Paradigms is billed as the brand experience summit - certainly the first of its kind in Europe - and for the past two years, we at Women in Brand have been fortunate enough to go along. Victoria and I are both big, unapologetic fans of Frontify anyway, but brand education is a shared core value of ours and theirs - reason enough to keep taking the chance on a summit that moves around, was a completely new idea as recently as 2022, and is only on its third iteration.
After Lisbon's summit last year, we were fairly certain that we wanted to return if the opportunity found us. After all, without this summit, we never would have met Mimi, and maybe Women in Brand would still be a distant dream, waiting to be fully imagined. In a way, our origins stories are tangled up together...
So we headed to Rome! If you follow us on Instagram, you'll know we each took all of the roads that lead there, and found ourselves (after a few espressos) bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, front row on September 24 for the commencement speech of this year's summit. Cocooned in the soothing and meditative main auditorium of the Acquario Romano, notebooks at the ready - here's what we were excited to share back with our wonderful brand-building community.
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World-building, and where to start
Day 1 kicked off with a female duo, so immediately we were in. Pophouse's Claire Houghton-Price and Kim Nyström talked to us about the value of heritage brands building out brand worlds, in order to captivate and nurture their superfans, bring in new audiences, and stay poised to jump on a cultural wave. As the brand behind ABBA Voyage, Pophouse is something of a kingpin when it comes to IP legacy management and experiential branding. Remember 'Running Up That Hill' reaching no.1 and staying there in summer '22 after THAT season of Stranger Things? Or maybe more recent memory will take you back to Sophie Ellis Bextor's flirtation with the charts again at the beginning of this year, when 'Murder on the Dancefloor' could not be separated from Barry Keoghan's... talents... in Saltburn. This stuff pays, and it seems as Millennials and Gen Z move into positions of dominant buying power, the trend is unlikely to go anywhere. Despite Kim lovingly referring to 'Murder...' as a 'vintage track' (which, as a strong, independent, and successful 36 year old woman made me want to die), we were absolutely blown away by the commerciality and passion infused into Claire and Kim's roundup.
This talk actually put me in mind of an article I wrote a few years ago for The Drum (no, I don't need a hand with that name I just dropped). After leading a 500 year old organisation through a rebrand, I found myself reflecting a lot on how much creativity we found looking back to move forward. And this was a theme that would be revisited a few times across the two days at Paradigms, so it bears repeating: mine your past for the stories, ideas, design systems - anything you can lay your hands on to build that 'world' of your brand. The answers are almost always there. History does tend to repeat itself and, as Claire and Kim were so quickly able to show in money terms - the old becomes new again, and profitable again, startlingly quickly. For younger brands, we might think of this in community terms. Sheer Luxe have done an amazing job at world-building through their employees and office culture alone.
Another talked that picked up on this was the brilliant, viral sensation Ana Andjelic's keynote on 'Culture GPT' - an analysis of how hitmaker brands operate within, interact with, and move forward culture. This talk was dense - so dense that I couldn't keep up note-taking at the speed of big ideas. Pearls of wisdom like: 'Brands create narratives and each product is an opportunity to tell another chapter of the story', and 'The best brand strategies create many doors into your brand' just fell out of this woman's mouth like it was nothing. It was a breathless, socio-psychological ride through the pace of culture today, and a rallying cry to brands to think beyond it. And while it leaned heavy on references to the fashion world (Ana's background - her credentials really are staggering), there were so many relevant points to all brands about how to exist online.
And, when you stop and think about it, all of this obsession with world-building it isn't surprising - the churn of the trendmill (RIP very demure, very mindful, Moo Deng, and all of their ilk) is brutal and expensive to try and keep pace with. Building your own brand platform and living there is at least controllable, if not a guarantee that your vanity metrics will always be super satisfying numbers. Marketers and branders alike have been trying for some time now to slow down the fetishization of performance metrics and data - any channel manager worth their salt could tell you likes, follows, and shares have much less to do with sales and bottom line growth, and much more to do with pleasing big tech's algorithmic choices that week.
What it means to create
The conversation around AI has (thankfully and not before time) matured and moved on - rather than our existential and somewhat ego-driven questions about its threat to humanity, this year's Paradigms dug deeper into that neurosis. What are we threatened by? If we can all agree that true creativity (human) is different that being able to create (machine), then what is this thing that we're desperately trying to protect - how do we define it, how do we harness it?
A panel discussion hosted by ASK US FOR IDEAS went some way to prodding this topic. We heard that great creative is 'emotional', it's 'collaborative', and it is focused - it meets its objectives. We heard that it can be stifled by too many cooks, it can be slowed down and fatigued by processes, it can be left on the cutting room floor despite having done no harm. We heard that, much like any successful relationship, it requires clear communication, honesty, and management of expectation. It also needs space to exist free of too much critique and analysis. To be honest, this 'creative' we spoke of sounded like any other living, breathing thing - it needed nurture, care, and time to develop into all it could be.
But it was on day 2, at a talk by brand strategist and poet Cam Brandow that this really landed. Cam's talk 'The journey back from the vanguard' was a homecoming. It was experiential - hand-drawn illustration, poetry, and even a meditation took us through our venture inwards. It actually put me in mind of 'The Artist's Way' and, if anyone has ever followed that process to reignite their creativity, they'll be familiar with the feeling of hearing that quiet knowing - your inner voice - again. Her talk took our breath away - a gentle and poignant reminder that you can choose to approach strategy, craft, and creative life from an uncynical and childlike place of awe and wonder. I've no doubt in my mind the work is better for it and way more importantly, that it's better for our physical and mental health to do so.
Cam's statistics around burnout were frightening - creatives in the UK are 3 times more likely to experience mental health issue than the general population. 64% are considering leaving the creative industry because of their wellbeing. So if we are to maintain, protect, and foster this divine human creativity, we must find a gentler way of doing so than repeatedly forcing ourselves into 'flow'.
And speaking of data...
The queen of data visualisation, Giorgia Lupi, gave an absolutely astounding presentation on how data can support brand storytelling and open up entire narratives visually that would have previously been left unexplored. She spoke passionately about how data can be emotional - her op ed for the New York Times about her life with long Covid was a beautiful illustration of this. With meticulous care and attention to detail, she documented her symptoms day-by-day, and she told us that when she started she had just wanted a resource to capture the experience - knowing so little about long Covid as we did at the time, and individual as each person's ongoing illness has been shown to be. What she didn't realize was how her work would connect with people, and how it would resonate with other sufferers, or family of those who have suffered.
One of our favourite case studies she took us through was a partnership with Mindworks - an interactive museum dedicated to behavioural science. Using an elegant, simple design solution - a pegboard, with different coloured and shaped discs - Giorgia was able to create a living mural, inviting participants to 'Design their Best Life' by stacking together the discs that represented the things they cared about most. Not only was this meaningful behavioural research, the dynamic installation could display our common values and desires, and show the beauty of capturing all of those different perspectives on life at once.
The straight-forwardness and accessibility of Giorgia's talk had us both shook - we left thinking about all of the ways we could start using more visual data in what we did every day. And I'm still thinking about the daily journal that Giorgia keeps - another simple, silent way of logging a life, a point of view, an experience.
We're still reeling from everything that Paradigms taught us, and all of the wonderful, inspiring creatives and brand thinkers we connected with. If you ever get the chance to go - run, don't walk!
Were you at this year's event? Leave us a comment below and say hi!
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