Brand+Bread | Culture

Brand + Bread is a thought collective asking tough questions about the future of branding. It offers the time and space for conversation and knowledge exchange on the issues facing this discipline, in an attempt to evolve our thinking and practicing of it.

Agenda

For our third meeting in May we're looking at what begins to reseble the impact of brands and branding: culture.

Is culture a dimension of brands or brands a dimension of culture? * Is culture the same as collective identity? * Is cultural relevance more important than personal authenticity? * Should brands be active or reactive to culture? * How can brands keep up with culture? * Is technology a new dimension of branding or a cultural movement? * What new cultural symbolism do brands have to respond to? * Are cultures brands? * Can culture be created, or only branded? * What makes a culture powerful enough to become a brand?

B+B takes place every first Thursday of the month.

Format

Each monthly meetup lasts roughly 2h. The first 30 minutes or so are dedicated to introducing a hypothesis around one variable of branding, followed by a 1.5h round table conversation over a glass of wine. You can contribute your point of view, support or challenge the hypothesis, or just come along and listen. We aim to have a new guest each month introducing the hypothesis, so we can give our debate more dimensions. We’ll keep it low-tech, less slides and more insights.

Participants

If you’re pretty familiar with branding, you’re either a strategist, a designer or a project manager, if you’re in charge of a product or a service brand, if you’re a freelancer or a small studio, if you’re a big agency, or a global practice. This is for you. If you’re a student, or have just started dipping your toes, if you’re just curious. Then this is for you too, but be mindful of unintended inside jokes and annoying jargon.

Outcome

The idea is to kickstart a collaborative effort for evolving our thinking and practicing of branding in order to make what we do more relevant to clients and more useful for the world. The thoughts, inspiring practices and ideas will be made available publicly over here following each monthly meetup.

Our host

IED Innovation Lab is a design playground for transformation projects. They provide a new type of design experience and a set of tools for students, companies, neighbours, public institutions, to come together and create their own projects of transformation: small, big, personal, social, local, global. They imagine, question, research, explore, experiment, educate and prototype. And they’re the perfect platform to help us explore the future of branding.

House rules

It would be great if we could try to leave our employer at the door. While networking is highly encouraged, let's not make it a new business pitching event.

While most of you are either Spanish or fluently speaking it, some of us are not, so be prepared for conversations in English or, at the very least, Spanglish.

Fees
The B+B meetups are free of charge, but we’ll fuel our thinking with liquids and nibbles, so gratefully accepting any contribution for these indulgences. Piggy bank will be provided.