Strands of Genius: Noah Brier + 2024 Holiday Consumer Research
featuring: an interview with our guest editor and a research report
Welcome to the Bonus edition of Strands of Genius! On Fridays, we’ll be publishing interviews from our guest editors, and sharing a research report. Thanks for being along for the ride. Oh and by the way, you look great today :)
:: STEAL THIS THINKING | RESEARCH REPORT ::
Ready or not, the holidays are here for brands — and consumers are shopping earlier than ever. While the most wonderful time of the year may not feel just around the corner, winning brands plan early to find digital shelf success.
Salsify surveyed more than 1,000 holiday shoppers in the U.S. and U.K. to gain insights into how and when shoppers plan to spend this year, as well as the top gift verticals and discovery channels. They’ve also broken out their data across generation groups, flagging critical differences between Generation Z (Gen Z), millennial, Generation X (Gen X), and baby boomer shoppers.
:: DIVE IN | THE INTERVIEW ::
NOAH BRIER, FOUNDER, BRXND.ai
>> Noah Brier, guest curated Strands on November 21st 2024. Read it here.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what keeps you busy. How did you end up doing what you’re doing today?
I started my career as a journalist, and then the magazine I worked for got shut down, and I needed to find something else to do. I interviewed to be a copywriter without knowing what a copywriter was and thus began my journey in marketing. I was a copywriter, creative director, ran strategy departments, and somewhere along the way taught myself to write code. That helped me start my first company, Percolate, which was focused on helping global brands manage all their content workflows. We sold that in 2019 and since then I worked on a few different things before finding myself completely lost in the world of AI.
What excites you most about what you do?
I get to think and be creative and build things and work with smart people. It's all pretty magical.
What beliefs define your approach to work? How would you define your leadership style?
I am driven by curiosity and a love for learning. My whole career has basically been a series of rabbitholes, where I got really into something and just had to learn everything about it I could. My goal is always to actually understand something well enough to explain it to others so that they'll understand it. That's probably still the journalist in me.
As for leadership style, I ran a fairly large company and hired and managed a lot of folks. Generally, my style as a manager was to hire smart people and do everything I could to clear space for them to be successful. I always try to lead by example, both in the way I approach problems and in going deep enough to understand what everyone is working on. I'm not a micro-manager because I hate being micro-managed, but I do think as a leader it's your duty to know the details and to ask questions to ensure you have a clear and precise understanding. I also manage by writing a lot, because writing scales.
What has been the most rewarding project you’ve worked on and why?
In my life? I have a family, so probably that. Everything is theoretical until you have a human to raise. Outside of that, it's really hard to say. They're all kind of like my children and have played different roles in different parts of my life. Overall, on the work side, I'd say the thing I'm most proud of is seeing the number of people who used to work for me at The Barbarian Group and Percolate who are now thriving in their careers. Spotting and nurturing talented people and watching them blossom is pretty amazing. They made it happen, but I like to think I played a small part in their success.
We are big believers in diversity -- Not only because we believe in equality, but because we also think it’s better for business. How do you frame these kinds of conversations, both internally and with clients? Is there an emphasis on action, or are the conversations really more about communication?
Michael Bierut has an amazing essay called Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content that he was kind enough to let us republish for Why is this interesting? a few years ago.
The point of that essay is that design isn't really about design, it's about everything else: art, culture, philosophy, music, theater, and so on. This is an idea I try to live every day: bringing as diverse a set of sources, people, and ideas to bear on a problem. I think it's the only thing that works.
Switching gears a bit, how do you find time to balance personal interests with your career? Do you believe work/life balance is possible? Anything you’ve implemented that you recommend that others try?
I don't have a good answer to this. I have been lucky enough to get to do almost exactly what I want for a large portion of my career. For the last fifteen years, I've run my own businesses and naturally, that creates a blurry line between work and life. I try my best to be with my wife and kids when I'm with my wife and kids, but I'd be lying if I said I was always successful at that. I just try to accept who I am and listen to the people I love who are around me when they tell me to get off my phone.
What’s your media diet? Where do you find inspiration?
I run a newsletter called Why is this interesting? - so a lot goes into that. I try to read a variety of sources, from Twitter, to magazines, to books. Generally I would say I practice a dumbell approach to media: either it's happening right now in my AI or Engineering lists on Twitter, or it's a book that was written over a decade ago—as little as possible in-between.
What’s the best piece of advice/knowledge you’ve stolen, and who/where’d you steal it from?
It's a bit cliche, but this David Foster Wallace bit from his commencement address is something that rattles around in my head a lot:
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Claude or ChatGPT?
Yes.
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rockON,
faris & rosie | your friends over at geniussteals.co
(still want more? @faris is still “tweeting” while @rosieyakob prefers instagram stories)