Tomorrowism logo
Pattern Recognition is our cultural analysis platform, documenting emerging patterns in consumer culture + their commercial implications for modern brand leaders.
hello@tomorrowism.co
Soho Works, 56 Shoreditch High St
London E1 6JJT

About us

Beth Bentley

Chief Strategy Officer

A multi-award-winning exec brand strategist and advisor to CEOs and CMOs. With classically-trained brand strategy skills and a deep sociological understanding of consumer culture, she helps leaders position their brands for both cultural and commercial growth. Before Tomorrowism, Beth sat on the boards and leadership teams of some of the world’s most-respected creative agencies and strategy consultancies (Wieden+Kennedy, adam&eveDDB, Portas, VICE), advising generation defining brands (inc. Nike, Google, John Lewis, Topshop, Cult Beauty, Uniqlo, L’Oreal, Vans), plus served as a government advisor to ministers in Whitehall. Beth leads all our brand strategy projects, and is also the editor of our digital publishing platform, Pattern Recognition, read by 30,000 brand leaders, academics, futurists and cultural analysts in 40 countries.

Mark Thompson

Chief Creative Officer

Mark has served in exec creative management positions at some of the most revered and awarded design practises and creative agencies (Made Thought, Wednesday, Moving Brands, Mother). With deep craft skills in brand design and art direction, his understanding of visual culture has helped lead and shape the visual codes and brand worlds of some of the most culturally tapped-in luxury, fashion and lifestyle brands (Adidas, Bally, Bang & Olufsen, Barbour, Ellesse, GAP, Kickers, Land Rover, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Stella McCartney, Victoria Beckham). Mark leads all our brand design and visuals projects.

Paul Bentley

Managing Director

Paul is a highly experienced creative agency leader, having run a mix of award-winning specialist agencies and consultancies across strategy, advertising, design, CX, content and activation. That’s given him a unique vantage point on how to break down and solve all sorts of modern brand growth challenges. Paul runs all our projects, working closely with our client partners to build the right approach, format and team, then ensuring we deliver world-class work.

What we do

WE POSITION, REIMAGINE OR REJUVENATE BRANDS FOR THE FUTURE THAT’S COMING.

We’ve spent 20 years advising the leaders of some of our generation’s most iconic brands through complex brand growth challenges, in times of ongoing cultural and commercial upheaval. Our work has won more than 100 awards. We don’t just know how brands grow. We know how brands grow when everything around them is shifting.

-----------------------------------------------


FORGET WHAT YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT BRAND STRATEGY

We don’t talk around in circles in workshops. Or fill your server with long-winded documents you’ll never read again. We don’t speak in metaphors. And we tell the truth. Our work makes brands more distinctive, aspirational, covetable, memorable, iconic.

-----------------------------------------------


THE EXTRAORDINARY COST OF BEING UNREMARKABLE

The greatest risk in modern business isn’t your competition. It’s cultural irrelevance. And rightly so. Brands that lose step with what’s going on in culture pay a heavy price. Brands with low cultural capital spend more on customer acquisition (Deloitte, 2024). Brands with high cultural capital command price premiums (McKinsey, 2024), and tend to be valued at higher multiples vs. peers with lower cultural significance (Morgan Stanley, 2024).

-----------------------------------------------


CULTURAL FLUENCY + AESTHETIC INTELLIGENCE = your unfair advantages

The most powerful levers of modern brand growth don’t show up in your quarterly report. But they affect what’s in it.

Cultural fluency
Your organisation’s ability to recognise shifts before they surface, by understanding the underlying forces shaping consumer culture. Where others might see random fluctuations, you see patterns. While others react to what’s trending, you’re the tastemaker. 

Aesthetic intelligence.
The other AI. The art of expressing that cultural fluency to build brand worlds, codes and behaviours that feel distinctive in a sea of algorithmic sameness. 

-----------------------------------------------


OUR APPROACH + SERVICES

A pragmatic, efficient consulting model that works. The way we break down and tackle challenges is based on the kind of advice and support we know CEOs + CMOs actually value (we know, we’ve asked a lot of them about this). Sometimes we do everything on this list, sometimes we don’t. Every business is at a different stage with different needs.

Cultural + commercial pattern recognition.
Our tried-and-tested programme of problem diagnosis. Based on commercial analysis, behavioural science, semiotics and foresight, we work with you to decode and clarify your brand’s most critical headwinds and tailwinds. They’re not always what you might expect.

The brand blueprint.
A brand’s x-ray on a page. Or a tablet of stone. Creating shared vision + momentum throughout your organisation; fuelling commercial growth + cultural heat within your audience.

Audience mapping + sizing.
Conventional demographics and personas are too often based on convenient fictions. We’ve built smart ways of opening up new depths of audience understanding, shedding new light on where your growth’s really coming from. And why.

Brand platform.
A powerful, enduring foundation that roots your brand in culture and helps build authority for years to come. We’re the ones who wrote Where Design Lives for Heal’s, Anything But Ordinary for M&S, Don’t Shop Around for LYST, and plenty more.

Brand design.
Visual mediocrity is no longer acceptable. We evolve or rebuild brand worlds, codes + operating systems to make them more culturally fluent + aesthetically intelligent.

Brand health + investment modelling.
So much you could do. What should you do? We’ll help you make better decisions, and build the case for ongoing, effective brand investment and measurement.

 

Our work

1 -

Lyst

1 -

Don't Shop Around

2 -

Seraphine

2 -

Life Changing Style

3 -

Radley

3 -

Stylish Thinking

4 -

Jessica McCormack

4 -

Beyond The Obvious

5 -

M&S

5 -

Anything But Ordinary

6 -

Urban Outfitters

6 -

For young people, by young people

7 -

The Body Shop

7 -

Changemaking Beauty

8 -

Medik8

8 -

The Best Skin Of Your Life

9 -

Accessorize

9 -

A return to craft

10 -

Tencel

10 -

Weaving the Future

11 -

Wallapop

11 -

Making second-hand the first choice

News

The God-tier of fashion discovery. The mother of all shopping destinations.

Services

  • Brand repositioning
  • Brand platform
  • Audience mapping + sizing
  • Brand design evolution
  • Brand behaviour + strategic activation
  • Company culture/engagement

"No-one else thinks, or delivers, like they do.
Tomorrowism helped us tell a bigger story, and that confidence and clarity directly contributed, I feel, to the positive outcome of our recent acquisition."

- Katy Lubin, VP Brand

The project

LYST sits at the very top of the fashion system, serving more shoppers with more inventory that any other destination on the planet – 200 million people and 17,000 brands. It has the biggest data set the fashion industry has ever seen. 

However, amid intense turbulence in the industry (shifting consumer values, an accelerating trend cycle, major disruption in luxury and multi-brand retail), user frequency had begun to erode. 

We addressed the erosion with an intensive 12-month programme of strategic interventions to systematically dial up LYST’s cultural fluency and aesthetic intelligence. Starting with repositioning the brand around its industry-leading fashion intelligence, and unique impartiality. In a shopping landscape that’s become so fast-moving, complex, overwhelming, impartiality matters and fashion intelligence is the new currency. From there, a mix of measures to cement LYST’s position at the God-tier of modern fashion discovery. 

Brand repositioning: bringing together LYST’s CXO to develop an ambitious reimagining of the brand’s future, building enduring new strategic foundations. Brand platform: new organisational vision, attitude + culture-facing brand idea: Don’t Shop Around. Audience mapping: working with LYST’s machine learning experts and data scientists, we applied Tomorrowism’s proprietary next-gen audience mapping, sizing approach to segment LYSTs gigantic global community of 200m users, merging artificial intelligence with cultural anthropology. Brand design: a more elevated, more confident, more differentiated brand world + more distinctive visual and verbal codes. Brand behaviours: applying the new approach to a fresh set of signature acts and deeds that position LYST where the heat is in the category. Company culture/engagement: supporting the CXO with cross-business education, embedding – including an all-hands event: The LYST Summit.