on kind of a crusade to get people to read more, and you won’t be surveilled if you get a book. You can read whatever you want if it’s a print book, so I’m going to predict a resurgence of print books.

Hey, you had it in Best Books, you had it in Best.

Yeah, so anyway, I may do that, but I’m all focused on Octavo, and I’ve got an experiment I’m running, which is can one person, one author, publish a group of products, books and audio books and e-books, by himself at the same level of performance of a big five publisher? And what would that take and how much would that cost to do that? And so I’m taking a good stab at it. So this is where my branding experience, marketing experience come in, is I’m able to kind of predict how new things might work, like doing things in a different way might work. So none of it’s guaranteed, we’ll see how it works. But thank you, Matt, for reading it and lending me your comments.

What’s fascinating is just how you pronounced it, because I, how did I pronounce it, Octavo?

I used to do that too, and I like it better. I like the sound of Octavo as an English speaker, but it’s Italian, so it’s Octavo, and an Octavo is just an octave. And it’s the format that part of the books were printed in. So this is a big change in the printing press. You needed to do mass production. You needed a different size sheet, and it’s the same size we use today. So, you know, I don’t know, let me get a book. So this one here, my book, Meta Skills, 6×9. 6×9, oh, here’s the real book. It’s gonna look like this. So 6×9 is the same format they use in the Renaissance. So it’s basically folding a sheet of paper into 8 panels, which is 16 pages, views both sides of the sheet. And that was a revolution, right? With that, using the Octavo, you could make cheaper books, affordable books. So it was so successful, they never changed the format. It just went on and on and on forever. And we’re still there today with that.

Molto bene.

Molto bene. Sisi.

Just a quick reminder, the Brand Builders Summit is back this September 16 to 19. It’s free online and features 40 branding legends covering strategy, design and business. Head over to brandbuilderssummit.com to grab your free ticket. Now back to the show.

Right. Let’s get back into our topic a little bit and sort of bring it back to this idea of autocracy and the pressures that brands are facing.

Well, can we talk about the reverse of that? We’re talking about what can branders do?

Exactly. Let’s talk about a solution.

Let’s talk about what they have to deal with.

Sure.

So, there are bad behaviors that are getting worse in business. And I think the first thing to do would be to resist those with arguments to say, well, this is probably not a good idea for the long term, which is what branding is about. So let’s try to do it a different way. I mean, just let’s be upfront about what’s going on. So some bad behaviors are, well, monopolistic behaviors, where you get bigger by lobbying the government to get favors and special deals to crush the competition. Maybe you keep the government away from your monopoly. Let it run for a while, right? So you got to deal with that. Customer lock-in is one you see a lot, where you try to hold your audience captive one way or another. There’s a lot of ways to do that. But you just make it so hard for them to change that they don’t have free will anymore to change to a competitor. So these are all secrets for not caring about customers. None of these are good for customers. So you have to sort of fight those. Manipulation through surveillance. Surveilling people through their computer interactions so that you can manipulate them by narrowing their choices, by narrowing their world. There’s a number of ways to do it, and a lot of people are very creative about those. So try not to help that along. There’s this role towards increasing self-service, which I think is really annoying. Self-service has been going since the 20s, since the Automat, the first sort of automated food service. But it’s been increasing, and I remember things like the day that gasoline stations, petrol stations, to you would say, hey, good news, you can pump your own gas. You don’t have to wait for someone to come out. Just do it yourself. We’re going to let you do it. And then it went on and on, and now we’re like anything that goes wrong, company doesn’t really want to deal with it. So they shove you through a whole bunch of gates, say, you have to go through. They want you to be like, you know, know all your passwords and answer these questions. And you’re on the phone for two hours instead of just talking to someone who should be empowered to fix your problem, which would be great for the companies because then they have information from the front lines that they can use to design their brand better. But it’s just easier for them to, or they think it’s easier to just shove people into, you know, you do the work. We’ll let you do the work. Opaque pricing rationales, like, why is the pricing going up? Why is the pricing of Netflix going up? All I get is more commercials and now it costs more. Why is it so hard to keep them online? Why do they just suddenly, you know, something goes wrong and I have to be the one to fix it. Price gouging is happening whenever there’s a crisis, like, oh, there seems to be crisis after crisis, you know, starting with COVID. Suddenly grocery store prices went up for no reason because, I don’t know, there were scarcity and they decided they could blame it on COVID. But that’s happening a lot now. So don’t agree with that. That’s not branding. Addiction by design. I mean, a lot of products now are, and probably including the iPhone, is addictive and it’s on purpose. And that’s not to customer’s benefit, that’s to the company’s benefit. So in the long term, customers are not going to like this. And the reckoning has not happened, but I’m sure it will. And we can talk about that. Annoyance is something that’s creeping up. Like companies just annoying you into paying more. They make the base product so annoying that you have to go up to the next level where it’s less annoying. And then that level gets annoying. So Netflix is a good example there. You pay for the next level to get rid of commercials, but then the commercial start creeping back in and there’s going to be another level. And they’re just going to ask for more and more and more without having better service at all. It’s not like the money is going into better products or better service. The idea that companies want to dominate their customers instead of giving them more freedom, more options. So that’s just wrong. And the reason this is bad isn’t because they’re not going to be profitable. They will be profitable in the short term, but in the long term, they kill the brand and they make it possible for new companies to come along with better customer service, just customer orientation. And they’re going to knock you out, and you’re not coming back. And then, well, it just goes on and on, right? But those are the kinds of things you have to look out for. And so what will happen, I think, is at some point people are just going to have had enough. It’s, anytime you have a system that’s not working, it’ll go on for a long time not working. And so suddenly, it stops working. And you go, well, what happened? It’s just like overnight, it broke. Well, no, it’s been happening since you made that decision three years ago. There’s always a lag time in systems. So you do one thing and it doesn’t seem to work until later it works. So if you do something bad, you may not see the consequences for a few years. If you do something good, you may not see it for a few years. And that’s why people are suspicious of branding. They said, yeah, but I don’t need long-term help. I need short-term help. So I’m going to go to marketing. And marketing says they do branding. Well, marketing doesn’t have time to do branding and they don’t care about branding. They got all their hands full just keeping the sales going. So they, I’ve seen more and more branding people sort of say, I don’t like these branding people like telling me I can’t do branding that they have a better idea. I really don’t like that. I think we do it better than they do it and they’ll have a rationale for that. But it’s obvious they don’t. They don’t care about it. They care about tactical advantage and they should. And it’s really difficult. It’s a really important job. So why not just say, this is what I do. And branding people, that’s what they do. And we’re pals, we work together and they make it easier for us to do what we do and vice versa. So I don’t understand this, but I think, I have a suspicion that the sort of the effects of autocracy and sort of the bad behavior that goes with that is influencing that, because we didn’t have that problem at all before. Things were going really well. So I wrote this book, Brand Flip, and I’m not sure when it was, probably before 2020, so at least five, six, seven years ago. And at that point, things were still going really well. And then it all started to change. But it only really showed up in the last couple of years. And I would say, you asked one question before that I thought was really interesting. Where was the point where it changed for me when I started to get alarmed?

Yeah, what was that second point?

Well, I mean, there’s highlights along the road. I was alarmed when Trump got elected and my wife and I decided we were going to maybe move. Because we didn’t see it fixing itself. Because it’s not Trump’s problem. Trump isn’t the reason for Trump getting elected. It’s the people, it’s the society elected him. It was a free election and there was no hanky-panky. It was totally free and that’s what we did. It took us six years, but we finally just moved away so we could get perspectives. We’re still all in for America, but it really helps not to be battling the dragons at the same time you’re trying to add value. So that was one and I would say COVID, when at least with Trump could have solved the problem in two weeks by making the right decision, instead tried to ignore the problem. He tried to hide the evidence and then blame everybody else and then say, it wasn’t his problem that half a million people died or almost a million, even though a lot of them were the people who were told not to wear masks and came to his rallies and got sick and died. These are some pretty big people too, some of them. No one has ever taken responsibility. So that was not great. And then I think when Trump got elected again, that was okay. The first one wasn’t a mistake. There’s something really serious going on here. That’s when I really started to wake up and say, okay, there’s no way you can just sit back and vote anymore. If you want to save democracy, you have to be active. I was in Florence a couple of weeks ago, and my wife and I were walking down a street really more like an alley, and a scrawler on the wall was this. I took a picture of it. I don’t know if you can see it. It says, did you read that?

Yeah. So this is how democracy, what does it say, dresses? Dyes. This is how democracy dies, not with a yelp or a whimper, but with thunderous applause. Wow.

And then the date is the date of Trump’s election. So some street philosopher put that there for me. But I thought, yeah, that was it. And then when I realized branding was really in trouble, not just democracy, is when one of the richest people in the world, Jeff Bezos, who is taking care of The Washington Post, which is a neutral magazine with political news in it, he bought it to protect it. And he promised not to touch it, especially the editorial. That’s his role, right? And then right before the election, he put his thumb on the scale and said, you can’t endorse the other opponent to Trump. We’re not going to do those anymore. This is like two weeks before. No more endorsements. People quit. The magazine lost 25% of its subscribers on the first day. They announced that, have not recovered yet. And he made this sort of announcement of why he did it, which was really ridiculous, illogical, unbelievable. And then I just, I blew it. I just said, okay, so we lived with Jeff Bezos not paying taxes, not paying sales tax, getting a sort of a jumpstart on all the other companies that he’s putting out of business, because technology sometimes needs help in being born. But that was a long time ago, right? And now he’s like still killing all the other smaller companies. And now he wants to kill democracy because it serves him to not have so many hurdles and rules to follow. He can make a lot more money because it’s not enough to have five yachts, whatever. They’re all kind of the same now. And I just thought, and then I saw him and the other oligarch standing up at Trump’s inauguration and I went, okay, that is, there’s no doubt now where they stand and where we stand. So that’s what got me, pulled me out of my stupor. So I still felt like this will pass and we’ll get over it. I don’t think this is going to pass. I’m more in the camp of this has to run its course. And I don’t know how long it will take. It will take two years or ten years or a generation, but it’s going to be bad. I think in the overall, in the scheme of things, in history, it’s going to be good, just as the Renaissance was good, how the Renaissance overturned a lot of bad stuff. I think we’ll get through it, but I think it’s going to take people to fight for it. And I think we’re all going to have to choose sides. And that’s what I’m watching for, is who’s choosing what side? I’m looking for companies that are choosing the right side. I’m looking for people and companies in Level C, where we have a whole new way of looking at business and branding that I think will probably be the norm when these students get out into the world. But we have to see it. But anyway, what’s happening now is not sustainable. That’s the issue. Good or bad, it’s still not sustainable. People don’t like it. Here in the US., we’re starting to see we’re on the verge of bloodshed, right? We’re on the verge of… We don’t even want to say the words civil war. But other people say we’re in a civil war. It’s just not a hot civil war. But you know, Trump would love to make it hot. And he’s, I don’t know, just watch the Saturday and see what happens when he has a parade with tanks going down the street. He’s not hiding it, you know, he’s not subtle. So it’s time that everybody says, okay, enough is enough, you’re out of here. We don’t have an easy way to say, there’s no confidence like you guys. We don’t think it’s working. Have a vote, because if we did, he’d be out already. I mean, he’s underwater in the polls. But the way we have it, you know, he’s good for two years and he can do a lot of damage in two years. So I hate to get all political about this, but there’s no way to separate business and politics. You have to take a stand. And I think branding has a huge role to play in fighting the good fight, in showing companies a better way to do things, a more sustainable way, and to position themselves for the change. When the change comes, when the Renaissance happened, some people say it’ll be a Renaissance. I think that some people are saying it’ll be the new Romantic Age, which is much more about art, where art pushed back against industry and made it better for everybody because people, there’s a sort of restored balance to people. They weren’t just all work and all factory work all the time. They were also poetry and religion and art and all those things too. We need to get that back in some new form, I would say, probably. We’re due for a big overhaul, a big change, and I think maybe Trump, maybe he’s playing a role, maybe he’s just like, he’s the guy, it could have been anybody, but we needed to tear some things down because we weren’t building them up. We weren’t restoring them and rejuvenating them fast enough. All food for thought, I have no answers to any of this, so I sound like I might, but I don’t.

That was my next question, Marty. I’m like, what do we have to do next?

Yeah, what do you have to do next? Well, I would say you have to fight against autocracy because it’s not going to be good for anybody except for a few people. Business is one place to do it. Branding is another place to do it. It’s gotten to the point in the US where you getting out into the street is the only way to do it. And we haven’t done that since, I don’t know, Nixon and the Vietnam War and all that stuff. But that did work. It had a huge effect. It’s just that nobody wants to do that again. It’s like, you know, we have lives and our lives are getting harder. But the thing is, they’re just going to get harder if we don’t do something. And, you know, people, I hear people that are in branding and they’re not making ends meet. And I think, boy, that’s wrong. It was always a good place to make a really decent living. And so was design. Design got to be, I mean, I made my money in design and then I made more in branding. You know, I had to work hard, I had to succeed, I had to compete, but I could do it. And I’m not sure anyone can do it very well now. I’m worried for people. And that’s not their fault. The opportunity isn’t there the way it was. And it’s not going to come back by itself. And so it’s just not, it’s not just those, it’s every creative field is getting killed. Every information field used to be, you were told, I was told this in high school, that’s how long this has been going on, that smart people will go into computers, they’ll learn coding. And everybody said, what’s that? You know, and then that continued for 20, 30 years. That advice now, anybody who’s a coder is being thrown out of a job, thanks to their work. Right? So, you know, I would say don’t dig your own grave. Don’t go along with this program. Fight back. Fight for doing it the human way. Use your hands more than your keyboard. Make stuff, you know, stick out, stand out, zag when everybody zigs. All that stuff is going to be more and more important. And luckily there’s backup for this. I’m not the only person saying this. So some of the people that I read and that I trust for predictions are saying, what we’re going to see is the emergence of a counterculture, right? So like we had in the 60s, right? The counterculture in the 60s, as crazy as that was, actually changed things and made them better. And now I think we need that again. So the counterculture has been absorbed into the main culture. I think it became the main culture, and then it became, you know, the way things go. Eventually, it got corrupt because you could make money doing those things. And now there has to be a new counterculture. So here’s a huge role for younger generations than the boomers and the Gen X and all that to get involved in whatever the counterculture turns out to be. But it’ll be a kind of a resistance. And I think it will be the new age. It will turn out to be the new age, and I’m all for it. I hate to see this happening. I just think all the idealism of my generation just got bought, you know. I mean, the computer, personal computer was created by hippies, essentially. You know, Steve Jobs and all those people, and the software programmers were hippies. They were inspired by LSD and idealism and those things. And they are the ones that invented it, and they had it, they got it started in a good direction until people that just wanted money got in to finance it. And then it started to get worse and worse, and it happened so slowly that all we’re seeing is these benefits. Oh, free search, free this, you know, free social media. Well, none of it was free. None of it was free. We’re paying more than we’re getting. Paying more for it. So, I don’t mean to complain about it, because I actually think this is going to turn out beautifully. It’s going to be a miracle of a comeback when it happens. But I don’t know how long it’s going to take.

I definitely think that some of the seedlings of counterculture are bubbling away. I don’t know if you’ve ever explored Web 3 and crypto and that community, that’s a tiny but mighty community that’s growing with the idea of decentralizing finance and cutting out politicians in the middle.

There’s another idea, that’s a really good idea, or at least a prototype of an idea that got taken over by money. It’s all about money and now it’s pretty much shown that what cryptocurrency is, more than anything, is a criminal enterprise.

This is it.

So that is not really a counterculture. That is actually part of the existing autocracy. This is like autocrats love it because they can use it to hide money. So no, that’s not part of the idea.

The idea was clever though, wasn’t it? Like this idea where government…

Yeah, no, I mean, really brilliant.

You know, yeah, as you say, I definitely have seen some of the products of the recent…

What was the problem that I was trying to solve? There was no problem. It just was an opportunity, but no, there was no problem and nobody’s… It’s not helping anybody. In fact, it’s depleting resources at a huge, massive scale because of the computer power it takes for a few people to take advantage of a Ponzi scheme. So, I mean, I know people…

All right, let me throw another one at you then.

Yeah, try another one.

Yeah, let me try another one. Let’s try this one. Well, it’s just a bit of a personal story. So, I think a lot of listeners and I know, Marty, I moved out to Wales, I bought a farm in lockdown and I’ve been out here. I’ve been doing a lot of observation around farming in this area and particularly commercial farming versus kind of more homesteading, right? There’s a whole interesting… I’ve just started to dabble in a bit of homesteading myself and I find there’s a big difference, a big different way of thinking emerging, at least that I’ve never come across before being a city boy, around using your hands, like you were saying, looking after your own produce. In fact, I’ve got my own aim to eat a plate of food that I’ve grown, the whole every component on it that we’ve grown on our land here next year. That’s my aim. So, I don’t know, maybe I’m just a tiny little pea in the pod, but there’s a lot of other people that are thinking, like, get out of the controlled states that we’re in and try and do something on the land, trying to do something real. And there are a few of us around. So, you know, who knows? Would you agree that’s sort of a start?

I would agree that you’re in the advance guard of the Romantic Age.

I’m very romantic.

Yeah. Well, you know, the Romantic Age is like all about nature and…

Yeah, hippie…

.poetry and, you know, love and stuff like that went out of style.

Definitely no love where I am, but yeah, I know what you mean.

No, you’re in Wales.

Fascinating.

I love Wales. Wales just makes me want to take a nap. I go there and it’s just like, I just want to lie down and let the breeze… Anyway, it’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous there. So I don’t blame you. Yeah. So I think you’re part of the new wave. And how much will that do? I just think it’ll do your soul a lot of good. And with enough people thinking that way, I think it’s a good antidote to this very soulless industry model that we’re using now, where, you know, the only thing to look forward to is we’re all going to be replaced by machines and maybe some of us will move to Mars. I mean, that’s not really inspiring to most people. And so I think we have to bring back humanity. I mean, that’s what my book MetaSkills was about. Very few people paid attention to it back in 2013. But it just seems like that it was an opportunity we missed and we have to still, it’s still there waiting for us. So we have to think about using our hands more, becoming fully human, not ignoring technology because it’s been amazing. I mean, I love technology and I love what it can do. But what it’s doing is just making money for a few rich people and driving the rest of us down to the bottom of the hourglass. The hourglass is filling up with us and there’s a few people at the top. And there’s nobody in the middle of that hourglass.

This is it. I think MetaSkills is a great example, another book to plug. Marty, we’re basically plugging all your books. But if you’ve not read it before, I would say it’s more technical than some of your other books. Like it’s more heavy reading, in my view. But it’s definitely worth looking at. What is it? It’s about five MetaSkills, feeling, seeing, dreaming, making and learning to help us reach our true potential in the creative workplace of the future. I definitely think it’s worthy of note tucking in to that way, folks get a chance because it’s worth exploring those. In effect, I guess, one thing I took away from it is like, these are the things the robots can’t do. These are the things that we need to harness and work on as individuals. I definitely got a lot out of it.

I think if we follow those guidelines of being more human, the helpful machines will drop into the background. That’s what they’ll be. They’ll be productivity aids, and they’ll be making streamlining life instead of taking over our jobs as creative people, which is the least of our problems. The biggest problem is just totally stripping all power away from people so that a few can live like kings on Mars. And I wish they would just go now. I mean, the problem would be solved.

Well, on that bombshell, I think we’ll have to move things to a conclusion. I guess the final question, and you may have sort of hinted at this already, but it’s like, where do we go to find out Marty’s latest thinking on some of these topics and other things? Is it substack, like you mentioned? Like, where do you…

Yeah, substack is… So substack… I’m doing two things on my substack website. One is free, and I’m serializing my book about Leonardo da Vinci as a detective. He’s a detective in this. It’s fiction. It’s a thriller. But it’s based on a lot of research about him, and there’s not a lot known about what he was like and how he thought and all that, but I was able to piece it together in a way that made sense to me as a creative person. I think I’m not far off on a lot of my assumptions. I also give him dialogue, which there’s no recorded dialogue of him, so, you know, it’s fiction. But it’s really a fun read, and you get lots of ideas about creativity, design, critical thinking, he’s a detective, he has to go, you know, be really smart about this, and he combines arts and science in his solving of this problem. He uses design thinking before anyone even knew what it was, and he was using it before anybody knew what it was. So that’s free, you can read it episode by episode, it’s almost three quarters of the way through now, so you can binge and catch up. Just sign up for Substack and get it. It’s called The Scarlet Files. Now, in the same place is another part, which is for makers, it’s for creative people, in the business, professionals who want to know more about what Leonardo was saying, what the meaning of it is, what I’m doing with the book, if they care about the new things I’m trying in book marketing. So a lot of my thinking generally about creativity is behind the scenes and that cost, you have to pay for that. A low, low, low, $5 a month. And you can just have one, you could take one month and read them all. You know, or you can keep up with the new ones. But I’m having fun exploring a lot of fresh topics that are just like, you know, happening right now. So, that’s there and I got a lot of, I recognize a lot of friendly faces there from branding who are eagerly reading and commenting and everything. So, that’s the place where you can comment. You can comment on both, but we can have a discussion back there. So, that’s that. Now, then Level C is the other good place. And Level C is in, it’s under repair in a sense, not repair, but it’s being remodeled into something much bigger. So, you can still see what we’re doing. You can see what classes there are available. And all that’s going to start up again in the fall with some changes to the classes, some improvements, some more options, and we’re going to have a whole new level to deal with that Andy’s been preparing. And it’s the reason we can fit in with a business school in Austria where we will have, Andy tried to call it the Neumeier School of Business, and I said, no. It’s not about me, I don’t want to do that, but it’s a big enough deal that they’re going to make space for it, they’re going to rent space in Vienna. And all of this may reflect back, it may be something that our professional students can get involved in, like either as teachers, but probably more like certificates from the school or maybe they get credits. We’re all working all that out, but Andy’s been on it. I mean, he’s really amazing. So, I would say subscribe to Level C just to know what’s going on. And then if you want archives of all my branding things, books, thoughts from the past, it’s not active, it’s just a repository for all the little articles and stuff that are still valid, martyneumeier.com. So, that’s the three things.

Okay. Well, thanks so much for carving out some time for us today. Jacob, anything final from you, sir?

I’ve just been listening in. It’s a fascinating conversation. And I’m sure all our listeners have not heard something like this before anywhere else. So, thank you, Marty, for sharing your thoughts.

I think we’re all in uncharted territory here. So, I’m eager to hear everybody’s thoughts. And you guys are great. And we might do another check-in in a while and see how things have changed. Let’s do that. You’re changing fast. And I would say the best advice for people is don’t align yourself with the past. Whatever is going on now is probably going to change. Don’t sign up for all the stuff I read to you that bad brands are doing because you will be left out in the cold when things change. You’ll have a reputation of being old school when you don’t want to be. So be part of the solution. And I think it will work out for you in the long term, just like branding.

All right. Well, thanks so much, Marty. And all the very best. Send our regards to Andy and hopefully catch up.

Yeah. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Jacob. Thanks, Matt.

Thank you. Thanks, Matt.