Steal IP from 2050
The Cayce Pollard Group designs unimpeachably powerful products, services, and provocations that utilize primal emotions to accelerate growth, deepen consumer loyalty, and drive revenue.
Brand is moribund. Conventional marketing? Mirthless. Even human-centered design is ubiquitous, rendering its deliverables undifferentiated. Those practices, once novel, all now take us to the same boring place.
To truly catalyze engagement, carve out market share, and demonstrably improve peoples’ lives, businesses need an approach that focuses on latent desires. On biological imperatives. On powerful, invisible triggers that drive decision-making everywhere—from point-of-sale to personal savings, from housing to transportation, food to fitness, data to dating.
The Cayce Pollard Group leverages tools from social science, methods from neuroscience, and critical insights from art practice to operationalize new ideas with entrepreneurial zeal. We don’t just conduct research. We don’t just design. We deploy, bringing ideas directly to market.
We work with early-stage startups, Fortune-500s, and established organizations to develop new products, services, and solutions that quiet existential dread and deliver growth in revenue, engagement, and market share.
Conventional consulting is the bailiwick of MBAs at MBB. Smart, but extravagantly expensive. Rigorous, but predictably arithmetic. Reflective of the past, not revealing of the future.
By contrast, we specialize in shaping the pluriverse—potential tomorrows, sculpted today. We anticipate needs and desires in emerging micro-moments and markets, before people are aware of what they want.
Our work concerns itself with minor details. Minutiae. Not predicting new colors in lip gloss, or the popularity of spider silk come fall, but new methods of addressing caloric security, intermodal transportation, potable water storage, circular commerce, or accountable capitalism—all on a longer achievable time horizon.
We believe that in today’s market, deeply emotional engagement is the key to success. Feelings in and of themselves don’t distract from sober decision-making. In fact, they drive desire, impel acquisition, and deliver structurally attractive economics. In health and wellness. In beauty. Food and beverages. Academic life. Immersive media. Hospitality and real estate. Product design. Even what by all estimates is a slowly emerging orbital economy.
The new quadruple bottom line: economic, environmental, ethical, emotional.
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CPG Advisory.
We’ve worked closely and confidentially with early-stage venture-backed startups, later-stage privately held companies, and large publicly traded entities on the NYSE and NASDAQ. We’ve been hired to tackle projects across a range of domains, spaces, and business categories.
Content marketing—we’ve done a copious amount.
Corporate retreats—we’ve led them.
Naming exercises, comprehensive brand architecture, microsites,
TV spots: We’ve done them all, and more.
Venture Studio.
To date, we’ve founded and sold four (4) companies and successfully shepherded six (6) ventures to liquidity events. We’re currently working on several new ideas, including solutions in fintech, prop-tech, commerce, and digital storytelling.
Expect a stream of provocations, theoretical ideas, and blue-sky proposals that we’d love to see gain traction and momentum in the world.
Speculative Futures.
Ideas or “emerging insights” from A16Z and Brookings reveal little of value about the future. We, on the other hand, employ the imaginative and interrogative method of speculation. Not prediction or projection, but a multi-tiered approach to experimentation that pushes conceptual boundaries and generates a wellspring of actionable strategies for founders, operators, and institutions. So far, we’ve produced in-depth concepts for the State of Israel, Harvard University, and the City of Detroit.