I am incredibly thrilled to share something new with you today.

Exposure Therapy is a community for strategic minds that will open up your world. 

We’ve created a space where you’ll always be exposed to provocative new insights, will understand the future of markets, culture and human behavior, can connect deeply with other strategic thinkers, and 10x your strategic abilities.

It's exposure for your strategic mind, and therapy for your strategic soul.

This is not another glorified group chat.

We've made this a very intentional community with immersive events, cultural and future explorations, and provocative ideas:

• Monthly Strategic Topics with Expert Roundtables, Community Discussions, and Original Research

• Immersive LA/ SF/ NYC Dinners (not to be missed)

• Strategy Office Hours

• Personal Intros and Connections

• Deep Resource Archives

If you're a brand strategist, marketer, CEO, CMO, futurist, culture & behavior thinker, researcher, or anyone doing exciting things in branding and the strategic front, Exposure Therapy will speak to you. 

We love strategy because it helps us understand ourselves just as much as it helps us understand the world.

Not many people feel that, but if you do, you should be here with us.

Exposure Therapy started with a single belief: Strategy is everything.

It’s how you build a brand, win a market, move in the world, and live meaningfully. It’s also a demanding lifelong practice. 

But so many of us have to do it alone, without a roadmap or community of inspiration. Being a true strategist means cultivating a fearless mind and staying in constant pursuit of knowledge. It means understanding culture and behavior, and grasping the forces that govern the future of markets.

Strategy is how you thrive.

If you’re reading this, you probably already feel this in your bones, but you also probably don’t feel like you get the exposure and connection you need.

If you did, you’d be unstoppable. 

We built this for you.

Rites of Passage

Here's what we've been consuming.

Why I Became A Death Doula (Endwell Project): "Let me tell you a little secret. What I've learned in my practice is that even the most religious amongst us start to question what lies after death. Here's why. Beliefs remain beliefs until they are tested. When they're tested, we have some evidence for them, and right on the deathbed, they're about to get tested."

A Plan Is Not A Strategy (Harvard Business Review): "A strategy is an integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choice in a way that you win. Strategy has a theory. Here's why we should be on this playing field and not this other one, and here's how on that playing field we're going to be better than anyone else in serving customers on that playing field."

How millennials learned to dread motherhood (Vox): "More moms themselves have been recognizing that there is a need for a course correction, that there are risks to painting parenting with too broad and bleak a brush. And many smart, creative people have been thinking more deeply about practical ways to make motherhood easier, to weaken its sticky, suffocating pressures. It’s not always easy to see, but things are changing, and can change further."

Brands lean on catalogs, direct mail to build awareness and drive sales (Retail Brew): "Wong agreed that catalogs offer brands more “real estate to tell [their] story,” which is especially important when you’re trying to sell big-ticket items... “I hate junk mail, too,” she added, but “nobody perceives something like a catalog from Design Within Reach or Anthropologie as junk mail. It’s not the same thing.”"

The Church of Group Fitness (New York Times): "Jeffrey Johnson... and his wife tried a few different churches, but stopped attending services because the ones they had joined felt too cliquish. But they found community — and more — in CrossFit, a group class that involves a variety of high-intensity exercises and weight lifting. “The one thing I feel out of CrossFit is, it’s kind of goofy, but it’s unconditional love,” Johnson told me. “Like, my coaches, even if I don’t hit the mark, whatever that mark is, they still care for me.”"

[BONUS] I spoke with Luxury Daily about Stella McCartney's appearance at this year's COP28 Climate Summit: ""When you have a market at a conference that brings together world leaders and innovators to move climate action forward, you're sending a clear signal that you're an innovative and evolving brand," said Jasmine Bina, CEO and founder of Concept Bureau. "It brings the high-level science down to a tangible, human-level experience and further cements the category of sustainable luxury."

Tell Me The Truth

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• The folder with all the trend reports
   

• The question to ask if you want honest feedback
   

• Top 10 TED Talks of 2023
   

• Things are getting worse except they're getting better
   

• Nurses are the most honest

Welcome Change

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• A historical change in our mythological framing
   

• I would recognize you anywhere
   

• The 3 linguistic processes of delulu
   

• No culture, no country

The Argument Dilution Effect is one of my favorite rules of strategy (or any situation when you want to convince people of something).

When you're making an argument, you should provide supporting arguments in order to make your point, right?

Nope.

When you add in many arguments, some inevitably weaker and some stronger, it dilutes away from one very strong argument.

Here's why: People don't receive information in an additive function.

They receive information in an averaging function.

The weaker arguments are not piling on top of the stronger arguments to make a taller tower. 

Instead, the weaker arguments are undermining the stronger ones by lowering the average grade of the stronger arguments.

In the world of influence, the strength of any argument that you make is only as strong as your weakest link. 

When we have a large volume of information coming at us, our minds somehow tend to average out that information rather than looking at only the most salient pieces of information. 

When my team and I started implementing this insight into our presentations and conversations, it was scary. We're known to be very ~verbose~ people.

But when we stopped being precious about our words and resisted the temptation to prove our ideas over and over, we saw a dramatic impact on our outcomes and the speed at which our clients adopted our strategies.

This is one of those min/max rules that will 100% improve your work... if you're brave enough to do it.

And I highly recommend you do.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.