Denny Leinberger Strategy – the partnership between Stephen Denny and Paul Leinberger – has wrapped up, having fulfilled its mission of bringing the insights from the Culture & Technology Intersection studies to the market through the publication of Unfiltered Marketing: 5 Rules to Win Back Trust, Credibility, and Customers in a Digitally Distracted World (Weiser/Red Wheel/Career Press).
Paul Leinberger and I set out in 2016 to understand the profound impact of technology on culture – an area of deep interest to both of us and one that we both came to from radically different perspectives, his from 30+ years of consumer trend research and mine from a more ethnographic study stemming from the 80+ interviews I conducted while writing Killing Giants: 10 Strategies to Topple the Goliath In Your Industry (Portfolio, 2011).
The result of this shared vision was five years of global quantitative research into this area of interest. Our yearly Culture & Technology Intersection study, which ran from 2016 through 2020, produced the end result we both envisioned, namely the publication of both of our second books, Unfiltered Marketing: 5 Rules to Win Back Trust, Credibility, and Customers in a Digitally Distracted World (Weiser/Red Wheel/Career Press). If you haven’t bought your copy yet, buy it from Porchlight Books (formerly 800 CEO READ) – they’re a wonderful company and a needed alternative in the book world.
Unfiltered was originally supposed to be titled, Raw – because “raw” was one of the more profound insights we came up with back in 2016. The emergent trend of leaders and brands going off-script and unscripted was a clear departure from the stylized and over-produced benchmark trends of previous years as was so evident in media, entertainment, and elsewhere. Whether this was a product of the collapse of trust so well reported on by Edelman’s Trust Barometer (and by our studies, where “Seeking Control in an Out-of-Control World” was a foundational trend) and fanned by the rise of President Trump is up for debate. But in 2016, it was bleeding edge.
By the time Unfiltered came about, the sentiments behind “raw” were still extremely relevant, but the nuanced evolution of this trend suggested that while trust was boosted by showing the evidence, by hidden camera video, and by off-script commentary, we didn’t need a constant “Hi, guys!” video streams running across our social feeds by strangers without standing in our eyes, flapping their hands at us while silently begging for us to toggle the volume back on. As the title of our study suggested, technology impacts culture – and our technological immersion shapes our culture like water shaping a canyon (just at internet speed).
Unfiltered went on to be featured in Fast Company, Inc, Marketing Profs, Branding Strategy Insider, the Marketing Book Podcast, and many others.
But with the publication of Unfiltered, the central mission of Denny Leinberger Strategy – the partnership between Paul and myself – naturally came to a conclusion. We each have our own consulting centers of gravity and interests. As such, we’ve wound up Denny Leinberger Strategy and are once again operating separately.
If you’d like to reach Paul, you can easily find him here, on LinkedIn.
As you’re here on my website, you’ve already found me.
Be in touch – and thank you for your interest in Unfiltered Marketing, the Culture & Technology Intersection study, and whatever comes next from either of us.
-SD
