Welcome to Accidental Insights #1
Here comes the inaugural newsletter.
Hello!
As a planner and strategist, my job is partly to spend lots of hours observing the world around me to gather insights that help companies build stronger brands. In a time when business, marketing, agencies, and culture are changing faster than ever, I felt an urge to a.) summarize those insights more smartly and b.) share them with the world to help people and brands make sense of the change happening around them.
Substack is on everybody's lips, and I wanted to test it out. So, why not write a bi-weekly digest of insights about business, marketing, culture, and consumption and share it with the world? Zero gatekeeping.
The aim is not to capture everything that happens but to give you a download of stuff that makes you a more interesting marketer with fresher perspectives.
Accidental Insights will be very Stockholm-centric but in English since most of my client's teams are English speaking and international at their core, yet based in Stockholm.
This newsletter will be a platform for experimenting, pivoting, testing, and trying. We’ll see where it ends up. Probably somewhere completely different from where it started.
/Johan
INSIGHT DOWNLOAD
The most interesting things I’ve read, seen, thought about, or debated the last two weeks. High and low.
→ Sexual wellness sells. Emily Oberg (of Sporty&Rich fame) just launched the sexual wellness brand Sensual Sport. A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Danish retail chain Normal to figure out what the Gen Z buzz is about and found out they sold sex toys from Sinful.se (who used to advertise a lot in the subway a while ago). Someone also told me that Margaux Dietz has been running a sex toy brand for a while. Yet, the big advertisers still seem slightly scared to jump on the bandwagon. When will IKEA or H&M join in?
→ Is brand strategy now about “who”, not “what”? I had breakfast with a very senior former client last week. We debated the need for advertising, and she argued that Veja isn’t spending anything on advertising. My counterargument was that they ensure loads of “cool girls” constantly wear their shoes. Hence, some of the most successful brands today (Skims, Rhode, Caia) have celeb founders, which made me rethink how a modern brand strategy should be designed. We as strategists and creative agencies spend loads of time developing what to say and what to do, but what truly makes a difference today seems to be who’s using it and therefore defining its brand in the eye of the public.
→ Newslettermania. FeedMe has spent the last couple of months writing about Substack as a tool for marketers (yes, that’s why I’m playing around with this platform). Brands like TheRealReal now offer proper Substacks to their customers. Substack is prominent on the other side of the pond but hasn’t taken off in Sweden yet. Is Sweden too small for advertisers tapping into Substack, or is it just a matter of time? They spend loads of money on various loyalty oriented content, so it might be wise to reallocate that budget.
→ TikTokTime. WARC just launched their new platform study, and TikTok is the media the users spend the most time with – 35 hours a week, twice as much as Instagram. Yet few mainstream brands succeed at TikTok and agencies usually treat it as an afterthought. Let's think about how to develop brand strategies that are TikTok-first and trad advertising-second. Maybe it connects to what I wrote two paragraphs ago about shifting from “what” to “who”.
→ Independent as f*** and loving it. Stephanie Moradi writes in Resumé about new independent agencies Kontiki and GLAM. In the last couple of years, dropouts from major agencies founded agencies like APE_CC, NOERD, 1000Worlds, and Save Our Souls. Prime bought their agency back from IPG, Garbergs are back in good shape, and freelancers are doing big work for big clients. It’s an interesting counterreaction to the big PE-owned groups with full-service offerings (Eidra, Noa, PP, Nova, etc.). Still, the big network agencies are struggling, and lots of them have exited the Swedish market. The big question: Is the middle market for Stockholm agencies now completely dead, and the big divide is PE or indie?
→ Sports ❤️🔥 fashion. In the world outside of Sweden, fashion and sports are having a love affair. LVMH sponsored the Olympics and is now sponsoring F1. Greek football team Kallithea FC has been a streetwear favourite for years, and Carine Roitfeld (ex. EIC Vogue Paris) just launched Players – a magazine at the intersection of sports and fashion. Swedes are usually early adopters, but we seem to lag here. Who will get the first-mover advantage?
→ LinkedIn unseriousified. Someone told me to follow Ken Cheng on LinkedIn. Probably the first comedian I’ve ever heard of using LinkedIn as a platform where he creates absurd parodies of contemporary LinkedIn writing. A while ago, I screengrabbed Mark Ritson trolling a question on LinkedIn (see picture below). Have all the LinkedIn warriors made the platform so unbearable that humour is the only way out?
→ Take me to the dark mode baby. Numerous articles about the death of “Obamacore” – virtue-signaling millenial pop culture. The internet is obsessed with what Edmund Lau wrote about the vibe shift to “dark mode” a while ago. Major Swedish brands have been predominantly Obamacore, focusing on sustainability, inclusion, and a positive feel-good vibe. Will they stick to the script, or will they pivot?
→ Return of the espresso bar? I started this morning at Lilla Espresso Bar at Hornsgatan, which seems to be the talk of the town, at least among my friends. Kersh Kafferosteri has just opened a small espresso style bar on Götagatan, and if you walk to the deeper parts of the Morjas store on Humlegårdsgatan, you will find an espresso bar (smart brand move) they opened a year ago. After years of embracing the “snutkaffe” as a status symbol, the espresso bar is making a silent but great return. Maybe it’s just another layer in the shift to dark mode.
OUTBOUND INSIGHTS
I read, listen to, and watch lots of stuff. Some ladder up to bigger insights, and some are just great reading in their pure form. I’ll share them here.
→ AirMail about Annie Hall coming to life (paywall). Excellent read on the creative process. (Article)
→ How To Spend It on Our Legacy's success. Our Legacy has built Sweden’s most interesting brand by focusing on their product instead of their brand. (Article)
→ Throwing Fits interviewed Nolita Dirtbag. Overfilled with hard-to-digest niche New York references. The interesting part is how he also operates like a one-man ad agency. (Podcast)
→ Curious to see a $19 strawberry? (TikTok)
→ Ana Andjelic Case Study:A24 (partly paywalled) is an interesting read about the future of A24. (Substack)
→ Hypebeast on Coperni’s show in Paris, which was held in front of a backdrop of 200 Fortnite players. (Article)
→ Zyn and the new nicotine gold rush in The New Yorker. Fun read, at least if you’re Swedish. (Article)
→ Culture Codes on Gen Z’s nostalgia. Excellent in-depth analysis with many useful references for your next strategy deck on nostalgia. (Substack)
That’s all for now. Writing this has been great fun, so I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you enjoyed Accidental Insights, please forward it to your colleagues.