Loomstate, the clothing company started by Rogan, considers itself part of "a cultural movement towards a sustainable future". Since when does a clothing line have a mission statement!?

As far as I'm concerned, this is the future of social organizing--entreprenuers and artists will have an equal, and perhaps more important, role as activists in making and inspiring change. I can't wait!

In today’s progressive movement, many of its best and brightest nonprofits and political campaigns are either not thinking about cultural strategies and marketing, or they are using strategies so ineffective or old-fashioned that they can hardly be called “innovative” or “strategic”. The result in even the most successful nonprofits and political campaigns has been growing tactical inefficiencies and dwindling or aging memberships. A dying movement, they say, is one that only talks to its self.

If our goals are to increase progressive voting and attract the millions of young people necessary to shore up America’s progressive future, we must do more than sell a progressive message or particular candidate to America’s young adults. We must also create a multi-layered cultural landscape, or marketplace, that subtly and optimistically prepares them to embrace progressive messages and messengers.

Today’s young people are truly different from other generations. Well-documented research tells us that whether creating a song list or acting politically, young people value control over their own experiences, distrust traditional institutions, and intensely value diversity. Where we find these young people is deeply entrenched within a culture that they are simultaneously creating, discovering and consuming. In other words, engaging young people begins with meeting them where they live work and play—in culture.

At the head of the pack of those who vie for the attentions of young people, we find for-profit companies large and small, who collectively are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into understanding young people, and identifying new marketing techniques to reach them through what they call cultural branding and experience marketing. Their aim is to develop long-term relationships with their customers on their customers’ terms. In this effort, culture, as the original peer-to-peer network that creates, influences, nurtures, and binds identities and communities, is an invaluable tool.

According to one marketing firm:“Branding gives a product or a company its identity. Culture gives any social grouping its identity. A cultural brand identifies and then enhances the link between group identities and product identities, and can often be a driving force in creating the very groups or subgroups that form their identities around a particular product or company.”

Not far behind the corporations, the evangelical Church can be found, adopting and adapting similar cultural strategies to organize its millions-strong youth constituents, and, as importantly, selling $3 billion in identity- and community-reinforcing product every year while swinging elections.

These incredible successes lie in their understanding that cultural organizing, like cultural branding, offers a customer episodic points of connection in the form of experiences and products, developed by or with consumers and creative leaders from all walks of life—not just top-down professional organizers. The result is two-fold: a productive cultural landscape where specific messages or messengers will be well received, and the establishment of deeper and longer lasting relationships with customers on their own terms.

When will the progressive movement begin to dedicate resources to building its cultural capacity?

Here's a stencil I saw a few days ago. An Inconvient Truth is perhaps the most current example of how to organize through products and experiences. The movie has changed the lives of more than a few friends and colleagues.

Other examples include Adam Werbach's Ironweed Film Clubs and Jeff Skoll's Participant Productions and www.participate.net.

This wheat paste is all over the Mission for a while. The power of cultural influencers is clear.

I keep forgetting to mention a campaign that is rather interesting from a cultural perspective: www.joga.com. It is a co-production of Google and Nike--a soccer-centric social networking site...or something. It is mostly a way for both companies to experiment with cultural organizing.

As one Nike executive describes joga.com, “Our job is to reinvent the way that we connect with consumers. We have to make sure we stay in their world, stay connected, stay relevant and, more importantly, we allow them to do what they want. It’s their world, their lives. We just give them the tools.”

We wrote this a while ago in order to describe our company, and just revisited it for a proposal we are writing. It does a good job of summarizing some of my thoughts on culture, and to post it.

"C3 Lab uniquely and consciously sits between the worlds of non-profits and social causes and entertainment and culture makers. We’ve built our company over this divide because we believe that lasting social, economic and political change starts with changing culture and the sense of identity, community and meaning that comes with it.

Cultural change demands creativity and inspiration, it builds community and conversation, and it blurs the lines between creator and consumer. When people become co-creators of culture (and therefore in identity, community and meaning), immeasurable potential for good, both on an individual and collective level, becomes possible because cultural participation breeds civic, political and economic participation.

We also bridge these gaps because we know that the combination of innovation and sustainability is a better approach to change than simple charity. We see ourselves as a hybrid—bringing together the best of mission-based, value-driven change work with the efficiency, effectiveness and broadcasting abilities of for-profit ventures.

Finally, we recognize that there is a tangible change to how people are seeking to bring about a better world. Specifically, that people (and research has confirmed) are less interested in being card-carrying members in institutions and would much rather craft their own episodic relationships with causes on their own terms, on their own time and in their own homes; that technology is enabling a rise in self-organizing which is bringing a new kind of community to the forefront of peoples’ lives; and that there is a rise in the purchase of consumables - from cars to clothes - as symbols of both style and support that speak to a better world. We seek to provide our clients and consumers a role in leading this new kind of progressive change movement."

From the Nation: “Instead of condemning popular culture, as they did in the past, many evangelicals now feverishly adopting its forms to create a parallel world of entertainment, a paradise of their own. Just ten years ago it still was a fledgling subculture; today it is anything but.” This pantheon of cultural products has become a $3 billion dollar industry--not surprising to anyone who has looked at the bestsellers book and music lists lately.