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May 23, 2022Liked by Rob Harrison-Plastow

I wish everyone could hear this Rob. Beautifully spoken/written. So grateful for your work.

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Sep 3, 2022·edited Sep 3, 2022

Agree with everything! The question I have is when I look at the strategy process regenerative businesses are using it's a low footprint/fair trade/circular model wrapped with 'marketing-as-usual', which is built on status competition and social hierarchy a.k.a. "aspiration", I don't see any progressive brands challenging the psychological foundations that consumerism is built on, it looks like everyone is still triggering the same class taste/distinction thing that Bourdieu identified, or Girard's idea of -ve versus +ve desire, or the nudgers come along and trigger "social proof", which Ernest Dichter figured out long before them.... Maybe this is just the way things are, maybe brands are totally embedded in contemporary lifestyles and identity, I honestly don't know, I doubt that genie is going back on the bottle, the one where when people saying "living standards" they mean generally accepted bourgeois middle-classery. Is this a new story or an old one with a change of wallpaper?

And lets say we want to maintain the US economy at a current steady state ~$20tn we'll have to find ways to create new transactions within the regenerative business to replace the lost revenue from the take-make-waste model, which presumably means investing new forms of consumer relationships...that could be interesting, to make consumption very conscious and I don't mean that in the woo sense, I mean it in the we'll have to get hardcore about measurement e.g. customer satisfaction per unit of environmental impact, open source & freely available...could be interesting...not sure, but I think we need to get clear on the ways the old marketing model stories work on us to find new ones.

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