Podcast

In early 2024, I delivered a keynote at a photography workshop in Morocco, a talk that has become one of my favorites, especially in a time when the world needs more wisdom and less frivolity.

What does the price mean?
What is the unique psychology of consumers in luxury market?
How does one leapfrog from the average to the luxury market?

– Can Ai replace Artists?
– Can Ai replace photographers?
– What does it mean to be an Artist?

On one hand there are those clients who want you to do the standard. On the other side of the spectrum there are the clients who challenge you to do better work, are proud they hired you and they trust you enough to allow you the benefit to disagree with them. How do we get less of the first and more of the second?

In a world of black headphones, why did Apple decide to go with white? And what can this teach us in the wedding industry? This episode is about social epidemics – or, why some services manage to spread where others don’t.

Good Marketing helps others become who they seek to become by giving them a place to belong in. Marketing, since its inception, has been making great use of status, which is humans’ constant effort to move up and down the ladder. And there are essentially two fundamentally different ways to do this. The first is by tapping on people’s need to dominate: to be smarter, prettier, more powerful. The second is by giving people a place to belong. Which one will you choose?

“Being authentic” is one of the most used phrases when it comes to branding. But what is “authenticity”? If authenticity is “the revealing of one’s true self” then, then, perhaps a better question would be 1. Is there ever a true self?; and 2. Do people even want to see it?

Originality sounds like a noble pursuit because all great thinkers appear to have been original. But is that true at all? If more of us acknowledged that originality is a flawed and over-glorified concept, the more we would feel safe to create. Our job, our mission, is to improve the familiar.

Ever noticed how the linguistic conventions of photography are tacitly embedded in an ideology of photography as a form of hunting? We load, check the viewfinder and shoot, and photographs seem to be our “trophies”. If we stop seeing photography as a form of “taking”, then we can begin to leverage photography’s healing power as […]