What Brands Can Learn from Religion
And What Religion Can Learn From Brands
Greetings this week from New York City. Reculture is here helping a brand partner develop an artifact to help their new direction make sense to a new market.
When I work with a brand, one of the questions I’m constantly asking is:
What actually survives?
What still means the same thing after the company grows, leadership changes, AI gets introduced, or the market shifts?
A few weeks ago, I did an entire podcast on culture, and how the biggest challenge for brands and institutions right now is preserving meaning in the face of forces like change, uncertainty, complexity, even corruption.
As it stands, all that change, all that complexity, all that uncertainty makes it incredibly difficult for anything to mean anything. Every day, there are more voices competing to tell us what’s important. We have more content, more language, more inputs than ever before, producing messages at a rate not one of us could possibly keep up with.
The knee-jerk response to all of that is nihilism, a belief that none of it really matters.
Meaning is over and everything is performance, so I’m just going to phone this in.
The kind of distrust and disillusionment we’re experiencing at scale right now is not exactly a recipe for anything that moves culture in a healthy direction like productivity, innovation, collaboration.
The hill I’m dying joyfully DJ-ing on, if anyone cares to join me, is that the answer to this problem isn’t more information. It’s meaning.
And culture is the collective embodiment of meaning. It’s what meaning looks like once people begin living it together. It’s what survives change and disruption, coming out the other side of it to declare, This is what still matters.
Which, (curveball) brings me to religion.
Stay with me for a second.
Whether we like it or not, we’ve inherited a handful of major belief systems that continue to shape how billions of people behave, understand the world, and decide what’s important. More than almost any institution on earth, they’ve had to wrestle with the question of what deserves to survive and what needs to change.
Recently, I sat down with a Muslim and a Christian who have each dedicated their work to that same question. They’re both trying to preserve the meaning they believe still matters while shedding the inherited assumptions they no longer believe serve them or others.
I hope you’ll listen to the conversation. But more than that, I hope you’ll bring the question back to whatever story you’re leading right now. I mean…if two of the world’s oldest and most influential belief systems can continue adapting without losing what matters most, then there’s hope for the rest of us trying to do the same.
Because the context is irrelevant. It can be a religion, a company, a community, or a family. Every culture is constantly facing the same question:
What deserves to survive into the next chapter?